How Amazon Grew to Become So Central in the E-Economy

This interesting Bloomberg post ‘The Enormous Numbers Behind Amazon’s Market Reach‘ proposes a nice visual history of Amazon’s growth and reach. It also provides an interesting status report of the weight of the company across several markets.

It shows that Amazon is not entirely dominant (yet!) and that it depends a lot on the particular industry or products. In reality, “Despite being the largest e-commerce player, Amazon still accounts for roughly 1 percent of global retail. In the U.S., the company’s share of all retail sales is as high as 7.7 percent, including sales made by other retailers who sell on Amazon’s Marketplace. Absent that, Amazon itself accounts for less than 3 percent of U.S. retail sales, according to Euromonitor International.”

The most impressive is the market share in e-books thanks to the Kindle, where Amazon is really dominant.

The exponential growth is also linked to a disciplined re-investment of its surplus over time (hence almost no profit since the start), in a real entrepreneurial approach sustained over time. It has also been patient when trying to develop into new fields, failing long before reaching success.

The most amazing in this story finally is that the company was able to maintain a long-term view and a startup spirit all those years, together with a strict cost discipline. A feat clearly due to its founder and the management style he embodies. What about the sustainability of the enterprise if the founder departs?

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How Private Initiatives to Reach the Graal of Nuclear Fusion Show a Tipping Point in the Financing of Fundamental Science

I was not aware of so many initiatives in parallel to seek to master the energy of nuclear fusion. Beyond the international collaboration around ITER in the south of France there are also large investments made in China and through a private company in California, TAE technologies (here a Wikipedia article on TAE technologies).

This last initiative is very interesting in its form: it is the only such endeavors that I know of that is entirely private and in the form of a start-up financed by venture capitalists and large corporations from the internet industry.

The fact that such fundamental science can be financed entirely by private funds is quite new. Of course it may have industrial applications some day, but previously the standard institutional setup was that fundamental science and associated large scientific instruments would be financed publicly, and that private funds would only take over once the science would be sufficiently advanced to get to practical applications in a reasonable time-frame and with a reasonable probability.

This exceptional example shows that private companies have very deep pockets to be able to fund such fundamental science (and that they dream of being able to exploit such technology in a monopolistic manner!). And also that the industrial age public research institutions will need to reconfigure in the Collaborative Age, since the border between fundamental and applied science is definitely shifting.

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How We Need to Overcome Our Societies’ Over-Protection Tendency

Following on our previous post ‘How Over-Protection of University Students Is Spreading and May Be Due to a Generational Issue‘ I feel the need to expand on the issue of over-protection in our societies and the need to be exposed from time to time to situations that hurt. How could we all have learnt to ride a bicycle without falling from time to time? How could our immune system grow and be effective without getting exposed regularly to microbes?

It all comes down to the fact that we are living organisms with the ability to repair and evolve. And that our evolution is the result of our will and experience.

The situation would be of course different with an object: when it is damaged or broken it can’t repair itself (yet at least). But for living organisms, what does not kill us makes us progress and evolve.

And avoiding confrontation with potentially disturbing situations diminishes greatly our adaptability and versatility. Adaptability is the prime advantage in natural evolution for humans. Therefore, avoiding exposure to potentially disturbing ideas and situations puts us at disadvantage in the long term.

I fear that is what may happen to the most developed countries. Take for example a Singaporean that has lived all its life in an exceptionally safe country: he or she will be frightened and will have difficulty to adapt to cities like Paris, New York or Houston which are reasonably safe cities, where you need however to be a bit vigilant (that’s an example I have been witness to!). Over-protection makes it difficult to adapt and there is a risk that people will tend to stay in their comfortable environment – until it gets wished away by some greater external forces.

Making sure we are exposed from time to time to tough situations, different opinions and ideas is healthy. And if it does not happen we need to force ourselves. Simple tip: travel more, and expose yourself to unfamiliar environments and cultures!

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How Over-Protection of University Students Is Spreading and May Be Due to a Generational Issue

Also known as the “coddling of the american mind”, this disturbing trend is spreading and speeding up, as exposed in the following papers the Atlantic ‘the coddling of the american mind is speeding up‘, and the two National Review papers ‘Are We Setting a Generation Up for Failure?’ Part 1 and Part 2. Those follow the publication of the book ‘The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure‘ And it now also spreads to other countries like France. We had already addressed this trend in our 2016 post ‘How Overprotecting from Different Points of View is a Moral Hazard‘.

The issue is that students can declare to be violently assaulted by ideas that do not fit their opinions and therefore decline to participate to debates and presentations. They can flee to safe rooms. Moreover this leads to cancelling speeches and debates even with renown philosophers and personalities, that have strong opinions on certain subjects.

The interesting point made in the analysis of the situation is the observation that this issue may be generational – linked to the first generation reaching university that has known internet since early childhood and social networks since teenage years. The theory would be they this generation falls prey to a low exposure to contradictory ideas, staying comfortably within their own online communities. “The new beliefs about fragility really came in only for those born after 1995. When [you] read the book iGen by Jean Twenge, and when I saw the graphs that she shows of how mental health plummeted when iGen reached its teen years, that’s when a whole new dimension of the problem became visible.”

This would be the demonstration that internet and online social networks effectively fostering community-centered and intolerant feelings. In addition, excessive protection from parents investing more in their children would also be a culprit.

Another issue is that universities in the US become increasingly corporatized, funded by large endowment funds and avoid to feel the wrath of past and future donors. This may also be a factor.

In any case, this trend is disturbing and needs to be curbed. In the modern world we can’t live in a society where people would close themselves to contradiction and avoid exposure to other ideas than the ones they are familiar with.

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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 Smart City Data Should Not Be Made Free

In this article ‘A smart city should serve its users, not mine their data‘, Cory Doctorow verbalizes one of the important issues facing infrastructure digitalization.

The first aspect, following our post ‘How Data Really is the New Oil, and Better‘, is that whatever data a smart city gathers should not be left available for free to service suppliers. It belongs to the community and should be valued if it is to be made available.

Further than that, the risk of the smart city in terms of data management and privacy is that the system decides how to change the city instead of the citizens.

“What if people were the things that smart cities were designed to serve, rather than the data that smart cities lived to process?” Cory Doctorow goes on to suggest that the flow of data access should be reversed, the individual having the opportunity to tap into the collective data, not letting know of his final choice, rather than data being collected independently of his will.

This would be quite a different model from the one that develops currently where our data is reaped by giant organizations without our consent. The data should not be made free, both economically and in terms of availability. Quite an interesting avenue to investigate: the final equilibrium of the Collaborative Age will probably be somewhere in the middle.

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How Access to University Campuses for Education Becomes a Luxury

In a different dimension but quite related to our previous post ‘How Human Contact is Becoming a Luxury‘, Seth Godin post ‘Toward abundant systems‘ takes the example of college admissions to show how the world moves from an Industrial Age’s world of scarcity into a Collaborative Age’s world of abundance. But is it the right example?

“Space on the Harvard campus is highly valued and also scarce. But if we can break education out of the campus/scarcity mindset and instead focus on learning, learning at scale, learning that happens despite status not because of it–then we can begin to shift many of the other power structures in our society.”

It is true that the availability of free or very cheap online courses is an opportunity to scale the acquisition of knowledge. Still, admission to renowned university campuses remains more competitive than ever (in part because it is now global). The reason is probably that a major value of university is the human connection and network – something not so easy to scale – and for which a limited group of students is more adapted as it creates a denser relationship network.

Alumni groups still play important roles in society and in the professional world. While globalization may diversify universities of origins, those social groups are still very influential because they remain limited in size. Therefore, while access to knowledge becomes abundant, access to the social connection of university campuses becomes increasingly a luxury.

This aspect is probably not accounted for sufficiently in the development of online education programs. Developing the community and the alumni group can also be done virtually but this requires a lot of effort and possibly some face-to-face real-life interactions. This will remain, and while this can be made more efficient, it will always be a limit to scalability for educational institutions.

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How Human Contact is Becoming a Luxury

In this great New-York Times article ‘Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good‘, the issue of diminishing daily human interaction is addressed. “Screens used to be for the elite. Now avoiding them is a status symbol.”

Human check-in, a luxury?

Our lives and interactions are indeed increasingly held through screens; not mentioning upcoming AI applications that will make us increasingly interact with virtual entities.

Of course, replacing humans with screens is cheaper, and requires specifically much less maintenance and management. Screens don’t have free will and are much less complex to manage.

And the luxury is now to avoid screens and have a direct human interaction. Moreover, the very rich increasingly try to avoid screens – like for their children.

As the article mentions, this is a very swift change from the 1980s and 1990s when having screens was a luxury, to the opposite now that they have become cheap and ubiquitous.

I think human contact remains much needed, and we need to find ways to both benefit from the productivity and convenience provided by screens, while keeping the density of human interaction. The balance will not be easy to find, and there may be substantial differences in outcome depending on wealth. Definitely an issue to keep in mind moving into the Collaborative Age!

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How to Become More Creative in our Professional Life

Valeria Maltoni in her blog ‘How can we Become More Creative at Work?‘ provides useful hints about how to improve creativity in situations which are supposedly quite constrained.

“Judgement is one of the biggest barriers to creativity while curiosity stokes the flames of imagination“, and the issue is clearly to be able to suspend judgment for a while to let creative ideas flourish. In addition being inspired by outsiders coming with a fresh viewpoint, and letting our own creativity express itself, appear to be essential aspects.

From my experience, the most important aspect I believe, is how the requirement for productivity removes the possibility to take time to look laterally. And it is true that I find myself sometimes much too busy, or too focused on achieving some intermediate milestone, to notice things that could be creative opportunities. Not even speaking of dreaming. I find that with smartphones and screens I have lost considerably my day-dreaming time.

Increasing creativity at work is a major issue in a world that is changing more and more frequently. This issue is not sufficiently addressed. Developing a framework to increase joint creativity is essential. What about taking more time to be creative at work?

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How to Analyze Drama Using the Karpman Triangle

I discovered the concept of the Karpman Triangle as a social model of human interaction – and a useful way to decrypt movie scenarios! This social model of human interaction (formalized in the 1960s) always involves a Victim, a Persecutor and a Rescuer.

Of course, in the dynamics of social interaction, roles can evolve and change. However the basics remain and it gives a useful analysis tool at least for movie and theater scenarios.

In real life it does apply too and gives an interesting model that can be used for individuals to realize their current posture and how they could switch. “The motivations for each participant and the reason the situation endures is that each gets their unspoken (and frequently unconscious) psychological wishes/needs met in a manner they feel justified, without having to acknowledge the broader dysfunction or harm done in the situation as a whole” (Wikipedia). Therefore, elevating the state of consciousness of the situation can help de-dramatize the situation.

If you are facing a drama, examine whether the Karpman triangle could apply. It is quite a fascinating analysis model for such interactions!

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How to Overcome the Paradox of Choice

Too much Choice creates paralysis and kills Choice. We can realize that in any restaurant with a too long menu. The excellent TED talk by Barry Schwartz tackles this issue deeper: ‘The paradox of choice‘.

The usual assumption at least in Western societies is that “The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have.”

Barry Schwartz notes that too much choice leads to choice paralysis, and also to ‘cost of opportunity’ issues (“the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen“).

Barry Schwartz goes as far as to attribute the unprecedented increase of clinical depression (and suicide) in our societies to too much choice. Finally, he says, when there was not to much choice, people had lower expectations and that may have been a cause of higher happiness.

I believe that faced with too much choice as we are today, it is still important to maintain low expectations and a mindset of satisfaction with what we have. I understand this is difficult in a world of temptation and where it is easy to depress over the fantastic lives other seem to have on social networks.

The paradox of choice is clearly a major challenge in our societies. The best response seems to be targeted education about how best to behave in such a world – and this seems to be mission in the new generations’ formal life learning.

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How Easy Modern Technology Makes It For Spies

In this excellent Foreign Policy article ‘the Spycraft Revolution‘ (recommended read although a bit long) the changes in the world of espionnage are described, as well as the challenges faced by those involved in this activity to adapt.

Cover identities are now much harder to forge, as we leave many traces of our past on internet. Closed data societies such as China would seem to have an edge on open data societies like the western world (and authoritarian governments over liberal democracies that limit spying). Counterintelligence can leverage the internet to resist deception. Mobile phones are the most spy-friendly device that has ever been invented, it is an incredible tracking tool, and they can even listen to what’s happening remotely.

“The cloak of anonymity is steadily shrinking“. Still, western intelligence agencies are facing legal hurdles but they may have to be partly removed to allow competition with opponents that don’t have this type of issues. Which leaves society more open to intrusive spying. The right balance has not been defined yet.

“Most of us don’t want to live in a country […] where the intelligence and security agencies are at the heart of public life and political decision-making.” Still we need to be realistic enough to defend ourselves against undue foreign influence. This balance will take time to establish and there will be blunders along the way.

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