Can we handle the inverted pyramid in the future

A discussion I often have with my circle – that is fathers of toddlers - is how kids are picking up digital technology faster than ever. It's mind boggling to see a 4 year old able to tap on the Youtube app on an iPad and start his favorite cartoon or start playing games! And in contrast, the prior generation - specially over 55 - struggles to come to terms with the newer digital technologies.

I was impressed when I got this TED talk by 12 year old Thomas Suarez forwarded to me. For those who do not know, he shot into fame when at the age of nine (yes nine!) he taught himself Python, Java, C and created a mobile app called Earth Fortune. He subsequently created a few more apps which garnered decent hits in the AppStore. I remember how I were when I was 12. And here he is standing on a podium and talking to an audience of several hundreds without flinching!

To me, society is surely turning upside down with time. For so long, we have been used to believing that knowledge and wisdom (and the associated fame, wealth, position in society and organization and all of that) correlates with age, experience and formal education. It was highly unlikely that a fresh graduate can know and contribute much more than a seasoned 40 year old in a company – but no more.

The digital economy is playing its role as usual. The coming together of voluntary experts sharing their knowledge “free” on the internet and the ability of search engines to rank them nicely has significantly lowered the cost of gaining knowledge on anything. But everyone is not able to take the advantage - it is only the smart guys who are able to leverage the digital platforms to the fullest.

I believe that, over time, as the economy becomes more digital, the balance of knowledge will significantly tilt towards smart younger workers who will be much more connected to the digital world. With more curiosity and less fear in trying out new things – they will exploit digital platforms far better than their older counterparts who can often be conservative. It’s impossible to envision how societies and workplaces will evolve be in a decade from now. Today our mental models are hard-wired to pyramidal structures where the top is ‘assumed’ to have more knowledge and hence can direct those at the bottom of the pyramid. I have never seen an org structure which is not a pyramid. But how long?

It will be interesting to see how society adapts to this situation what I like to call as an "inverted pyramid". Would be very interested to know others’ thoughts or even if you believe this is going to happen.

In the Internet of Things when will humans volunteer to become the 'things'

The Internet of Things (IoT) and the advancements in M2M (machine to machine) never ceases to fascinate me. One of the prime use cases of M2M among many which has added a ton of value in several industries is real-time asset tracking and their management. I am confident the days of tediously transcribing data into data capture systems will finally be over by this decade. Almost all goods flowing through an organization (at least the valuable ones worth tracking) would have embedded sensors. They would provide real-time status and provide alerts for any imminent fault through use of intelligent predictive models.

The challenge worth thinking about is how industries where the main assets are ‘people’ and main outputs are knowledge artefacts will take advantage of this huge value-prop of M2M and IoT, that is, real time asset management. Needless to say, in the foreseeable future, knowledge based industries will be the only ones that will still employ humans, rest will probably be taking advantage of automation and employing only robots.

And such industries - like everyone else - would need to better manage their core assets which are people and their knowledge. Firms with huge number of people spread across 30-40 countries already have a difficult time matching emerging opportunities with available internal skills – a topic which I discussed in my last post how it can possibly lead to employing ‘fit-for-purpose’ mercenaries. 

In my opinion, the current situation is waiting to be disrupted. Here is a possibility which I think can happen over the next ten years. There will be emergence of digital platforms positioned for the knowledge industry that will help manage their human assets just like manufacturing does. The heart of it will be simple non-invasive software that will track down their employees' every move. The software will record the websites they visit, the forums they contribute, the groups they are affiliated to, the books they read, the internal business applications they access and so on and so forth along with time spent in each activity. And it will provide analytics on top of all this data to help categorize people into distinct expertise areas.

I know this is getting hairy. Specially after the recent Ed Snowden appearance in SXSW. The only difference I see is this. In this new scenario, it will be voluntary. People will sign up for being tracked. They will have the option of “switching off” tracking when they want to. Question is why would they do it? The main motivation would be to signal one's coordinates continuously in the huge knowledge map in a non-interventional real time manner. Services will emerge to crunch such data to come up with a single index for each individual like today's credit score! People would be eager to increase their "score" in the heavily crowded knowledge market to get recognized and improve their prospects.

I think people will be motivated to trade their privacy (selectively and optionally) when they see tangible benefits. All this will be a huge win for the industry as well as they can hire and manage their human resources far better than they can do today.

Will mercenary workforce be the future standard of employing human resources

One of my old friends visited me last month. We talked about numerous things. One topic that we spent a lot of time discussing was how our previous generation (our fathers that is) spent a substantial part of their work life in one company, one profession, one city and so on and why the current economic forces do not allow this ‘sameness’ any more.

I have been part of strategy discussions where we tried to prepare ourselves for the major changes anticipated in the coming decade. There is no right or wrong in such futurology discussions. The best you can do as a company or as an individual is whole-heartedly bet on certain perspectives and closely monitor whether the scenarios you laid out are playing out as expected.

One thing I strongly believe is traditional employment – that is how companies employ individuals and how individuals work for companies - will fundamentally change in the new world. Especially in the Internet economy, digital economy, knowledge economy whatever you call it.

I believe this is inevitable because of the lack of platforms in companies where skills and opportunities/projects can be matched without friction. Large companies by design have to break their end to end operations into silos to achieve efficiency. And such divisions lead to unavoidable waste. At a macro level, within the four walls of a company, skills go unused due to lack of opportunities and opportunities go unexploited due to lack of skills.

It is in this backdrop I feel certain that there will be a rise in mercenary workforces in the coming years. Mercenaries are constructs of extremely talented and deeply skilled set of individuals (maybe with their small teams) in specific areas who offer their services for a specific project in a company at a premium. They are not generalists but specialists in their chosen areas – be it programming, media strategy, data mining, big data architecture, hardware design and so on and so forth.

There are already some industries which exhibit this trend. In such industries superstars or A-listers are independent and are able to create their ‘brands’. They charge a premium for specific projects and also take a cut from the gross earnings in the backend (films and sports are prime examples). They sell their talent for competing entities thus bringing down competitive barriers. What works for these industries where superstars can pull apart from the rest is the presence of a platform (television, internet, films, etc) where their skills are watched by millions and their performance is measured and evaluated objectively.

In the coming years I feel the digital economy will provide the right set of tools and platforms for individuals to showcase their professional talent. Performance measures of individuals / teams will be publicly available for their different projects. Already a few platforms like Linkedin try to do that but there will be more such that will come up. 'Matching' platforms will grow. Companies undertaking complex initiatives will look for such teams who will be employed only for the duration of the project and then disbanded. And such teams will also work for competitor companies thus constantly levelling the playing field. Current legal hurdles will be taken down.

We are living through an era of profound advancements to humanity and a decade ahead looks too far away. One can hardly draw a reasonable picture of the world only a few years into the future, the best we can do is stay prepared and keep our peripheral vision on....