May 3, 2023
Ten things that corporations can do to empower their employees and their use of AI whilst NOT reducing their workforce to increase profits.
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The Newsletter.
Invest in upskilling and reskilling: Provide opportunities for employees to learn new skills and develop expertise in areas related to AI, such as data analysis, programming, or robotics.
Foster a culture of innovation: Encourage employees to experiment with new technologies and processes, and provide the resources and support necessary to implement new ideas.
Promote collaboration: Encourage cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing, to bring together employees from different departments with diverse skill sets and expertise.
Ensure transparency and communication: Be transparent about the company’s AI strategy and communicate clearly with employees about how AI is being used and how it will impact their work.
Emphasize ethical considerations: Ensure that AI is being developed and used in an ethical and responsible manner, and prioritize the well-being of employees and society as a whole.
Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash
Implement AI for augmentation rather than automation: Use AI to enhance human decision-making and productivity, rather than replacing human workers with automated systems.
Prioritize employee well-being: Consider the impact of AI on employee well-being, and take steps to mitigate potential negative effects, such as stress or burnout.
Encourage employee feedback: Solicit feedback from employees on how AI is being used and how it could be improved, to ensure that employees feel empowered and engaged in the process.
Reward creativity and innovation: Recognize and reward employees who come up with innovative ways to use AI to improve the company’s operations or products.
Invest in long-term goals: Focus on the long-term benefits of AI, rather than short-term cost savings, and invest in initiatives that will create sustainable growth and benefit both the company and its employees over the long term.
chatGPT
Work
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April 23, 2023
People: The Driver
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I spotted this car parked near a Farmers Market - I walked on, wondering about the owner and what their story was.
The Driver.jpeg
Returning a few hours later, I saw a couple of cars stopped at a junction. They weren’t moving and as I got closer saw an elderly man using his feet to propel him and his wheelchair backwards across this small, pot hole riven junction … up a small incline.
I walked over and asked him if he needed any help.
“No thanks. I’m fine.
Are you sure?
“No really. I’m ok … Thankyou.
Pushing harder with his feet for the final assault on the slope.
I waved to him … ok then … and kept going. He shouted out.
“Thankyou. Thankyou very much. I’m ok … really.”
I turned around to wav to see him by his car, wrestling with the door to get in, carefully watched by his lady friend, sitting patiently to one side of the road in her wheelchair.
I still don’t know the story of the car, nor it’s owner - but clearly, despite what the car might say to a passer by … he was a proud, well mannered, graceful man. I really wish I knew his story.
Travels Without Charley
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February 18, 2023
Wherever you go in the world, New Zealand, Scotland, Austin Texas, Raleigh North Carolina, Hyderabad, Shenzhen …. pretty much anywhere, you will find there are tech centers. Tech centers that often adopt ’Silicon’ or ‘Valley’ or variations on such in their names, but there are many more. The local government will often declare they are investing and building a tech center of excellence to ‘rival’ Silicon Valley. Except they aren’t. Let me explain.
cross-post
Technology
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February 18, 2023
It has occurred to me that while I have been posting to this blog at the rate of knots, this blog has been not feeling the love. I have some thoughts on how to fix that. I am going to try the first idea for a while and see what happens. Stand by!
People First
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November 9, 2022
My Speciality ? Generality !
MySpeciality
A slightly edited version of a post originally published on February 14th 2016 @ Beyond Bridges, now archived here
A friend and reader of this blog just sent me this link, which is a third party version of the LinkedIN map below. It seems to be limited due to LinkedIN’s API constraints, so it can’t map more than 499 of your connections. That said, there does seem to be a lot more information and analysis that surrounds the graph. Andy it means YOU can go try it out on your network. Thank you David.
A good friend of mine messaged me through LinkedIN. He is a fast thinking, witty, bright, intelligent, big thinking kind of guy. He’s also interested in his next gig - so let me know if you want an introduction. Anyway, to my point. He had been on my LinkedIN profile and commented;
I think you would be well served to pare that list (of skills I had listed in my summary) to maybe 4-5 distinct and specialized areas where you really shine better than the rest. Things like Leadership, Marketing, Communications are too generic and readily available in the marketplace.
And I agreed. In fact, so much so that I pared it down to zero. My skill list is summarized in another part of the profile anyway. But it got me to thinking.
I am a big fan of Mike Pesca over at Slate who delivers a daily podcast called The Gist. Try it. You won’t regret it. A couple of weeks ago he had Eric Weiner on as a guest, and they spent some time talking about where genius comes from. Turns out that Eric has just written a new book about ‘how genius happens’. One of my takeaways was that genius emerges from generalism - not speciality. For example, he talked about the fact that Einstein was not the most knowledgeable physicist of his time, but his value was that he was broad in both interest and knowledge. A ‘Renaissance man’ if you will.
This an absolute opposite to what we live with today. We eschew the ’polymath’ in favor of the ‘monomath’. From the site Gain Weight Journal;
Unfortunately, we live in an era of monomaths now. This means specialists. The problem with that is that people get stuck with one way of thinking, they have blinders on, and cannot see the big picture, including the relationships and similarities between different things.
I know, even our education system is driven to a singular focus and it seems to be getting worse. For myself, I focussed on Maths and Physics in my education from the age of 15. Maybe I was bored. Maybe I could see the future, but despite that formal focus, I did put an effort into ensuring that I didn’t get locked up in that world and miss out on everything else that there was to offer. (Though I probably shouldn’t have read all three volumes of Lord of the Rings over a two week period shortly before some year end exams!). Back to the plot. Reading that quote reminded me of what we used to say back in my Group Partner days … “The Last Thing You Ever Need Near A Problem Is An Expert” Good. Because I am not. LinkedIN ‘Labs’ used to run something that visually mapped your connections so you could see clusters of people in your network. They closed it a
while back, but at the time I wrote about it, dubbing it ‘Cloud Hopping’. I also observed that most people had a very tight network of very few ‘clouds’. This was mine.
A highly distributed interconnected network, emerging from European and American networks in finance, technology, application and social disciplines. I think Derek was spot on. My strength is not my speciality. My strength is my generality. And, while I would absolutely not describe myself as a genius, I am definitely a cloud hopper. A connector. And there are not many of us around, or at least we tend to keep quiet, because we live in an age where value is placed on ‘what you know’. The ‘who you know’ is almost written off as ‘the old boys club’ . But once you understand the value of the role that Gladwell calls out in The Tipping Point - the pieces fall into place.
My Speciality? Generality!
I first published this post on Beyond Bridges on February 10th, 2016. That site has gone, the words archived,
linkedin
mike peska
Work
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November 4, 2022
Return On Effort
“This time he was here to help us understand some truths about how we really run the business, make decisions, and value what’s worth doing. When I say value, I don’t mean a list of generalized”values”, or the bullshit phrase of “adding value”, but how we attribute value when evaluating our options and making tradeoffs.”
💬 Jason Fried
Read The Whole Post
return on effort
Value
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November 4, 2022
Coordination Costs
The Stripe co-founders were candid about their failure to predict where the economy was heading. They also said they overspent on things like “coordination costs.” That’s not a term I’ve heard before, but I suspect it is a reflection of getting too big and too inefficient.
💬 Jessica Lessin
It’s a new term to me aswell - BUT recently on LInkedIN there was a meme running around - which used this graphic.
Coordination Costs
It’s pretty self explanatory. The formula is that for every person you add to an organisation, the number of potential conversations increases - a lot. If ‘n’ is the number of people in an organisation, the number of potential conversations is n-1 + n-2 + n-3 …. in other words …
3 people … 2 + 1 = 3 4 people … 3+2+1 = 6 5 people … 4+3+2+1 = 10 6 people … 5+4+3+2+1 = 15
And adding 1 person to a 10,000 person organisation adds 10,000 possible new lines of communication.
communication
coordination
Work
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October 17, 2022
We Are Becoming A Power Skills Economy
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Josh Bershin writes that we are becoming a power skills economy.
In other words, automation did not eliminate work at all – it created new jobs, better jobs, and an acceleration of our workforce into what we now call the “service economy.” We are essentially shifting to the right in this model.
💬 Josh Bershin
BTW, in case you are wondering, ‘Power Skills’ is the ‘new’ name for ‘Soft Skills’. To be fair, it did need a new name. It’s also fair to say that whilst he’s not wrong, he fails to mention that in the last 15 years (where he references 2007) no mention that the average income of people is flat and that real income is declining.
But that’s a different opportunity.
Oh - and maybe not so ‘new’ Josh was talking about this back in 2019 - and gave us a few clues as to what he was talking about, this is one of his graphics.
What Are Power Skills
Here’s My Take
Becoming? I think it is really more like that we are starting to recognize these skills. They have always been there - and though not necessarily recognised or even understood - I bet if you find successful people in that ‘old’ economy - they would demonstrate a lot of these traits.
Josh is not alone in highlighting these skills and their importance. What nobody is doing is organizing these skills into a taxonomy - much less an ontology. (What’s the difference you may ask) Stan Garfield has a very simple explanation)
Taxonomy
Ontology
… except now there is.
More of this to come, but have to say, very excited by a company I have been talking to that has not only done a lot of research into these skills, but also which skills are most important - and why, depending on what you are trying to do.
Not only that, but they are releasing an app that will allow anybody to
- assess their personal strengths and weaknesses across all skills
- define which of those skills they should focus on to maximise their ability to be most succesful at what they are trying to do
- all through a self paced, self directed, learning program.
As I said - more to come. Just to say - the cavalry is on its way.
Featured Image by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
(🩻 Sometimes posts get messed up as I archive them here and then later I spot that and clean it up. This is one such post.)
josh bershin
Learning
power skills
soft skills
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