Category: Institutions and Revolutions

How Power Creates Responsibility (and Weakness Promotes Irresponsibility)

One of the issues we are facing as democracies is the rise of irresponsible requests from small groups. In fact, weak groups have nothing to lose: and they tend to become quite irresponsible. The weaker, the more desperate and the more irresponsible. A good illustration is the condition of trade unions in France, or the desperate gestures of people threatening to make their plant explode to avoid its closure.

On the other hand, power almost always brings responsibility, although it might take a while for the people to perform this transition (as such it is typical that a political party coming into power after too many years in the opposition will take one to two years to become quite responsible).

This observation bears also a way to deal with irresponsibility: give more power in certain areas to bring responsibility on the table. It can be an excellent negotiation strategy when facing a really irresponsible party.

Share

How Each Social Group Has Its Own Vernacular Tongue

Have you realized that each social group, be it a local community, a sports club a particular industry or a specific company, has its own vernacular tongue. In particular, it tends to use words and acronyms whose sense is only understandable by the initiated. We often underestimate the community power created by this shared understanding – and the exclusion power for those that don’t understand it.

Which means that an outsider’s first focus should be to learn that specific tongue, so as to be integrated. The power of integration brought by the capability to speak the community tongue is incredible and underestimated.

As a consultant I do enter many different client organizations and learning the specific words, expressions and acronyms is the first priority. Once they are known and used properly, I feel integrated in the community, and they feel I am part of them, which is quite useful.

Hat tip to Alain Carcassès for the discussion and the original idea

Share

How Remote Teams Can be More Productive Than Colocated Teams

This interesting post on Techcrunch ‘Not even remotely possible‘ makes the point that a remote team can be quite more productive than if they are colocated.

“Quite apart from the time and rent saved, there’s growing evidence that remote teams can be more productive than in-person ones. Consider: “We found massive, massive improvement in performance — a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home.” Consider companies like Automattic, Gitlab, InVision, and Zapier, all of which thrive as fully remote companies.” [the Stanford link is a study made on China’s largest travel agency]

The interesting point here is how the way we work changes because of remoteness: “The biggest transition from office to remote work isn’t the geography; that’s incidental. The biggest transition is the mode of communication, which goes from default-synchronous (walk over to your colleague’s desk) to default-asynchronous (PM them on Slack.) I certainly concede that certain forms of work, and certain people, benefit more from synchronous communications; but I put it to you that “most kinds of software development” is not among them, and that an ever-increasing fraction of the world’s work can be described as “most kinds of software development.””

Managing remote teams and getting traction from home is the future. It saves money, environmental disruption and is even more productive! So why wait?

 

Share

How Social Networks Change Military Coup Techniques and Show Obsolescence of Institutions

During the 20th century the first objective for any military coup was the radio and television broadcasting stations: control of the broadcasting of the news was of strategical importance. The events of the Turkey coup last year show that social networks have rendered this tactics obsolete: Turkey President Erdogan was able to address its nation using his smartphone!

President Erdogan addressing Turkey through iPhone and Facetime

This is another change of paradigm and obsolescence of the public broadcasting institution as sole vector of news and propaganda.

The funny thing is that dictators and other dirigiste regimes will face a difficult paradox: reigning in social networks might feel good from the control of communications perspective, but it will also diminish resilience in the face of unexpected events like a coup. How to deal with this paradox? The openness of the world will necessarily win!

Share

How Lifetime Employment Has Become Impossible As the LifeSpan of Companies Dwindles

I stumbled on the enclosed picture and I found it was a great way to illustrate the tremendous change from the Industrial Age to the Collaborative Age.

Where life employment could be a reasonable assumption, the average lifespan of companies today requires us to rethink that perception completely.

And this represents the average lifespan of the larger companies, not considering even smaller companies that are generally less stable over time.

Our own lives transcend the life of temporary organizations. Organizations become more and more transient organizations built around a project. They are rarely developing into a sustainable organization of its own, and are often acquired by other businesses.

The time of companies’ instability has come. Are you prepared?

Share

How Artificial Intelligence Needs to Be Regulated

In July there was a lot of media coverage of the declarations of Elon Musk about Artificial Intelligence in front of a US Governors Assembly. See for example Fortune’s ‘Elon Musk says that Artificial Intelligence is the Greatest Threat We Face as a Civilization‘.

According to Elon Musk “AI’s a rare case where we need to be proactive in regulation, instead of reactive. Because by the time we are reactive with AI regulation, it’s too late,” he remarked. Musk then drew a contrast between AI and traditional targets for regulation, saying “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization, in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs, or bad food were not.”

His point is that if unregulated, AI might learn to manipulate to achieve goals that would be harmful to (some) humans. Elon Musk has access to the latest AI developments and it might be difficult to understand those capabilities. In any case, his warning should be heard and regulation might be a good thing. At the end of the day, AI might be used as a weapon and weapons are generally regulated. In any case it would not harm to have a regulatory approach to it. The challenge of the safety certification of AI-driven objects could be the right way to tackle the issue.

Share

How Tax Systems Evolve in the Collaborative Age

As I was looking at a EU document about VAT in all European countries, the historical tables have caught my attention (pages 18 sqq). They show invariably a substantial increase in VAT rates in the last decades. In most countries, this tax has become the main income stream of governments. In South East Asia, Singapore and Malaysia have just introduced the equivalent GST, and it will soon in introduced in India at a substantial rate.

GST or VAT is becoming increasingly important. This tax is non progressive, it applies to poor and rich at the same time; actually percentage-wise rich people will generally pay less if they consume less than their income. At the same time, income tax importance has generally stagnated or touch less people (in France, less than 40% of taxpayers pay income tax). Similarly, corporate tax shows a strong tendency to diminish in all countries nowadays. VAT/GST increasingly becomes the main income stream of governments.

I believe that this evolution reflect deep transformations related to the Fourth Revolution, without being quite sure about the cause. In a way, it is a problem because tax systems become generally less progressive (increasing tax with revenue) and this increases inequalities. At the same time it follows the fact that income might not reflect value and that final consumption might be a better indicator and taxable source nowadays.

Share

How Digital Can Change Justice – Predictive Justice in Practice

As a Business Angel I see quite a few startup ideas and the concept of Predictice has struck me as a major experiment of digital applied to public service (disclosure: I liked it so much they got some investment from me too, just for the sake of following up their evolution more closely!).

The concept is to use all available judicial decisions for France (soon to be open-source but elsewhere available on some professional databases) to analyze the data using syntax associations and thus be able to give statistics on the expectations of a decision concerning a particular case. To be relevant, the algorithms have to be built with professionals using a specific process; so algorithms are being progressively developed in several judicial fields (family, private property etc).

The results are quite astounding as the system can give the average chance and compensation amount in fine grained detail based on the details of the situation and even the geographic location of the jurisdiction (which will certainly raise some eyebrows as it appears that there are regional differences).

The interesting thing is that it brings justice to a new level. It does not replace lawyers or judges, but it brings the debate to another level. As a support to the work of humans it brings substantial value. It gives valuable feedback to jurisdictions. More generally, with this startup Big Data transforms the way justice is being practiced.

There are certainly many fields of public service that are ripe to be disrupted in the same manner.

Share

How Government Needs to Shift with the Collaborative Age – Influencing the Digital Sphere

Government’s role needs to shift significantly with the Fourth Revolution. In the past it used a lot of resource for data capture and crunching, which is now done automatically and more quickly using digital tools. In a series of post ‘Teaching Digital at the Kennedy School of Government: A Road Map‘, David Eaves outlines some principles.

His main point is that “It is the digital sphere?—?and the rules, norms and structures that come to define it—that will, in many cases, control the physical sphere. This is why digital’s impact on the economy, democracy, and society should not be underestimated. It is also why understanding, shaping and engaging in those rules, norms and structures is essential to a policy school.”

Some key questions remain to be resolved: “What government can and should look like in a digital age is a real and pressing question“. ” Can governments become learning organizations that move at the speed of digital?“. It needs a fundamental rethink of how government conducts its operations and what value it adds to the People. The issue of regulation of the digital world is also acute.

Solutions are not yet available in a standard format but this area is certainly a very interesting field to watch as experiments are conducted in certain countries!

Share

How the Fourth Revolution Changes Business Leadership

The image of the evolution of the largest market capitalizations in the US shows how the most valuable businesses evolve from old-fashioned resource intensive businesses to new technology.

This transformation of the business world is of course facilitated by the current primary resource downward cycle, and of course this mainly reflects people expectations of future gains, which can be somewhat of an illusion. However the shift is so massive that it is worth noting. Even large manufacturing companies like GE have disappeared. Institutions are weakened by the shift they were not able to tackle early enough.

The investment power represented by the massive cash reserves and the leverage that can be raised on their valuation makes these companies potent transformers of the world. Yet at the same time by making digital ubiquitous and almost free, they facilitate the emergence of the next disrupters that might shake their very foundations.

The list may change, but the most valuable companies will certainly remain in the technology space for years to come, far into the Collaborative Age.

Share

How User-Generated Data Should be Better Valued

The excellent Economist article ‘The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data: the data economy demands a new approach to antitrust rules‘ raises a superbly framed question.

Railway, phone and oil tycoons of the late 19th century saw their empires dismantled by anti-trust laws to create competition and better prices for consumers. Anti-trust laws are still being applied strictly in the US and in Europe, looking mainly to the global market position.

“What has changed? Smartphones and the internet have made data abundant, ubiquitous and far more valuable. […] Meanwhile, artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning extract more value from data. […] This abundance of data changes the nature of competition. […] By collecting more data, a firm has more scope to improve its products, which attracts more users, generating even more data, and so on. […] Access to data also protects companies from rivals in another way [preventing new upcoming startups to have access to the vast troves of data]”

The fundamentals of the recommendations to follow in the paper is to give value to data and user access. This is valued in the rare transactions to acquire companies, but not really valued as part of a market by authorities.

Availability of data on users should be better valued in the economy as this becomes the driving force of the Collaborative Age. And this should be part of authorities’ decision-making. The question remains: beyond advertisement, how to value troves of data generated by users?

Share

How Each Civilization Bears the Seeds of Its Destruction Through Inequality Increase

Each civilization is characterized by a social organization and a specific elite. Following on our previous post ‘How Excessive Inequality Will Lead to Revolutions‘ and observation of the fall of previous civilizations and social organizations, a good question is if all societies do not spontaneously tend to increasing inequality – unless specific events or policies temporarily produce the opposite effect.

Societies generally probably tend to become more rigid over time as the elite tries to protect its advantages. If not compelled by external events to compensate (such as drought, catastrophic event, war) or without a visionary leader at the helm that increases redistribution, this may inevitably over time lead to a revolutionary event.

That revolutionary event is generally triggered by an economic downturn such as a bad harvest or more recently, an economic depression.

The Fourth Revolution is happening, transforming our economies and our lives. Elites will also change as a result. Will that be sufficient to manage the transition as we observe a rise in inequality in developed countries?

Share