Le_Must_Read_Boostzone_Institute_April_2013

Le_Must_Read_Boostzone_Institute_March_2013

The Blackholepad has absorbed an incredible number of tools and accessories, more or less voluminous, within the last few years. Here is a list “à la Prévert”, not really organized, of what has disappeared into the Blackholepad.

My calculator, my diary, my notebook, my calendar, my address book, my mail (including letters, postcards from my travelling friends, Christmas cards) and my mailbox; my files including my tax receipts, my bills, my paychecks, and therefore my filing cabinets; my music including my CDs, my LPS and therefore my record shelves but also my CD players, my radio, my stereo and my pieces of furniture on which they were standing; my pictures and my photo albums but also my camera, my video camera, my movies, my video projector, my DVDs, my DVD player, even my TV!; my geographic maps, my city maps, my compass and therefore my GPS; my encyclopedia, my dictionaries, my grammars, all of my reference books; my mobile phone and my fixed telephone line, my video conference system, many of my travels because I can video conference from the Blackholepad, and, for the remaining travels, my airplanes or train tickets have already gone into the hole; my game boards for chess or for go or any other game, even my dominoes, not even speaking of my video games that used to come within cassettes and required a special equipment…

Without mentioning my gym trainer, my diet trainer, and even part of my music trainer.

And I have certainly forgotten a lot of things in this list.

Currently, it is going on and absorbing my computer itself  – because I use it less and less and my tablet takes over – , my printer is going the same way because I don’t need to print anymore, my scanner also. My desk itself is disappearing; my health monitors are going; the Blackholepad has also even started to eat my reading glasses because it is so easy to enlarge any page or any font… It is also currently fast absorbing my books and my bookshelves.

Soon the Blackholepad will absorb my memory via a tool called life logging  that records continuously my activities via a camera and a microphone (it will be convenient if Alzheimer strikes), my credit cards, my wallet, and probably my ID card and my passport.

I hope it will not absorb my toothbrush but I am not that sure. Geeks are certainly working on ways to produce ultrasonic tooth cleaning waves out of the next version of the pad…

But the Blackholepad is also a great retrieving tool. It is easy, within a few finger clicks, to have access to everything I had whenever I need it if and when I still need it. Wherever I am!

Except that, for some items, I would still like them to “jump” at me in a serendipitous way, and they don’t necessarily do that easily. It is the case in particular for my music, my pictures and my books. For my music, there is a wonderful invention, the shuffle. Listening to music by shuffling all one’s music brings constantly nice memories, forgotten melodies, and actually it works better than in ancient times when we had to go along the CDs shelves for exploring our music. For the pictures, there is also another possibility, mostly convenient on computers but soon available on tablets: the screen savers that retrieve pictures from the Blackholepad at random. Again it is better than all those albums sleeping under dust or those pictures stuck in shoeboxes. Old memories jump at us through the screen every time it pauses.

But what about my reading books i.e. all the books others than encyclopedia, dictionaries and reference books that one does check whenever in need of information I can’t read them again and again as I would with music. I can’t have them appear on the screen regularly to remind me that they are here and that I should not forget their content or the lessons of life they gave me. In the past, when we had bookshelves and book piles all over the place we were constantly surrounded by them, we lived with them; we were reminded of their content by their very physical presence. How to rematerialize my books at an era where e-books are the future? You will tell me that the designs of the e-book readers’ screens all tend to represent a traditional bookshelf and that it will help me to browse through my library as I did with the real one. But forget it! We keep only on the active e-shelf the e-books we are currently reading. After that, they fall into the Blackholepad. But I believe in e-books strongly, and I am really convinced they represent the future of the cultural diffusion of written knowledge. I am so convinced that I invested in two digital publishing houses, one for business books (Boostzone editions), one for literature books (Emoticourt editions). But doing so I also discovered that this dematerialization of books is not only a problem for me as a reader who expects to still rediscover regularly the forgotten or the unread books in my library. It is also an issue for bookshop keepers, for authors and for book givers.

Bookshop keepers might well disappear if they have nothing to show, as did the music or video shops and as did the video renting shops. It is sad because part of the purchase was done on touching books (and the recommendation system of Amazon is great but not as good as roaming through the piles of books at random) and on their personal recommendations, which they gave by holding physical books in their hands while mentioning their qualities. For authors it is even more of a drama. They can’t easily “sell” e-books when they organize a signature or give a conference, worse, they can’t sign them! For readers obviously the lack of a physical signature and its few accompanying words is also quite frustrating. Finally for book givers it is an other drama: a book remains a great gift, full of content, remaining as a souvenir, conveying for ever the emotion of the relationship between the giver and the receiver, bearing itself often a signature and a caring message. How could an e-book convey all that?

I have been looking at several rematerialization solutions. The first one is still virtual but works for me as a user, it consists in putting the covers of books within a file of pictures, it then becomes feasible to have them shuffled like other pictures on the screen saver. I am sure an App will soon do that without the need to capture the cover pages as pictures. An other one is to print on demand whenever a book is to be given at a conference, for a gift, or for a signature. It works, it might sound absurd to print an e-book but it could lead to us owning physically only books that we received as gifts or by meeting the author. Why not? In that case the book is again a valuable object for something additional to its content. A book would become a rare object, again and paradoxically at a time when its potential de-multiplication has become infinite. Other solutions will appear soon for sure.

What are the implications of the Blackholepad on business and management?

From an economic perspective, we all know that this massive dematerialization means less jobs because the number of jobs behind the Blackholepads and the Apps replacing the goods has nothing to do with the number of those who were employed for the production, storage, distribution, destruction of the disappeared products, from cameras to printers, to CDs, to books to calculators to GPSs, etc.

It also means the producers have to reinvent new goods and services. We will not have bookshelves anymore or much less if we store only books with a high emotional value, but may be we will have shelves for our 3D printed arts, etc.

From a management perspective, documents have been dematerialized for quite a while already, servers for databases are now mostly external rather than internal, few companies still have a documentation center having books and files on shelves. Large savings on a lot of equipment that will not be bought anymore should happen. The Bring Your Own Device movement (BYOD) for example is also a major potential cost saving for corporations. Most importantly however, management will be impacted because the access to work and workers, the access to collaboration, the access to collaborative virtual artifacts (like Wikipedia), the very nature of what an office is (or rather is not anymore), the very nature of people interactions will be challenged.

As an example, the corporate directory will disappear not only in the cloud but also for good because Linkedin, a much more complete and up to date tool, will replace it. Even more deeply, full departments will physically and administratively disappear from the company, outsourced progressively, collectively or by every employee, to the blackhole and the cloud via virtual work. It has started with design departments, secretarial staff, etc. in particular for small and medium companies.

In that context, the above example of the rematerialization of e-books should lead us to a broader thinking about rematerialization in the work context. The recent decision by Yahoo to ask individuals to stop remote working and to come back to the office responds exactly to the same logic as my small book example: how can individuals get creative via serendipity if they are not physically confronting their ideas? If they are not “jumping” at each other? The 0 or 1 solution (all remote or suddenly all physical) is probably a bit absurd but it has the merit of having kicked off a real and necessary debate, not on whether or not interactions will be more or less dematerialized but on how and when we will find ways to rematerialize them.

Le “Must-Read” by @Boostzone Institute – February 2013

Le_Must_Read_Boostzone_Institute_January_2013

Boostzone Institute – WebReview December 2012

This is a wonderful time of the year, we all get ready to wish each other the best possible moments, to give each other gifts, to be with our loved ones for a few family events, to hear once again a number of Christmas carols, etc.  But something feels strange in this atmosphere. No, not the too much debated fact that we have become much more individualistic, that we are all too consumerism driven, that our social solidarity is only a vague memory and that the Christmas Carol of Dickens will make us feel better, etc. What I feel is rather something more subtle and awkward. It seems to me that a number of forces are actually changing drastically the very “value” of an individual in our interdependent civilization, that our very sense of our own identity is challenged more than ever.

Which forces am I talking about? All those related to the fact that we are more and more parts of a collaborative world and that this very “belonging” questions the “value” we have as an individual, whatever meaning you put behind the word “value”. Let me take a few examples.

We “are” with our networks. We are more and more judged (valued?) on the quality and the size of our networks, professional or personal or both. But does the network reflect our value or does it become our value? Do we still have a value without our network? And the additional fact that we know that the network does not really need us to have its own value could be depressing at time. The impact of social networks on our lives is even subtler. We may have entered a world of continuous mutual adjustment. It might be great because we are more flexible, but doesn’t it also lead to a general consensus toward some conformism? We might influence others via our curation efforts and our tweets, and we are influenced in return; this is certainly most generally for good, but are we able to judge ourselves when, really? Are we clever enough or independent enough to safeguard our critical judgment?

We “are” Big Data. This is the dawn of Big Data but Big Data is often only the sum of a myriad of things we have done, along with others. In marketing, it will soon not be necessary anymore to have groups of real individuals being put together in a room for testing a concept; Twitter will suffice. Your opinion, or mine, will not really matter anymore.

Productivity and “us”. Productivity gains thanks to machines and to collaboration become so huge that we feel less like responsible players but more and more like Chaplin in the Modern Times, one among many within a large gearing where our chances of survival depend on the next technology gimmick or the next emergence of the “free” provision of what we do and are currently paid for (valued for) thanks to the Internet. If we have a job that is threatened by collaboration and free access, we might be worried, or enthusiastic, depending on which side of the fence we feel we are.

“You” are sometimes a robot. We interact more and more with machines, mostly via screens, with “whom” we actually talk, who thank us (we will soon thank them loud too I suppose) for an increasing number of transactions where we used to talk to humans. This “low-touch” world is certainly good for productivity gains but the very value of “us” talking here becomes quite surrealistic. In some cases it might lead to new forms of loneliness, even of despair. In some others we really win time via these new tools, can we learn how to use this time more intelligently?

The implications of this new definition of the self, the “me”, the “you”, are still unclear to me, as was not so long ago the definition of a “friend”. It is probably a more fundamental change than what we think. Good or bad? Hard to know but unavoidable and therefore requiring some thinking and some personal management. “Know yourself”, “manage yourself” have never been so difficult to understand and to apply. But if it is more complex it is probably also quite exciting, because thanks to all these ambiguity and changes I am a bit more you and you are a bit more me and after all it might be a recipe for peace… a great word at this time of the year.

Obviously what I am searching when I look for the means to make us Augmented Managers (my book comes out in January, look for it!) has something to do with looking for how to all remain responsible and loving humans.

Let me wish you a wonderful new year, and let’s wish we could become all better at recognizing the real value of each of us in each of us for each of us. The year will be tough at least from an economic standpoint, a social standpoint, a political standpoint, an ecological standpoint, let’s make it a great one from a mutual/collective/collaborative/solidarity human discovery standpoint.

Happy 2013!

This post is narrow (it reflects only a tiny part of my notes) and biased, (it only reflects my major personal takes of the day and only in the field of management and strategy implications). What is said here was not necessary said in the various discussions but is what I decided to hear, interpret and share.

The sessions I attended on the third day were dealing with management, the notion of what a technology company is, issues with economic growth, life blogging and Facebook.

• The “Transforming social enterprise” leads to seriously question what an employee is within the new Klein bottle shaped enterprise (I covered that issue in my book on the Fractal Nature of Enterprise 2.0).
• Email will remain for long the hub of communication, even if the arrival of news flows within the collaborative tools is now a given.
• Only few senior executives of collaborative tool companies realize that collaboration will lead to a race against collaboration (to paraphrase Andrew Macafee), they are outrageously optimist on the fact that freed resources will be allocated to more growth. The same arguments are used against this “race against collaboration” as the ones used against the “Race against the machine” although it starts to be demonstrated that the jobs freed by automation are far from being reallocated for more growth. The issue is partially the one of skills mismatch and I would love to see in further Techonomy sessions how to use technologies and in particular the social technologies to address this issue of skill mismatch within our advanced countries.
• Also I found that very few executives already realize how deeply collaboration is changing the very fundamentals of management, from HR management systems to strategic thinking, to workforce strategy, to the dynamics of internal power games, etc. There is a lot of discussion and debates about the importance of corporate culture but the details of it are still far from being clear for many.
• The external tools have become definitely better than some internal corporation tools. The main case in point is the internal directory vs. Linkedin. No internal directory can ever be as good as Linkedin (for legal, personal and IT reasons). Therefore it is not surprising that 20% of requests on LI are made by employees looking for their colleagues. LI will become the “normal” point of references for individual’s profiles. Linkedin is the mirror of the Bring Yourself As An Asset concept.
• The link between internal and external usages of social tools gets reinforced by the day. One interesting management implication is that employees start to “shop” for experts on social networks as they are shopping for goods on the Internet. An other one is that thanks to the crowd sourcing of jobs for small tasks of more or less sophistication we start to see the emergence not only of a lot of free agents but also of a lot of “flash employees” coming (mostly virtually) to work just for a task or a few hours.
• There is an increasing consciousness that software will never be the same with the arrival of the Cloud. It is not just a new tool; it is a fundamental change for the role of software within organization’s information management.
• The links between business entrepreneurship, technology, values seem to me yet to be defined. In particular I am surprised to see the difficulties all entrepreneurs have to find a balance between being entrepreneurs (aiming for realizing something and making money out of it) being “good” citizens (participating in NGOs for example), and being “responsible” citizens i.e. being able to understand and endorse their responsibilities especially once their success leads to change the life of millions of people.
• In particular I was surprised to see most of the Facebook discussions being focused around their economic performance, their marketing capabilities, the way they can best use their bigdata, while I would personally expect a higher sense of accountability and of responsibility. It is not enough to be a great scientist having invented a new form of nuclear energy, it is essential to understand what good and evil can be done with this energy, especially when one remains in control of most of what is made with this energy. Let’s not forget, Facebook was understood by its user as a tool for their life; any use of that tool and of what people use it for (and put on as information on themselves) requires he highest sense of responsibility. This is particularly true for the users located in countries where the rules are different from the ones in the US.
• Overall the takes I have for Techonomy this year are: on the positive side the incredible high level of interventions, participants, ideas, etc.  It really makes the time and money investment to go there worthwhile; and on the “development needs” side the fact that Techonomy could 1) go more towards the management implications of techonomics 2) work more on the future of interactions between the lo touch interactions where all the digital technologies lead us towards, and the hi touch interactions (physical meetings, face to face work, face to face or at least phone interactions) that are an essential part of our contemporary work/life balance. Robots will talk to each other, great, let’s not forget that humans have to talk to each other too and to derive value out of it (innovation, love, enthusiasm, etc.) 3) work more on the labor economics implications, from both the social dimensions (what are we going to do with all those who are released by technologies and social technologies?) and from the managerial dimensions (how to manage people in a high tech / high collaborative / high transparency world, what is the next version of workforce strategy management?) 4) invite a philosopher and / or a sociologist because one the main questions (the elephant in the room in a way) remains: ”what is the value of work for man? Does technology free us or alienates us? Does it free our time? If yes, why is it that those who have a job work too much while at the same time so many don’t have a job? Is it only an economic question or also a philosophical question?”

This ends my series on Techonomy12.

This post is narrow (it reflects only a tiny part of my notes) and biased, (it only reflects my major personal takes of the day and only in the field of management and strategy implications). What is said here was not necessary said in the various discussions but is what I decided to hear, interpret and share.

The order of the point is more or less random.

This second day was still dealing with big data but also with 3D printing, geo engineering, economic analysis around technological progress, marketing, robotics and peer economy.

• The fact that the new social Commons are not accounted for in the GDP and that therefore GDP is largely underestimated by this lack of measurement leads Eryc Brynjofsson and Andrew MacAfee to suggest to consider time spent for contributing as an economic value. The concept is relevant for society but even more for corporation when time spent in collaborating (e.g. to knowledge management or internal social networking) should be valued at various levels: market cap valuation, IP development, etc.

• Productivity gains due to automation are here to last, jobs will disappear as long as we are not collectively able to generate more jobs or to help people gather the skills needed (skill mismatch concept). This extremely serious issue is debated but no sense of solution is seen. I still believe we need to make progress on understanding how productivity, management and CSR should be combined. I wrote on this earlier on http://www.boostzone.fr/2011/03/how-good-management-can-generate-unemployment/

• 3D printing capabilities are ever more proven and are definitely entering into the market; “Making things matters” again (Steve Houver, PARC). I can’t see any industry not being affected within this decade. Most challenged ones are those with many individualized products (medical for prostheses) or with high level but low turn inventories (glass frames, spare parts, etc.). Many foresee a future with 3D printers close by the local FEDEX office. It will challenge many logistic chains and production chains.

• Education needs to be seriously overhauled in order to prepare the students to learn how to learn all along their life but the most important challenge remains to trigger intellectual curiosity and mental agility for all, from children at school to middle age executive who don’t see the necessity to change. A way could be to show to them the growing isolation they risk.

• Students at school help each other; within corporations it is probably important to foster more co-training and co-coaching.

• Major changes are expected, because of BigData in Education, Health Care, Energy, I would add all actors of the labor market because the knowledge of supply, demand and intermediation techniques will be dramatically enhanced.

• Retail will be transformed mostly by the arrival of mobile and social technologies; salesmen will have to change completely their role. Also retail will resist some technologies like NFC since it could deprive it from some customer information. Any industry needs to revisit when and where it gives up information that could be valuable.

• Self driven cars could develop quite fast during the next two decades. If true it could change significantly the labor market of drivers of all sorts but also what and how we work in cars. A challenging thought.

Boostzone Institute – WebReview November 2012