How Facebook Faces a ‘Big Tobacco’ Addiction Industry Problem

I find this post ‘Facebook has a Big Tobacco Problem‘ just excellent – and the title is great too. Facebook is clearly addictive, pervades society, has adverse effect on mental health, and.. is in denial.

“Facebook’s problems are more than a temporary bad PR issue. Its behavior contributes to a growing negative view of the entire tech industry.“. Facebook is currently working hard to change its image, but the amount of evidence of its effect on behavior also mounts.

This existential issue is a threat to the entire technological world and society will have to find a solution that will necessarily involve regulation.

Some comparisons developed in the post are even thrilling: “As in the 1990’s, when Big Tobacco felt its home market dwindling, the companies decided to stimulate smoking in the Third World. Facebook’s tactics are reminiscence of that. Today, it subsidizes connectivity in the developing world, offering attractive deals to telecoms in Asia and Africa, in exchange for making FB the main gateway to the internet”

It might well be that there will soon be some kind of existential crisis to make social networks mature in terms of model and rules.

Share

How Ego Kills Creativity and Talent

Quoted in the excellent book ‘Ego is the Enemy‘ by Ryan Holiday: “The performance artist Marina Abramovi? puts it directly : “ If you start believing in your greatness , it is the death of your creativity ””

Ego kills creativity and talent. It’s a well known fact however we still witness too many situations that demonstrate the truth of this assertion.

It is difficult to stay cold headed when one finds success. We tend to believe we are special, and this is the beginning of the end.

Maybe it is worth remembering that success is as much the result of luck than the result of talent and creativity. And talent can be improved through sheer work; luck can be improved too in a certain measure, but it takes other skills. Ego will kill luck that is often based on good relationships with people; and it will also kill talent because one will not put any more the work in. So, let’s try to avoid ego even when we are successful!

Share

How to Overcome the Challenger Syndrome

In my consulting work I am mainly working to help market challengers become better, or tackle more complex and larger contracts by applying best practice approaches. Some of my clients aspire to become leaders in their market. But often they can’t break through the psychological ceiling they put on themselves: behaving like a leader is very different from behaving like a challenger.

As a market challenger, you promote your reactiveness, your flexibility to accommodate client wishes, the ability to respond to tricky out-of-the-normal situations. You show you deliver under the most challenging circumstances.

As a market leader, you promote that you deliver the golden standard, and you promote volume gains that are acquired through standardisation of ways of working or of products.

It is extremely difficult for a challenger that has promoted adaptability and flexibility for years to change behavior and enforce standardisation on its clients. This is a difficult psychological barrier. Only by changing behavior can one become a leader in its market. It takes vision and guts to behave like a market leader when one is still small with a limited market share. But that is what it takes to eventually become a market leader.

Share

How to Leverage Randomness for Effectiveness

Amazon warehouses – the backbone of its effectiveness – have from an early stage been built completely random: stuff is stored wherever there is space. The computer system tracks everything and the company has found that it is more effective that way – less time to find where to put things, and more change to have a set closer when picking it up. It also saves space and makes space utilisation more efficient.

This Quartz post explains it all: ‘Amazon: This company built one of the world’s most efficient warehouses by embracing chaos‘.

This story is quite similar to what happened with emails: while in the past I used to sort painstakingly my emails in various folders, I just leave them in a dump nowadays and use powerful search features to find what I need. Email sits there in a random order, and I use another way to access the information I need.

With the increased power of mobile computation and networks, more and more applications will pop up for intelligent randomness. There are still a lot of areas where we do take the effort to sort things by categories; it is useful to consider whether this still makes sense nowadays.

It is amazing how randomness can be leveraged for increased efficiency and effectiveness!

Share

How Curiosity is As Important As Intelligence in a Complex World

This assertion came up in an influential HBR paper ‘Curiosity Is as Important as Intelligence‘. Of course, this is already suspected for a long time, like the famous quote by Einstein on the subject.

The interesting side of the HBR paper is that it links directly curiosity with the ability to navigate in complexity. It takes the position that it is a skill that can be learned, and that it is an essential skill in today’s world. ” [Curiosity Quotient] has not been as deeply studied as EQ and IQ, but there’s some evidence to suggest it is just as important when it comes to managing complexity in two major ways. First, individuals with higher CQ are generally more tolerant of ambiguity. This nuanced, sophisticated, subtle thinking style defines the very essence of complexity. Second, CQ leads to higher levels of intellectual investment and knowledge acquisition over time, especially in formal domains of education, such as science and art”

So let’s develop our Curiosity Quotient actively!

Share

Is Artificial Intelligence really Intelligent?

Jean Piaget famously wrote “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do“.  That’s of course quite a far cry from the supporters of Intelligence Quotient tests (intelligence is what is measured by the test). It is also quite far removed from the capabilities of what we call today ‘Artificial Intelligence’.

The most common approaches to AI today is machine learning. The machine is exposed to thousands of test pictures or events and learns to distinguish observations. Of course, this approach does not really prepare the machine to deal with unexpected circumstances. In that respect the machine is not really intelligent.

Maybe Artificial Intelligence is not really the right way to describe the capabilities of those machines. Their processing capability is tremendously superior to humans, but they are not intelligent. Yet.

Share

How Important The Manner to Give Feedback Can Be

A large part of my work as a consultant is to give feedback to my clients, for example when doing reviews of the current way of working on a specific project. The intent must be to give feedback without hiding aspects which need to be improved, and at the same time giving it in a way that does not create defensiveness and rejection.

How NOT to give feedback

It would be absolutely counter-productive to give accurate feedback on issues, that will never be corrected because the message was dismissed.

This is absolutely essential and it is amazing how often this aspect is overlooked. As a consequence, when performing a review, we can spend a very substantial part of the allocated time (up to 30%) showing our conclusions and getting challenged by various levels of the organisation, modifying the manner in which to present our conclusions in a manner that is palatable to the organisation.

In reality, the process of giving feedback must be to generate a powerful conversation that allows the person or the organization on the receiving end to absorb and reword the conclusion in a manner that leads to its acceptance, and finally action.

The aim of a successful feedback is to generate the right conversation.

Share

How Ethnography Deciphers Consulting Intervention Success

In this excellent and en-lighting article (in French) ‘Working on the Client to Carry Out a Mission. Ethnography of an Experience in Strategic Consultancy‘, an ethnologist examines what makes consulting missions successful. To achieve his conclusions he was embedded with the team in a strategic consulting project.

According to him, success is achieved not only thanks to the data and analysis capability of the consultants, but mostly thanks to 3 key relationship processes:

  • enrol the client to become an active member of the team
  • create a community with the client by redefining the borders
  • manage the client internal politics by associating with some key actors

What I find interesting in this aspect is how he shows that relationship and emotional work is essential in the success of the consulting intervention. Although consultants are hired mainly on the basis of their knowledge and capability, this constitutes only a small part of what is required for success.

Share

How to Deal with Both Luck- and Skill-Driven Situations

In this excellent post ‘The Difference Between Luck and Skill’, Valeria Maltoni explains how there are situations that are driven by skill, and other by luck; and that it is important to understand what is driving the situation to take the right behavior.

First, our brain is not geared to distinguish luck from skill. “Our nature throws a wrench in our ability to distinguish luck from skill. The problem is that we naturally embrace stories and shy away from statistics.” We need some analysis to understand what is at stake and it may not be easy. As a result, we overestimate the importance of skill and underestimate the situations that depend on luck.

Then, “In The Success Equation, Michael Mauboussin says that when skill is predominant in a field, the best course of action is to engage in deliberate practice with feedback and coaching; while when luck is predominant, he advises not to worry over results, because we have little or no control over them. Instead we should just focus on getting our process right to succeed long term.” (which means, get ready for the opportunity that will present itself one day or the other). Thus we need to behave markedly differently whether skill or luck drives what we are trying to achieve.

It gets complicated, of course, by “The paradox of skill — In fields where skill is more important to the outcome, luck’s role in determining the ultimate outcome increases. While in fields where luck plays a larger role in the outcome, skill is also very important but difficult to ascertain without a large enough sample set.”

So, is your project luck or skill-driven? Adapt your behavior in consequence!

Share

How to Make a Team Effectively Achieve More for Global Teams

TEAM is a nice acronym for Together Everyone Achieved More. But as experience shows, this not always the case. What are the conditions for this to happen?

There are quite a few models of team development that show the different stages required before a team reaches full effectiveness. Nevertheless, the composition the team is also an essential ingredient.

I just want to share a few keywords that are essential from my perspective, in particular for global project teams that are becoming more and more frequent:

  • Diverse (in the way to approach problems and issues in particular)
  • Well-travelled (open to other cultures)
  • Co-located (or, if not possible, at least frequent face-to-face meetings)
  • Accepting difficult conversations
  • Respectful of each other and the outside world
  • Able to do emotional work and support each other in the face of adversity.

Do you have any more to suggest?

Share

How a Collection of Top Individuals is not a Top Team – Specifically When Setting Up an Organisation

Sometimes as a consultant I get involved in supporting the setup of new organisations. Invariably, and more so even if the organisation is rich, top individuals from all required disciplines are head-hunted for key positions. Alas, this collection of individuals often does not make a working team and a successful setup. This even sometimes ends up in disaster – just because the collection of individuals does not act as a team.

The more individuals have been successful, the more generally their ego has grown and the more it is difficult to get them to participate to a collective adventure. Professionals that have been successful and recognised also sometimes lack the drive and energy that is required when setting up a new organisation; not to mention that they may not be willing to work out the required nuts, bolts and details of setting up something from scratch.

From my perspective, the recommendation in this situation is two-fold:

  • try to get seasoned individuals that are still energetic, motivated, and open-minded, than top leaders in their discipline. The small lack of experience will be largely offset by the capability, motivation and willingness to build as a team something new;
  • invest largely in teambuilding and make sure there are plenty of alignment sessions to make the team work together to build something new. It is essential that they work as a team and understand each other’s needs.
Share

How to Deal With Tearing Thoughts

I encourage you to read this beautiful post on Tearing Thoughts by Om Swami. It is a post about how to deal with those negative thoughts appearing out of blue and “running amok in our mind like an elephant gone wild razing our peace and calm in practically no time“.

Om Swami recipe for dealing with Tearing Thoughts

The good news is “Dropping a thought is a practice in meditation that can be learned and cultivated. Once you master it, all you have to is to hold a mini self-dialog and gently shift your attention on something positive.”

But further from practicing with dealing with such negative thoughts (which we can’t stop appearing, such is the workings of the mind), the key lesson here is also that “When we accept the cyclical nature of our life and thoughts, we ease up a bit. We start to realize that not everything in life can happen the way I want. Not all my dreams will come true. That universe has its own plans too. Once we get a handle on it, the rest is as easy as rocket science“. An Om Swami gives his personal recipe (refer to the image) to help keep tearing thoughts away. A great recipe for sure!

Share