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.
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.
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."
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
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?). 😂
