Useful Lessons Learnt for the Professional Services Business

I love this post by Pamela Slim ‘23 Lessons from 23 years in business‘, because it resonates with my experience while providing a useful perspective. Of course it is mainly applicable to professional services such as coaching and consulting, although after consideration, its relevance is actually quite far reaching. I really recommend the short read.

Here are some of the lessons that resonate the most with me:

  • we often don”t know but we have the find out attitude (through the depth of our network or reference basis)
  • the importance of professional ethics – any lapse will catch up later
  • be conservative on the financial side and on the commercial expectations to survive on the longer term
  • it’s actually more work and pain than you’d expect first!
  • seek impact rather than income
  • the importance of the client in our success and development
  • the need to look for root causes instead of going straight for the symptoms brought to our attention initially by the client

In some follow-up posts, the last three specific topics will be developed further because I believe they are so important.

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How Natural Language Processing Still Has Strong Limitations

I am getting quite interested these days about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its actual applications. Most is about Deep Learning of course, and an essential element is Natural-Language Processing (NLP) or making sense for the machine of texts or words. This is an essential first stage to allow the machine to then perform statistical analysis of the data and produce all sorts of useful analysis.

I observe that NLP now performs very well in fields where expression is quite standardized and normalized, such as in legal or scientific fields. In particular, applications of AI to legal aspects is really becoming amazing. However, it still has limitations when it comes to analyzing informal correspondence and longer texts. This makes it harder to use AI to make sense of informal messages and data and to use those datasets as a basis for further analysis.

Of course it has improved substantially in the last months and years as any user of Google Translate or equivalent can witness: translations are now more to the point thanks to AI. Still it does not appear to be sufficient to deal with large sets of informal exchanges such as messages, email and other informal communication channels.

When this aspect will be overcome – which will take time and may not be immediately transferable between languages – the power of AI will be much more visible and dramatic than it is now. Let’s watch for progress in this area!

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How the Number of Taxis and Hire Cars Drivers Have Tripled

According to this Quartz post ‘More Americans are Driving Taxis Thanks to Uber and Lyft‘, the number of drivers for taxis and other hire cars has apparently tripled in the past few years in the US. This is consistent with the increase in cars in city centers (see previous post ‘How Changes from New Technology Will Lead to Unexpected Results‘)

This shows certainly that there was an un-served demand with the traditional taxi system for point-to-point ground transportation. At the same time it does ask questions as to the actual revenue of all those drivers (some are of course now part-time with the likes of Uber and Lyft); and about what they will become if autonomous driving becomes successful, which it will effectively some day.

This example is excellent because it definitely shows how internet can disrupt the traditional economy (taxi plates’ value has dropped off significantly); create abundance where there was an artificial constraint; give opportunities for revenue to more people including additional side revenue, and more generally promote self-entrepreneurship. At the same time it also draws attention to the social consequences that ensue in terms of limited social protection for the drivers. A tripling of numbers make private hire car drivers a substantial percentage of workers and there are long-winded consequences to be expected.

The Fourth Revolution tangibly changes our world, our careers and opportunities. And not marginally!

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How We Should Not Separate the Person from the Problem in Negotiation

The ‘Harvard’ way of negotiating advises to separate the person from the problem. It appears it is possibly not the most effective way of negotiating and that negotiating on an emotional basis may be more effective. I really recommend reading the book ‘Never split the difference: negotiating as if your life depended on it‘ by Chris Voss, which is extremely enlightening. Chris Voss is a top FBI negotiator with international exposure who has become something of an authority in the field of negotiation.

His basic observation is that emotional work is more important than rational approach in negotiation. However, “Until recently , most academics and researchers completely ignored the role of emotion in negotiation . Emotions were just an obstacle to a good outcome , they said . “ Separate the people from the problem ” was the common refrain“. Since the early 2000s this view is shifting, albeit quite slowly.

Good negotiators create emotion, are excellent active listeners, and label emotions to move forward to resolution. Again, this shows how in our modern world rational approaches find their limits in the real world (see previous post ‘How We Need to Consider Heartset as well as Mindset‘).

In negotiations as in other aspects, emotional work is the key to success. Let’s never forget the personal connection and emotional work is needed in all situations even in the most tense like a touch negotiation.

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How We Need to Consider Heartset as well as Mindset

Robin Sharma makes the point that when it comes to personal leadership or change, mindset is clearly not everything. We also need emotion, or what can be covered by heartset.

As we move progressively away from the rationalism, foundation of the Industrial Age, the mobilization of emotions become visibly increasingly important in terms of success and differentiation. And it thus comes down to developing one’s own heartset in parallel of one’s mindset.

What is a heartset? According to wikipedia, mindset is “a set of assumptions, methods, or notations held by [a person]” – and it defines how we respond to an event or an action. Accordingly, heartset could be defined as a set of emotions and emotional states held by a person, that define how we respond emotionally to situations.

Your mindset is important, and you should also consider developing your heartset. Emotional work is a decisive skill in the Collaborative Age.

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How Small Groups Can Now Bring Change Even Inside Large Organizations

It is well known that “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” (Margaret Mead). It would seem this also applies from within large companies such as Google or Amazon, as explained in this interesting post ‘Small Groups United by a Shared Purpose are Changing Big Tech Companies. Here’s How‘.

The examples developed are how a group of Google employees have successfully raised the issue of the company getting involved in defense program; and how Amazon employees have pledged the company to do something active in the field of climate change.

The capability of communicating in groups, broadcasting and receiving feedback, allows easier self-organization of groups with a purpose. It may be the most visible in ‘Big Tech’ where it may be more natural, but it will undoubtedly also change how large companies address certain issues.

Employees, like citizens, are increasingly empowered to raise to their leadership topics of concern and obtain a voice for change. Welcome to the Collaborative Age!

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How to Increase Happiness After our Professional Decline

In this follow-up post from ‘How Professional Decline is Coming Sooner than We Think‘ we continue to investigate the excellent and deep material of the paper ‘Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think – Here’s how to make the most of it‘. Once we have recognized that professional decline is inevitable and probably occurs around 50 or 20 years after you started your current career, how can we deal with this to maintain or increase our happiness?

The author quotes ancient Indian wisdom about the different phases of life. It also quotes some modern wisdom about happiness of mature people. In sum, it appears to be essential to pro-actively start a new phase of life around sharing one’s knowledge and experience, connecting, and serving.

People do that in different ways, from consultants to interim managers to serving their community and becoming teachers. Many also develop their spiritual self. The way is to recognize that this phase in life calls for a change, stopping competitive behavior and sharing more.

Be proactive in recognizing that your professional decline starts earlier than you think; and increase your happiness by taking the time for yourself and to help grow others. That’s a quite good recommendation that I will endeavor to follow!

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How Professional Decline is Coming Sooner than We Think

I strongly recommend to read this long article ‘Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think – Here’s how to make the most of it‘ because it contains much profound wisdom about professional career and happiness.

In this first post, let’s concentrate on the fact that our professional decline happens earlier than we believe. “According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world’s leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. So if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that. The specific timing of peak and decline vary somewhat depending on the field.” It seems that creative fields see an earlier decline, while fields relying more on building up experience over time have a somewhat later decline.

In any case, “The biggest mistake professionally successful people make is attempting to sustain peak accomplishment indefinitely, trying to make use of the kind of fluid intelligence that begins fading relatively early in life. This is impossible.”

It is essential that we recognize that we can’t sustain our performance indefinitely, and that there should be space for our younger successors to take over and put a new spin into our works. This is probably the number one happiness issue with high level professionals.

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How Dismantling Facebook Is an Increasingly Strong Idea

In the past months the pressure on dismantling the Facebook empire has increased dramatically: from the NY times pledge by a former co-founder Chris Hughes ‘It’s Time to Break Up Facebook‘, calls to revitalize the old anti-trust laws (such as in ‘Steering with the Windshield Wipers‘ by Cory Doctorow). And all of this under increasing evidence that more or less voluntarily social networks such as Facebook have strongly influenced elections (listen to the TED talk about ‘Facebook role in Brexit and the threat to democracy‘).

One particular aspect that appears to be concerning and specific to Facebook is the unrestricted power of its founder Mark Zuckerberg (owning 60% of the voting shares) and thus the associated governance issues (things are a bit different in other internet companies). This is a particular strong point made by Chris Hughes in his column, and is quite noticeable.

Another strong aspect coming out of all this literature is the fact that certain free market ideology developing since the 1970s have made acting against monopolies less straightforward than before, and that it would be legally harder today to apply those principles.

I truly believe that sooner or later, some action will be taken against internet behemoths in the field of anti-monopoly. They might defend themselves and hire superb lawyers, one day will come where their dominance must be kept in check. Let’s hope it is not too far away.

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How to Overcome the Science Reproducibility Crisis

Following up on our previous post on “How Fake Science is Strongly on the Rise and Endangers Us“, the issue or reproducibility in science is also coming up strongly: even paper and findings recognized as legitimate for a long time are put in question by the inability to reproduce results, and more specifically in human sciences. This post ‘Why Your Company Needs Reproducible Research‘ provides a good summary of the issues at stake.

Recent efforts are reproducing psychology results lead to “Only about 40% of the findings could be successfully replicated, while the rest were either inconclusive or definitively not replicated.” Similar proportions are obtained in business-related research.

While this may be due to very human bias like the need to show some results from research, and the inherent complexity of the environment around some experiments, there is definitely a need for more thorough replication requirements prior to confirming results. This puts more challenge on researchers but is probably a need in a world that sees increasingly fake science.

Science will always progress by invalidating previous results or restraining the boundaries of validity of previous results. This is a normal process, still we need to be wary to ensure reproducibility of results before they are spread as invariant truths.

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How Fake Science is Strongly on the Rise and Endangers Us

In this excellent paper ‘The Rise of Junk Science‘ the issue of increasing number of improperly reviewed publications is described. They now substantially dominate in number more professional scientific publications. Some even believe that there is a “global “epidemic” of scams by academic journals that was corrupting research and, in effect, endangering the public“.

With much easier access to publishing, there is an increasing number of scam scientific journals that are easily accessible, do not practice rigorous peer reviews. There are also an increasing number of fake conferences, that even name recognized scientists that don’t even attend in an attempt to attract other reputable scientists.

While this issue is probably not new – it was always possible to do vanity publishing – it spreads to an unprecedented level, and in a context where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between legitimate and fake science. “for the first time in history, scientists and scholars worldwide are publishing more fraudulent and flawed studies than legitimate research—maybe ten times more. Approximately 10,000 bogus journals run rackets around the world, with thousands more under investigation, according to Cabell’s International, a publishing-services company. “We’re publishing mainly noise now,” Franco laments. “It’s nearly impossible to hear real signals, to discover real findings.”

Luckily there seem to be an increasing awareness of the issue and modern technology also allows to develop powerful tools to distinguish between junk science and legitimate science. Still we need to be careful that something looking like a scientific paper might also be fake or junk!

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How to Design a Font to Better Remember What you Read

I love this initiative from an Australian University: Sans Forgetica, the font that is scientifically designed to help remember courses: see the Sans Forgetica page.

“Sans Forgetica is a font designed using the principles of cognitive psychology to help you to better remember study notes. It was created by a multidisciplinary team of designers and behavioural scientists.”

The interesting part I find is that “Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The ‘desirable difficulty’ you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing.”

By making harder and longer to read and understand, it seems that we remember better. I find that is quite an interesting insight. It shows that it is important to spend sufficient time reading and processing what has been read to better remember.

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