How to prepare for the jobs of the future: Learning, Love, Collaboration, Design

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A little while back I was interviewed for a cover story on the jobs of the future for the Careers section of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Here are the sections of the article that drew on my thoughts:

According to the futurist Ross Dawson, the world of work has always required employees to be on the front foot.

“Jobs have always disappeared and others come up,” he says. “It’s just that the pace of change has become far faster than ever before.”

Dawson say there are two overarching issues to consider when predicting which jobs will survive the next change to the work world: remote work and automation.

Employees with an eye to the future should ask themselves, “Is it is possible this work could be automated?” and “Is it possible that this work could be done by somebody else somewhere else in the world?”, he says.

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Keynote slides: Creating Massively Successful Networked Organizations

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I have just completed the day two opening keynote at Connected Enterprise 2012, following Brian Solis‘s day one keynote.

Here are my slides for the keynote. As always, the slides are designed to accompany my presentation, not to stand alone, so are provided for the audience at the event and any others who may find them useful nonetheless.

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The future of marketing: 7 critical applications of crowdsourcing

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On October 25 in New York City I will run a workshop on Crowdsourcing for Marketing in Enterprise & Agencies as part of the global Crowdsourcing Week workshop series. The following day I will run a workshop that is highly complementary, on Crowdsourcing for Media and Content.

Following on from the broad-based first edition of Getting Results From Crowds, one of the most important topics I have been delving into is the application of crowdsourcing to marketing. The New York workshop will go into the topic in detail, including the primary applications, extensive case studies, industry perspectives, analysis of crowdsourced marketing platforms, approaches to building your own crowds, effective strategies for creative agencies to tap the rise of crowdsourcing, and more.

Just as the field of crowdsourcing is far broader than most people appreciate (with 22 categories in our Crowdsourcing Landscape), there are many ways in which crowdsourcing can be applied to marketing.

There are 7 major applications of crowdsourcing to marketing:
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The 5 elements that enable expertise networks to flourish

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Last week I gave a keynote at an internal conference of a large technology services firm that has recently acquired another firm. The conference brought together senior executives and managers from the two organizations so they could get to know each other and plan how they would work together with existing and new clients.

A significant part of my role was to provide a highly upbeat, optimistic, engaging perspective on the future of business. However I also wanted to address the specific issues they would be encountering in combining their capabilities.

Many years ago when I was working with a large law firm to help them develop their client relationship and cross-selling capabilities, I created a simple framework, shown below.

The fundamental issue for any significant professional firm is to match the best possible capabilities in the organization with the relevant opportunities for value creation at their clients.

This begins at the interface with the client. Whoever has any interaction with the client, including the relationship leader and relationship team, has responsibility to identify and bring to the client the most relevant capabilities of the firm. However there are 5 key steps that are required for that to happen.


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Value polarization and transcending job commoditization: Expertise, Relationships, Innovation

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Yesterday I released a first version of my Future of Work framework.

I think that a detailed explanation of the outline framework would be a very useful complement to the visual landscape, and I aim to provide that over coming months in a series of blog posts, videos, and other content.


Click on the image to download the full framework.

Today, I thought I would look at the ‘Value Polarization‘ section under Economic Structure.
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Global distributed organizations can attract the most talented in the world

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Forbes has a nice story about the history of WordPress and the role the open-source software plays in the for-profit business Automattic. The article at one point says:

Automattic has an idiosyncratic workplace. As a legacy of its open-source roots its 120 employees are spread across 26 countries and six continents. Although most work alone at home, each team–usually made up of five or six people–has a generous budget to travel. “All of the money we save on office space, we blow on travel costs,” Mullenweg laughs. Groups have gathered in Hawaii, Mexico and New Zealand. Once a year everyone meets for a week at an accessible destination with a solid Internet connection. A distributed workforce means Automattic can hire talent from around the world–without having to offer the perks and pay of Google, Facebook and Apple.

This brought a response from Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg:
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Prediction: Video-conferencing will help drive increased business travel

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Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at Global Business Travel Association Australia/NZ’s annual conference, on The Future of the Global Economy: The Opportunities.

My keynote focused on the major economic, technological, and social shifts under way and how they impact business travel and how it is managed in organizations.

Clearly a particularly pointed issue in the world of business travel today is the rise of video-conferencing, which many companies in recent years have latched onto as a substitute for travel, largely for cost-saving.
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How collaboration is transforming the relationship between sell-side and buy-side financial markets

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One of the most important dynamics in almost all industries today is how value creation is increasingly shifting to be between organizations rather than within organizations.

Most notably, the nature of client-supplier relationships have dramatically shifted over the years.

This is not new. I have spent considerable time working with the institutional financial services sector, and seen major changes over the years. I recently recalled a White Paper I wrote years ago, How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services, in the wake of a Collaboration in Financial Services conference I co-organized and chaired in New York.

Here is an excerpt from the White Paper. The same issues are still playing out today.

At the highest level, there is no question that collaborative technologies will impact the structure of the financial services industry. The implications may take some time to be visible, however the shifts in power and value creation between industry participants are already evident.

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Don Tapscott: The arc of history is a positive one, towards openness

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This week’s TEDGlobal2012 event is themed Radical Innovation. The opening presentation, very fittingly, was by Don Tapscott, who spoke about Four principles for the open world. Do take the 18 minutes to see his exceptional presentation.

The four principles for openness that Don offers are:
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Sorry Grant Thornton, amorphous fears about IP loss should not trump value creation

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Sorry, Grant Thornton, I think your instinct is very likely wrong.

I saw this advertisement (also in French and Flemish) in Brussels-Midi station when I was recently passing through.

Grant Thornton claims to have an ‘instinct for growth’. For some reason it seems to have an instinct (it appears without any evidence) that expanding into new markets will lead to loss of intellectual property. So the instinct is one for inaction, and in turn no growth.
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