Don’t wait until your product is perfect to push the button or you’ll never progress by getting the right feedback. Yet how finished, polished, perfect should be your product before you shoot it to the world? What is actually a ‘minimum viable product’ to follow the words of the Lean Startup Movement?
Are you ready to push the button even if not "perfect"?
There is a little bit of debate on this issue. Is it just a functional product even if it does not look nice? Well, if it’s not attractive and nobody tries it, you’d better add some good presentation.
Is it a product for CEOs? Make sure it looks professional enough.
Is it a nice-looking product that does only part of the work? Here again it depends who you send it to, and what they would expect.
‘Done is better than perfect’ is written on the Facebook walls. It is the motto of the hackers. It’s true. But your product should have at least some of the functionality and look as your prospective clients will expect. Don’t wait forever for the perfect, but make sure what is done works for what you expect it to do. Maybe you should start by analyzing what are the minimum functionality you are aiming for your audience and stick to that as a priority.
In summary, don’t seek to be perfect. Just do the right thing – and just the right thing. And shoot to the world.
The Fourth Revolution fosters a contradiction between cultural unification and diversity. And diversity wins, for sure!
We observe a quick assimilation into a unified world where English is the lingua franca, or so it looks on a first glimpse (actually there are some contradicting statistics there, and English tends to diminish on the net). At the same time the Fourth Revolution makes it easier than ever to read and understand other languages, and even save languages on the brink of being forgotten!
Thanks to the Fourth Revolution, we'll continue to understand this language
We’re all using automatic translation every day; our computers can spell check an incredible number of languages, soon for sure there will be automated translators that will allow us to communicate with others, in the palm of our hands. Most of these tools use the crowd-power: Google translate asks to suggest better translations; users are constantly improving the tools.
And languages on the brink of being forgotten suddenly have more chances to be saved (see the BBC article “Digital Tools to Save Languages“).
I love the quote from the article:
“Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in – all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature”
With the widespread recording tools of the Fourth Revolution, the syndrom of the elderly dying in Africa without passing on his knowledge is behind us. The library in the mind of this wise person is not lost any more. From the remotest corners of the world, knowledge is preserved, available, searchable, offering an immense opportunity for us.
I can’t even imagine what we will be able to do with it! And you?
Social media is trendy. It is where companies can meet consumers, in particular the young generations. A lot of companies launch themselves for marketing purposes. But those who do so half-heartedly, thinking they can just broadcast their message without engaging with the people, are in fact lowering their brand reputation.
Are you overwhelmed by the Corporation?
As this paper “Lessons of the Exterminator: Transforming Your Social Media, One Customer at a Time” argues, nothing makes more of a difference than not responding to consumers complaints and remarks. If you’re claiming you’re social and you don’t react to consumers observations, you’re doomed on the long term. Unhappy consumers that get a response on their twitter or facebook complaints, and are then engaged in a meaningful conversation will, on the contrary, give the company the benefit of the doubt, and might even become one of their most fervent supporters.
There is a famous case-study involving DELL in 2005 (see this article on Dell’s hell as a summary). Dell took an inordinate amount of time to react and could only see the damage to the brand. They’ve taken the initiative since then and have become one of the brands most engaged in social networks (see a paper written late 2011 on “why Dell is still a great case study“), with a dedicated team engaging with customers and most of their employees trained in social network. Today they’ve learnt their lessons and they leverage social media to the benefit of the brand.
That’s why you can’t really engage in public social media half-way. If you are not setup to respond immediately to consumer’s remarks, if you don’t empower your social network team to exceed expectations and give them the power to get the organization to react, you’re doomed.
Still 70% of the companies engaged in social media today don’t get it!
Don’t engage in social media just for the hype and the impression that it is trendy. If you engage, engage completely and be ready for challenge from the outside. A challenge, that taken positively, can lead to substantial improvement in your business and your brand.
Once upon a time there was a company that had no boss. There were quite more than 100 people in the office, and they just organized themselves fluidly around temporary projects: who has the best idea got the support of others.
Extract from Valve Employee Handbook
Desks had wheels so that project teams can join spontaneously. Just unplug, replug, and there you could work next to your new buddy.
Failure was accepted as a learning opportunity and very quickly, new hires worked directly on the main products where they could wreck havoc so easily!
Employee evaluation was based on peer evaluation; a constant stream of feedback was organized to each employee from the feedback of peers; and even salary increments were based on a peer-review ranking.
Do you think this company exists in another galaxy or is just in the Fourth Revolution’s author imagination? No, it’s a company called Valve and its employee handbook is accessible here. Get a glimpse of how the workplace of the future will look like, it is absolutely eye-opening! A real MUST-READ!
Brace yourself because the workplace is going to look more frequently like that: we will be expected to take initiatives in an unstructured environment and let our contribution shine in the eyes of the others. No more boss, no more instructions. Pure initiative, pure entrepreneurship.
Are you ready for the Fourth Revolution in organizations?
In this stunning video from TED, Kevin Kelly describes the revolution of the last 5,000 days of the Web and what is coming in the next 5,000 days. Knowing that the video was shot in 2007 we can already see some predictions coming true!
Fasten your seat belts, the world is now changing amazingly!
How the web will become a ONE machine and we will all be the ONE. How in 2040, the processing capability of the web will exceed the combined processing power of 6 billion individuals. And more insight about the tremendous changes that are happening in the world!
That form of crowdfunding is almost quite close to a a cooperative approach (investment upfront in exchange for cheaper products later), but it works and can serve to produce win-win solutions locally! What’s interesting is that people got involved into the project after they had been touched via social networks, as the bakery project did not have any storefront at the beginning.
So, social networks and crowdfunding can work at different scales, from the local to the regional to the global. How can we leverage these different scales?
In this follow-up post on the topic of complexity (read “How the Fourth Revolution brings us from the complicated to the complex” if you’ve missed it), we’ll examine in the world that surrounds us, how complex systems behave, to take some lessons of what we can expect of the Collaborative Age.
Do you know that erosion does not happen regularly across time? In the blink of an eye geologically speaking, major events, floods, storms, change the shape of the rivers thousand of times more than years of normal flow!
Colorado river canyon: how do you think erosion really works?
99% of the shaping of the Grand Canyon probably happened during short, abnormal events. The gradual shaping of the canyon, sand grain after sand grain, is a myth!
When I was studying hydraulics some years (ahem…) ago I learnt this lesson which seemed strange to me at the time. Today as I know more about complex systems it is not surprising anymore, it is normal. But it really shows how our perception of the world around us has been shaped by the Industrial Age.
Industrial Age mindset wanted us to believe that changes happened progressively. A famous controversy among naturalists in the first half of the 19th century opposed the ‘catastrophists‘ to the ‘gradualists‘. Consistent with the Industrial Age mindset of a mechanistic, predictable world, the ‘gradualists’ won finally and their view imposed to the world for the next 150 years or so. (Funny enough, earlier wisdom was rather ‘catastrophist‘ (eg the Bible)). It is only recently that science re-discovered that the evolution of species, the erosion of rivers, and many other natural phenomenons do not evolve progressively over time. There are some climax periods where evolution happens thousand times faster, separated by relatively quiet periods.
The theory of complex systems, and in particular all the works on risk, show that variability in most systems follow a ‘long tail’: the probability of events significatively out of normal range is much higher than we think conventionally. And when they happen, they change the situation dramatically. In fact, they shape the entire system, dwarfing all the progressive change that could have happened before.
What can we take from all this science and knowledge?
It is not because a situation, an organization, a market etc seems stable for some time that a major event will not happen that will reshape completely the surrounding world
we always underestimate the possibility of a significant freak event (and underestimate also its power to change our environment)
Freak events will happen sooner or later. They will change completely the balance of a situation we thought was stable and secure. The reality is that freak events are those that drive the changes in our world, not progressive ‘gradual’ change.
Would you agree that the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the tsunami in Japan 2011, etc are freak events that were totally outside the normal? And that they shaped the world more than any other event in the previous decade?
We need to be ready for freak events, because they create the real change. Not only that: we need to be ready to grab the opportunity.
Discover next week in the last post of the series how the successful K.E.E.N. can grab the opportunities offered by freak events.
Complex is not the same as complicated. Industrial Age got us used to the complicated mindset. Collaborative Age is the the era of complexity. And here lies a fundamental difference overlooked and misunderstood by so many people.
This is the first of a series of 3 posts about complexity and how we can thrive through it.
Watch gears: complicated but not complex!
A watch is very complicated, as are numerous appliances we are using everyday. Yet, its outcome is highly predictable (it’s a watch after all!). We can rely on it to run precisely for days or months in a row. Each component fits nicely, mechanically in a single system. Each component does not have the choice of doing whatever it wants. It is driven by the system to perform reliable its single function.
While in a complex system is also an intricate buildup of many interrelated contributors, there is one main difference: each contributor has the choice, follows its own interest.
Afghanistan: example of a complex, unpredictable system
Like the situation in Afghanistan, the outcome is difficult to predict, more difficult even to steer in the expected direction if we are one of the players.
Science added another category of complex systems: some purely mathematical systems that include retro-action and multiple iteration loops can have results that become unpredictable (chaotic systems), even if the initial mathematical formula was simple. It is the case of weather and other important systems around us (ref the famous analogy of the butterfly flying in Brazil that can create a storm in the US).
The Industrial Age viewed the world as complicated; it meant that there was supposed to be a way to understand how it worked and there after, predict where it was going. As such, predictability of your behavior and your results in the vast system of production was expected; in exchange there was some predictability in your career development, based on your formal education.
Alas the mechanistic view of the Industrial Age did not resist to reality. We now know that the world is undoubtedly complex. Totally interconnected. And as such, forever unpredictable. Forever impossible to divide in small parts, cogs, that would nicely fit together to create a perfect, predictable world.
Of course, the ever accelerating development of connectivity in the past decades has dramatically increase the complexity of today’s world. We are all now fully inter-dependent, part of a large complex system.
We know now that we are in a complex world, and that just being a cog following instructions is not a sustainable way to success. That major unexpected events are drawing the picture of the world much more powerfully than the succession of daily small changes. That an idea in remote Afghanistan can create a storm in New-York and change forever the lives of billions of people.
Let go of the mindset of the Industrial Age. The world is not complicated, it is just complex!
In the following weekly posts, we’ll examine some properties of complex systems, before finally discussing what we can really do today to thrive in a complex system. Check out next week the followup post on complexity!
In the Fourth Revolution book we argue that traditional accounting is obsolete. On of the arguments is: it does not measure human capital.
How human capital weighs more than physical capital (in trillion USD)
Some economists have tried it though at the national level and here is the result, in this figure. Amazing, isn’t it?
There is some debate among economists on the derivation of the human capital value. This one was derived in this article, Human Capital Accounting in the United States 1994-2006. The article is a bit dry, so let’s summarize the basis for the calculation. The Human Capital is measured as the present discounted value of lifetime incomes (market and non-market) of the entire population. Interesting is that in the US, human capital does not increase as a result of higher education, but only as a result of population growth, which is mainly driven by immigration. Education levels remain relatively constant at the moment.
In this area, Singapore has gone one step further: faced with a declining local population due to low birth rates, the Singapore government actively scours the schools of South East Asia for clever kids and offers them a fully-paid scholarship, up to their university studies included, under the condition that they stay and work for the first few years of their career. They even enroll a large contingent of Continental Chinese students that way. They certainly hope that these young people will stay and found a family in Singapore. Note that as a country, they actively go and seek gifted kids in remote schools of China! It is thanks to this proactive human resource policy that Singapore constantly increases its Human Capital, the key to the Collaborative Age.
In some other countries, the debate about immigration seems to be from another age. Japan declines because it does not culturally accept immigration.
In the Collaborative Age more than ever, Human Capital is key to economic development. It needs to be increased, both through education and number. It’s the key to prosperity.
Note – this article was initially inspired by Alex Tabarrok’s blog post Human Capital.
Education is a key institution that will necessarily be fundamentally changed by the Fourth Revolution. Traditional education was created during the Industrial Age to produce people for Manufacturing. Still, today, the education model is already changing, deeply and more quickly than we think. And voices start to be heard on that topic.
Students graduating from conventional education: an institution already obsolete?
Lately, high education had become a very profitable market and some countries like Australia openly develop Higher Education as a great activity sector that also serves to attract foreign currency and talents. Advertisements for Universities is at an all-time high in all South-East Asia countries! At the same time, the cost of education has soared, leaving many youngsters in deep education debt in countries like the USA.
How much is higher education a good investment? The model used to be that investing in a great university would be greatly profitable on the long term, over one’s career. That it would be the safest investment of all. It is not so straightforward today, of course. Some people like Peter Thiel announce that we are in a ‘higher education bubble‘ where education is overrated and its cost will collapse soon. In this article on “the education bubble has popped“, Doug French argues that the profitability of investing in (formal) education becomes more and more elusive as tuition soars and under-employment looms. He also gives some interesting numbers: tuition increasing four times quicker than inflation, more and more credit-based funding (education debt would have outgrown credit-card debt!).
Good education was supposed to lead to good jobs, at least at the beginning of a career. More and more authors argue that 1) “jobs” in the traditional meaning of “slots inside an organization that provide a steady income” are disappearing; 2) to find good income in one’s occupation, other skills are needed than those that are supposed to be learnt at school. Daniel Jelski in this post “the three laws of future employment” states that
Law #1: People will get jobs doing things that computers can’t do.
Law #2: A global market place will result in lower pay and fewer opportunities for many careers. (But also in cheaper and better products and a higher standard of living for American consumers.)
Law #3: Professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have a steady job.
As a consequence his advice to students is quite different from what conventional education would advice: follow your passion, work your way into mastery (the 10,000 hours practice), and work on emotional connection and beauty.
The crisis in conventional education can be seen coming. If that is really a bubble, it will hit hard when it will burst. The Fourth Revolution is at work!
I found this thought in one book by Alan Weiss, a consulting guru. I noted it because that’s quite deep actually, and it relates perfectly to the Fourth Revolution transformation.
train for mass production efficiency
Training was appropriate for the Industrial Age. People got trained to do their job more efficiently.
You trained people to do their individual task more quickly, with better quality… And you used carrot and stick incentives to help.
Alas, training is not any more appropriate for the Collaborative Age. Education is much more. Because value is not anymore in people following a written, predictable process to produce something. Now, you need to give people the background, the thinking tools, the inner game to produce effective things, that are worthwhile and of high value.
Education (as in general, higher cultural education) was reserved to a small portion of society. It needs now to be made available to everybody.
And ‘training course’ needs to change in ‘educational event’. And the content focused on getting people to developing their thinking and creative abilities.
When will you change your people’s development strategies to fit into the Fourth Revolution new needs?
Did you remember the time where there was no email, no internet, no wikipedia, no facebook, no skype? At the moment I write this post I am sitting in an airport terminal in Doha, Qatar to change flights on a long trip between Singapore and Houston, TX and (for free) I can Skype with my family back in Singapore, exchange with the world, watch an educational TED video and… write by blog on my internet server located in the US (or so I believe…).
I can’t stop to be amazed. What will we do of all this new power?
