The Fourth Revolution Blog

Choosing one’s destiny is like deciding to exit a train

I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become – Carl Jung.

As I was about to write this post about destiny and choice I immediately thought about putting a very conventional picture like this

the choice of roads — which road do you choose?

Which is just a nice way to express this choice problem, basically expressed by the following powerpoint – management presentation type drawing:

But after some thought, I realized that this is not how it happens in life. It is not like you wake up some day and face a decision, which you have to take in any case. It is far more like being carried away on a train and deciding whether or not we should go down at the next station to start something anew, like this

contemplative man on the train — will you go out at the next station?

I like the metaphor because obviously you don’t want to jump out of the train just at this moment where the train is on the bridge. Yet if you want to decide on your destiny you need to decide when and how you’ll disembark from the train of life you’ve taken a few years ago. Beware, if you don’t decide, where it could bring you. This man seems to be resigned to where he is being carried away. Don’t be like him!

Think about it. Will you choose to exit your train at the next convenient point? Will you force yourself to go against the comfortable train trip to discover new horizons?

What can we learn from Jonathan’s Starbucks card experiment?

Did you hear about Jonathan’s starbucks card experiment?

It’s quite a simple experiment with deep learning in crowdfunding.

Jonathan made his starbucks card available to anyone on the internet. Anyone could buy a coffee with it. And anyone could put some money on it.

Although it was not intended to be that, the experiment ended up experimenting whether people would refill the card by how much. The experiment is detailed in this post on O’Reilly: “Jonathan’s card: lessons from a social experiment”.

Guess what happened?

It became a social media event, using a twitter account that broadcast the card’s balance live.

Here’s an extract of the card balance curve.

See, people almost never refill before it goes to zero. But then they refill with a large amount.

Would we tend to use FREE until there is no more, but then be generous as we are in fact participating to a social event?

This pattern is often identical when people that know each other share a single resource and need to refill sometimes. What is astonishing here is that it happened with people who did not know each other. Yet they must have had a sufficiently strong emotional connection through their participation to the social network.

It just shows that communities that are emotionally connected over social networks behave like communities that are face-to-face in real life. Over considerable distances, community behavior develops. Social networks really break the distance factor!

Gong Xi Fa Cai! To celebrate the Year of the Dragon, the Fourth Revolution is free on Kindle for another 48h!!

2012 – the Fourth Revolution year of the Dragon!

After the tremendous success of the first Kindle promotion of the Fourth Revolution, to celebrate this new year – the Chinese new year, the Fourth Revolution book on Kindle is free for another 48 hours only!

Are you ready for the year of the Dragon?

The Fourth Revolution on Amazon.com’s Kindle store

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The Fourth Revolution on Amazon.fr’s Kindle store

The Fourth Revolution on Amazon.de’s Kindle store

Read the Fourth Revolution book and change your life!

Happy new year 2012! Slain the dragons in your life!

(the promotion starts on January 23 at midnight California time, i.e. around noon in Europe and late afternoon in Asia, for 48h straight)

The real story of K.E.E.N.’s motivation

The K.E.E.N. is not anymore motivated by money. She wants to have fun, to bring something to the world, to prove herself.

One of the best stories I found is the story of the development of Apple’s graphing calculator.

Apple's graphing application credits — Apple's graphing calculation application

Or, how two engineers, against all odds, against Apple itself, have worked hidden for a number of months in Apple’s offices, unpaid, to create a great product.

What was their motivation? Let’s use Daniel Pink’s Drive book framework:

Autonomy: they did what they wanted to do, deciding by themselves what they would do and how
Mastery: this project allowed them to show how good they were in programming
Purpose: they wanted to create a product so great people computers could not ship without it

Why did they succeed? They were supported by the informal organization; they had a tribe of supporters; their enthusiasm and sense of purpose did communicate to others.

While this was all developed against the will of Apple’s managers, they were clever enough to see the interest when the product finally came out. That would certainly not happen in many organizations!

When I continue to see large organizations that think that they can retain and motivate people just by giving them money (or, the expectation of getting more money sometime in the future), I just see a total misunderstanding of the world they are living in.

The K.E.E.N. is not any more motivated by carrot and stick. She is motivated by challenge, a deep sense of purpose and her community. When will the standards of organization leadership change to accommodate this new reality?

The Fourth Revolution wrecks the society in which it occurs

The title of this post is directly inspired by this quote:

“The major advances in civilisation are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur”

– Marshall Mc Luhan, in “The medium is the massage“, 1967

This prescient quote by a visionary author is directly applicable to the Fourth Revolution, a major advance in civilization. The storm of the Fourth Revolution is upon us. Society will undergo a tremendous change. Are you ready?

[source of the quote: “thinking about the social enterprise”, a blog post by JP Rangaswami]

How Eric Schmidt (Google) was almost right, but not quite

“Every day we produce as much content as was produced by all of mankind for the 20,000 years before 2003” [Eric Schmidt, former CEO, Google] (quote from Seth Godin’s book ‘we are all weird‘)

Actually this quote is wrong. This content is not only produced. It is published. And that’s what makes the difference.

Think about it.

Think about that incredible amount of information at our fingerprints.

And think about how easy it is today to access and find any kind of information from anywhere in the world.

Latest stats from Facebook: more than 250 million photos uploaded every day, 800 million users, half of which connect every day. Twitter: 300 million tweets are sent every single day. There are millions of blogs. 135 million professionals on LinkedIn.

“Every day we produce as much content as was published by all of mankind for the 20,000 years before 2003″

And you’re still not a believer of the Fourth Revolution?

Video of the month: insights by Seth Godin on the K.E.E.N. skills – and the importance of failure

Building on failure is another skill of the K.E.E.N. This interview of Seth Godin is a real eye-opener on the power of failure, and in general, the skills of the K.E.E.N.

Seth gives also deep insights on the new world that is awaiting us: remember – the concept of climbing the career ladder is bust !

Find other inspiring resources and videos in the Fourth Revolution Resource Center, in the page on K.E.E.N. – related resources.

How to create a great venture: have a scaling plan from the beginning

In a previous post we discussed the differences between Freelancer and Entrepreneur.

fractal hand - symbol of scalability — How will you scale?

The fundamental difference is about succeeding in scaling the activity.

Scalability is difficult. In the book Founders at work: stories of startups’ early days, which accounts many stories of IT and internet startups, most if not all stories revolve about the problem of physical scaling, e.g. servers and databases. When a service becomes successful, a single server is not enough; you need more, and then the scalability problems start, because you need to synchronize everything seamlessly. Those startups that succeeded managed their scaling problem quickly and efficiently enough.

Similarly, many startups need to overcome the process scalability problem: how to reproduce, or model, a successful pattern of work set by the founder.

Because scaling is indeed a very difficult problem, some people just decide it is better to avoid it. For example, in the field of consulting, Alan Weiss (author of “million dollar consulting” and many other bestsellers) is adamant that it is much better to work for one’s own rather than bother trying to manage others or trying to scale into a full-fledged consulting practice. He prefers to have alliances and subcontractors when he needs more production power.

The problem is that by avoiding the scaling issue, you will never effectively build an entity that will have a life of its own (you will never be an ‘Entrepreneur’). You will not benefit from the value of leveraging a group of diverse talents to achieve a given goal. You will not be able to spread geographically, or to touch a large number of people with your great service or message. In brief, you will fall short of your potential impact on the world.

So, scalability is a problem that should be dealt with upfront, together with the business plan or other planning considerations for the new venture. A scaling plan needs to be put in place so that the infrastructure, the organization, the processes, take into account scalability from the beginning.

Don’t shunt this step out of the preparation. Work out your scaling plan today!

Facebook today is the internet of 2004

Do you believe things change quickly? Facebook, today, represents the same size than the entire internet network in 2004.

And remember that Facebook service was launched in… February 2004!

The internet itself has bloated dozens of times.

17 years ago, when I graduated, email was still a rare thing reserved to companies and universities.

Let’s just put that in perspective: in less than 20 years our way of communicating has changed dramatically. In less than 7 years internet has become social. Many people could not think about communicating without Facebook and Twitter.

The tools are here. The social and political consequences might take some more time. Still, they are inevitable. The Fourth Revolution is here.

Don’t miss it.

When will governments finally realize that the interconnected economy is already here?

The world acts today as if governments still lived in the good ol’ days of powerful national economic policy.

That’s just obsolete.

The crisis in the Euro zone shows that economies are truly interconnected, even between continents. We know that there will be soon a dollar crisis as there is currently a euro crisis (the same causes, debt, necessarily causing the same effects). The rest of the world can’t just watch doing nothing. We are too interconnected today.

This extremely interesting piece of research about how interconnected private companies really are gives another highlight. Unfortunately the “Big Brother” pitch of the article is I believe, wrong. It is not that a small number of companies would control the world; it is that a limited number of companies are central nodes in the network through the quality and density of their connections. In the terminology of Gladwell, they are ‘mavens’.

The world is fully interconnected — A fully interconnected world

The big economic powers of the previous century are not really economic power in the sense of imposing their will; they are well connected nodes in a worldwide economical network.

Our governments must stop behaving as if we were 50 years ago. The solutions to the 1929 crisis won’t apply today.

We are all interconnected. We not only need an economical coordination at the European level, we need one at the Global level. The Fourth Revolution will change forever the balance of power from the Industrial Age; adjustments will be difficult but necessary. Only with the right coordination of economic policy will their effects be more smooth, avoiding deep, damaging crisis.

Ladies and gentlemen in government, the Fourth Revolution is here. Be proactive. See that we are all interconnected and act in consequence. Will you?

A surprisingly easy way to improve your brain’s cognitive capabilities

Look at this guy. Right now he is improving the capabilities… of his brain!

treadmill exercise — ready to exercise your brain?

Well, that’s what this article from the New York Times, “How exercise benefits the brain” says.

One of the most useful discoveries of the Fourth Revolution period is our understanding of how our body and our brain are interlinked. It has huge consequences explained in the Fourth Revolution book, and also in the Fourth Revolution Manifesto part VII (p16 and following).

I have been raised in a very rational household where the brain capabilities were praised and the body was discounted as some inevitable and annoying appendix. The thing is that there are more and more proofs that our body participates significantly to our intelligence and our cognitive abilities. Our emotions (bodily reactions) do in fact influence our actions – for our good most of the time. And we know that our posture influences our mood and our receptiveness to others.

I have now the discipline of doing some easy deep breathing exercises in the morning for only 5mins – and it really changes my day. When do you start having routines acting on your body to work on your mood and your cognitive capabilities?

The Great Convergence of the world economy is happening NOW

The economical convergence of the world has started. This graph is extracted from an article by Robert Branche (in French): “Facing the convergence of the world economy”.

OCDE vs emerging countries: GDP per capita 1972-2010 — OCDE vs emerging countries: GDP per capita over time

It shows the evolution over time of the ratio of the GDP per capita of a choice of emerging countries (Brazil, China and India) over the OECD average. There is no doubt in this graph that a convergence starts around 1994 – around the time the Fourth Revolution started, at least for India and China. This happens at the same time than the significant shift in the value creation chain in the 1990’s (see the post “Visualizing the demise of manufacturing“).

This convergence will continue. Ultimately the GDP per capita of China and India will be close (on average) to the OECD countries.

What will be the final outcome? For Robert Branche the outcome will be necessarily, a decrease of the standard of living in the OECD countries by about 50% until 2050. The reason stated is that the standard of living in the OECD is artificially high thanks to low-cost importations from China and India – which will become more expensive. Is that so problematic? It would mean that the standard of living would be back to say, the one the OECD had in the 1980’s. Is that a big issue?

While the worldwide economic convergence will probably accelerate thanks to the Fourth Revolution, the outcome, in terms of standard of living in developed countries, is more debatable. Developed countries will see significant changes in their economy; whether they lean into them or resist them will decide on their ultimate fate. Countries can go down in terms of standard of living very quickly (as in Argentina in the 1970 to 1990’s for example). On the other hand, if developed countries adopt the Fourth Revolution early enough, there is no reason why the standard of living, and the quality of life, should be significantly lowered.

In any case the world will see more shifts of wealth and standards of living in the next 50 years than in the 20th century.

Listen to the warning: let’s lean into the Fourth Revolution. That is the only way developed countries can preserve their future.