Is Google becoming a former supermodel?

In the rapidly changing world of the Internet, Google has become one of its superstars. Within little more than a decade Google has risen to be a giant in the industry with almost 20,000 employees, revenue of $23.6 billion and profits of $6.5 billion. Growth though is slowing and competition is on the up. Most companies would be envious with long-term growth rates of 17% that Google is expected to achieve, but for a company that has been used to growing at between 30-40% a year such growth seems almost pedestrian. Analysts think so, and while Apple has become the most valuable company in tech, Google stocks have hit the wall in the past 12 months and under performed the broader market.

So has Google run out of runway, can it compete in this Brave New World? Is this supermodel now destined only to make cameo appearances on Hollywood movies, or in MBA terms, has Google moved from being a Star and become a Cash Cow?
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Declining Job Markets everywhere – even chicken sexers are changing

I had to check that it wasn’t April Fool’s Day when I read an article yesterday. It tells the story of an industry that is changing. On this blog, we try to provide the reasons why the future of world of work is changing and give insights into what it might look like. We often look at examples and case studies to illustrate the points we’re making about new skills, shifting structures and the unlearning and relearning that will be required to be successful in the near future.

We’ve highlighted all sorts of changes, from why the trucking and engineering industries are battling to get young people to join their industries, to issues faced by banks, pharmaceuticals, media, the military, politicians and almost every other industry.

But this article was a revelation to me. Apparently, Japan has dominated the world wide chicken sexing industry for nearly a century, supplying almost all of the highly trained people who are able to decipher whether a newly hatched chick is female or male. But things are changing. Read about it at News24 here, or an extract of the news item below. It might be a bit of fun, but it’s also another example of the changing world of work…

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Constant Change must be a Continuous Business Process

At TomorrowToday we are convinced that the decade ahead will be the most turbulent that any of us have ever experienced. The change will not be spectacular (in the sense that there will be world changing changes), but rather that the speed and complexity of change will be incessant. The changes will come in small steps, but they will come so often that the effect will be of constant, disrupt change.

The pre-emptive management/leadership approach in such times will be to build the ability for constant change into the heart of your organisational processes. This is obviously easier said than done. Yet, it is not as hard as it might seem if it becomes a leadership focus. Booz & Co’s S+B e-zine recently featured an excellent article highlighting this very issue. You can read it online here, or an extract below.

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Gartner Says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years

I was recently sent this list by email. A quick Google search points to the source at Gartner. It’s a quick read and has some useful insights and thought provokers.

The world of today is dramatically different from 20 years ago and with the lines between work and non-work already badly frayed, Gartner, Inc. predicts that the nature of work will witness 10 key changes through 2020. Organizations will need to plan for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends.

Organizations will need to determine which of the 10 key changes in the nature of work will affect them, and consider whether radically different technology governance models will be required.

1. De-routinization of Work
The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning. Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. For example, we cannot automate the process of selling a life insurance policy to a skeptical buyer, but we can use automation tools to augment the selling process.

2. Work Swarms
Swarming is a work style characterized by a flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value. Gartner identifies two phenomena within the collective activity; Teaming (instead of solo performances) will be valued and rewarded more and occur more frequently and a new form of teaming, which Gartner calls swarming, to distinguish it from more historical teaming models, is emerging. Teams have historically consisted of people who have worked together before and who know each other reasonably well, often working in the same organization and for the same manager. Swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating. Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad hoc action requirements, as ad hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations.

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A new normal – a new reality – for the economy

This is an excellent interview with Mark Anderson, the editor, publisher, and chief correspondent of the Strategic News Service newsletter. It was conducted by S+B (Booz & Co’s ezine) in July, and gives one view of the “new normal” that is emerging. Well worth a read:

A Return, Not to Normal, but to Reality

Mark Anderson, the high-tech industry’s most accurate prognosticator, foresees an economic landscape still under the stress of too much liquidity — and decision makers still in denial.

by Art Kleiner

In trying to make sense of economic uncertainty, it pays to look beyond conventional wisdom for an explanatory theory of the hidden fundamentals that can drive or hinder growth. Hence this interview.

Mark Anderson is the editor, publisher, and chief correspondent of the Strategic News Service newsletter, one of the most incisive publications in its field. Ostensibly about the future of the computer and communications industries, it covers a broad range of factors that affect and are affected by those businesses: everything from technological advances to capital flows to government policies to educational innovations to advances in physics.

Anderson argues that the root cause of the crisis of 2008–09 was excess liquidity: too much money seeking rapid returns, subsidizing too much production for too few customers. That bubble burst, no subsequent engine of economic growth has proved sustainable, and the excess liquidity remains, driving some prices up and others down, and splitting the world even more dramatically into economic haves and have-nots. Three critical measures, in Anderson’s view, need to be put into place before serious recovery can get under way. The first is better protection of intellectual property. The second is the specific type of financial reform that would prevent “jackals” (short-sellers) and “vampires” (sophisticated investors who take profits without contributing either market balance or information) from dominating the market as they do today. The third is a rebuilding of the manufacturing base of the industrialized world, including an accelerated transition to green energy and technologies.

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Mind Games – games where thinking REALLY counts

Got sent a link from Faaiez (twitter username : )

Very short article from The Los Angeles Times profiling some new games that require you to really engage your mind in order to play them. Engage as in, in order to move things you have to think them into action.

Charlatans and con artists have laid claim to its power for centuries. In science fiction, Jedi knights call it “the Force,” and the mind-bending X-Men (and Women) are old hats at it.

Telekinesis. Harnessing the mind to control your surroundings. It is the stuff of fantasy.

Now, that fantasy is crystallizing into reality.

Of course this technology is destined for greater things. Our cars, houses, planes, artificial limbs, wheelchairs, etc, etc will one day be controlled by simply thinking.

I often wonder how this will all be so? Let’s be honest, most of us battle to think about the stuff we have to deal with now. And based on millions of years of human history, we don’t think that well. Imagine when our minds are needed to control more than just ourselves? What damage will we be capable of then?

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How much Klout do you have on Twitter?

I mainly use two online apps to run the Twitter accounts I run. And I use these two because they do very different things. There are some things I need to do from time to time where the one trumps the other, and visa versa for other things. So there’s no getting rid of either of them.

• CoTweet (I do wish Co-Tweet had an iPhone app)
• HootSuite

Anyway, a possibly meaningless introduction to Klout. It’s integrated into CoTweet, but you can get there without CoTweet (click here).

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 0 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 25 variables to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. The size of the sphere is calculated by measuring True Reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.). Amplification Probability is the likelihood that messages will generate retweets or spark a conversation. If the user’s engaged followers are highly influential, they’ll have a high Network Score.

We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link. We perform significant testing to ensure that the average click-through rate on links shared is highly correlated with a person’s Klout Score. The 25+ variables used to generate scores for each of these categories are normalized across the whole data set and run through our analytics engine. After the first pass of analytics, we apply a specific weight to each data point. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final Klout Score. The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people.

I’ve enjoyed engaging with their system of measurement, simply because it goes beyond the usual measure of ‘how many followers’ I have? A friend, for example, who has three times as many followers on Twitter than I do, but our Klout Scores suggest I behave in a very different way to how he does, and because of that, according to Klout, I get a higher score.

Sometimes I smile when I look at what Klout feedbacks to me, because it sounds a little like a personality assessment based on my Twitter behaviour. Very flattering and all mushy and gooey. Who knows, perhaps this will even be a significant measure of who we are in  the future. Can it be any less accurate or definitive than some of the measures we use today? Maybe even an extra layer to be applied to the Talent Matrix being implemented inside of companies the world over? At least the feedback is objective, instant, and I know exactly what’s expected of me to move it  : ) But this is a conversation for another day…

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Precious – a bicycle that Tweets!

Have you ever heard about Tweetjects? – objects that Tweet, It’s a term coined by Dr Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM’s Master Inventor (that has to be the coolest title out there!) and he is on a quest to enable objects to provide people with relevant information without us having to seek out this information. It’s cutting edge stuff and you can learn more about Tweetjects here

Meet yesiamprecious a bike that is tweeting it’s way across America, sharing every sweatin’ mile of joy and heartache. Precious’s brain is an on-board device that captures all of his experiences, combined with a cloud-based system that analyzes those experiences. Put this all together and get a bike that’s able to express itself in his own words. He shares his up-to-the-moment thoughts, and has a subconscious which allows him to dream about all he’s been through. The bike’s “thoughts” are then documented on Twitter account and on the Precious site

Why do this? It’s all part of a really clever way to use social media to raise funds for the Livestrong Foundation – The Lance Armstrong Foundation unites, inspires and empowers people affected by cancer.

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Cell C may need more than (Trevor) Noah’s Ark to get them out of this one?

I’m sure it started out as a great idea at CellC Marketing HQ? The mobile phone industry has a mostly terrible name when it comes to customer service. Lines drop all the time, prices cripple you, data crawls regularly and call centers frustrate whatever life you still have, right out of you.

So it was a no-brainer to come up with a bold PR/Marketing angle of honesty, integrity and openness aimed at the bruised and beaten South African consumer. You know the story if you’ve been in South Africa these last 2 weeks. But in case you need an overview, care of The Daily Maverick and Mandy De Waal:

On Wednesday 28 July a mysterious Internet user going by the moniker of SABobbyT posted a video clip on YouTube of popular local comedian Trevor Noah going ape about mobile networks in general and Cell C in particular. In just four days Cell C found the offending link, watched it, decided to respond publicly, briefed its big agency (Ogilvy) to swiftly book media space in the Sunday Times and Rapport and to develop an advert apologising to Noah. The ad was created, approved and placed in record time before the advertising print deadlines for the two weeklies closed.

So what exactly did the ‘then nearing Super-Hero status’ Cell C CEO do? More from Mandy De Waal and The Daily Maverick:

Two “mea culpa”’ full-page adverts signed by Cell C’s CEO Lars P. Reichelt later, and the Twitterverse was abuzz with chat about social media hero Trevor Noah, how he had stood up for the small guy and what swell people Cell C were for coming clean. The story was getting airtime and was reported on by no less than Bloomberg while other media pundits were calling the effort a marketing “master-stroke”.

However, what started as a ‘master-stroke’ is fast turning into a sinking ship (in some circles anyway – search cellc on Twitter and scroll through). You can read other’s views on why they think this has been a ‘master-sink’, here, here and here, but I’d like to comment on simply this:

What Cell C and Trevor ‘I need a lifeboat’ Noah missed in all of this, is that they picked a social media space to execute their very clever campaign. They used a new world platform with old world marketing antics. They just don’t go together easily.

The Social Media space has, at some levels, become a sacred space created away from the power, smoke and mirrors of traditional media. There’s a new set of rules that governs, towards the promise of more authentic and honest dialogue. It’s a space that belongs to everyone, equally. No matter your status, your money, your power. In the world of Social Media we can all stand together as equals. You may be able to shout further than I can, because of the size of your network, but you can’t shout any louder. Your view is as important as my view.

So when Cell C (powerful and wealthy) steps into ‘our space’ and sends communication to apparently ‘one of our own’, who can shout quite far with his ‘friend base’ of over 120 000 on FaceBook, and thereby invites us to accept their communication as honest, transparent and full of integrity, and then confesses to this being simply a marketing campaign, you can understand why people are responding the way they are.

My prediction is that Cell C and Trevor Noah will lose credibility through this event. It’s a classic case of two parties not understanding the shifts that have taken place in this new-way-of-connecting-world. Of course they wont lose on every front. Some people out there (see Twitter again) love that they’ve been pranked (or should that be Arked? Or even Noah’d?). But this will remain, for a long time, as a case study of how you don’t do social media.

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Flattr Update – How paying for content is shifting and changing

A while back I wrote about new models for paying for content online. One of the new developments I wrote about was Flattr. It’s a ‘closed system’ that allows you to pay people for the content they produce, as long as they’re part of the Flattr system. I like the ethos behind their model, and I think it has great potential to begin to shift our mind-set around paying for content.

I signed up for Flattr at the beginning of July. To be a part of Flattr will cost you a minimum of a 2 Euros per month. It’s an investment in other people’s content, and not a payment to Flattr.

At the end of July I had been allocated 6.31 Euros, and a total of 7 of my blog posts had been Flattr’d 14 times. I’m chuffed with the results, and assuming Flattr is able to sustain the growth of their database, it can only be a good thing.

If you produce content (blog, podcast, vidcast, etc) I’d encourage you to look them up and apply for an invitation to get into their system.

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Where are the markets going? No-one really knows, and that’s the ‘new normal’

One of the strong messages of our work on future trends is that this recession has been more than just a financial downturn. In almost every industry we work in, the past two years have seen the acceleration of forces and drivers of change that are changing the fundamental structure of the industry. The rules for success and failure and the understanding of “how things are done” are being rewritten.

We are trying to document as many examples from different industries as we can, so that we can both prove our assertion that we need to be preparing for a “new normal” as the upturn begins, and to help our clients anticipate and prepare for the new business landscape they’re likely to face in the decade ahead.

I recently was working through some old magazine cuttings, and came across this article from a year ago, at the height of the chaos on the stock markets. It was by Business Week. At one level, the article says nothing more than “we don’t have any idea what’s going on”. But it says a lot more than that – it says that the rules by which we work out investment strategy seem to have changed dramatically. It’s a long read, but well worth the effort. You can read it online at BusinessWeek (make sure you click on the graphics on the first page and see the impressive century data), or an extract below:

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Men your time is up!

I came across a very interesting and well written article in The Atlantic which examines the world in which women have now emerged as the majority workforce for the first time in US history. This is an incredible milestone and here are a few of the facts driving this very positive trend:

- for every 2 men who get a college degree, 3 women will do the same this year
- women own 40% of privately owned businesses in China
- Most managers are now women in the US

As the knowledge economy becomes more and more entrenched, thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success. The world of work has now progressed to the the point where societies can take advantage of the talents of all their adults. This is a very encouraging development and I’d encourage you to read this insightful article below or follow the link to The Atlantic:
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Do we Twitter because we’re human, and are we human because we Twitter?

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The most important development opportunity of the next two decades

One of my personal passions is trying to work out how to help developing countries, especially in my home continent of Africa, can help their people out of debilitating poverty. I believe it is possible. It is certainly desirable at all sorts of levels.

One of the possibilities that presents a huge opportunity to help developing countries take a quantum leap forward in wealth development is the fact that the majority of their commodity and resource wealth is most likely yet to be discovered. Put another way: “There’s gold in them hills”.

Here’s a pop quiz to prove my point. Imagine an average square mile of the earth’s surface. How much sub surface value is there in the earth below it? I’m talking about the sub soil resources, minerals, etc that can be extracted and commodotised. In the typical OECD country (and OECD countries account for a quarter of the earth’s surface), each square mile has about $ 300,000 of sub soil assets below it.

In Africa, what do you think that number is? Is it less or more?

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Quotes from the digital edge

I have been doing some work preparing for a workshop session with an advertising agency. They want me to help them think through the implications of social media for their agency. We’re using our framework, “Beyond the Hype” as a starting point.

While doing some focussed reading, I came across a few quotes which you might appreciate. They got me thinking…

Bob MacDonald, CEO of Procter & Gamble: “What I would like to have is a one-on-one relationship with seven billion people in the world and be able to customize offerings for those seven billion people. Digital allows that relationship.”

Seth Godin: “The role of the CMO has changed from Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Movement Officer.”

Alice Louw, of TNS Global Brand Equity Centre, said: “Forward-looking agencies and companies of all types need to adopt the role of expert consultants capable of guiding clients in their Crowdsourcing endeavours: helping them to achieve optimal community engagement; to build and sustain a level of trust and authenticity with the community; to implement appropriate incentive schemes; and to make appropriate tactical decisions. This will mean stepping outside of engrained ways of thinking; adopting new philosophies; and re-evaluating traditional cost models.”

General Eric Shinseki (via Tom Peters’ excellent business book, Re-Imagine): “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

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Are Most Big Corporates Really Psychopaths?

RANT ALERT. Most times I try to be a dispassionate researcher of the new world of work. But sometimes I just can’t take it anymore. Today is one of those days…

Almost every day I pick up a story on the Net of someone being fired by their company for some indiscretion related to social media or digital communications. I suppose people get fired every day for breaching company policies, but when you dig into most of these stories, you really get a feeling that the people in charge just have no freaking clue and are acting like reactionary, idiotic psychopaths.

A psychopath is “a person afflicted with a personality disorder characterized by a tendency to commit antisocial, perverted, criminal, amoral and sometimes violent acts and a failure to feel guilt for such acts.” (dictionary.com)

It may be a bit over the top to call the reflex firing of a person a psychopathic act, but it certainly is not the act of a rational, emotional stable or intelligent entity either. And when it is clear that someone has been fired largely because their employer just does not understand how social media or digital communications work, then I think you can label it antisocial, perverted, criminal and amoral. And normally there is no apology later. That’s a psychopath then!

Is your company a psychopath? You’d be surprised who else is…

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The Talent Exodus looms large

We’ve been talking almost since the recession began about a talent exodus. Our view has been that as soon as the economy begins recovering and companies start hiring again, there is going to be a tidal wave of staff movement. We’re calling it a talent exodus.

It should be obvious why this will happen. People have been overworked, and often abused, by their employers during the downturn. Imagine, for example, what it must be like to work for BP right now, when your boss has just announced his retirement at age 53 and a £ 600,000 a year pension for the rest of his life. You will be paying for that pension out of your salary, which has not increased in two years, nor will you get a bonus this year. Most other company examples are less extreme, but the same outcome exists – people are ready to look around at other options.

Secondly, when companies begin expanding and looking for new talent, they will not favour the currently unemployed. They will prefer to hire new staff from other companies, and they will not be constrained by industry boundaries either. So, your staff will be getting head hunter calls soon, and most will be willing to take the calls.

And now, a survey confirms our instinct. According to Deloitte LLP’s fourth annual Ethics & Workplace Survey, one-third of employed Americans plan to look for a new job when the economy gets better. Of this group of respondents, 48% cite a loss of trust in their employer and 46% say that a lack of transparent communication from their company’s leadership are their reasons for looking for new employment at the end of the recession.

It’s not too late to do something about this now! But you need to start now. This issue should be top priority and the head of every management agenda for the next year! If it’s not on your leader’s radar, your company is in big trouble.

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Visualisation: An ageing world

I really enjoy clever visualisations of data (see previous blog entries on this here). So, this is the shortest of blog entries to alert you to one I just discovered. Brought to us by GE, it’s a visualisation of how various countries will age over the next few decades. See the population pyramids expand and contract, and compare two countries at a time. It’s pretty easy data, but well done as a Java Applet.

Check it out here: http://www.ge.com/visualization/aging/

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Nine key workforce trends for the next decade

Download a copy of this article in PDF format – right click here. The contents of this article can be presented as a keynote or a workshop for your team. Contact our UK or South African offices to find out how.

My company, TomorrowToday, researches the new world of work, and focuses especially on helping our clients to understand the disruptive forces that will change the world in the next decade. We use a variety of constructs or frameworks to help people understand and respond to these issues. One of my favourites is our “TIDES of Change” framework (read an extended article on it here).

I was recently asked to simply list some of the key workforce trends of the next decade. It was an interesting exercise. So, without much explanation or detail (search this blog site for more details on each of these trends), here is a list of the most important issues we’ll be facing in the next few years in relation to our employees, leaders and teams. There are obviously some variations in different world regions, but these are fairly general trends for the next decade:

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Simba’s inclusive social media taste strategy – clever

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