Why and where emerging markets catch up with the developed world

Another interesting infographic from The Economist, showing how and in which areas emerging markets are slowly catching up with the developed world. The last point is even more interesting: apparently what we now call the 'emerging world' accounted for the majority of the world's GDP just before the industrial revolution began...

The role of education in resolving global challenges

There's an interesting series of lectures on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website. The 'Ideas Lab' discusses new ideas about social entrepreneurship, education, science, etc.(a bit like TED conferences).

I picked out this one from David Ellwood, speaking about how "To meet the challenges of the "new reality", the educational system must help prepare a new breed of exceptional public leaders."

Surely education in general plays an important role to prepare our society for future challenges. However, David's remarks about public leaders' development can -and should- also be applied to leaders in private companies. The interesting bit is that they shouldn't necessarily do so solely to 'be good' (whatever the reason behind that might be) but for their own self interest as well -as away to differentiate themselves from an increasingly competitive world.

The crucial role of education lies in creating these mean to differentiate oneself. China and India are soon to deliver more well educated professionals than the Western world altogether. But this education is based on knowledge and 'hard skills'. So, differentiation will come from innovation, future-orientation and collaboration. It's these skills that we need to focus on in education now, 'knowledge' becomes less relevant.

A thought I will explore more thoroughly next few weeks...

Public policy - David T Ellwood

View more webinars from World Economic Forum

The future of organizations: the 3 major shifts

Continuing my research on the future of organizations, I found this short but interesting video interview with Peter Hinssen (author of 'The New Normal').

The biggest shifts in future organizations, according to him:

• Blurring of boundaries between the company and the external world
  (my notes:) Surely many of us will experience this already... the streamlining of the complete value chain has caused a kind of inclusion of suppliers and clients, working with the same software and accessing each others' databases; but also new processes like open innovation and crowdsourcing will increasingly enhance this trend. In an extreme form the boundary between an organization and its competitors is likely to evaporate as well (I'm looking for some proof-points for that, however);
  
• Internal entrepreneurs instead of intrapreneurs
  (my notes:) This distinction is somewhat difficult to grasp... is it about giving more employees entire decision freedom (as in a decentralized model discussed in previous blog)? It could as well mean finding ways to benefit from ideas or creative minds from outside the company, bringing us back at open innovation... What's for sure is that true innovation will not (or less) come from internal employees anymore;
   
• GenY: new flexibility between employer and employee
  (my notes:) The question on whether GenY will be jobhoppers has been debated furiously over the past years. Confronted with the consequences of the recent global crisis, GenY would now understand the value of fixed employment and some degree of certainty, some argue. Whatever, what's for sure is that GenY talents will likely want some type of flexibility and a more 'project'-based job content. This poses some challenge to organizations who are dependent on these key talents.

(bytheway, this interview with Peter is about chapter 6 of his book. You can find interviews about other parts of his book on youtube)

The future of work and organizations, the dark and the bright sides

A couple of questions have been intriguing me for a while now: how will professional organizations look like in the future? Will they become virtual (as I explored in previous blogs #1 and #2)? How will this impact the nature of work itself? Will the changes of the organizations be driven by a change in attitude and expectations of the workforce, or will it be the other way round?

In search of an answer I’ve been going through two books on the subject: The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life
by Thomas W. Malone and The Shift: The Future of Work Is Already Here
by Lynda Gratton.

Malone’s study on the organizational trends is based around a core principle: as the cost of communication decreases organizational models tend to get decentralized. Ultimately, at the current cost of communication, companies start to benefit from being both big AND decentralized.

This decentralization can take different forms (or, sometimes, stages): from loose hierarchies (think Linux and Wikipedia) through democracy (where employees decide) and, ultimately, organizations based on market dynamics. The last one is definitely the most disruptive I know of, and Malone goes into great length into examples (HP, BP, Intel, …) and insights in how this might work –or not. Taken to the extreme, we might envisage a multinational with only a single person employed, all the rest being ‘e-lanced’ (his term didn’t take off… but you could easily call it crowdsourcing these days).

Of course Malone realizes that decentralized organizations do entail specific challenges (to which he often founds solutions) and that these models are not necessarily applicable to every company. The table beneath clearly shows the advantages and disadvantages of different models:

Well worth the read.

The second book ‘The shift’ I bought based on the promises from the cover –always tricky. I was expecting some insights about the evolution of work from a personal (psychological) point of view. I certainly got what I wanted from the first part of the book, where Lynda lays out potential scenarios of future working life, thoroughly analyzing their causes and their consequences.

On the dark side, Lynda paints futures in which workers would increasingly lead fragmented lives (pretty recognizable even now), live in ultimate isolation in a society that will increasingly exclude large portions of its members. Sounds stretched? Not really if you extrapolate very visible current trends (which is basically what Lynda is doing).

In the second –bright- set of scenarios Lynda pictures working life driven by self-reflection and social awareness, where workers will lead professional lives that make sense to them, through different tools that are becoming available (digital markets, crowdsourcing, etc.).

These scenarios are not an OR-OR story. Most probably, all these scenarios will unfold simultaneously. This makes these vivid accounts, taken together, as a smart and rather complete view of how working life would be like for ‘humanity’ as a whole.

In the second half of the book Lynda describes how her ‘five global forces’ (call them megatrends) lead to three shifts in working capital (intellectual, social and emotional). It’s got the merit –and the flaws- of simplicity, but is clearly aiming at young graduates choosing a direction for their career, or for experienced workers who feel trapped in their current job and working environment. I’m neither one of these, but I must recognize the advice the book contains is certainly valuable to either of these two groups.




Check out my previous book reviews:

• "Making globalization work" Joseph Stiglitz
• "2030 -Technologies that will change the world" Van Santen, Khoe, Vermeer
• "What Technology wants" David Kelly
• "Crowdsourcing" Jeff Howe
• "The next big thing" William Higham
• "Future Files" Richard Watson
• "Future savvy" Adam Gordon
• "Futurewise" Patrick Dixon
• "Ecological intelligence" Daniel Goleman

The impact of megatrends on Western governments

Megatrends clearly have an impact on businesses, the environment they operate in, but also the very nature of their operations. But what about governments and public services? Are they prone to these long-term shifts? Should they pro-actively adapt to these changes or can they afford to sit back and watch things coming?

The presentation beneath is a first attempt at mapping the key opportunities and challenges governments face in the light of a selection of megatrends I cover. It's meant as a conversation starter for public institutions -and is by no mean a complete assessment of all the megatrends affecting public services. Consider this an introduction...

The impact of megatrends on western governments

View more presentations from Frederic De Meyer.

The impact of technological trends on society, and how companies should adapt

Came across this somewhat old but certainly not outdated speech of technology visionary Peter Hinssen. A brilliant account on where technology advancements are impacting society and how companies should adapt to this changing paradigm. The fundamental change is indeed that we have more and better technology in the home than at work. This is an obvious statement, but its repercussions are very often overseen...

(btw: these are the highlights of a speech given to Dexia personnel -Dexia is a Belgian-French bank, hence the focus on the financial markets ate the end)

Some concrete ideas to ensure sustainable urbanization

Quite a convincing speech by Alex Steffen at TED. His starting point is that urbanization doesn't necessarily have to go hand in hand with energy waste. In fact, the denser a place (in terms of # people per square km), the less emission is would entail. Quite logical come to think of it: the more you find things you need in your immediate environment, the less you have to travel to obtain it.

Strangely enough this would lead to the conclusion that it would help if even existing cities get more people living in it... Sounds weird at first, but Alex provides some nice evidence of how this could be done in a sustainable way (whether it's more socially livable is another question though, not addressed by him):

New migration patterns in the future: brain drain from the West or from the East?

It’s a question that has been intriguing me ever since I started investigating megatrends: how will migration patterns evolve in the next 20 years?

It is quite difficult to have an exact picture of this, since these patterns are influenced by a couple of NEW forces that will be increasingly impactful over the next years:

1. Climatologic migration is likely to increase if global warming continues to cause an increasing number of regions suffer from draught or other consequences of climatologic changes. Water shortage will likely be a major factor, and when looking at the projections of the regions that will suffer from it by 2025, one can conclude that the movements will not only happen from de centre to the outskirts, but also within the Western world (to the East coast in the US, to Scandinavian countries in Europe):
   
   
   
   
2. Economic migration has been known for a long time now, but it is likely to take different forms in the future:

• demand-driven immigration of talents from emerging countries to the West: Western countries will increasingly encourage immigration of specific competencies and skills to fill the gaps caused by the ageing population. As Daniel Altman points out in the interview beneath, this might be a bad thing for the countries of origin of the immigrants, who will have to deal with a brain drain. But as the case of India shows, this is not necessarily so on the long run, more and more Indians are now returning to their home countries packed with skills and knowledge that they could not have obtained in their home countries.
  
  

• a less well documented cause of migration patterns might be the Western generation Y: is it not likely that their spirit of openness and boundary-less will ultimately drag them to ‘where the action is’ (hence, where the economic growth is highest)? As a first sign of this: universities in emerging countries are gaining much popularity worldwide, as they move up in the lists of most qualitative education offerings:
  
  (universities of emerging countries as they appear on quality lists of different sources -with their ranking in order of appearance: )
  
  
  
  
  (universities of emerging countries in the list of most popular universities globally, with their rankings in order of appearance: )

There’s obviously more forces determining migration patterns, but these three are quite new, will be increasingly impactful in the next 10 years, and their full impact is still relatively uncertain. So, to me, these three are the most crucial ones to follow up closely.

Gamification as a tool to maximize the success of crowdsourcing projects...

I’ve been spending some time researching the ‘gamification of business’ trend.  Except for the case of Marriott's (see previous blog) I found it rather hard to find some convincing examples that this is going to be a crucial thing for businesses. The 10 examples provided by Forbes are not all about using a ‘game context’ for business practices, which is perhaps an evidence for the difficulty of finding enough good examples.

The excellent platform gamification.co offers some good insights into the trend, amongst others this interesting video from a panel debate at the first gamification congress earlier this year.  (if the video beneath doesn't show try to go to the ForaTV posting directly):

Apart for some examples and do's and dont's, the video touches one aspect of gamification which I think might be of immediate benefit to businesses: it’s use in crowdsourcing projects. No doubt putting crowdsourcing projects into a game format would attract many more contributors to the table, and if they have fun with it they’re more likely to contribute for free… I’m not saying it would help for all type of crowdsourcing, but at least for the creative projects.

Looking at the benefits of gamification as listed by research company Gartner, I can only conclude that these would highly benefit crowdsourcing projects as well:

1. Accelerated feedback cycles. In the real world, feedback loops are slow (e.g., annual performance appraisals) with long periods between milestones. Gamification increases the velocity of feedback loops to maintain engagement.
2. Clear goals and rules of play. In the real world, where goals are fuzzy and rules selectively applied, gamification provides clear goals and well-defined rules of play to ensure players feel empowered to achieve goals.
3. A compelling narrative. While real-world activities are rarely compelling, gamification builds a narrative that engages players to participate and achieve the goals of the activity.
4. Tasks that are challenging but achievable. While there is no shortage of challenges in the real world, they tend to be large and long-term. Gamification provides many short-term, achievable goals to maintain engagement.