Collaborative Age | The Fourth Revolution Blog

Best Single Word Career Advice: Squiggle!

I had an inspiring read of the latest book by Mitch Joel, a leading digital marketing guru, titled ‘Ctrl Alt Delete: reboot your business, reboot your life. Your future depends on it‘. It is an excellent book on the Fourth Revolution (which he calls the ‘business purgatory’), with one half about business reboot and the other half about personal reboot. (Unfortunately the book does not seem to be available in Kindle format, only paperback or hardcover, which might make it harder to get).

careerAdvice Anyway, I found there an excellent career advice, and a new concept, the squiggle:

Very few people set out in life to be the people that they have become. Even fewer know that they are going to be in a specific industry from a very young age. The most successful and interesting entrepreneurs and business people don’t have a very linear career path. In fact it is actually very squiggly. Always bear that in mind. Embrace the squiggle.

Let’s push a bit the concept. You won’t ultimately be successful in what you are doing now – both because what you’ll be doing tomorrow might not have been invented yet, and because it is by having a squiggly career that you will finally bring together the knowledge that will redefine your field.

Be squiggly to be successful. Ready to squiggle?

Are you another victim of the illusion of risk avoidance?

“If you risk nothing, you risk everything“

No risk, no view! At the edge of the cliff — No risk, no view!

That’s a famous quote that is too often forgotten. Our Industrial Age civilization tries to make us forget about risk. It provides all sort of ‘protections’ which might not be protecting us so well after all (think for example, unemployed persons’ management) and tends to hide sickness and death. It makes us think that great education can provide a risk-free life as an employee of some large organization.

It is an illusion to think we can live without risk. It is an illusion to try to avoid risks. Doing nothing, not moving is the biggest risk of all. Even if it is successful, it means avoiding so many opportunities, avoiding contributing your bit to the world.

There is just one single truth: our risk of dying someday has 100% probability. Our risk of dying someday without having contributed to build our world is… based on how much risk you take.

What about trying to take some reasonable risks just now?

Why would “profits without production” be bad?

In a column in the International Herald Tribune “Profits without Production“, Paul Krugman explains how the world is changing and how corporations like Apple is the highest valued company in America and employs only 0.05% of the workforce, to be compared with GM in the 1960’s – also the most valued company in America but employing 1% of the workforce and thus spreading wealth much more through society. And that it is a problem for economic growth because of less redistribution of value throughout the economy.

Indeed as we defend in this blog, with the Fourth Revolution the value is moving from manufacturing into creativity. For Apple, manufacturing is a (low cost) commodity. The value lies in the creativity, the design and the service; in summary, in the experience. Marketing then takes care of selling us that experience at the right price – the price we are deady to pay for it.

Yes, we have a problem now of large corporations not reinvesting in the economy their huge profits; yes, we have a problem of the share of employee compensation shrinking compared to executives’ and shareholders compensation, thus slowing down consumption and growth. Yes, we have a problem of monopolies being created in new economic arenas that will need to be tackled.

However it serves nothing to complain that value is moving from tangible manufacturing into intangible creation. It is the sense of history. What we need to do is to find solutions so that this shift is accompanied by an appropriate balance in the distribution of value throughout society. We have not found the recipe yet but let’s continue to experiment and observe!

Launching the Innovation Renaissance, About the Law of Diminishing Innovation

Alex Tabarrok is economist and has written a short essay on ‘Launching the Innovation Renaissance‘. In this highly recommended book he analyses the current issues related to innovation – such as patents, education system and corporate rewards.

The Tabarrok curve of decreased innovation when patent protection exceeds a certain level

Alex Tabarrok is also known for the Tabarrok curve of decreasing innovation when patent protection increases beyond a certain level. Not dissimilar to the Laffer curve of diminishing tax returns when the tax burden increases!

His view on patents and how the increase in patent protection in the 1990’s in the US, in particular in the field of software patentability, is actually diminishing innovation instead of fostering it, is very interesting, and quite aligned with what we exposed in some early blog posts such as ‘How patent litigation cost half a trillion dollar inefficiency in the last 20 years!‘

It is quite a short book, very easy to read, and to the point. One small issue though is that it is very US-focused and would gain to be broadened more globally looking at the innovation issues world-wide. Issues are not the same everywhere, but at the end of the day innovation does benefit everybody.

Add it to your summer reading list!

How to resist the increased immediacy of our world!

We live in a world of ever increasing immediacy. This tends to change significantly the way we behave. We can’t spend a few minutes without watching our devices!

In social networks, our posting history is soon unavailable, after a few days at most. It is difficult to search for past posts. Even in the case of emails, data shows that people tend to forget ever sooner those emails that are not on the top of the pile (see “Is Email Open Rate Decay Increasing?” blog post by Christopher S. Penn). A reason might be increase in the use of mobile devices with a much more limited screen and usability of scrolling down!

Curve showing optimal twitter frequency for marketing (from marketingsavant.com)

The curve above suggests that for marketing purpose, tweets should be sent many times per hour!

In the same time, tools that allow to read content in an asynchronous manner like Google Reader are being discontinued by their producers.

So, are we supposed to be permanently hooked up to our devices so as to not miss the latest update or news? Isn’t it a conscious strategy by marketers to push us to remain hooked in front of our tiny screens? Does that really correspond to a need?

Every time I disconnect, or I stay in a situation where I can only connect once a day or so, like during holiday time, I feel like it is enough. Not so much changed in the meantime.

One of the skills in the Collaborative Age will be the ability to manage time. To resist to this behavior expected from us to remain hooked to our social network feed.

Will you use these holidays to get off the hook and disconnect for a while? Practice your time consciousness?

Witness the change on our planet. How will it change our view on our Environment?

Have you heard about Google Earth Engine Timelapse? The Google team has layered satellite imagery of earth over several decades (generally back to the early 1980’s). This shows how landscapes have been changed over the time.

You can for example look at how the Dubai coast has changed, or how the Columbia Glacier has retreated over three decades.

You can even look at your hometown change by scrolling on the world map and zooming on your favorite place!

Simply awesome – remember that the first TV image of earth dates back only to 1960!

I strongly believe that our environmental mind has significantly changed the day we’ve seen pictures of our blue planet floating in a dark void in the 1960’s. Will this initiative further create a small revolution in our perception of our environment?

What happens when we are submitted to information overload

When submitted to information overload, “We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is.” – Nate Silver (in his excellent book ‘The Signal and the Noise‘). Nate is an expert statistician, successful at forecasting various things from baseball to other sports to elections (he is the founder of a famous think tank called Five-Thirty-Eight which specializes in elections prediction (apparently it gave the best prediction of the last US presidential elections)).

Nate Silver explains that information overload might foster extremism and people retreating to their communities, hence sectarianism and possibly, fights between partisans. It is his interpretation of what happened when printing released information in the 15th century – great fights happened around Protestantism and numerous communities formed that tended to avoid contact with this new information coming rushing at them.

Following this thought, it might very well be a risk of modern life that the excess of available information would only create stronger beliefs in ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and that we would be psychologically tempted to reject the bulk of it as a natural, defensive reflex. That could explain the increasing defensive communities that can be observed across the world.

We need to limit the amount of information we submit ourselves to – and at the same time find a way to keep an open mind. Be wary that many strange things we observe today might be due to information overload – and people picking and choosing only what aligns with their beliefs. That might be the key to understanding many behaviors.

How the fight against Patent Trolls continues: The White House in action!

The issue of Patent Trolls is now tackled at the highest level with, early June 2013, a White House communication on how it expects to address the issue of impediments to technology due to these nefarious actors: ” The White House issued five executive actions and seven legislative recommendations designed to protect innovators from frivolous litigation and ensure the highest-quality patents in our system“.

This comes in the general action to try to phase-out patent trolls (see our previous post on How Intellectual Property is Changing – Too Slowly but in the Right Direction). Now a number of comments on these executive orders from the White House imply that they are too weak and will not be efficient to curb the patent troll development. See for example this post on Quartz: “Why patent trolls will laugh in the face of the US government’s weak attempts to fight them“.

This issue of excessive patenting and undue burden on the economy will certainly remain very high on the agenda for the next few weeks and months. Let’s continue to observe how this institution will need to transform to deal with the changes of the Fourth Revolution!

How Intellectual Property is changing – too slowly but in the right direction

There are increasing calls for profound reform of intellectual property. This is a subject close to heart that we touched on in our posts Patent trolls and the end of conventional intellectual property and How patent litigation cost half a trillion dollar inefficiency in the last 20 years!.

What are the evolutions lately? This paper by Joseph Stiglitz “Lives versus profit” summarizes the incredible issue of companies that try to patent our genes, at the expense of us all. According to Joseth Stiglitz, “More broadly, there is increasing recognition that the patent system, as currently designed, not only imposes untold social costs, but also fails to maximize innovation“. And further, “unbalanced intellectual-property regimes result in inefficiencies – including monopoly profits and a failure to maximize the use of knowledge – that impede the pace of innovation“.

Things seem to be changing in the perception of lawmakers. A new proposed bill could end the worst patent troll behavior by simply getting them where are the most vulnerables – money. Read more about this initiative in the paper ‘Death to patent trolls: How a new bill could slay technology’s worst parasites‘. Patent trolls are just a nasty way of doing business by taking advantage of real innovators through old tactics such as intimidation and brutal force in front of a court. Let’s hope this bill will pass and be effective.

Reform of our intellectual property regime, one of the most important institutions of the Industrial Age, is a prerequisite for moving straight into the Collaborative Age. Those countries that will overcome the particular interests of some of their industries to reform effectively this field will have a significant competitive advantage. Why are so few doing it?

Why Face-to-Face Relationships Are Still Essential to a Creativity Culture

When Marissa Meyer, the new CEO of Yahoo, banned full-time work from home last February she ignited a lot of criticism.

(see for example the Guardian’s article “Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s work-from-home memo is from bygone era“).

At the same time Apple is building a 3 billion dollars’ (now gone up to 5 billion dollars’) specially thought headquarters to lodge their employees and promote maximum collaboration.

Even with social networking and all these tools that make long distance interactive communication so present in our lives, does tele-working allow the right culture and collaboration to develop?

New Apple Headquarters — The new Apple headquarters: like many creative companies, Apple invests heavily in physical infrastructure to enhance collaboration

In the case of large companies like Yahoo and Apple, or even Facebook, it does not seem to work. Face-to-face collaboration, nurturing chance physical encounters on a campus seem to be the best way to foster creativity and productivity from collaboration. In the case of Yahoo, after one week of shock, papers started to appear showing that possibly, taking this decision was the only way to allow a new Yahoo culture to develop and flourish (see for example the paper “Marissa Mayer Got It Right — You Can’t Fix A Broken Culture When People Aren’t In The Office“).

The power of face-to-face relationships, their intensity and the unconscious exchanges that occur, are still central to collaboration. Or are they? In the next few posts we will explore the conditions in which collaboration can still happen remotely.

How 3D Printing Technology Shakes Consumer Protection Institutions

3-D printing is already shaking our institutions. The recent issue of a 3D printed gun – and the availability of the drawings for free on the web – has scared many. Governments are already considering how they should change the regulations around weapon acquisition and export; on the other side hackers defend the freedom of internet.

Cory Doctorow, an expert on the internet regulation (and generally, a proponent of a large freedom), fears that these events will lead to inappropriate regulations of internet content, due to the fact that judges and societies will be scared by the object.

For guns, regulations might change to address ammunition rather than guns (nobody has yet managed to 3-D print live ammunition and it will take a long time before anybody can do that), but in any case, drastic changes will necessarily happen.

Guns are a very polarizing issue. But what about more conventional liability for hurting someone with a 3D printed object, or damage to property? How liable would be the person who put the design on internet, in a 3D enthusiast forum and who lives at the other end of the planet? How would the entire sets of regulations developed to protect the consumer from defects in products need to change?

All these questions are in the air. Because the institution of manufacturing changes, so needs also the entire set of regulation, or regulatory authorities. It is just the start of a drastic revolution. Watch how it unfolds over the next few months!

How 3D-Printing Is Redefining our World Quicker than We Imagine

You will not have missed a few events that shook the news in the past few weeks and which are related to 3D printing, a new Fourth Revolution manufacturing technology (refer to our post on POD (print-on-demand) and 3-D printing):

the issues around 3D printing of guns and the availability of those drawings on the net to anyone, which by-passes all the weapons-control regulations that were based on conventional manufacturing traceability – see for example an Australian reaction here,
the fantastic rescue of a toddler with an artificial trachea that was 3D printed and will dissolve itself progressively as tissue will build around it (more on this here, here and here; the technique is not really new but always impressive: re-view also this great TED talk mentioned in our post Manufacturing Revolution reloaded: 3D printing of human organs is real!)

Like every new invention we can see here, almost at the same time, the two sides of it – the most beautiful at the same time as the ugly, destructive side.

But for the moment, is there a better proof that this new distributed manufacturing technology starts to shake the world as Chris Anderson predicts in his latest “Makers” book?

Remember the time where computers were huge expensive machines and people thought the personal computer would never happen and never be found useful? If you are working in a manufacturing industry, you’d better beware of what is going to happen as manufacturing becomes personal and decentralized!

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