Category: Uncategorized

Who Will Prosper in the New World

// Tyler’s Op-Ed piece generated a sizable slew of [disagreement] in the comments…  //

THE CONSCIENTIOUS

Within five years we are likely to have the world’s best education, or close to it, online and free. But not everyone will sit down and go through the material without a professor pushing them to do the work.

Those who are motivated to use online resources will do much, much better in the generations to come. It’s already the case that the best students from India are at the top in many Coursera classes, putting America’s arguably less motivated bright young people to shame. “Free” doesn’t really help you if you don’t make an effort.

PEOPLE WHO LISTEN TO COMPUTERS

Your smartphone will record data on your life and, when asked, will tell you what to do, drawing on data from your home or from your spouse and friends if need be. “You’ve thrown out that bread the last three times you’ve bought it, give it a pass” will be a text message of the future. How about “Now is not the time to start another argument with your wife”? The GPS is just the beginning of computer-guided instruction.

Take your smartphone on a date, and it might vibrate in your pocket to indicate “Kiss her now.” If you hesitate for fear of being seen as pushy, it may write: “Who cares if you look bad? You are sampling optimally in the quest for a lifetime companion.”Those who won’t listen, or who rebel out of spite, will be missing out on glittering prizes. Those of us who listen, while often envied, may feel more like puppets with deflated pride.

PEOPLE WITH A MARKETING TOUCH

There will be a lot more wealth in this brave new world, but it won’t be very evenly distributed because a lot of human labor won’t seem like a special or scarce resource. Capturing the attention of customers with just the right human touch will command an increasing premium. Don’t forget that Mark Zuckerberg was a psychology major in addition to being a tech genius. Sheer technical skill can be done by the machines, but integrating the tech side with an attention-grabbing innovation is a lot harder.

MOTIVATORS A lot of jobs will consist of making people feel either very good or very bad about themselves. Coaches, mentors and disciplinarians will spread to many areas of life, at least for those of us who can stand to listen to them. These people will cajole us, flatter us and shame us into improving our lives, our work habits and our consumption. That’s why so many people go to yoga class instead of relying on the podcast. Managers who are motivators of first-rate talent will see their earnings continue to rise.

Who will be most likely to suffer from this technological revolution?

PEOPLE WITH DELICATE FEELINGS

Computing and software will make it easier to measure performance and productivity.

It will be harder to gloss over our failings and maintain self-deception. In essence everyone will suffer the fate of professional chess players, who always know when they have lost a game, have an exact numerical rating for their overall performance, and find excuses for failure hard to come by.

Individuals will have many measures of their proficiency. They will have an incentive to disclose that information to get the better job or social opportunity. You’ll assume the worst about those who keep secrets, and so openness will reign. Many of us will start to hate the idea of Big Data.

PEOPLE UNLUCKY IN HEALTH CARE

Quality surgery and cancer treatment cannot be automated very easily. They will be highly expensive, and unlucky health breaks will be all the more tragic because not everyone will be able to afford the best treatments.

With marvelous diagnosis available online, some people will get the right treatments early on, whereas others will know exactly what they are dying from.

PEOPLE WHO DON’T NEED MONEY

We are used to thinking in terms of rich, poor and middle class, but those categories will change. Berlin’s eastern neighborhoods and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, are a window onto our future. These urban areas are full of people who are bright, culturally literate, Internet-savvy and far from committed to the idea of hard work directed toward earning a good middle-class living. We’ll need a new name for the group of people who have the incomes of the lower middle class and the cultural habits of the wealthy or upper middle class. They will spread a libertarian worldview that working for other people full time is an abominable way to get by.

POLITICAL RADICALS:

A mechanized, computer-driven, highly unequal future is sometimes viewed as a recipe for rebellion. But the Edward J. Snowden saga shows this won’t be easy, as tech is at least as much an instrument for surveillance and control as it is for revolt. We’re also aging rapidly, and that tends to make society more peaceful, less violent and less extreme in all directions. It was the 1960s, a peak era for manufacturing jobs and the American middle class, that brought so much social turmoil and unrest. The more that work is done by machines, the less compelling is the case for putting your manufacturing in a distant country where wages are low. If there is any big winner from all of these trends, it is probably the good ol’ United States.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/31/who-will-prosper-in-the-new-world/

And then the product loses focus and starts to look like a camel (a horse built by committee)

… the Product CEO Paradox: The only thing that will wreck a company faster than the product CEO being highly engaged in the product is the product CEO disengaging from the product.

This happens all the time. A founder develops a breakthrough idea and starts a company to build it. As originator of the idea, she works tirelessly to bring it to life by involving herself in every detail of the product to ensure that the execution meets the vision. The product succeeds and the company grows. Then somewhere along the line, employees start complaining that the CEO is paying too much attention to what the employees can do better without her and not enough attention to the rest of the company. The board or CEO Coach then advises the founder to “trust her people and delegate.” And then the product loses focus and starts to look like a camel (a horse built by committee). In the meanwhile, it turns out that the CEO was only world-class at the product, so she effectively transformed herself from an excellent, product-oriented CEO into a crappy, general-purpose CEO. Looks like we need a new CEO.

How can we prevent that? It turns out that almost all the great product-oriented founder/CEOs stay involved in the product throughout their careers. Bill Gates sat in every product review at Microsoft until he retired. Larry Ellison still runs the product strategy at Oracle. Steve Jobs famously weighed in on every important product direction at Apple. Mark Zuckerberg drives the product direction at Facebook. How do they do it without blowing their companies to bits?

Over the years, each one of them reduced their level of involvement in any individual set of product decisions, but maintained their essential involvement. The product-oriented CEO’s essential involvement consists of at least the following activities:

Keep and drive the product vision. The CEO does not have to create the entire product vision, but the product-oriented CEO must drive the vision that she chooses. She is the one person who is both in position to see what must be done and to resource it correctly.

Maintain the quality standard. How good must a product be to be good enough? This is an incredibly tough question to answer and it must be consistent and part of the culture. It was easy to see the power of doing this right when Steve Jobs ran Apple, as he drove a standard that created incredible customer loyalty.

Be the integrator. When Larry Page took over as CEO of Google, he spent a huge amount of his time forcing every product group to get to a common user profile and sharing paradigm. Why? Because he had to. It would never have happened without the CEO making it happen. It was nobody else’s top priority.

Make people consider the data they don’t have. In today’s world, product teams have access to an unprecedented set of data on the products that they’ve built. Left to themselves, they will optimize the product around the data they have. But what of the data they don’t have? What about the products and features that need to be built that the customers can’t imagine? Who will make that a priority? The CEO.

But how do you do that and only that if you have been involved in the product at a much deeper level the whole way? How do you back off gracefully in general without backing off at all in some areas? At some point, you must formally structure your product involvement. You must transition from your intimately involved motion to a process that enables you to make your contribution without disempowering your team or driving them bananas. The exact process depends on you, your strengths, your work style and your personality, but will usually benefit from these elements:

Write it; don’t say it. If there is something that you want in the products, then write it out completely. Not as a quick email, but as a formal document. This will maximize clarity while serving to limit your involvement to those things that you have thought all the way through.

Formalize and attend product reviews. If teams know that they should expect a regular review where you will check the consistency with the vision, the quality of the design, the progress against their integration goals, etc., it will feel much less disempowering than if you change their direction in the hallway.

Don’t communicate direction outside of your formal mechanisms. It’s fine and necessary to continue to talk to individual engineers and product managers in an ad hoc fashion, because you need to continually update your understanding of what’s going on. But resist the attempt to jump in and give direction in these scenarios. Only give direction via a formal communication channel like the ones described above.

Note that it is really difficult to back off of any non-essential involvement yet remain engaged where you are needed. This is where most people blow themselves up: either by not letting go or by letting go. If you find yourself where my friend found himself — you cannot let go a little without letting go entirely — then you probably should consider a CEO change. But don’t do that. Learn how to do this.

– Ben Horowitz

There is, it seems, an assumption out there in adland that being ‘curious’ is a desirable quality to possess.

Or at least claim.

Particularly if you call yourself a planner or – loathsome word that it is – ‘strategist’.

Curiosity does of course, have much to recommend it.

But if you want to be a planner rather than just a finder-outer-of-stuff, if you want to do more than peddle ‘insights’, if you want to move things forwards, if you want to be leader,  if you  want to change the world, then simply being ‘curious’ just isn’t going to cut it.

You need to be cross.

Indignant.

Exasperated.

Angry.

Or even plain ol’ fashioned fucked off.

For curiosity is about wanting to know how things are.

It’s about wanting to look under the hood of things and discover their workings.

But being angry is about being dissatisfied with how things are.

And wanting to change them.

Now.

Being angry compells us to action.

Martin Luther King wasn’t ‘curious’ about civil rights.

He was angry at their absence.

Change comes from indignation that the status quo is allowed to exist.

Change comes from exasperation at the fact that the ways things are, is not the way things should be.

Change comes from anger at what people are asked to put up with.

People aren’t ‘curious’ in Egypt.

They’re angry.

And when it comes to our small part of the world, there is surely lots to be angry about.

Products that don’t live up to their promises.

Promises that are specious.

Marketers that knowingly pollute minds and bodies.

Businesses that cannot grasp the notion of service.

Businesses that haven’t woken up to the fact that being a responsible corporate citizen isn’t a sideshow for bleeding heart liberals, but is actually better business practice.

Businesses built on the back of dubious and conveniently outsourced labour practices.

Brands that choose not to inform the consumer of the human and environmental impact of their manufacture, consumption, and disposal.

Marketing content that barely conceals its disdain for its audience.

Marketing content that shamelessly peddles in tacit or explicit sexism.

Marketing content that pollutes our leisure time, our private space, and our physical environments.

The list needless to say, goes on.

And in all of this, curiosity will not help.

Because curiosity isn’t opinionated.

Curiosity isn’t dissatisfied.

Curiosity cannot marshall resources.

Curiosity cannot persuade and bring along others.

Curiosity will not keep you going when the going gets tough.

Simply put, curiosity just isn’t enough to help us with the things that really matter.

For  – putting aside for one moment all the fancy talk of ‘engagement’, ‘participation’, ‘community’ and so on – what people really need (indeed, really deserve) is as Helen Edwards has written, better products, better service, easier lives, a cleaner world, and more health and happiness.

The purpose of our efforts is to help in that.

In ways both big and small.

Our purpose is to make people’s lives better.

And making people’s lives better requires vision, impatience and action.

Ask Ghandi.

Ask King.

Ask Mandela.

So if we are to contribute to people’s lives, if we are to play our humble part in changing the world for the better, then f’fuck’s sake, let’s get angry.

// Martin’s all fired up. Perhaps we should be too. But for the right reasons, and not for the usual frustrations.  http://martinweigel.org/2013/07/31/the-importance-of-being-angry/