People First
My last 🔗 Travels Without Charley makes for a short, thoughtful read.
Thinking Allowed
This is a People First post that was originally on the People First domain. It has been moved here as part of my domain consolidation program. It’s a steady and slow WIP as I check each entry, so do please bear with me.- More about People First
- Other People First Posts
(not just from the ‘other domain’ … all of them.)
Ten things that you can do to embrace the future of AI whilst mitigating the threat of losing your liveliehood.
1. Stay informed: Keep up-to-date on the latest developments and trends in AI and automation, and how they are affecting your industry and job market.
2. Develop new skills: Continuously learn new skills to stay relevant in the job market, such as programming, data analysis, or other skills related to AI.
3. Pursue higher education: Consider obtaining a degree or certification in a field related to AI, such as computer science or data science, to prepare for the jobs of the future.
4. Explore new career opportunities: Look for opportunities to work with or alongside AI, such as in fields like robotics, automation, and machine learning.
5. Be adaptable: Embrace new ways of working and be open to adapting to changing work environments as AI and automation continue to transform the workplace.
6. Build a strong professional network: Connect with other professionals in your field and seek out mentorship and guidance to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in AI.
7. Be creative: Explore new ways of applying your skills and expertise to stay ahead of the curve and capitalize on emerging opportunities in the AI economy.
8. Consider entrepreneurship: Starting your own business or pursuing self-employment can provide greater control over your livelihood and allow you to take advantage of emerging opportunities in the AI economy.
9. Advocate for policies that support workers: Encourage policymakers to create policies that support workers and address the potential negative impacts of AI on employment, such as job retraining programs and income support for displaced workers.
10. Stay positive: Embrace the potential benefits that AI can bring, such as increased productivity and efficiency, and stay positive about the opportunities that lie ahead.
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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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.
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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.
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Promote collaboration: Encourage cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing, to bring together employees from different departments with diverse skill sets and expertise.
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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.
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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.
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Implement AI for augmentation rather than automation: Use AI to enhance human decision-making and productivity, rather than replacing human workers with automated systems.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
🌡️ It's Called Global Warming
Ever wondered why we used call it ‘Global Warming’ - and now we call it ‘Climate Change’?
Said it before - say it again - Language is important. More than important - it shapes how society thinks.
Frank Luntz understood that …
Memo exposes Bush’s new green strategy. is a 20 year old article describing how Frank Luntz first introduced the idea of ‘changing the dialogue’.
Doesn’t ‘climate change’ sound so much nicer than ‘global warming’?
Which is why 20 years later we read these kind of headlines quite regularly.
One in three people on the planet hit by ‘monster Asian heatwave’
Language is one of the 8 pillars of People First thinking where we explore the subtle art of manipulating conversation and dialogue through the careful choice of words. It’s rampant.
People: The Driver
I spotted this car parked near a Farmers Market - I walked on, wondering about the owner and what their story was.
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.
Identity 2.5 Is Here
This is a new identity newsletter from my Kiwi friend Alan Mayo - it’s the start of a journey he is embarking on talking about Identity 2.5. …. wait what? … 2.5?
Don’t fret - I’m not going to steal Alan’s thunder and get into what ‘2.5’ is - but Alan and I have had enough conversations for me to know that if you have an interest in identity - this short series is going to be well worth your time and his 2.5 solution is really rather clever.
“This is about Identity, not Digital Identity.”
And no - that is not code for the newsletter being deeply philosophical - exploring the Id etc … but rather recognizing the challenge that most tech conversation is about digital identity and essentially ignores ‘real world’ identity … and this is true even if the blockchain does finally solve identity.
Que?
Let’s assume that we crack ‘digital identity’ - and in case you don’t know - we are a long way off that - but stick with me - ‘when’ it is solved what happens when you (say) catch a plane, phone a call center, walk into a store, visit a bank, get a mortgage … then what?
If you have explored these scenarios, you already know that it’s a mess and digital identity is not going to solve for those scenarios - except by morphing the real and digital worlds. Beyond that, ‘real world identity’ is
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inconsistent
- across industries and markets
- across multiple organizations
- even in a single organization
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unreliable
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hardly secure
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random
… which typically means that organizations have to create - and support - multiple workflows and systems.
Use Cases
A Gas Company Call Center
A certain Gas company in Southern California has a ‘call center’ security level that goes as follows …
- I tell them ‘my’ name … any name
- To validate who I am … I have to tell them ‘my’ address
That’s it. At that point I am free to meddle with that account as much as I like.
How do I know this? Because I have done that three times in the past week. THREE times. I am not asked for ‘social’ - though why that is ever considered secure in this day and age is beyond me. The number I call from is detected at their end - and it is NOT the phone number they have on the record for that account. That doesn’t matter. No secret questions were asked. No texts sent to the number on record.
Full disclosure - I did this for a friend who was traveling and had full knowledge and permission from him (the account holder). Why? Because it was a simple issue that needed to be resolved. BUT had I used my real name I wouldn’t have even been able to have a conversation - because my information wouldn’t have correlated.
Bottom line however - if you find anyone else’s gas bill you could play havoc.
DMV Identity
I wrote a piece recently called An Afternoon With Kafka
It was meant to be a fun piece describing the trials and tribulations of renewing my US drivers license. In the end I got my license.
Key point … the official address they have on record for me required me to prove my identity by providing third party utility bills. BUT, that address is up in Northern California - and I am currently in SOUTHERN California - so I asked if they could send my license to a local SoCal address.
No problem …. it was done - BUT - in DMVland, what that means is that my US Drivers license now has that temporary, non official address on it and I did not have to prove it was connected to me.
I was asked recently to show my license to ‘prove my identity’. I ignored the oxymoron, showed them my license and they dutifully wrote down the address. On that occasion, it made no difference - but what happens if that address was important?
Most people would look at the ‘official government doc’ and take it at face value.
Identity is clearly a mess.
Ok - that’s it - do please subscribe.
Should we declare ourselves a networked state? A Balaji Srinivasan concept.
A Substack with bundles of links : 🔗 Digital Countries are the Next New Thing
Who’s already started : 🔗 The Network State Dashboard
The Book : 🔗The Networked State Book (free and downloadable)
🔗 Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World is a new book by Malcolm Harris.
He talks about it on this podcast 🎙️The Dark History Of Silicon Valley with Sean Illing.
Oh my!
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!
The 🔗 Beckn protocol “allows you to create open and decentralized digital ecosystems”. So far, the word ‘blockchain’ is mentioned nowhere (that I have found). I also haven’t found how it handles ‘identity’ before it facilitates a transaction, though it says it does ‘identify each other’ but I’m not sure that is the same thing?
Can anyone share their experiences. It looks really interesting from a ‘People First’ perspective.
Extracts from their world …
identify each other and perform transactions with each other without the need for a central intermediary
Beckn Protocol is an open commerce protocol with an abstract core, which is enabling market players to reimagine building seamless digital experiences and networks. This is very similar to how HTTP, while being a simple and open protocol has fueled seamless interaction between multiple systems and led to an explosive growth in internet adoption.
The beckn community is an open community. So, no registrations. No memberships. No partnerships. Just a minimal footprint of an open and equally accessible Beckn Protocol that anyone can use. Multiple businesses and organizations have started using beckn protocol to fuel their digital acceleration. The credo of being an open protocol creates a level-playing field for any market player, small or large.
My Speciality ? Generality !
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,
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
We Are Becoming A Power Skills Economy
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.
Here's My Take
1) 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.
2) 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
The Lore Of The Rings
I was delighted to be joined on the People First podcast by Ramsey Avery who is the Production Designer for the Amazon series - Lord of the Rings - Rings of Power.
Wonderful conversation that I know you will enjoy.
The Attention Economy
It’s funny how 'xx is the new oil' keeps cropping up … this one is kind of related - but focussed not specifically on data - but rather, The ‘Attention Economy’ ….
"For the better part of the past century, the most important commodity has been oil. Wars have been fought over it — Pearl Harbor was a preemptive strike to secure Japanese access to Indonesian oil — and it elevated desert tribes to the ranks of the wealthiest cohorts in history. But the sun has passed midday on oil’s supremacy. We’ve moved from an oil economy to an attention economy.
We used to refer to an information economy. But economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance (scarcity = value), and in an age of information abundance, what’s scarce? A: Attention. The scale of the world’s largest companies, the wealth of its richest people, and the power of governments are all rooted in the extraction, monetization, and custody of attention."
Some other phrasing that caught my eye and mind …
"If Facebook is Exxon and Netflix Shell, TikTok is fracking king Chesapeake Energy, the rule-breaking insurgent armed with novel extraction methods that threaten the established order.”
"everyone is trying to outTik the Tok”
"MrBeast … most popular video (is) a real-life reenactment of Squid Game, which cost $3.5 million to produce (the cost of an episode of Mad Men). It received 300 million views."
You can read the whole Scott Galloway piece here.
Thinking Allowed
This is a People First post that was originally on the People First domain. It has been moved here as part of my domain consolidation program. It’s a steady and slow WIP as I check each entry, so do please bear with me.- More about People First
- Other People First Posts
(not just from the ‘other domain’ … all of them.)
In Sync
No - not the 🎶 pop group - they were 'NSYNC' ... just an acknowledgement of how nice it is to find like minded travelers on the journey.
The quote below found here
“We need to resist the narratives that are frequently served to us by corporations that sell these technologies, that these models of the future are dependent upon the particular technologies that they’re selling, that it’s always some future that is just around the corner that we have to buy into, when in fact the future is already here.”
Featured Photo Credit: Gabriel Gusmao on Unsplash
Artificial Intelligence For The Creative Professional
There are a group of companies springing up that are doing for the written word what Dall-E, MidJourney and Craiyon are doing for images, which is to say - enter some core text and let an AI generate the output.
My mind explodes when I see the 'image' results.
I think ‘meh’ - so far - when I see the 'written' results.
I am pretty sure that the engines are as sophisticated as each other, so I wonder if my reaction is more to do with my own abilities - as in I have NO artistic ability when it come to creating images, but I can - and do write - so my bar is higher?
For more background, you might enjoy this from The Verge;
🔗How independent writers are turning to AI
Note - all of the words you read on peoplefirst.business are not created - or even suggested - but any AI tool. (Can you tell?). 😂