Category: Collaborative Age value production system

The Fourth Revolution and the CEO mindset’s transformation

The latest IBM CEO study gives some interesting insights into how CEO’s role and priorities change over time. In 2012, this study of more than 1,700 CEOs came with 3 strong topics:

  • For Employees: Empowering Employees through Values
  • For Customers: Engaging Customers as Individuals
  • Amplifying Innovation through partnerships

The study highlights that now at last CEOs of large corporations see that investing in internal social networks (for collaboration) and external social networks (for engaging customers) is mandatory.

One conclusion of the study is “As CEOs ratchet up the level of openness within their organizations, they are developing collaborative environments where employees are
encouraged to speak up, exercise personal initiative, connect with fellow
collaborators, and innovate“.

While only 16% of them do it now, in 3 years time it is expected that a majority of them will get on external social networks:

CEO and the usage of social networks

It is interesting to note how the focus of CEO’s changed in the past decade or so

CEO focus 2004-2012

We can see how the focus changed from revenue growth to change, accounting for complexity and leveraging on employees. This looks like the trajectory of the Fourth Revolution revealed! It is clear that CEOs are “abandoning command and control” (link to an excellent paper by Alexandra Levit) to more collaborative ways of working. This Forbes article “If you don’t have a social CEO you are going to be less competitive” is also a great reference on the IBM study.

There is obviously a big limit to this study: it only considers corporations. When will the corporations feel that they might not be the best value-producing form of organization? When will IBM also study what happens in other organizations? Already today the CEOs need to be much more entrepreneurial. This trend will only further develop and grow. I’m already looking forward to the next studies!

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Perfecting the Rules for Crowdfunding: Reminding about the Risk!

Crowdfunding is still polishing its model. In September 2012, to make they would remain true to the ideals of crowdfunding, Kickstarter did a significant change to its rules. Conscious of some deviations and criticisms, the new rules aims at making sure that people do not mix up crowdfunding and purchasing new items (follow the link to Kickstarter’s announcement “Kickstarter is not a store”).

This came after some hefty criticism that some of the projects did not deliver to the funders the goodies that were supposed to be delivered (because you don’t crowdfund for free – refer to our post “Crowdfunding is not charity – and it is not free!”).

Kickstarter Failures InfographicIt is a good reminder that crowdfunding projects do entail a significant amount of risk – the risk of innovation. Some will fail, and even the products that are to be developed by big names might end up being disappointing! This is the game of innovation, and statistically failure will happen; and so-so results will be the majority. The infographics gives some statistics as of June 2012 on the ratio of failure to successes; a more detailed infographics is here.

It will be tough for Kickstarter to maintain the clear message that Kickstarter projects, although filtered out by the crowd, are still risky endeavor and that the thrill is to follow the people try hard and maybe fail. Crowdfunding will remain an isolated island in our world of quick and immediate gratification; and those reminders from crowdfunding organizations will necessarily have to be repeated often, again and again so that we don’t forget that it is some kind of risky venture investment.

Nevertheless, it is good to see how the crowdfunding model is getting refined to stay close to its true calling. It will probably take another couple of years until the model is really settled (enough time so as to have enough feedback from completed projects – as they only start to really trickle in after the enthusiasm of their initial launch). Let’s follow up how that evolves!

The infographics is by Appsblogger.com; follow this link for the full infographics; and this link for the blog post on “Kickstarter failures revealed”.

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How the Anonymous are a Precursor of the Collaborative Age Organization

This interesting article in the Guardian “Disorganized but effective: how technology lowers transaction costs” highlights how lower the transaction costs has allowed the development of such amorphous groups such as Anonymous or the Occupy movement.

the AnonymousInterestingly, the article takes a perspective on the dramatic change of our capabilities in terms of ‘transaction cost’ that is very similar to our Fourth Revolution concept based on our communication capabilities. It is the same of course. The previous Fundamental Revolutions always saw the creation of more organized bureaucracy – the Agricultural Age’s bureaucracy paving the way for the Industrial Age’s Corporation. The Fourth Revolution is the era of chaos and complexity. And for the first time we can organize chaotic groups that deliver effectively.

Not just the Anonymous, Occupy, other activists but also many groups that are not so much on the dark side, like all the Open Source movement: these are all amorphous groups without visible structure; their weak structure is constantly evolving and never fixed, completely akin to turbulent flow. They rely heavily on technology to communicate, using automation and a choice of synchronous and asynchronous tools.

These groups are in advance on their time; soon we’ll all participate to such groups because chaos begets creation, the value engine of the Fourth Revolution. They are the real precursors of the Collaborative Age turbulent organization.

Welcome to a chaotic, and effective world – Welcome to the Future of the Organization!

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5 Conditions that Foster Your Creative Mood

Coming back to John Cleese take on creativity, let’s dwell a little bit on his 5 conditions that make it easier to reach an open mode, which enables creativity:

  • John CleeseSpace (quiet space – isolation of usual pressures and demands)
  • Time (create space for a specific period of time where normal life stops) – create also boundaries of time to stop!
  • Time (sleep on it – leave time to mature the solutions you’ve found – even several days)
  • Confidence (which is required for playfulness – be free to play and look at the unexpected). When you’re being creative nothing is wrong!
  • Humor – gets from the “closed” to the “open” mindset mode the quickest

Further more, John Cleese emphasizes that even if encounters and discussions are great to create new ideas through the encounter of two different frameworks, isolation and time are also needed to mature them.

Once again we find creativity at the contact point of a contradiction between social encounter and personal reflection. Creativity needs both in harmony and not in conflict.

If you are outgoing, do you also take enough quiet time? If you are introvert, do you socialize enough? Balance is the key to exploiting these apparent contradictions!

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Creativity is not a talent – it is a way of operating. Practice your Open Mood!

If you are intrigued by the mysteries of Creativity like I am, you need to watch this video of a speech by John Cleese on the subject.

Click here if you can’t see the video.

John Cleese is obviously a Master Creator full of weird ideas. In this video he explains how it is important to practice a creative mindset – “A mood – an ability to play – the most creative were in this mood as being child-like”, an “Open mood” -relaxed, expansive, less purposeful mode in which we are more contemplative, more attuned to humour and consequently more playful versus our usual “Closed mood” mode.

Furthermore John Cleese goes on to explain how it is vital to practice this open mood even if the result is not great every time.

Creativity is thus the result of the practice of an open mindset. When do you start practicing?

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When you most feel like giving up… what should you do?

There is an interesting statement by Robin Sharma:

When you most feel like giving up is when you most need to be keeping on
Are you keeping on?

“When you most feel like giving up is when you most need to be keeping on“. How much is that applicable?

The need to be persistent is a mantra of self-development books. And indeed, it is a very important parameters to beat the Resistance that tries to prevent us from creating anything new (re-read the “War of Art” blog post and the “The War of Art” book if you’re not sure any more about what is Resistance).

I have experienced it first hand in my entrepreneurial venture. I have decided to give it 2 years before deciding to continue or ditch it. And when I feel miserable, stressed and depressed I remember this (or my wife does remind me), which gets me back on track.

There are some instances, though, where it might be better to stop and start something new. They are rare. It is very difficult to identify these rare instances because Resistance tricks us into believing that any difficulty is candidate for stopping. To get a full review of this important issue, re-read “The Dip” by Seth Godin. From a practical perspective, here’s a useful and simple process:

  • define first some “breaking parameters and criteria” and write them down
  • Decide that you will stop if you reach those breaking parameters
  • Be very strict that you apply the exact parameters and criteria that you had written down a few months earlier

Be persistent. And know what are the rare instances where not to be.

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How the Fourth Revolution is the era of the individual widget – even for drugs!

The Industrial Age was all about mass production and production for the bulk of the population. That was in particular the dominant economic model of big pharma. Rare diseases were not tackled for the lack of economic viability.

Assorted prescription drugsToday this changes completely. Some biotech companies are extremely successful at making drugs for rare, orphan diseases. And social security or private insurance is happy to pay for the hefty price tag – because those diseases are so rare. In this great paper in Forbes, “How A $440,000 Drug Is Turning Alexion Into Biotech’s New Innovation Powerhouse”, we get a great insight into a new business model. A business model which addresses the needs of individuals at the fringe of the mass production model, while remaining profitable.

As in many fields, the Collaborative Age is the Age of production for the individual of customized products. Pharma is just one example. The revolution in manufacturing will bring the same result – produce widgets one by one, on demand.

In the medical field, medicine is becoming more and more individualized. Genetic factors are increasingly taken into account before administering medicines or X-rays, as sensitivities vary. Soon we won’t get mass produced drugs but drugs specifically generated in dosage and type for our own case.

The Fourth Revolution is the era of narrow niches – so narrow that it addresses an individual. Are you still stuck in the mindset of mass production? Change now to understand the world as it transforms!

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How the Fourth Revolution transforms the market for work

Our Industrial Age world is apparently in a crisis – employment rates diminish currently for most generations, and those who are employed are increasingly so on a part-time basis. The proportion of salaries in the net national value creation is diminishing.

Contract work - the new work framework
Contract work – the new work framework?

Yes, the Industrial Age model of salaried work is in a crisis – not a crisis actually, but a transformation. Even the Harvard Business Review now blogs on “The Rise of the New Contract Worker”, or how increasingly people look for alternative forms of work. Not straightforward employment but rather innovative forms of work and compensation, which generally imply some sort of contracting or more or less informal grouping.

The portion of salaries in the economy will further diminish because more and more people will be contractors, on their own or in small ad-hoc companies. The inter-mediation cost has dropped dramatically with freelance platforms. When countries will give even more flexibility on such basic social services like health insurance, the proportion of freelance contract workers will only increase.

The salaried worker working exclusively for one single employer is dying. What will replace it might increase anxiousness for some because of the apparent risk and the need to market oneself; yet it will unleash the creativity of the world by making sure that all work that gets done really contributes to creating value.

An employment market crisis? Reframe it: it is just a deep transformation of the way we will get compensated for work! When do you start taking this opportunity?

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Creativity takes courage. Are you ready to test your courage?

Yep, real creativity takes courage.

creativity tales courage (Henri Matisse)
How courageous are you really?

Real creativity that is – creativity that is exposed to the looks, reactions and feedbacks of others. Being creative in one’s realm without sharing does not create anything for the world.

Are you really courageous? Ready to confront criticism and people making fun of you because you show them something which is outside the normal?

There’s just one way to know it. Create something and show it, publish it to the world. There you’ll know whether you can face your fears. You’ll know whether you’re courageous.

Be courageous. The world, your community, your family needs you to be.

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Done! The Fourth Revolution put the music industry upside-down!

This summer for the first time the ‘summer hit’ in the US came out of nowhere. That’s “Call me maybe” an infectious song (250 million views on YouTube). Well, that’s not exactly true: it came out of YouTube and social networks. The story is counted in this very interesting NYT article which I recommend to read.

Call me Maybe by Carly Rae JepsenThis song became a hit through a YouTube-twitter infection. And it is only with regret that the radio stations went on to play the title after a few weeks. For whom actually? It seems the young generation listen to music (for free) on YouTube anyway. Artists make money through public appearances and other means; not any more through broadcasting their songs. That’s a fact.

It goes to show how the traditional music industry is completely overtaken. It does not master the broadcasting channels that are important to the young people. It is the end of that industry as we knew it in the last decades.

And it is the beginning of viral hits. Funny videos, cool songs… Stay tuned! The Fourth Revolution has toppled the music industry and it is not the last institution that will go!

PS – listen to the song it’s really viral!

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How the Fourth Revolution transforms our view of Earth

Working in the field of large, complex projects, I can’t see a project file nowadays without great pictures coming from Google Maps adorning the file: pictures of the site, of the present facilities…

Industrial Facility seen from Google Satellite
Industrial Facility seen from Google Maps

And indeed it is so easy from any computer to have precise satellite pictures of any place on Earth that we just don’t think any more about the miracle that is… ten years ago only, this privilege was reserved to government authorities and large corporations who could pay to get the picture taken by an aircraft or a satellite.

And today in developed countries most roads in large cities are also visible through Google’s StreetView.

This unprecedented democratization of earth imagery has far reaching consequences. It changes fundamentally the concept of ‘public space’ (which can now be observed from anywhere on Earth) but also the concept of ‘private space’ (you can’t hide what you have in your garden from your neighbor any more!). It changes fundamentally how we perceive the physical space around us. This transformation is as strong as when we saw the blue planet Earth for the first time from space, floating in emptiness, in the 1960’s.

Some people argue that because only a limited number of actors manage this data (Google being the most prominent), we are exposed to possible manipulation of the data for commercial purposes, showing us only what they want to show us (see the paper “The Dark Side of Commercial Mapping”). We are not so pessimistic, because there will always be competitors and the crowd will denounce abusing behavior. But certainly our view of the geography that surrounds us has been transformed and this has already changed our decision making when it comes to property or project management.

Today, our perception of our immediate and distant geography has been transformed. Like our new vision of Earth transformed our mindset in the 1960’s, how will our action taking relative to geography, in particular in the field of ecology, change?

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The best digital maps are created by humans and crowd-sourced

Following the outcry about the poor quality of the new Apple mapping application that came out with the iPhone 5, let’s investigate how the best electronic maps around have been created.

Google Digital MapNo surprises, there’s a lot of human work, sweat and crowd-sourcing behind them. This excellent paper on “How Google Builds its Maps and What It Means for the Future of Everything” describes how an army of people (most of it probably in India) have reviewed all the grueling details of the Google map database, helped lately by Google Street View cars to achieve the appropriate accuracy.

But Google Maps also allow users to give their input to correct inaccuracies (even wondered at the small clickable “Report a Problem” at the bottom right that allows you to give input directly to Google?). So, a significant additional accuracy is given by crowd-sourcing.

Digital maps aggregate an incredible amount of geographical information on several layers, giving insights into our world in a way that had never been possible before – and thus changing our view of it. Even if Google maps was only created in 2005 (!), taking into account the effort that has gone into it, you can’t just improvise an alternate version. Catch-up of the current mapping data will take significant amount of effort. That effort will be done by competitors because this data is so strategic commercially, but only those will be successful that have significant capability to mobilize people to code the data – and to mobilize the crowd to ensure constant accuracy even in case of changes. Google has an advance over everybody else, and this huge investment they made will be one key to their future success.

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