Freelancing means freedom

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What happens when freelancers outnumber salaried employees? In the USA, more than 30% of the population are freelancers. The assumptions of employers and employees are being turned on their heads, but politicians are still focused on creating jobs. Good luck with that.

This transition is nothing less than a revolution. We haven’t seen a shift in the workforce this significant in almost 100 years when we transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Now, employees are leaving the traditional workplace and opting to piece together a professional life on their own. As of 2005, one-third of our workforce participated in this “freelance economy.” Data show that number has only increased over the past six years. Entrepreneurial activity in 2009 was at its highest level in 14 years, online freelance job postings skyrocketed in 2010, and companies are increasingly outsourcing work. While the economy has unwillingly pushed some people into independent work, many have chosen it because of greater flexibility that lets them skip the dreary office environment and focus on more personally fulfilling projects. – The Freelance Surge is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time

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21C Monopoly

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The robber barons of the 21st century are the platform owners. They have combined the power of network effects with a 20th century corporate capitalist, winner-takes-all approach. Amazon is choking the book publishing industry, Google is dominating advertising, and telecommunications companies are using their control of the pipes to directly compete with service providers. Now Uber is going after the taxi and car rental industries, getting to be larger than established rental car brands, with none of the overhead. All of these companies provide initially good services to customers. But over time their monopolistic tendencies kill competition and the entire ecosystem of innovation.

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Good leaders connect

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Why do organizations need leaders? If you think about leadership from a tribal, institutional, or even market perspective, then it is about controlling information and appropriately using the power you have been given, in order to achieve the organization’s aims. But communications have changed that, as we move into the network era, a move that had its foreshadowing with the invention of the printing press, and has been accelerating with every electronic medium invented since. As author and historian, Gwynne Dyer, has noted, “Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.”

Modern democracy first appeared in the West only because the West was the first part of the world to develop mass communications. It was a technological advantage, not a cultural one – and as literacy and the technology of mass communications have spread around the world, all the other mass societies have begun to reclaim their heritage too. – Gwynne Dyer

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Promoting learning

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The Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow noted some 60 years ago that rising incomes should largely be attributed not to capital accumulation, but to technological progress – to learning how to do things better. While some of the productivity increase reflects the impact of dramatic discoveries, much of it has been due to small, incremental changes. And, if that is the case, it makes sense to focus attention on how societies learn, and what can be done to promote learning – including learning how to learn. – Joseph E. Stiglitz

We may talk about the importance of learning, but for the most part we do not practice it. Let’s start with schools. Schools tend to focus on weaknesses instead of strengths. They also focus too much on content dissemination. Our institutions have failed to foster the love of learning, and do not motivate students to learn for themselves – in many cases it’s the opposite. One problem is the continuing focus on subject-based curriculum. It separates education from reality. We do not live our lives in subject areas, and no workplace is subject-based, but almost all of our curricula are stuffed into category silos.

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Mastering the Internet of Everything

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In a recent interview, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, stated that the major hurdle for the Internet of Everything is the underlying architecture or it will not happen, as too much effort will have to be spent on systems integration. As with most technical hurdles, this will likely be addressed, sooner or later.

Many people are just figuring out Web 1.0, mastering their web browsers, email and the like. Others are getting into Web 2.0, using social media to connect to people and join communities of practice. And now along comes the internet of everything (IoE). How will we be able to master this new network paradigm, or will it master us?

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Peering deeply into collaboration

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Dion Hinchcliffe recently took a look at the evolution of workplace collaboration technologies and the move toward data-driven control by organizational leadership.

But, as Constellation analyst Alan Lepovsky recently observed to me and I’ve had CIOs tell me on several occasions, the real play is the ability to peer deeply using machine learning into this collective intelligence to make better decisions based on ground truth that comes from what the organization as a whole actually knows. Essentially, it’s applying IBM’s Watson-style machine learning to the full collaborative output of your organization. – Dion Hinchcliffe , ZDNet

Dion concludes, “I predict that the digital organization of tomorrow will make the fullest of its most important information assets, especially the full measure of digital knowledge of its workers”. Is this the future? As minions scurry about, leaving traces of their collaboration and knowledge-sharing, managers will be able to see the whole picture and make informed decisions. This future reminds me of F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911).

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Friday’s Finds for Enlightened Animal Trainers

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media this past fortnight.

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

Gamification addresses the symptoms of a broken system, but does nothing to fix it. via @ericzigus

When people care about and are invested in their work, when they draw a sense of purpose and identity from their work, when they understand themselves as part of a greater whole, gamification is not needed. Rather than trying to change people’s behaviour when they are reluctant to engage in tasks, the point of which is lost on them, organisations should ensure that people draw a genuine sense of identity from their work. People are truly engaged when work is meaningful to them, when they can see the purpose of what they do in contributing to the overall purpose of the organisation.

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Organizational Learning in the Network Era

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W. Edwards Deming, American management visionary, understood that systemic factors account for most organizational problems, and changing these has more potential for improvement than changing any individual’s performance. Therefore the role of executives should be to manage the system, not individuals. But the real barrier to systemic change is hierarchical management, as it constrains the sharing of power, a necessary enabler of organizational learning. People have to trust each other to share knowledge, and power relationships can block these exchanges. Just listen to any boardroom meeting and see how power can kill a conversation. If learning is what organizations need to do well in order to survive and thrive, then structural barriers to learning must be removed.

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Network Era Skills

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It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation, that more productive work can be assured in the network era. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers, including management.

Only people can enable knowledge, trust and credibility to flow within and between markets and companies. Business in the network era is connecting companies to their markets through knowledge workers having conversations in communities and social networks. The core skills for this emerging workplace are: 1) working & learning out loud 2) cooperating, 3) collaborating, and 4) self-organizing.

Working and learning out loud make implicit knowledge more explicit. Creating ‘knowledge artifacts’ that can be shared and built upon by others results in faster organizational learning, and being able to take action on that learning. In an organization, working out loud can take many forms. It could be a regular blog; sharing day-to-day happenings in activity streams; taking pictures and videos; or just having regular discussions. Developing these skills, like adding value to information, takes time and practice. Working out loud also means taking ownership of our learning.

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Learning is Connecting

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“Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make email usage look like a rounding error.” – John Chambers 1999

Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, was right, but not the way most people understood it at the time. As everything gets connected, we have to re-think our ideas about education and training. While education over the internet may not be as pervasive as email today, learning over the internet is massive. Learning is happening on every social media platform. It’s just not being controlled by educators and trainers. For example, there are how-to videos on YouTube, learning-oriented chats on Twitter, study groups on Facebook, and professional communities on LinkedIn. Google Plus may soon become the biggest social learning platform, as it integrates with collaborative documents, and real-time video Hangouts that can automatically be recorded and made available via YouTube.

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