Harold Jarche

are you prepared?

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Major technological advances, like the printing press or the Internet, create economic volatility. This in turn changes the existing social contract. A common assumption for the past century has been that with education and effort, you can get a job and earn a decent wage. This is no longer the norm.

Consider that some or all of your current work will be automated in the next five years, probably to be replaced by software. As with agriculture last century, fewer people are needed to do manufacturing, information, or service work today. We are entering a post-job economy. Our careers will be shorter as our lives get longer. Companies are no longer the stable source of employment they once were.

“Half a century ago, the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 was around 75 years. Now it’s less than 15 years and declining even further.” – CS Investing

In the next five years, many professionals will have to change not only who they work for, but what they do. Are you prepared?

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leadership in the rear-view mirror

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I doubt that students at Stanford thought they would become sadistic prison guards when they entered that university, primed for higher learning.

I doubt that the teacher who gave electric shocks to a “student” had planned that as part of her day.

I doubt that when budding physicians enter medical school, any plan on torturing people through rectal feeding.

Why do good people do bad things? In most cases, it’s the system.

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uber-proof your labour

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Platform capitalism is beginning to define the economy for the second Gilded Age we seem to be entering. It requires 4 contributing factors, which when combined, create a perfect opportunity for the ‘uberization’ of almost any industry.

  1. A platform: a mobile application delivered through an oligopoly like iTunes or Google Play.
  2. A critical mass of users: upwardly mobile knowledge workers, especially those in Silicon Valley or the tech sector.
  3. Desperate service providers: people with no ability to organize due to weak or non-existing trade unions in their field, who see opportunities for better cash flow.
  4. Lack of regulations and oversight: bureaucracies that either cannot keep up with technology advances, or political leadership that condones poor working conditions in the name of progress.

Platform capitalism is not just affecting the taxi, cleaning, and hotel businesses. Many professions are getting ‘uberized’.

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a new way to work

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Corporations were created to give limited liability to organizations that were taking on large, capital-intensive projects, like building railways. Today, most corporations have little physical capital and instead derive their value from intangible goods and services. Such a significant economic shift should make us question the value of putting so much value into the corporation, when most of it now is created by workers.

Do we still need a corporation to enable wealth-creation for a post-industrial, and more importantly, a post-job, economy? For example, the open source model has shown that software can be developed faster and cheaper (and many would say better) without a corporate, hierarchical structure. There are alternatives.

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leadership for the network era

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Power and Leadership

The TIMN [Tribes + Institutions + Markets + Networks] model shows how society grew from a collection of tribes, added institutions, and later developed markets. These aligned with revolutions in communications: from oral, to written, to print. The network era began with the advent of electric communications, though it is by no means completely established.

Each type of societal structure has required different types of leadership. Alexander the Great was probably one of the best tribal leaders. He led his armies from the front and created an enormous empire. After his death, some of his generals created long-lasting institutions not based on military tactics. Ptolemy’s library at Alexandria is one example. Later, institutions like the Catholic Church dominated more through soft institutional power, rather than wielding swords. Others did that for them when necessary. As a market society developed, new types of power were exercised by the Fuggers and the Hanseatic League. Later, captains of industry such as Andrew Carnegie, would dominate in their markets, often circumventing institutional power.

As we enter the network era, we see companies like Apple dominating, often ignoring Wall Street pundits. With network effects, Google can control the online advertising market, making market competition almost irrelevant. Power shifts as a society’s organizing principles change.

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friday’s finds for 2014

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Every fortnight I collate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I post the best as Friday’s Finds. Here are the best of 2014.

“The nature of work is changing. People’s relationship with work is changing. The changes to society will be vast.” – @gapingvoid

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, & eventually degenerates into a racket.” —Eric Hoffer – via @tom_peters

“Again, while enlightened animal trainers are recognizing the danger of a purely behavioral / Skinner approach, VC’s [venture capitalists] are funding it for humans.” – @SeriousPony

“Humans require the difficult and messy social routing protocol of trust.” – Valdis Krebs @orgnet – via @voinonen

“The Industrial era was based on the principle that an organisation produces, not the individuals, so the workers cannot produce without an organisation.” – @EskoKilpi

“How do we evaluate teachers? We never speak of this. It is irrelevant in our country. Instead, we discuss, ‘How can we help them?’” – Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Educator, via @PascalVenier

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hierarchies in perpetual beta

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I have said many times that teamwork is overrated. It can be a smoke screen for office bullies to coerce fellow workers. The economic stick often hangs over the team: be a team player or lose your job, is the implication in many workplaces. One of my main concerns with teams is that people are placed on them by those holding hierarchical power and are then told to work together (or else). However, there are usually power plays internal to the team so that being a team player really means doing what the leader says. For example, I know many people who work in call centres and I have heard how their teams are often quite dysfunctional. Teamwork too often just means towing the party line.

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becoming collectively smarter

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We are in the midst of a nano-bio-info-techno-cogno revolution. We are entering the network era and change is coming fast, which may sound like a cliché, but consider the last major shift we went through. We had lots of time for our institutions to adapt.

When markets came about, we had a few hundred years to move from the Hanseatic League, adopt double-entry bookkeeping, and progress to high frequency trading. We also were able to develop education systems, from one-room schoolhouses, to public universities, and later business schools to fuel the new corporations. Today, we are seriously lagging behind in learning how to deal with the scientific advances of the network era. We do not have the time afforded to us during the last shift to a market society. We have to jump from following state-established curriculum to creating our own learning networks: in this generation. People need to learn and work in networks, shifting their hierarchical position from teacher to learner, or from manager to contributor. They need to not only take control of their professional development but find others who can help them. It is becoming obvious in many fields that we are only as good as our knowledge networks. We have to become collectively smarter.

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