Category: Collaborative Age

How Solar Becomes an Energy Revolution

Right now, we are the witnesses of a very significant shift in energy production and consumption, at least when it comes to electrical power. New renewable forms of generation are becoming economically competitive, and power storage starts to be more realistic. And in addition, the trend is towards decentralized generation and storage.

solar-power price curveSolar energy, and in a more limited manner wind energy, are now becoming economically competitive even without subsidies. It is a real breakthrough – again, silicon and its exponential efficiency gains surprises us!

In Singapore for example, a country with a long standing non-subsidy energy policy, solar is now taken seriously as a substantial complementary power production source and the government is setting up an adequate framework to support financing and lease solutions for solar panels (so that consumers only pay for the power consumed but do not have to bear the upfront investment).

Elon Musk at Tesla is now unveiling home storage modules, and promote coupling with solutions for electrical based mobility. This paper in ParisTech Review summarizes well the vision that unfolds before our eyes: ‘How Elon Musk plans to transform two industries (and the 21st Century)‘. Of course we need to be fully aware that Tesla’s inroads currently relies a lot on heavy subsidies by the California state government, but it is quite possible that it may represent a future that is closer than we imagine.

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How to Decide Whether to Hire Somebody – a Simple Collaborative Age Heuristic

Mark Zuckerberg says: “I’ve developed over time a simple rule. I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person. And it’s a pretty good test”

interviewI find that it is an interesting heuristic which also says something about the leadership style of this particular leader (by the way, think that he hired Sheryl Sandberg for example who is currently reporting to him as COO and the consequence of this quote in that case).

Anyway, I clearly realize that this heuristic might seem strange in the most usual “industrial Age” working place settings, pyramidal hierarchies and leadership styles. In the context of the Collaborative Age though, it find that it is a thoughtful heuristic. One important aspect is that more and more, people that you meet in your professional life might report to you or become your boss depending on the project and the circumstances. So it is better to be able to work with them either way!

Quote from kk.org (Kevin Kelly).

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What Collaborative Age Education Should Concentrate On

Education requires a major revamp nowadays with the Fourth Revolution. We don’t need anymore the Industrial Age schooling that was designed to educate the resources needed by the industry (in summary, compliant and literate).

Creativity-SchoolingCollaborative Age requires people that are collaborative, creative and know how to deal with the vast amounts of data and information available at everybody’s fingertips. This excellent paper from ParisTech review ‘Education Series – 2 – New knowledge, new know-how: skills for the 21st Century‘ summarizes some essential traits of future education:

 

 

  • Managing data to find useful information
  • Maintaining and developing creativity
  • Navigating diversified knowledge spheres

I think this paper forgets about a very important aspect of future education, which are the soft skills require to collaborate effectively. Industrial Age education promoted individual excellence (for example though the typical exams); Collaborative Age education needs to promote teamwork and team success.

In any case, “Developing a culture like this requires that the learners be not afraid to fail. […] If you want to discover new ideas, you must be prepared to take risks and to make mistakes. […] In the same vein, schools today do not value differences. In many instances, there is only one right answer to a question, whereas a creative approach enables students to propose new answers to a given problem, seen from a totally different angle or point of view. Conformity must be abandoned and intellectual curiosity stimulated“.

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Why A Significant Change Will Happen Soon in Our Civilization

“We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth” — Vernor Vinge. Why? Read this excellent post on Artificial Intelligence – a crossing between our considerations on the fact we have no intuition for the exponential and our concern for the Singularity (why are we alone in space??).

In particular I can’t escape showing this great illustration – with all due attribution:PPTExponentialGrowthof_Computing

Oops! What’s going to happen soon? And the post argues with reason I believe that we might not see it coming until it is upon us, due to the fact that we do not have intuition for the exponential.

Are we ready for this? I think not.

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Why Data Monopoly is Not Like Physical Monopolies

A paper in Harvard Business Review takes the position that ‘Data Monopolists Like Google Are Threatening the Economy‘. According to this paper, beyond the usage of massive data to create value through data mining, the fact that these troves of data are concentrated within a limited number of major actors is a major issue akin to the concentration of means of production in the early XXth century in the hand of a few monopolists.

data_monopoly2I don’t agree with this analysis. First, there are always new actors coming into play that take significant shares of the available data. For example one could argue that Facebook today concentrates a lot of personal data, and it is only a fairly recent entrant compared to Google and Yahoo.

Second, there is no major capital investment barrier like for infrastructure or industrial facilities that were at the origin of the anti-monopolistic laws. There is no limited resources like for oil, or extremely expensive investments required like for heavy industries. Data and its management is not entirely free, but reasonably cheap so that new entrants can still appear. In addition the amount of data generated worldwide increases exponentially, creating ever more opportunities.

Yes, significant value can be created by clever organizations out of Big Data. No, these are not monopolies that impede the operations of the market, as long as internet usage is maintained equal for all users.

Please comment if you don’t agree!

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Why Playing at Work is Not an Option

Brene Brown in her book ‘The Gifts of Imperfection’ quotes a certain Stuart Brown: “The opposite of play is not work—the opposite of play is depression. Respecting our biologically programmed need for play can transform work. It can bring back excitement and newness to our job“.

play workPlaying would then be necessary in all corners or our life. How often are we playing in a professional context? Ask yourself – when that happens, how do you feel about the ongoing effort and work, and about the team of people you work with?

There are many ways to include some playing even in the most serious of our situations. In any case when you observe some kind of collective depression, you now know the remedy!

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What the Single Most Important Difference Between Small and Large Companies is

“The most important difference between big and small companies is the amount of time running versus creating. A desire to do more creating is the right reason to want to join your [small] company” writes Ben Horowitz in book ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things‘.

startup_meetOf course, creativity is essential to the success of small companies because they need to be agile and respond to the needs of the marketplace to survive. Creating something is intrinsically part of their DNA. Large companies prefer the comfort of predictability and will often discourage too highly creative endeavors even if they profess to foster innovation. This is of course an issue for creative companies that grow too fast and might become bureaucratic before they realize it. It must be a constant challenge at Facebook or Google to maintain a creative atmosphere in spite of the rapidly increasing size of the organization.

Another reason is that it is more difficult to work as a cross functional team in large organizations that in small companies, and you need to ask permission before doing anything like this. Creativity comes from mixing ideas and viewpoints, hence it is fostered naturally in small organizations where everyone works together.

Finally, creative people will then possibly find more satisfaction when working in small organizational structures. With the Fourth Revolution, small organizational structures become much more viable. Hence staying creative will remain easier in the Collaborative Age.

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How Facebook Creates Value for the Real Economy

Facebook commissioned a study to Deloitte that shows that it adds more than $200 billion to the global economy and 4.5 million jobs. Of course that might be a bit inflated being a study commissioned by the culprit, but that still makes one think about the global value generated by a new tool that was created in 2004 (The report, though, does not comment on the possible value and jobs it destroyed elsewhere).

FacebookSo what are the areas that have been considered for this evaluation?

In this study, there are mainly three:

  • 65%: marketing effects of course (creating value through increased marketing)
  • 22%: connectivity effects (consumers are enticed to buy new terminals to stay connected on Facebook!)
  • 13%: platform effects (creating value by developing and selling apps for the facebook platform)

The percentages vary depending on the country, for example in India, the connectivity effect is relatively much larger.

Facebook seems to be on its way to develop a sustainable business model, creating value and jobs while enabling many remote connections, conversations and sharing that would have been impossible to imagine even ten years ago. Like another candidate, Google, is it becoming a candidate to be one of our new institutions of the Collaborative Age?

Here is the link to the full report including the methodology.

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Why Finding Meaning in our Life Becomes Harder

As the complexity and unpredictability of our world increases significantly, and has even been accelerating in the past few years, it becomes more difficult to find our life’s meaning and purpose.

labyrinth
How can we find our way in an ever larger labyrinth?

One of the reasons is the multiplication of choices that are offered to us – like excessively lengthy restaurant menus, choice kills the choice. As our freedom increases, it is naturally more difficult to fix ourselves on a single purpose.

One other reason is the unpredictability and the occurrence of freak events that change significantly the world around us: how can we steer a straight course over years and decades in this context?

This all happens at the same time where personal development has never been so popular, requiring everyone to find passion and purpose in life and follow those. As a result, our general level of stress increases dramatically, leading inevitably to serious societal problems.

The solution might be not to find one’s purpose in absolute among an infinity of choices, but to find our purpose close to what we do on a daily basis, which restricts the field of search. I will elaborate on this key ideas in a few future posts.

Some references from previous blog posts: What we can learn from complex systems to understand today’s world, Why, even in a Complex World, you Need to Head Towards your Purpose!

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How to Create Disruptive Change

Following our post ‘Why Experts Are Always Wrong About the Future‘, how can we overcome the limitations of expert forecasts, and create the disruptive changes that puzzle experts? Paul Graham a famous Venture Capitalist, shares some insights in an interesting post ‘How to Be an Expert in a Changing World‘. The post is worth reading in its entirety for its insights.

Expert future predictionPaul Graham starts from the same position as us: “Change that matters usually comes from an unforeseen quarter. So I don’t even try to predict it“. And he continues, “we are full of obsolete beliefs“. Hence he concludes, “the best strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change“.

There, Paul makes gives us two important practical pointers we can use:

  • “If you’re sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring […] When an idea is described as crazy, it’s a compliment“
  • “focus initially on people rather than ideas. Though the nature of future discoveries is hard to predict, I’ve found I can predict quite well what sort of people will make them. Good new ideas come from earnest, energetic, independent-minded people“.

Thus become expert in a domain, explore crazy ideas and hang out with other people prone to the same tendencies – a recipe for shaping the future in a disruptive manner?

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How Public Services entered a Competitive Market with the Fourth Revolution

We used to think of public services as activities outside of the competitive landscape. That’s maybe true in a country, but the new situation brought by the Fourth Revolution is that’s not true anymore: public services are in competition between countries.

Tax rates OECD 1981-2012
This schematics of effective corporate tax rates in the OECD shows the effect of competition between public services in the past 30 years (source: taxfoundation.org)

Effectiveness, performance of public services is today the most important competition parameter when it comes to economic performance. Countries that are not good at it do already suffer on the global market. In addition this competition puts a lot of pressure on tax rates (in particular at the corporate level) impacting further those countries which public services are ineffective.

The problem is that because this competition is somewhat remote, public services often do not realize this new situation. Finding a way to show them how competition is impacting the national welfare should be a great incentive for improvement. Unfortunately, defensive reactions against globalization often impede these discussions.

Yes, public services are now on a competitive market. They need to increase their effectiveness for the sake of national welfare. Let’s not shrink from it, and just realize that this situation will be even more real in the Collaborative Age!

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How to Negotiate Properly To Reach Agreement

In the book “Getting to Yes” by Roger Fisher and William Ury (veterans of international and corporate negotiations), the useful approach of Principled Negotiation is exposed. It is based on four powerful points:

negotiating
Avoid this particular negotiation tactics!
  1. People: Separate the people from the problem.
  2. Interests: Focus on interests, not positions.
  3. Options: Invent multiple options looking for mutual gains before deciding what to do.
  4. Criteria: Insist that the result be based on some objective standard.

Of course proper and consistent implementation of these principles requires some practice. It also sometimes requires quite some work to get the other party to agree on this approach and play the game of that type of negotiation.

If I had to choose one of these points as the most important, the creative ability to come up with a number of options (and at the same time, to be sufficiently resilient from an emotional point of view to be able to assess the actual pros and cons of these options), would probably be my choice. Having as many options as possible a key asset in a negotiation. Be creative!

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