Posts Tagged ‘careers’
That’s what I said. Government’s cannot promote innovation
Yesterday, I was playing with John Hagel’s list of three features that distinguish fringe/flaky activities from edge, innovative activities and I suddenly realized: governnments cannot promote innovation.
This is why.
3 differences between fringe/flakey and edge/innovative enterprises
John Hagel, famed for his work on the motor cycle industry in China, points out:
#1 Edge activities are scalable
There is a way to bring the critical stakeholders and a critical mass of people together to make a difference.
#2 Edge activities are ‘life works’
The change brought by edge activities are so compelling that we are willing to back them with everything we have.
#3 Edge activities change the status quo
Edge activities don’t exist as a complement, extension or protest to mainstream activities. They intend to take over the mainstream.
When we develop a new industry, we curtail, or even displace, other industries. People are put out of work. How can a government sponsor that?
QED. Governments cannot sponsor innovation.
How can governments support innovation?
It seems to me that govenments’ job is to promote social conditions that promote innovation.
#1 Look at employee rights in failing or contracting industries. I don’t mean employee privileges, I mean rights. How do their rights stack up with the rights of other stakeholders (who are also losing out). Bring those into balance in a fair, transparent, agree and comprehensible matrix.
#2 Make it easier for employees to move from one industry to another. How easy is it to retrain mid-career? How often does this happen? How do individuals go about it? With what success? What structural changes would make it easier?
#3 What other structural issues make it hard on employees exiting collapsing industries? How do we treat people who are not in employment? How does the tax law and the banking law make life difficulty for people who are reinvesting in new industries?
What I learned from Hagel’s points on edge industries
That’s what I learned from thinking through Hagel’s three points about edge industries. Government has got to make it easier for more edge industries to succeed.
And that means Governments must make it less painful for old industries to shrink and eventually fade away.
It also follows that a good governments, in this day and age, should be boasting that this is an economy, and society, in which old industries are given and neat, tidy, respectful burial. And that we are proud of our ability to move on. Because moving on just got profitable . . . for everyone.
Employers for life
Today, CIPD published a story that we want an employer for life.
Insecurity distracting us from growth
Some people don’t understand the economic numbers and if they don’t, then the responses reported by CIPD spell out for them the meaning of a severe recession.
Employees are grubbing at the bottom of Maslow’s Need Hierarchy.
It’s not much of a life, and we won’t be going any where fast as a country until we reduce the fear and worry about basics.
Employment relations and psychology
We need to get the politics right. We need to get every one to sit down and see what we can keep stable, and keep it stable. Give people as much security as they can so they can plan.
But we also have to learn to function in the “whip and crack of the whirlwind.” Other communities do. We need to as well.
Careers have changed
CIPD was knocking the ‘free agent’ route. Well, UK has not had much of tradition of self-employment or entrepreneurship. We will get panic simply because we don’t have many role models around us.
Let’s take the intrapreneurship route with which we are more familiar.
Before social media
Our CV showed an obedient relationship with authority.
In a social media world
Our CV is our portfolio of original work and our evolving purpose.
What is our evolving purpose?
When we aren’t used to telling our story, explaining our purpose can be the hardest thing in the world.
So often our purpose has been no more than “hitch a ride on a gravy train.”
For too long, we’ve pretended
- we can drive the train
- make gravy
- and that we are welcome on the train.
That is the crisis that we are facing.
But hey, if catching gravy trains is our skill and purpose in life, then at least we can become knowledgeable about gravy trains. When do they come and how do we hop on and hide?
We can write about it. We might have to be like Banksy and keep our identify quiet. But we can write about it. And show he evidence.
To carry on the train metaphor, we can show a picture of us in Edinburgh in the morning and in London in the evening. Of course, “they” will be looking out for us now. No problem. We are the experts. Another route!
Psychologists reading this know where I am headed . . .
Build that portfolio!
You can call your life by any name you choose but there is only one life you can call your own. Start you blog today!
Don’t do anything indiscrete. Begin with the small things. Take a picture of a train.
And then another. Then another.
It’s a cheap hobby at least.
Bet it becomes lucrative though!
Acknowledgements:
“conduct your blooming in the whip & crack of the whirlwind” : Gwendolyn Brooks
“there is only one life you can call your own” : David Whyte
Get to the heart of what will be the vibrant, interesting, & lucrative jobs and careers in the 21st century?
Posted on: November 26, 2009
New management
When I went to university, we were told that management is the art of getting work done through people. A passport to laziness and exploitation!
Today, we say management is developing people through work.
Work should be fun. It is fun for some of us.
And work should be fair. Not only should we receive a fair day’s pay for a fair days work. We should be growing as a person and capable of doing more with each hour of work that we put in.
Rewriting the training manuals for jobs and careers
In 20th century management manuals, Stage 1 of work was doing. For about 10 years, roughly from 16 to 26, we learned a trade and built breadth & depth through education and exposure. Our job was to cultivate a deep knowledge of our materials and tools, appreciate our customers, and adapt what we did for their needs. We wanted to learn enough about the wide range of situations that we might encounter in the future so that we could go with the flow and make a living as the years went by.
Sadly, of course, markets change and revolutions happen in technology. With very little notice, customers defect to other products and markets, competitors outrun us, or the technology changes sufficiently to require another 10 year apprenticeship.
In the ‘olden days’, HR departments were responsible for seeing ahead and retraining staff ahead of any abrupt changes. By definition, the HR Director’s job was to spot changes on the horizon and get everyone retrained in new ways without disrupting today’s operations. There was a reason for that high salary!
You are now your own HR Director
Today’s management theorists and leadership coaches counsel another approach. They recommend that each of us scan the horizon for changes and retrain ourselves in good time.
This is quite hard to do. As noobes, we barely understand the business. We don’t have data to see ahead. Indeed it might be kept from us. And training tends to focus on skill rather than the ‘sweet spot’ where are skills are deeply valued by our customers.
The sweet spot where your skills are deeply valued by your customers
I know that there has been a lot of research on how to train people on the sweet spot.
- I recall attempts to train doctors by introducing them to patients from day one. The conclusion, I recall, was that the pre-clinical training was necessary to speed up communication between noobes and experienced doctors and the experiment was abandoned.
- Cognitive psychologists have developed computer games to test whether it is better to learn the market before we learn the underlying technology of our business. They concluded no. First, learn the technology, then try to make money.
- Military psychologists have found that youngsters trained to manage their attention on computer games performed better as fighter pilots. In the game, the recruits played the part of captains of de-mining vessels. Each ‘month’, or game cycle, they would concentrate on the overall outcome of running the ship and concentrate on learning one of the functions only ~ navigation, finance, HR, etc. The limitation known with this approach is that under pressure we often go back to the “level” that we first learned, requiring, once again, that we can see into the future and pick our “level” correctly.
It seems easy to mess up our mental models of the sweet spot and what we need to do to manage it. We can overemphasize the money end and underemphasize the skill. We can also learn to manage situations that are too small to sustain a living.
More research needed on managing our own training for 21st century jobs and careers
None of these experiments have focused though on developing a sense of the sweet spot and organizing skills and commercial acumen around a sweet spot that morphs, ebbs and flows. I know no experiment where “subjects” were explicitly trained to monitor what is happening around them, to think of their own skills (and the skills of their team) and bring those together into a rewarding balance.
I wonder what would happen if we learned to think that way from the get-go?
Organize your own thinking about vibrant, interesting & lucrative jobs and careers in the 21st century
If you want to try, to organize your thinking about the sweet spot between your skills and the needs of customers, this is what I recommend.
Pick on anything you did today that you enjoyed and draw out 3 spokes
- name the key technical skill that you used to provide your customer with value
- name the customer and describe his or her needs
- name the sweet spot and try describe it in one sentence
These three spokes correspond logically to three factors associated with successful business teams:
- The teams ask questions more often than the give answers
- They concentrate on the outside world a little more than on themselves
- The look for what is going well and are positive 5x more than they are negative
Become your own HR Director
I think it will take quite a few lots of 10 to 15 minutes jotting down notes for this way of thinking to come easily. But when it does you will be your own HR Director
- Looking ahead
- Retraining on time
- Finding the sweet spot where you feel vital, involved, entertained, valued AND rewarded!
Do let me know how it works out!
#1 my career is a journey to find my people
A good performer jumps on stage, looks out at the audience, and thinks, “Here I am!”
A great performer jumps on stage, looks out at the audience, and thinks, “There you are!”
Steve Rapson from Art of the Solo Performer
contributed by DW from Connecticut, USA
and for #2 thru #1001 visit Music Thoughts
Career decisions for young and old
I do a lot of career coaching. I talk to youngsters of all ability ranges. I talk to MBA student making career changes after a flying start in management. I talk to people who’ve been unlucky enough to lose their jobs and who looking for an echo career.
Are easy when we know what we want
What all these people have in common ~ those who are happy to get work at the minimum wage and those negotiating banker-size bonuses ~ is that they will not get what they want until they decide what they want.
And tracks are laid out for us by someone else
Many of us ~ particularly the talented, able and lucky ~ go through life on a set of rails. We go from one school to another, on tracks laid down by other people, and decision making has amounted to no more than “this” or “that”. Both are good and we chose on the basis of the frills ~ which perks were more to our taste.
When the tracks are gone, we have to lay them for selves
Then one day, shock and horror, the tracks are gone. We will have to lay them down ourselves. Suddenly, we realize that we are “institutionalized”. We haven’t being make decisions for ourselves. We are capable of rolling down pre-laid tracks without thought, but we are totally incapable of laying the tracks.
Smashing Magazine has a very comprehensive list for finding work
It’s a steep learning curve. Today Smashing Magazine has a list of “do’s” for free lancers. These “do’s” are the basis for job searches as well. Print them and rate your progress at getting them right.
The trouble is that step one is deciding what you want!
I can tell you right now which steps you will find hard ~ deciding which sector you want to work in and finding out about the companies. That’s the equivalent of laying the tracks. That is the part that you’ve never done before because you always took for granted that the tracks were there.
How to lay your own tracks
- Print out the article from Smashing Magazine
- Get a shoebox or box of similar size
- Keep your envelopes from junk mail
- Take envelopes of one color or size and every day find a website relevant to the industry that enchants you. Read and take notes.
- Take envelopes of another color or size and every day find a firm in your industry that sparks your curiosity. Read and take notes.
- Every month sort through. Keep the ten best firms and make notes on questions you want to answer about the industry.
- Also sort through and look at the people you would love to meet and learn a little about them
I can be sure that in 1-2 months of doing a little work every night, the industry will come alive. Smashing Magazine’s list will begin to be easy. Indeed, I strongly recommend that you start a blog. Get a Posterous account, which is easy to manage, and start “Expeditions into the Publishing Industry”, or whatever. In time you will be an acclaimed expert ~ and you will have got there by the first step that you took today.
Stop daydreaming about step 53 ~ take the 1st step
Indeed, if you don’t take the first step, if you keep telling me about step 7 or step 10 or step 53, then I know you are not serious. Step 1: print out Smashing Magazine’s article. Step Two get a shoebox. Step Three get a junk mail envelope and make your first notes.
And sigh with relief that you live in days of the internet!
And stop whinging! This is easy in the days of the internet. Just 10 years ago, this was almost impossible to do!
My grand-mother had a clear ‘rule’ – none of us should work for a family-business. We should all go out and work in another business or organization. My grandmother was obviously fed up with family businesses. She had been burned by them a few times. And I think she made the right call.
I think we should go further though. We should all aim to have our own business.
Is it the Talmud where we are advised to join an established business? That is good advice. We should acknowledge what works in the world and work with it.
But I think we should also aspire to autonomy. Many organizations work on a tournament system. You have to start in round one and work your way up. Should you want to move to another organization, you cannot carry credits from the previous rounds with you!
We need a way to aggregate our experience into a stronger and stronger portfolio.
Online portfolios are a good start. Planning our careers as if they are a business is another.
But as employment law is very clumsy and big organizations are more interested in subordination than developing your ongoing value, isn’t it a good idea to register yourself as a company, employ yourself, and develop alliances with others from day one?
Who is doing this? Who is making sure their youngsters go on to independent careers after an apprenticeship with some one else?
If you plan ahead, you will be interested in this list . . . and add to it
Posted on: October 3, 2009
- In: opportunity
- 1 Comment
As a relative “noobe” in the UK, I’ve been frustrated in my search for data about the economy. It is incredibly difficult to get information from the National Statistics Office that in the US and NZ can be slurped online in seconds.
There also seems to be little vision about where we are going.
Repeating complaints and doomsday scenarios doesn’t help, I know. But asking the right questions does.
Yesterday, IT writer, Philip Virgo posted a summary of his lobbying at each of the Party congresses. I’ve reorganised his post below as a set of questions – using his words when they graphically describe the issue.
Questions about the future of work in the UK
- Which are the industries of the future? [Which are they are, and how are developments in these industries consistently highlighted in the media?]
- Which industries will have “integrated career paths”?
- What would be consequences of not having industries with integrated career paths? What is the alternative?
- Will “home made” careers do? Or, will our children be condemned to a “professional backwater . . . no longer part of the mainstream route to the top – unless they emigrate and don’t come back”?
- Will our children and grandchildren be “condemned to surf the cybercrud on the fringes of the global information society – as the UK becomes the electronic equivalent of Cannery Row – a post-industrial poor relation to the economic powerhouses of Asia”?
What will attract industries of the future – particularly in IT and information-management?
- A competitive communications infra-structure and access to world-class broadband
- Regulatory simplicity, clarity and predictability
- Fiscal certainty [presumably for companies and employees]
- Removing planning controls designed for the 50’s and replacing them with controls we need for the information age.
- “Workforce skills programmes” that develop a critical mass of skilled people in the industries that interest us
Virgo describes the migration of IT businesses out of the UK – Maxwell’s newspapers, Google and Yahoo. Isle of Man, Switzerland and Singapore seem to be attractive destinations largely because they undertake to defend data privacy from interference from the US. If that is so, then a foreign policy component of future planning is also clear.
These questions seem to be a good way to start thinking about life and prospects in the UK in the future
What do you think of them?
Being a ‘noobe’ here, I’d be interested in your thoughts on the right questions to ask . . . and the likely answers.
Is the internet good for you?
Was it this week that we had the media telling us that Facebook would give us cancer? And a professor telling us that the internet makes us scatty?
Well, I won’t go where angels fear to tread, but I do know this. The world has changed in a fundamental way and it is very important THAT YOU GET IT!
The internet has changed the way we make a living and before you go off and spend 5 to 10 years getting a qualification and doing low paid jobs to get experience, have a look at the business model of the profession you are entering. Will your profession survive the intenet?
And don’t ask recruiters and HR officers either. They rarely know the answers.
Ask experienced people who are responsible for strategy in their field and don’t join up unless they can ask clearly! Invite people who have a hig profile in your future career to talk to your school, university or service club, and ask the questions you need to ask!
Managing risk
At the heart of any profession or occupation is the management of risk – yep that thing that bankers didn’t seem to understand.
Very simply, we cannot know everything in the world and when we have an unfamiliar decision to make, we turn to professionals for advice – doctors, lawyers, teachers, plumbers, and even, bankers. Even my lowly purchase of a loaf of bread at the supermarket is the purchase of advice. I am trusting my supermarket to sell me something wholesome and good at a reasonable price.
But how do we know who we can trust?
We have several mechanisms.
- First is a system of licenses. A body, like the British Medical Association gives a doctor a practising certificate, for example, to indicate the doctor has the training and knowledge that we expect.
- Second is a system of audits & inspections. Chartered Accountants like KPMG and Deloittes check the financial affairs of a business and tell us if it is a going concern.
- Third is the business model itself. Newspapers, for example, would verify information is correct before they printed it and it was for that verification that we would pay a shilling or a dollar for our paper, though we often felt that we were buying the content. They are motivated to get information correct so they stay in business.
The internet adds another way to manage risk
The internet has changed the game of business, and importantly the careers available to us, because it adds, among other things, an additional way to manage risk. This additional mechanism for managing risk affects how consumers get advice and who gets paid for giving advice.
- Google Search, for example, allows us to pull up information from all over the world in the blink of an eye. For many particularly simple matters, we can find information for free and save ourselves the fees of professional advice. Knowledge has become more easily available and much cheaper.
- Twitter provides recommendations with equal speed and allows customers to speak to each other. The wisdom of crowds gives us assurances that previously were only available from auditors and inspectors.
- Blogs, YouTube, Flickr make us all citizen journalists. Collecting and transmitting data is now so cheap and easy that events like a plane ditching in the Hudson are transmitted as they happen. No paper or TV service can report events so quickly.
But there is so much rubbish on the internet
Indeed there is. And it is very important to treat the information for what it is. IT IS NOT information provided with a stamp of approval from a professional body or a well established business.
This is frightening for many people. And so it will be until they think clearly about what is happening and act accordingly.
We have two tasks therefore.
- First, understand how to verify information on the internet.
- Second, to understand how the internet changes the value of various professions and how much people in those professions will earn in the future.
A lot of people write about the first task. I am interested in the second.
How does the internet change the value of various careers and the salary you can expect to earn?
Whether you are in a profession or ‘old school organization’, or if you are changing careers and thinking about your next move, these are the questions that I think you should ask.
5 questions to ask about the value of information in your profession or organization
1 Why did you want to go into this career?
When you chose this career, what value did you believe you would add to the world? Why did you undertake the qualifications instead of just opening up your business? What did the qualifications teach you that cannot be taught elsewhere and freely on the internet? How are the systems of knowledge maintained so the knowledge of your profession is deeper and more valuable that information on the internet? To what extent is the profession protected artificially and will these artificial barriers be stripped away by the internet?
2 How do you maintain integrity?
What are the promises that your profession makes to the public and are these promises genuine? For example, do you send someone to jail for breaking these promises? What areas of malpractice does the profession look out for? How do you check that your core promises are being honoured? When your customers are able to talk directly to each other, what aspects of your service can they inspect better than you can? If they are able to check themselves, of what value is your guarantee? What aspects can they not check and is the responsibility of your profession?
3 What does your online profile say?
Are you on professional groups like Facebook, Twittter, LinkedIn and Xing? If we Google your name, can we find you? What issues are Googled by your clients/customers/patients and what do they find? How do you maintain your profile? How good is your understanding of information traffic on the internet and the way Google chooses what to show people? How is your profession learning about the internet and the way it is developing? How is your profession managing the conversation about the internet among your members?
4 What is your ‘authority’ on the risk management issues which have been the basis of your profession?
What are the issues on which your profession is expert, experienced and willing to help other people, albeit for a fee? Who in the internet world defers to your opinion and how do they link to you? How does your profession monitor your online authority? How do you manage your online authority? How do you manage the way one member of your profession competes with another for internet domination? How do you ensure that your clients/customers/patients get access to well debated information and ‘honest authority’, so to speak?
5 How do you help your customers/clients/patients find the information they need and make intelligent choices?
What choices are your customers/clients/patients making on a daily basis? What information do they use? What do they search for? How does information find them and are they able to process it safely and to their advantage? How has the internet changed this process? And how have those changes, and ongoing changes, changed the basis of your business model? How you make a living, in other words, and how future members of your profession will make a living?
Your comments?
This is the first time I’ve written about these issues. So I’d be very interested in your views – or comments – or indeed questions.
How do you think the internet changes our work and our long-term potential to make a living?
What questions should we be asking leaders of professions and encouraging our young people to ask before they invest in an expensive training?
flowing motion 
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