Institutions and Revolutions | The Fourth Revolution Blog

Welcome to the Era of the Hardware Movement

The Hardware Movement – creating hardware in a decentralized, low risk and low series way, is starting to get some real grip. This post “The Long Tail of Hardware” exposes some latest thoughts on this topic.

self_replicating_printer — This printer is able to produce most of its own parts and replicate!

While funding for hardware startups does increase significantly, it has not yet reached the point where it becomes a global sensation and where former manufacturing institutions get in trouble from the competition. Still, 3D printing redefines our world quicker than we imagine. I have seen 3D printer in the offices of most of my engineering clients for prototyping. It seems that an ecosystem of garage hardware developers is developing. The tipping point could be close.

There are some legal implications of course, and open-source hardware is a concept that is maturing with a variety of licensing arrangements.

This movement needs to be watched as it may take the world by storm, although it might take a few additional years.

How to Resist Patent Trolls (Video)

We have written several times on this blog on the patent troll phenomenon, these entities trying to make money by owning widely applicable patents and attacking normal companies for wrongdoing (links below).

This excellent TED video gives an excellent explanation of the phenomenon and what you should do if it happens to you.

It also reminds a great lesson of what to do when you are taken hostage by someone. Concentrate on your objective and don’t let yourself be impressed.

Follow this link if you can’t see the video.

Previous posts on patent trolls:

Hat tip to Tim Berry for the link

Why We Should Stop Treating Our Organizations Like Machines

“These days, a different ideal for organizations is surfacing. We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent – attributes found only in living systems. The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines” says Margaret Wheatley.

fourmis de feu — Those Amazon basin ants self-organize as floating rafts to survive the periodic tropical inundations. A powerful example of collaborative organization in an unpredictable environment.

This is an absolutely powerful way to expose the tension that increases nowadays between the Industrial Age’s process-driven, “machine-like” organization and the Collaborative Age’s network that serves to produce value.

Comparing the Collaborative organization to a living system is clearly spot on. It is an ecosystem that achieves results through temporary collaboration, creativity through serendipity and random encounters.

Alas, the mechanistic view of organization is still very present. This creates huge waste and low satisfaction of those who participate in these organizations. This tension will increase in the next few years in all traditional organizations until it will resolve either through a crisis or through a transformation.

And you, are you ready to consider organizations as living systems?

Hat tip to Valeria Maltoni for the quote and Robert Branche for the image (on the cover of his new book, “les Radeaux de Feu“).

How Crowdfunding Demonstrates the Power of the Long Tail

Kickstarter, a leading crowdfunding site, released very interesting statistics about the crowdfunding activities it supports. On this site, 1 billion dollars of funding will be reached early 2014 with more than 5 million total backers!

What is particularly interesting is that the long tail, so typical of the Fourth Revolution, is at work everywhere: in the distribution of the value of successful projects (75% of projects have a value of less than 10,000$), in the distribution of the number of projects backed by backer (71% only backed a single project and this represents a stunning 40% of the total amounts spent).

This serves to confirm that crowdfunding does leverages the contribution of individuals in a fully distributed manner. As the US federal government and Security Exchange Commission is finalizing regulations that will allow companies to be funded by crowdfunding within certain limits (read this excellent article on the subject, “The promise and perils of equity crowdfunding“), we do observe a definite shift in the capability of individuals to influence projects and even companies on a global level and a decisive manner.

This is a definite shift in the economical power of our societies. Watch for the creative stuff that will ensue!

How to Overcome the Stockholm Syndrome of Traditional Employment

Following on our blog “What is so Awful About the Disappearance of Hierarchy?“, and the fact that many people feel attached to traditional hierarchical organizations as a kind of comfort anchor, I find that an interesting phenomenon to prompt thinking is the “Stockholm Syndrome”.

This psychological syndrome appears after hostage-taking situations, where the hostage might have developed a comfort feeling from small attentions the hostage taker might have had for him/ her. In spite of an overall terrible and violent picture of an hostage situation, it happens that a very strong emotional connection develops, where the hostage defends the hostage-taker. The hostage feels like the hostage-taker cares, whereas this is absolutely not the case.

It might be a stretch, but would it not be a similar case regarding the attachment of many people to traditional, hierarchical organizations? Employees are the first to complain loudly how they feel mistreated, poorly recognized, and how work is a burden; and at the same time, presented with alternative types of organization, they defend the traditional hierarchy because of the comfort provided and the small attentions given from time to time (gifts, bonuses and other recognition material).

We know when we are taken hostage in everyday life when we feel vulnerable, powerless and at the mercy of other people. Don’t let it happen to you even within normal employment: find your freedom space, including financially, and don’t feel at the mercy of your employer. And avoid absolutely the Stockholm syndrome!

What is so Awful About the Disappearance of Hierarchy?

As I was giving a conference in Singapore I talked about how the Fourth Revolution will certainly lead to the disappearance of traditional hierarchy in organization.

The reason is that Industrial Age hierarchy was justified by the scarce and expensive communication capabilities. This resulted in the pyramidal organization, which minimizes the number of links between individuals. Today with cheap and plentiful communication, organizations should become much flatter and networked.

Anyway I must have touched a ‘hot button’ because my remark did spur a lot of questions. Attendees seemed terrified by the perspective of the disappearance of traditional hierarchy. It might be because it gives some comfort and single point of reference (the boss) which makes it a more comfortable situation to be in compared to being in the midst of a network with uncertainty as to what needs to be done and how. Still some organizations do manage to be successful that operate in a fully non-hierarchical manner (see the blog post on the company Valve).

Removing hierarchy requires each of us to determine its objectives and be self-directed when it comes to what needs to be done. I fully understand that proposition might look scary to those used to work in a traditional environment. Still isn’t it an interesting value proposition that includes more freedom? Is it worth it? Can everyone adapt to this new organization? What do you think?

What a New Model for Effective Journalism Entails

There is a new news broadcasting outlet that becomes ever more successful lately (and I am hooked to their daily emails I receive through subscription): Quartz (qz.com).

The development of this brand and the associated business model is explained in detail in these two excellent blog posts by Frederic Filloux (link to post 1 and link to post 2). What I retain from this detailed explanation is that

Journalists are professional journalists drawn from established newsrooms
Yet, journalists are asked to provide the full content including all the links and pictures, exactly like if they were independent bloggers (and the website works on the basis of a blogging tool)
Revenue is provided by a specific advertisement strategy with few high value ads, which makes it free and profitable at the same time
the platform is designed for sharing and spreading the word

This is clearly the future of information business: high value content with specific angles on the current news that can’t be found anywhere else and a deep socialization of interaction with readers.

Traditional news outlets must be scared to death!

It’s not about Work-Life Balance, it’s about Work-Life Integration

This is a quote of Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, as related by Hugh McLeod. Hugh continues: “Work and personal life seems to meld together in a way that can be either enhancing or debilitating – and it is up to each person to structure what works in their life and in ways that allow them to be their best in work and at home. What is interesting is that this is a new phenomenon, borne out of technology.”

Work-Life balance is a typical concept stemming from a time where work and life were happening in different environments, separated by the barrier of commuting. This geographical border has now been abolished by technology. Work has already heavily invaded our private home, and life increasingly (but with more difficulties due to old habits) invades a bit our work.

Visionaries try to develop new spaces where life and work could co-exist harmoniously (this seems to be one of the objectives of Tony Hsieh’s Las Vegas downtown project that allies urban and social experiment).

We need to stop these obsolete and pervading considerations about work-life balance and concentrate on how we can integrate these two activities. In fact, they are not antagonistic but in synergy and we need to recognize that better. Once we look at it that way, a world of possibilities opens.

What about you? What do you see when you consider that work and life are in fact integrated and will become ever more integrated?

How the Subscription Economy is Spreading, Killing Ownership Further

Further to our successful blog post on The End of Ownership, John Warrillow proposes an interesting alternate view on the development of the Subscription Economy.

Increasingly, successful companies propose to clients to pay a subscription instead of buying individual items. John identifies 5 main business types associated with a subscription business model:

flat fee to access an unlimited library of content,
sampling boxes,
automatic replenishment of consumables,
monitoring (e.g. antivirus etc),
reporting – access to information.

The most interesting evolution lies in the first type. Unlimited libraries of content have only been made possible through the Fourth Revolution. It looks increasingly like subscription is the model of the future for access to cultural and artistic products, leveraged by powerful algorithms that suggest further products based on what you have been using. It is the typical model of Netflix for video, and it seems that Amazon and online music broadcasters increasingly tend towards this model.

For example, Amazon Kindle proposes a program where customers can borrow titles and authors get compensated from an Amazon pot, proportionally to the popularity of their books.

Hence, not only do we own less and rent more, but the rent increasingly looks like a flat fee for a service, relatively independent of the usage intensity. A great business model that will further reinforce our dependence on rental.

Re-imagining Work – Fourth Revolution applied (Video)

This excellent video from RSA Animate features Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer at Microsoft, explaining the future of Work – how it shifts with the digital revolution.

This video gives another perspective on the fact that Work as we were envisioning it in the Industrial Age is going to be deeply transformed by the Fourth Revolution: “The ways we live our working life today has become outdated“. And, it mentions how the concept of productivity is obsolete – not only obsolete – “it is fast becoming the problem“. The video also presents some interesting considerations on office space!

Plus, you’ll really enjoy the great illustrations as usual with RSA talks!

If you can’t see the video, follow this link.

Hat tip to Valeria Maltoni for this nugget. In her post she adds more comments on how she sees the future of work – in particular, that “One thing is for sure, a culture of openness remains scary for most organizations, as well as the people who work in them.” Interesting thought!

How to create disruption for billions in 18 months

Disruption happens ever more quickly. According to this excellent post on Asymco, Android is the third platform to reach 1 billion users.

Only that according to the graph, Android took 1.5 years to get there; Facebook took 3 years and Windows (two decades ago) probably something like 5 years.

1 billion user is planet-wide disruption. And today it only takes a few month for successful ecosystems to disrupt the planet and change our habits.

Do you remember the first version of the iPhone went on sale mid-2007? 6 years ago ONLY?

Food for thought.

How Regulation is Used to Defend old Institutions

Avid readers of this blog will know how much we believe and observe that the Fourth Revolution will transform existing institutions. Older institutions do fight back though – and often through the usage of existing regulations, which do in fact tend to reinforce the status quo.

Older Institution in need of a facelift?

A good summary of the issues faced by a number of startups that intend to radically change the economics of certain sectors such as taxi (Uber), accommodation (Airbnb) is available in this post ‘New innovators face backlash‘.

Issues related to tax that are faced by the web leaders such as Google and Amazon can be added to the evidence. In fact it is amazing how existing regulations promote stability. And hence do promote deep instability when changes are so significant that the former order of things can’t work any more.

Would the legislative inflation that can be observed in many countries nowadays be another sign of the resistance against the Fourth Revolution?

In any case, really disruptive innovations will necessarily hit existing regulations as they become significant enough to be noticeable. Those countries that will be flexible enough will succeed quicker in the transition to the Collaborative Age. Which are they?

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