Category: Collaborative Age

How the Modern World Is Actually More Resilient in the Face of Catastrophic Events

With the Covid-19 pandemics there have been a lot of comments on the fragility of modern economies when they face such a disruption. I don’t agree. Of course there are severe consequences, but I believe that the modern world is actually must more robust than it would have been decades ago when facing such an event.

Some examples which struck me.

Supply chains have been disrupted it is true, but global supply chains have also helped fight the virus and deliver equipment between China and other countries, and vice-versa. And supply chain is not really going to be disrupted for long. After a few days or weeks, new chains will be in place for the industry. Many large industrial concerns are still producing; reasons for stoppage were more related to the protection of employees.

Modern transportation has allowed in France to easily transfer sick people between regions to alleviate hospital load.

Despite the confinement, the economy has not stopped as much as it would have a few years ago, thanks to the modern capability for remote work. Many companies and organisations have carried on.

Governments in Europe have taken measures to protect employees and people from the worst short term economic impact from the crisis.

And overall (this still remains to be confirmed), the action of most governments will lead to much less fatalities than would have been the case some decades ago.

Of course the pandemics is a terrible blow to the world and its economy, but we will certainly observe that it will be far more resilient than we expect.

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How the Pandemic Accelerates the Move to Remote Work

The Covid-19 pandemic has really shaken the world. And it has accelerated the move towards virtual remote work. I like this title from Mitch Joel: “It Took A Global Pandemic To Change How We Work“.

While I have been practicing this work mode for years as a global consultant, many more people have found out that it can work provided there is a reasonable organisation at home to allow it. I have many contacts in large companies that discovered this mode of working for the first time, and were obliged to do that for weeks!

I am deeply convinced that in the collaborative age, we’ll still have face-to-face meetings but we will also work increasingly from home or remotely.

The key, I believe, is to know each other physically if possible before starting to collaborate virtually. Although that may not even be fully true as long as there has been some one-to-one personal interaction on an emotional level before, and that can also be through some remote video meetings.

And this will also mean some profound changes in architecture: home offices will become a must and not any more an option.

Welcome to the age of remote work!

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How Fake Reviews Are Another Bane of E-shops

I discovered in this paper ‘Her Amazon Purchases Are Real. The Reviews Are Fake‘ how there is an industry setup to generate fake reviews on Amazon. This must be an issue for all e-commerce websites and creates another challenge for those sites to regulate and banish.

The setup is actually quite clever: a consumer really purchases the items, comments positively on them one week or so later, so that the review seems legitimate. Only that she gets reimbursed on her purchases separately and whatever she writes it is a 5-star review. This in turn, pops the item up the search results on the site, resulting in more sales – and thanks to Amazon reach, an added profit that is probably many times the investment in the fake purchase of the item in the first place: “a high ranking in a search can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue“!

Having some family and friends write gleaming reviews on Amazon is an old trick to promote one’s stuff, or at least try to make it visible. But in that case it seems that the practice has taken industrial proportions. Up to the point where I wonder what truthfulness should be given to those reviews on e-commerce sites!

Amazon and other e-commerce sites will soon need to do something. This may not be as damaging as fake political ads, but on the long time this has the potential to severely erode people’s confidence in those sites.

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How Increased Monopolies Could Explain Low Interest Rates

In this interesting post ‘How Monopolies Broke the Federal Reserve‘ the author expresses the opinion that the current world of low interest rates is a direct consequence of the emergence of large monopolies in the current global economy (after having however qualified this view by the fact that economists are good to explain the past and terrible to explain the present!).

The point that is made is that interest rates are low because people don’t know what to do with all their liquidity: “Thanks to ever-increasing wealth concentration and meager growth across the developed world, you have some people sitting on incredible piles of cash and a shortage of people with robust opportunities to borrow and use that cash.” It’s a savings glut!

However beyond this explanation what is offered in the post is that it is not that there is nothing worth inventing anymore, but that any worthwhile innovation is captured – and the value is kept – by a few giant concerns. “The economy has become a giant kill zone. In venture capital circles, the term “kill zone” has become quite popular to describe the phenomenon of having no places to profitably invest“.

There are signs that the GAFA of this world are eating, devouring the value of startup companies and not really allow them to grow and prosper. Could the increasing power of monopolies be limiting innovation and creating a situation where new upstarts can develop? And is the consequence low interest rates?

While I am not entirely convinced, it is still a view useful to ponder!

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How Connections is Far More Important Than Likes

Valeria Maltoni reminds us in her post ‘There’s no ROI in Likes. The ROI is in Connection‘ that connections are quite more important than social network likes. It’s worth reminding ourselves from time to time!

“You don’t get connection from status. You get it by enlivening each other other, making people stronger through engagement. Status may give you self-esteem, but alone it does not create change“

The post is quite interesting to read as it recounts an actual experiment performed on a social network (LinkedIn).

Indeed change depends on strong connections. Social capital accrues in actual physical networks. Think about how often you have transformed virtual connections to physical connections (in my case, not impossible but quite rare). And the value that can be created by a physical face-to-face in terms of possibilities.

Let’s do more physical connections and less likes!

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How the Value We Create Should be Measured Like Energy

This intriguing post ‘4 Questions with Peter Tunjic, Founder, DLMA Labs‘ touches on the issue of how to value on a comparative scale wealth, social interactions, infrastructures and other aspects creating value in our lives.

Peter Tunjic’s goal is to “create a program that would graphically represents flows of capitals within a corporation – financial, social, natural, etc. [He] had long recognized that capitals could be transformed from one form to another. ” – for example in a corporation.

The interesting part of his approach is that he concludes that money cannot be used as a way to reduce all forms of value. He rather compares value with a level of energy that can be transformed, like kinetic energy can be transformed in potential energy and vice-versa.

“What we should be doing in business is turning money into things with a greater value than money – human, intellectual and social capital. Put simply, the unique properties of these capitals mean they can bring about more positive change for longer.”

The approach is still not mature, but thinking about measuring value as some energy that can be transformed is a great idea that would have merit for being developed further. Maybe a future contender to replace GDP as a measure of value growth?

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How We Need to Set Rules for Biohacking

Biohacking (using drugs and technology to make one’s body/mind function better) is trendy. In this post ‘Biohacking Gone Wild‘, some interesting examples are given – from simple examples we all are actually using, to extreme hacking.

We’ve been doing biohacking in its widest senses for ages, for example when we are wearing glasses.

Some modern examples are quite frightening: “It’s estimated that over 100,000 people already have various types of implants. In Sweden, thousands of Swedes are inserting chips under their skin to speed up their daily routines. They use chips to open locked doors, to store contact information, and to get on to the train“

We do, and we will obviously progressively extend our capabilities using technology of some sort. I do think there are some limits that should only be exceeded with care. For me, anything changing my body chemistry for example, is for me clearly out-of-bounds. Using prosthetics adding capabilities to my body can be discussed as long as it can be shut down, removed, or only put on when needed. Not to mention personal data protection.

Biohacking is just starting, and it will pervade the world of the Collaborative Age. What rules should we put in place to keep it within reasonable bounds?

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How the Economy Increasingly Becomes a Project Economy

In this post ‘Welcome to the Project Economy‘, an interesting perspective if given on the transformation of economic activity towards a project-based activity (to be taken with a pinch of salt though, the author being part of PMI and thus promoting project-specific training and certification).

Still, the historical perspective provided in the post is interesting and quite aligned with my views. “A century [after the Industrial Revolution], the future of work has once again become a central topic. Technological advancements and automation are provoking a business transformation every bit as radical as the one set in motion a hundred years ago.” “Amidst all this chaos, one thing is clear: the 4th Industrial Revolution has unleashed The Project Economy. The fusion of physical and digital in a desire to blend speed and precision as organizations integrate strategy design and delivery, is taking hold in broader and more sophisticated ways“. The post goes on to give interesting examples in a number of companies and industries.

I certainly concur about this transformation and this explains why I am passionate about project management. At the same time, there are many different types of projects and ways to approach them, and it may be a bit excessive to broaden the concept too much or to try to put all projects under the same approaches and methods.

What’s exciting is that each project remains a single human adventure involving a limited team to create new stuff that may change the world. How many projects are you in at the moment?

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How Important It Is to Distinguish Between Finite and Infinite Games

In this excellent speech ‘What game theory teaches us about war’ (Youtube), Simon Sinek reminds us that there isa great difference between playing finite or infinite games. This brings back to the book ‘Finite and Infinite Games‘ by James Carse.

“There are two types of games: there are finite games and there are infinite games. A finite game is defined as known players fixed rules and agreed-upon objective (such as baseball for example). An infinite game is defined as known and unknown players the rules are changeable and the objective is to perpetuate the game.“

He reminds us then that business or strategy is an infinite game, and those finite players won’t last long. “The game of business is an infinite game. The concept of business has existed longer than every single company that exists right now and it’ll exist long after all the companies that exist right now go away. The funny thing about business is the number of companies that are playing finite they’re playing to win they’re playing to be the best they’re playing to beat the quarter or the year and they’re always frustrated by that company that has an amazing vision, a long-term vision that seems to drive them crazy and over the long term that player will always win and the other player will run out of resources or the will and they’ll go out of business“.

There can be some differing views about how to play infinite games (see this post about whether the current unpredictability of US external policy could be a way to play the infinite game: ‘Why Simon Sinek is wrong about Game Theory.’

Still this distinction is important and it reminds us that when we play infinite games, rules are not so essential as they are constantly reinvented; and strategies such as unpredictability can be valid to have other players on their toes. Are you playing a finite or infinite game?

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How the Notion of Country Is Becoming Progressively Obsolete

As reminded in this excellent post by Gapingvoid, the notion of country is quite recent (the formalization of the concept of nation dating back to the Peace of Westphalia (1648)). It is now under siege, and actions are being taken in real life that show its limits: “The Kingdom of Denmark has just appointed a new Ambassador… not to a country, but to Silicon Valley“.

There is thus an increased recognition that large corporations of the Collaborative Age may have a larger influence on our lives than smaller countries. At the same time the notion of nationalism shows its limits in an open, more connected world (even if there is a temporary reaction against international trade, it remains and will remain a major economic factor).

There is at the same time a pull-back towards one own’s community (smaller entity than the nation-state) and the feeling of belonging to a wider, more international community through our social networks and through supra-state entities such as the European Union. Power is hoarded by large global corporations. At the same time, the emergence of a nomadic elite is substantially changing the perspective of the society influencers towards a more global perspective. The central level of nation-state is progressively being voided, or at least becomes less important.

The nation-state was probably a temporary useful concept suitable to the Industrial Age. It is probably not adapted to the Collaborative Age and new governance levels will have to be implemented – probably a multi-layered governance with a much stronger global level.

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How People Have Changed Their Discretionary Entertainment Expenditure Towards Streaming Platforms

In this interesting post by Frederic Filloux ‘The Consumer Trends That Destroyed Media’s Business Model‘, some interesting trends are exposed about our consumption habits in the area of entertainment (thus, discretionary expenditure). Of course those expenditures only represent a small share of our total budgets, but they have great influence on our understanding of the world.

The curves and statistics show that most expenditures are taken by subscriptions to internet and mobile services, followed closely by a fast growing video-on-demand trend, led by Netflix. This leaves only limited space in the budgets for other expenditures such as events and tickets, literature, or press subscriptions. This translates to more and more time spent on those services to the detriment of written books or media, or even live shows or visiting museums.

At the same time that there is an increasing development of somewhat addictive series instead of feature films, this trend is at the same time not too surprising but also concerning.

It definitely shows a substantial shift as many of those expenditures did not exist 20 years ago, therefore, they have necessarily replaced other activities and expenditures and those (including cable TV, the press, cinemas or generally live shows) are thus suffering. The trends give all of us much more choices in what we are watching while giving us potentially less opportunity to discover new things.

Anyway, it is quite illuminating to observe how our expenditure habits have dramatically changed in the last years, giving us more opportunity to choose our entertainment, with a large domination of online and video entertainment. This is certainly a trend that will continue.

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How Small Groups Can Now Bring Change Even Inside Large Organizations

It is well known that “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” (Margaret Mead). It would seem this also applies from within large companies such as Google or Amazon, as explained in this interesting post ‘Small Groups United by a Shared Purpose are Changing Big Tech Companies. Here’s How‘.

The examples developed are how a group of Google employees have successfully raised the issue of the company getting involved in defense program; and how Amazon employees have pledged the company to do something active in the field of climate change.

The capability of communicating in groups, broadcasting and receiving feedback, allows easier self-organization of groups with a purpose. It may be the most visible in ‘Big Tech’ where it may be more natural, but it will undoubtedly also change how large companies address certain issues.

Employees, like citizens, are increasingly empowered to raise to their leadership topics of concern and obtain a voice for change. Welcome to the Collaborative Age!

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