The future of work: What happens when talent trumps capital?
crashdev.blogspot.com
crashdev.blogspot.com
Sorry, this is encouraging for us here, but I think it's silly. Clayton Christensen studied why strong incumbents fail. He found again and again that incumbents were the best at adopting new technology, even radical architectural changes, provided that the technology gave an improvement that was valued by their customers.
They failed when the new technology wasn't valuable to their customers. Even when they developed the technology in-house, to a level of excellence, it didn't help them - if their customers didn't want it. The reason it eventually caused them to fail was that other people did want it, and firms grew up to service them. Eventually, the new technology improved enough so that the incumbents' customers also wanted it - but they bought from the new guys, who had by now become the "incumbents" for that technology, and had all aspects of the business worked out (engineering, product design, brand, advertising, channels, distribution, support etc).
It will be the same here: if incumbents can harness new technology to serve their customers, they will do so. If they are fighting for their lives, will put their massive resources into play to secure the necessary technical talent.
And the danger that is hard for them to fight: other firms serving different customers, with technology that one day will be good enough for their customers (but not yet).
e.g. target people who cannot afford the incumbents' product, with a product that's not good enough for the incumbents' customers.
e.g. target people who can't use the incumbents' product in a specific situation, with a product that is not as good as the incumbents' product in the usual situation.
e.g. target people who lack the time, skills or expertise to use the incumbents' product (i.e. not worth the hassle), with a product that is not as good as the incumbents' product for their customers (who do have the time, skill, expertise).
This is the mechanism - avoid threatening incumbents, and you have a chance. Threaten them, and they will kick your ass (you will "provoke a competitive response"). It's not as simple as lacking technical expertise.
I do not believe this is true. There are many very good technical people who don't mind running businesses, but my experience is that the best technical people? they don't want the headache.
The best technical people I know lack the business/social skills to negotiate what I think their maximum salary as an employee would be, much less the ability to run a business.
We can't all be polymaths.
But again, I said 'most companies'. Some of them have a very clear view of the situation and make sure that talent is happy and unwilling to move to another company, let alone start their own. And I think there are more of those companies all the time.
And to be fair to the rest, they probably can't afford it.
My experience has been that the people who really focus on maximizing the money are folks like me; I mean, I'm no idiot, but I'm certainly nowhere near the best of the best technically. And even me, I'll choose freedom over maximizing my short-run income.
It's an old myth used by people without technical expertise to put down technical people. The put down is quite general with a cute twist: The technical expert is painted as good ONLY at the technical topics and is poor at EVERYTHING else including even ordering lunch. It's just a put down to win in competition within the organization. The usual way to avoid such a put down is to 'fit in', 'go along', and 'don't stand out'.
BELIEVE me, becoming a technical expert does not somehow ruin a brain for other work.
It is true that some technical experts don't bother with 'social', etc., but the issue is desire and not ability.
But you know what? I'd be a better technical person today if I took the effort I put into business and social skills and instead put that effort into becoming a better technical person. And I'm never going to be as good of a social person as someone with similar innate ability who started seriously practicing at an earlier age.
If you can win in competition within your organization through putting down other people, your organization has bigger problems. I suggest finding a new job, or, as the article says, starting your own company.
You say this as if it were rare or unexpected! If so, then you are missing the weight of what you said! Once a company, or nearly any organization, gets big and old, it's nearly standard that the organization becomes arrogant, inwardly directed, and process oriented, has big cases of middle management goal subordination, and has each person fighting with others down the hall instead of the competition outside the building. Or, people go to work, work their tails off, stay busy, busy, busy, put in long hours, come home dead tired and frustrated, and the organization accomplishes next to nothing because all the effort is lost in internal mud wrestling.
The solution mostly is not to 'find a new job' because nearly all organizations of any size are like this.
Yes, the solution is to start your own company.
This pair of observations is solid now because, really, big organizations in the US -- GE, AT&T, GM, and more -- are dying out due to new technology, small competitors, foreign competition, etc. The US is regressing to the mean of many old world economies of a lot of small companies with little role for big ones.
Once you reach some maturity and begin to understand people, being good 'socially' gets to be simple enough. F'get about the struggles in middle school, high school, and college! So: (1) Have money! If you don't, then JOB ONE is to make some! (2) Stand up straight and be confident! (3) Mostly expect only respect, not loyality or affection. (4) Work to understand the emotions, fears, frustrations, and aspirations of others and, then, don't rub them the wrong way.
For adult women, first on their list is your money: They want to know that you have money enough to support a family and, further, have the competence to make more such money.
For girls in high school, they want to see you as confident and, then, gentle with them, and then perceptive about their emotions. They want affection, often sex, praise, acceptance, approval, and validation of their worth as girls. By late high school and in college the young women move your money to the head of their list of what they want.
That's about it.
I mean, yeah, okay, that's harsh. but yeah, I also thought that women mostly cared about money... until I gained some experience in the matter. I also thought that people worked hard at large corporations as a matter of course; again, I was disabused of the notion after gaining some experience.
Really, at large corporations? the way to get by is to be good enough that nobody wants to be mean to you (because you might leave and then nobody would be able to do your work) and to not work too hard.
That's how people who are really good at large corporations are compensated. They don't fuck with you and they don't expect a whole lot of work.
who works hard at a large corporation? that's like joining a startup for the job security.
But, you know what? small companies also have drama. At small corporations, if anything, it's harder to avoid the drama. Today is going to be dedicated, mostly, to dealing with drama within my company, oh, and drama it is. Yeah, there's less paperwork when a small company wants to fire someone, but it can still be a really big deal; the work still needs to get done, so I can't solve the drama that way.
"Unemployed"? I'm an entrepreneur, not an 'employee'. I've been an employee of several large organizations, all very well known. At one, it was a startup but now is very well known.
Big organizations mostly don't need to get the work done and, thus, usually don't. They mostly don't need to get the work done because the organization has so much momentum that it can get by for years mostly not getting much work done. Getting the work done is not valued. Actually, about the work, next to nothing is valued. Indeed, anyone who tries to do very much becomes a threat to the rest.
People make progress via 'goal subordination', e.g.. forming coalitions that agree to occupy the high end of the ship as the other end sinks.
Large business organizations in the US are dinosaurs on the way to extinction.
The only reasonably promising path to financial security in the US is money in the bank from profits from being an entrepreneur. In particular, it is better to have an electrician's license and be an electrician sole proprietor entrepreneur than to have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and try to work for a large organization.
The big, huge opportunity is exploiting Moore's law, the Internet, cheap storage, the ocean of good infrastructure software, and more as a base to deliver valuable, new information to all the world.
On women, you can believe me now or encounter disasters and believe me later.
Broadly, in the more industrialized countries, the data is overwhelming: Women are grand disasters on the way to extinction. Literally. No doubt. Exactly. Period. E.g., at Wikipedia, read that currently, on average, each women in Finland is having just 1.5 children. Finland did well beating Sweden, the Soviets, and Germany but is losing out to their women. At 1.5 children per woman, Finland is rapidly on the way to extinction.
F'get about Finland: The number of children per woman in all the more industrialized countries is too low to keep up the population.
Net, the women are distracted from concentrating on having children and, thus, are on the way to extinction.
In the past, the women had plenty of children whether they really wanted to or not. Now they have some choices so don't have enough children not to be weak, sick, or dead limbs on the tree.
Beyond just children, on average the women are grand disasters at forming stable family units. The situation is very much as in the movie 'The Godfather, Part II' where Michael asks his mother if it is possible to lose one's family. His mother says, "You can never lose your family". Well, Michael's father Vito didn't have to worry about that, but Michael did have to worry about it and did lose his family. Michael said, "Times have changed". He was correct about one of the biggest issues in all of the more advanced countries.
So, Vito's wife had a walk-up, cold water flat, likely far too cold, in NYC, and near rags for clothes, and next to nothing else, had three sons and a daughter, and continued to play a solid role in the family for life. Michael's wife had the best luxuries in all of history, two children, aborted a third, and just HATED her husband and marriage and ran away from her marriage. BUMMER. And that has been the story USUALLY not just in that movie but all across the US and all the more developed countries for several decades now.
So, the women are going extinct. If anything is left, necessarily it will be women who are GOOD at being strong limbs on the tree, almost surely GOOD at being wives and mothers. Thus, in the more developed countries, humans are now in by far the fastest and largest change in the human gene pool of at least the last 40,000 years when, say, the genes of Western Europe split from those of Asia and the Americas.
So, it's both large business organizations and women that are going extinct in the US.
So, a man who wants financial security needs to be a successful entrepreneur. Then if he wants a strong family, he needs to make some very special efforts to 'guide' the situation, at least day by day, often hour by hour.
Right: Being an employee in a large organization sucks. And being a husband of the usual woman sucks.
'Feminism' is mostly just the ideology for an excuse for being a weak, sick, or dead limb on the tree. It's not new but goes way back, through women's movements for many decades and to Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew'. Now that ideology is on the way to being extinct.
So, young men: Avoid what is going extinct. Avoid being an employee in a large organization and be an entrepreneur instead. When forming a family, avoid any hint of 'feminism' and be very much in control, often hour by hour.
Got it.
Exactly. From Alan Kay, Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike, Guido Van Rossum to Linus Torwalds the best technical people could care less about "starting their own company".
They can be solvable by a small team who raise capital, innovate, build a team, win some smaller customers, grow their sales... but by that point they are approaching 100 people and have been around 5 years.
That sort of success is around. I used to work for a company, started in 1996, which was acquired around its 10th birthday. That's exactly what they did - now part of a 20,000ish person company, they are now considered the incumbent (and all of their peers from the late 90's have also been aquired!).
The real problem big corporation face is that they don't even think there is a problem. If they can't see the holes in such things as, let's say, SAP, how can you even think to apply a better solution? And even when you manage to convince them to see IT as a strategic part of the business, even there, you don't neew top talents. The situation in corporations is so bad that almost any decent programmer whose brain has not been killed by corporate software 'values' can bring something to the table.
All this talk about how large companies are so horribly incompetent, etc. is hogwash. I think it's just incredibly hard for a large organisation to solve their inherent problems. From what I can tell the leaders generally figure out exactly what the problem is but are somehow incapable of solving it. And it's not a matter of salaries or benefits alone.
When your argument relies on developers' not being able to do math, it's not very convincing.
Large organizations are, for the most part, slow to change, and they tend to treat all "talent" in a similar way. They've been able to get away with this for technical talent for some time because the grass wasn't greener on the other side. Now, and for the foreseeable future, it will be.
Many large organizations (in my limited experience having worked for two non-tech focused Fortune 100s) value years experience over real experience and talent, have a stratified (and slow) system for promotions, are wary of young people making critical decisions, are not meritocracies, and are not really champions of the methodologies/technologies that most of the startup world has adopted for years. Each of these things are working against them in a major way.
In short, it's about more than the paycheck, and in the current environment that's especially true. Large corporations have to be willing to adapt and make the changes necessary to adapt to this fact, but their slow moving and old school cultures won't allow it. It's going to require a change from the ground up, and only the most progressive organizations will embrace this fact. But, then again, if they're progressive, then they're probably one of the few that don't need to worry about this issue.
It's an OLD story with a very well known outcome -- the change struggles, dies, and doesn't happen and people give up.
And the reasons are very well known:
(1) Downside Only.
Broadly in companies, people in middle management are evaluated very strictly on very specific criteria. Basically for a job description, a superior writes it and the subordinate is to DO IT.
The norms for nearly all the company and especially for middle line management, are rock solid that the job descriptions never require doing something, as in the article, creative to save the company.
So, no middle manager ever gets a negative mark for failing to do something creative, that likely no one in the company understands, to save the company. Doesn't happen.
A middle manager who sponsors a project that fails gets a really BIG black mark that can end his career. So, for sponsoring a creative project, there is a big downside.
Suppose the manager sponsors a creative project and it is successful, say, quite successful, even saves the company? What is the upside? Since usually the middle manager doesn't have an equity position in the company, there is little upside.
And if the project is seen as successful internally, then everyone else in management will feel threatened and will undercut, sabotage, gang up on, and otherwise destroy the career of the 'successful' manager.
Net, for a middle manager to sponsor a creative project has essentially only downside.
(2) Managing Creative Projects.
To do something 'creative', from the aspect of practical management within a large company, there are really only two approaches:
(A) The CEO sponsors such projects. However typically in a large company, the CEO is too busy to sponsor a project.
(B) The CEO sets up a 'creative division'. Such a division typically gets resentment and no cooperation from the rest of the company and, finally, gives up on helping the company and spends its time in make-work, junk-think, busy-work, nonsense projects. When the next CEO comes in, the group is axed.
(3) The Extant Business Model.
A large business has a successful 'business model'. Mostly what the company does is JUST execute that business model, that is, stay with their 'bird in the hand' and not go looking for more birds in the bush. Or finding good birds is difficult; they already have one good bird; so, they would rather nurture that bird than go on the difficult search for more good birds. To execute the business model does not require, in any very direct or accepted sense, doing something new and creative. So, net, creative projects are not welcome.
(4) Professionalism.
There is a role for creativity in the economy, but one important condition is a lot of highly respected professionalism of the creative workers. Such professionalism typically has some high formal education requirements, a strong professional society, professional peer-review, professional liability, and government licensing. Examples include law, medicine, and some fields of engineering. So far, 'creative software' does not qualify.
Without the professional respect, a creative worker is trying to paddle a small canoe up a tall waterfall.
Note: For law in companies, how do lawyers not get eviscerated by the rest of the middle management? One way is, there is a rule in the legal profession that any working lawyer must be supervised only by a lawyer. So, really, in companies, lawyers are insulted from the usual middle manager organizational struggles.
(5) How to Be Creative.
If someone has a great idea for something creative that will be valuable, then they should start a business. They should be the CEO of that business, the main source of creative ideas for that business, and the main sponsor of additional creative work for that business. The creative direction of the CEO becomes the 'business model' for that business.
Then the valuable results are provided to other businesses as products or services. If the 'creative' work can make money this way, then fine. Otherwise, net, f'get about it. Sorry 'bout that.
To some extent, the large companies change. So, something that starts off being creative and becomes quite successful can be taken up by the 'field' of the business as standard, accepted practice. A good example was using linear programming to manage an oil refinery. How? Each day at the refinery, you have supplies of crude oil available with an analysis of each supply. You also have the selling prices of the various possible products -- naphtha, gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene, motor oil, heating oil, etc. So, your mission, and you have to accept it, is to say how much of each crude supply to process and how much of each of the possible products to produce to make the greatest profit.
When this bit of 'optimization' first became possible, the gains were large enough that the work was accepted as part of the standard technology of operating an oil refinery. Indeed, the Chicago branch office of IBM was selling mainframe computers, at some millions of dollars each, for just this calculation.
Actually, however, it is still the case that much of the creative work is performed by specialized companies that supply their results to the refiners and not by the refiners themselves.
An "old story"? Right: The bones in the graveyard have tombstones reading applied statistics, management science, operations research, applied research, etc.
Net, a big company that might be 'saved' by some creative work in computing mostly won't worry because there is little chance there will be any competitor who will make any significant business progress from any such creative work. So, why bother? Usually the answer is, don't bother.
There is an example of how to make such creative projects work: Find a nice area and set up a research group. Fund the research group directly by the company and as approved directly by the CEO. Have the research group visit the operating groups and select problems to work on. The research group selects their own problems. The research group works on the problems on their own funding. Typically a project goes from two months to two years before it ends. When the research group believes that they have something valuable for an operating group, that group is contacted. The operating group decides whether to implement the project. If the project is implement, then the financial results are carefully tracked. For the first three years of implementation, half the financial gains are credited to the operating group and half to the research group. After the first three years, all the gains are credited to the operating group. With such accounting, typically only about one research project in 10 is successful in making money for the company, but the research group can return about $3 to the company for each $1 in the funding of the research group. When the research group goes for funding, the CEO always offers more money than the group wants, and the group always declines the extra money! That's one way to execute 'creativity' successfully in a company. It can help if all the general managers of the operating groups have Ph.D. degrees, say, in chemical engineering, and if the company is owned by the CEO.