Category: Organization in the Collaborative Age

From Blogger to Beauty Guru to Celebrity Businesswoman in 6 Years

August 2013 headlines: After six years of tutorials and millions of views, YouTube beauty guru Michelle Phan has launched her own 250-product line of makeup – backed by L’Oreal.

Michelle Phan tiger eyesI am not particularly a fan or expert on makeup (!) but I found it to be a great story to show the power of the Fourth Revolution. Michelle is clearly passionate about makeup. After some blogging she started posting videos on Youtube in 2007. Obviously there was a need! She has today  769 million views and has 4.6 million subscribers! And what was a passion became a business. AT 23 years old L’Orelas backed up her video making. And at 26 years old L’Oreal backs her up for a personal line of makeup.

This great post on Mashable explains her story. Her secret recipe is story-telling. “Success is like a lightning bolt. It’ll strike you when you least expect it, and you just have to keep the momentum going” she says! This other post is also quite instructive about her career.

Coming from a humble background, with passion and having obviously fun, Michelle created what will soon be an empire. She created tremendous value for many people (for free). And most of her fans are at the other end of the planet, in Asia. And all thanks to the Fourth Revolution!

Have a look at the promotional Youtube movie for her product line which recounts her journey and where she thanks the community she created around her for giving her all the ideas that founded her success and her product. Still don’t believe in the Fourth Revolution?

More material: Michelle has also her own Wikipedia page, here is the link to her Youtube channel, and her website.

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How the music industry transforms through the Fourth Revolution

I would like to share this excellent summary of the economics and of the transformations of the music industry in the last few years: Who killed the industry – an interactive explainer. It is a brilliant example of the transformation and of the questions raised by the Fourth Revolution.

music industry revenue per year
The music industry total revenue per year, by type of support

The interesting point is that from the point of view of the artists, it was pretty tough to earn any money in the previous setup. All the money was flowing to the industry.(“[in 2000, she estimated that if a band made an album, sold a million copies, went on tour, and made two music videos, the band might break even, but the record label would take home $6.6 million”!.., [and the band owns none of the work])

It seems there are more opportunities now to be heard, to connect with fans, and to make a living. However, the new forms of music streaming seem once again to forget to compensate the musicians!

In any case, if you thought you’d become rich by becoming a well known musician or singer, that will make you think twice!

Hat tip to Mitch Joel/Alistair Croll in their fantastic weekly “Six links worthy of your attention” on Mitch’s blog

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Why you should first depend on trust… and still put it in writing!

Contracts and how to behave with them are one of the most frequent issues in many instances, in particular in professional activities. In my case, it applies particularly in the field of project management activities.

contract photoShould we have a contract? What should be in there? How should one behave with respect to the other party? Be extremely contractual and formal or be relatively informal and rely on the contract only as a last resort reference? Opinions on the matter vary, behaviors are tainted with cultural differences.

One of the best guidance I found is: “Get it in writing but depend on trust“. It is a quote from an excellent book by Gerald Weinberg, ‘the Secrets of Consulting‘.

It sums it all: those that are coldly contractual are wrong. Those who are all in talking and not in writing are wrong. Both won’t get anywhere.

In all instances I have found that whatever the contractual environment, the bureaucracy and the expectations of compliance, trust needs to be created, maintained and developed between parties for things to happen. And the best project managers and managers understand that. They will try to develop trust with their counterparts.

Depend on trust. You’ll go far. Just put it in writing too!

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How a Single Person Can Now Create a Product useful for Millions of Users

Maybe you have been using the ‘Instapaper‘ application. It is an application that allows you to bookmark webpages and read them later, even when you are disconnected, from any device (more on Wikipedia).

InstapaperWhat you may not realize, is that this application was developed single-handedly by one person, Marco Arment, during 5 years, from 2008 to 2013. With no full-time employee, this self-funded startup attracted more than 2 million users!

Marco sold it in April 2013 to allow it to grow and in a very humble blog post tat is worth reading explains how that was needed to allow the product to grow and tackle competition (he still remains involved and has only sold a majority stake).

Think about it: “If a multi-million dollar business can be developed and managed by one person with a laptop in an apartment, what happens to your business and your job as this rapid innovation and digitization continues to ripple through every industry“? This question by Mitch Joel in his last book “Ctrl Alt Delete” is worth considering for a moment. In the Industrial Age, such product development would have required a large staff and a huge investment. Not any more.

And I have personally met a number of entrepreneurs running very profitable companies from home with the help of part-time contractors.

Indeed, the Fourth Revolution is marching on! Are you in?

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Steve Jobs, Insanely Driven (Video)

Steve Jobs was an exceptional individual, and quite insanely driven. He must have been tough to work with! This interesting 1h BBC video about his life show how much he was driven by his own idea, and regularly took the market by surprise, coming from unexpected sides.

(Follow the link if you don’t see the video)

The first minutes about his education and the origin of his philosophy very close to the hippy approach (“taking LSD was one of the most important things in my life” he says) are quite fundamental to understand his drive to change the world. They are possibly the most interesting of the video (the rest we generally have heard already).

However the revelation that he tried to fight cancer using unconventional means, which only delayed surgery and allowed the cancer to spread, is also showing the other side of excessive drive.

Take the time to re-discover why and how Steve Jobs did what he did. That’s quite instructive.

Hat tip to Mitch Joel from his blog post Insane Ambition.

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Why You Need to Reboot Your Life

Mitch Joel is a well known blogger, founder of a marketing agency specialized in social media. He published a few months ago his new book, ‘Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It‘.

This book is excellent and is based on very much the same philosophy as the Fourth Revolution. An entertaining slideshow and even a video are available to explain the basic concept of the book (and take an other view on the Fourth Revolution!). Enjoy!

So, are you ready to hear that you need to change to remain employable in 5 years?
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Why You Should Stop Asking for Permission

In the Industrial Age we’ve been raised to ask for permission before doing anything. That was part of our basic education as polite and obedient workers.

If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permissionThe thing is, nowadays and as at any time, to create great stuff, it is essential not to ask for permission.

When you are in an organization or any kind of social setting and you have a great idea, if you start asking for permission, you’ll never get it or you’ll become upset before you get it.

Practice the Jesuit saying: “It is much easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission“!

Just go and do it. Even if it means diverting some resources here and there. If the idea is good they’ll follow.

The next time you’ll realize you are about to ask for permission, pause a second and ask yourself if that’s really the right thing to do!

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Why Large Modern Organizations are Handicapped when it Comes to Adaptation

An interesting short e-book from the Boston Consulting Group, ‘Adaptative Advantage: winning strategies for uncertain times‘ by Martin Reeves, addresses the issue of adaptation (and innovation) in large organizations.

board-meetingLarge organizations need to be especially aware of the challenges they are likely to encounter in developing adaptative capabilities. Classical approaches to managing scale – delegation and specialization – can be highly efficient under stable conditions, but the hierarchical structures they produce are too rigid for the rapid learning and change required in turbulent environments.
A narrow focus on leanness, too, can impede adaptability. Under pressure from competition and capital markets, some large companies have squeezed out not only inefficiency but also the diversity and variation needed to adapt to rapid change. What’s more, once adaptative capabilities in highly structured and specialized organizations have atrophied, they can be challenging to recreate.

In summary, the search for maximum optimization and scalability is bad for adaptation because it squeezes out all the resources and organizational levers that would be needed for adaptation.

This is just why so many large organizations and institutions will not survive the Fourth Revolution. This is why successful organizations will seek to be sub-optimized, to remain reactive, constantly changing and adaptative.

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When Imitated, it Means You’re on the Right Track! Persist!

Following on our blog post about competition, most people tend to get angry, frustrated and fearful when they realize what they are doing is being imitated. Wrong! That’s absolutely fantastic! It just means that what you are doing is so great that people believe it is worth imitating!

When imitated, that's great news.
When imitated, that’s great news. Don’t retaliate, innovate more!

As Pamela Slim says, “When you are great at what you do, people are bound to imitate you. Sometimes they will try to steal your  intellectual property, or students, or employees or business model, or artistic genre. It is natural to get upset when this happens. But instead of fighting with the imitator, move on to innovate the next stage of your work. If you are doing your job well, your work is constantly improving and growing. Imitate that.”

And she continues with this marvelous formula: “When imitated, don’t retaliate, innovate.”

We could argue on the contrary: when nobody cares to imitate you, maybe what you are doing is not at the right level?

More great thoughts from Pam Slim in her post 10 Ways to Develop a Mastery Mindset

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Why You Should Not Care So Much About Your Competition

There is an idea that comes back again and again in all leadership and management books: don’t care so much about your competitors. Instead, concentrate your focus, energy and creativity in creating an awesome product. Be pro-active instead of being re-active.

How often do you think about your competition?
How often do you think about your competition?

This comes as a realization that organizations and individuals often spend too much time spying out what the competition is doing. Whether they would create some product that could push them out of the market. Fear is created. Actions become reactions instead of initiatives.

Many of the most successful ventures never cared about competition or imitation. They went their own way.

Some other successful ventures start life by imitating the competition (often because they were created by some former employees) and then, only, progressively, create their own way.

The thing is: you can never be the same as your competition. There are always areas where you’ll be weaker, and areas where you’ll be stronger. Don’t try to level up your competitor by working on your weak areas. Work on your strengths instead. And by doing so, create something truly unique. And the best is, this works for organizations as well as for individuals!

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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).

careerAdviceAnyway, 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?

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What Should Be the Time Span of your Business Plan?

“Avoid predictions that are impossible. That means, among other things, not trying to peer too far into the future. A narrow question in a time frame of six months to a year, fine” – that’s the general recommendation about forecasting by Dan Gardner in ‘Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail – and Why We Believe Them Anyway‘.

What you should absolutely not do when developing a business plan!
What you should absolutely not do when developing a business plan!

I am increasingly astounded by the boldness of those producers of business plans that extrapolate into the future… in 5 years or 10 years. That has been made much easier with Excel of course (just copy the formulas into the next years…) but how can that be used to support decision-making? How can we even entertain the idea that the future will evolve linearly and let the nice exponential formulas in our spreadsheet forecast huger and huger growth? Can you just remember how the world was different 10, or even 5 years ago?

For my company, I have decided not to have a business plan. Of course, I don’t need to seek external funding. When/if I’ll do then I’ll cook something knowing it is pure BS to please bankers or investors. In the meantime I just try to have an idea of what the next year will look like, and that’s enough to steer my venture… and end up widely off course already!

Stop spending time doing long term business plans, except maybe as a sensitivity. Concentrate on executing, now and in the next 6 months. You’ll get there much more easily!

If you are interested on some good elements on the limits of business plans, look up this interesting blog by Tim Berry. Although the founder of a business plan software company, his views on the matter are very refreshing.

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