This
article is adapted from a presentation I am making at the World
Congress on Intellectual Capital & Innovation at McMaster
University later this week.
I'm going to start this future
state vision at the front lines of a typical corporation, and look over
the shoulder of a typical knowledge worker in 2015. The company this
employee works for no longer has a knowledge centre, in-house
researchers or a corporate library. In fact, it has outsourced and
shrunk its IT and other infrastructure to zero. It has no in-house
overhead, no 'back office'. Everyone on the payroll either sells
product or delivers services to customers.
The company learned a valuable lesson in the early 2000s, when it
released two commercial software tools to all its staff: instant
messaging software, and VoIP global peer-to-peer telephony. These two
products, which cost the firm absolutely nothing, quickly became the
highest-rated and most-used IT applications in the company, even though
staff had received no training in their use. Since that time, the
primary technology strategy and KM strategy of the company has, as a
result, been to propagate simple, free tools to all staff, and develop
no technologies internally. The entire financial system of the global
corporation is run by three people, and aside from the company's public
e-commerce site there are no centralized repositories or
centrally-managed websites. Each employee's laptop now contains the
following tools and content:
- A simple, personal content management system
that allows individual employees to organize all the information they
use in their job, publish that information selectively to people inside
and outside the company who want to subscribe to it, free or at a
price, and likewise subscribe and archive other people's information.
This tool is a stripped down version of a weblog. It takes five minutes
to learn and connects everyone in the company to everyone else in the
business world. The tool is free. It, and all the content it manages,
is completely under the control of the employee and, like the laptop on
which it sits, is portable when the employee leaves the company.
- An expertise finder tool
that allows employees to find and contract with experts inside and
outside the organization as easily as they find information. It
includes a ‘super address book’ that lists, diagrams, automatically
harvests and maintains access information for everyone in each of the
employee's networks. Like the CMS tool, it was developed by tech
hobbyists and is free.
- A ‘virtual presence’ tool
that provides one-click multimedia access to anyone in each employee's
‘super address book’, and virtual presence at any conference. Used in
connection with a rotatable laptop camera and headset, the tool, which
comes free with new laptops, simultaneously shows a view of and
provides high-quality audio of, the person you're talking or listening
to, the document or presentation you're collaborating on, and any
sidebar instant messaging conversations you're participating in.
- A set of new, easy-to-use productivity tools
that enable DIY research, data mining, and one-click canvassing of each
employee's networks for peer-to-peer help solving a problem or finding
information.
With this powerful, simple suite of tools, knowledge management has
become a personal rather than a corporate matter. The company no longer
needs centralized infrastructure or content management, or full-time
information professionals. KM & IT really have become ‘everyone's
job’, and corporations no longer need website development specialists,
website managers, content architects, content managers, network
coordinators, or database purchasers. Front-line professionals do their
own analysis and much of their own research as well. The personal
laptop, with its context-rich content selectively and simply made
available to others inside and outside the company, has become each
individual employee's and independent contractor's proxy, resume, and
calling card. And the ‘virtual presence’ and other tools empower each
worker to conduct business effectively, collaborate with colleagues and
attend meetings anywhere in the world without incurring the time or
cost of travel.
Let's step back now from the perspective of the knowledge worker and
look at how the business environment for corporations has changed in
2015. In the early 2000s, large corporations that were once
hierarchical end-to-end business enterprises began shedding everything
that was not deemed ‘core competency’, in some cases to the point where
the only things left were business acumen, market knowledge,
experience, decision-making ability, brand name, and aggregation
skills. This 'hollowing out' allowed multinationals to achieve enormous
leverage and margin. It also made them enormously vulnerable and
potentially dispensable.
As outsourcing accelerated, some small companies discovered how to
exploit this very vulnerability. When, for example, they identified
North American manufacturers outsourcing domestic production to third
world plants in the interest of 'increasing productivity', they went
directly to the third world manufacturers, offered them a bit more, and
then went directly to the North American retailers, and offered to
charge them less. The expensive outsourcers quickly found themselves
unnecessary middlemen. Now in 2015, the result is what Doc Searls and
Dave Weinberger, two Internet experts, have called a World of Ends --
which in its business application means a disintermediated world where
specialized businesses contract directly with each other to bring the
benefits of globalization and the free market to consumers. The large
corporations, having shed everything they thought was non 'core
competency', learned to their chagrin that in the connected,
information economy, the value of their core competency was much less
than the inflated value of their stock, and they have lost much of
their market share to new federations of small entrepreneurial
businesses.
A number of other factors contributed to the demise of many large
multi-national corporations by 2015, and the explosion of a new
entrepreneurial economy. As predicted by the economic think-tanks of
the early 21st century, and by demographic and cyclical forecasts like Boom Bust and Echo and The Fourth Turning, the economy of 2015 had been further transformed by these events:
- The crushing debt load of citizens and governments,
especially the turn of the century US government, led to a spike in
interest rates and a collapse in the value of Western currencies, stock
markets, and housing. As a result, consumers in 2015 are much more
careful in their spending and much more price-conscious. Those that can
afford to, primarily the baby boom generation, are buying fewer, longer
lasting, premium quality goods and keeping them much longer.
- The realization that globalization and ‘free’ trade are
devastating for Western employment and our environment have led to a
backlash against imported goods, the cancellation of free trade
agreements, and strong ‘buy local’ campaigns and consumer preferences.
- A steady stream of corporate scandals, and the perceived
propensity of many large corporations to lie to, threaten and even sue
their customers, has severely eroded the value of brand names. Where
the youth of 2004 prided themselves on wearing the latest brand
clothing, the youth of 2015 pride themselves on wearing clothes they
made themselves, using computerized tools attached to their laptops.
They're also making much of their own music, movies, software and
books, and distributing them to the world for next to no cost, forcing
the commercial distributors of entertainment products to slash their
prices to stay in business.
- A large proportion of the population in 2015 is
self-employed, with lower disposable income but more time than the
previous generation. As a result they do more of their own home
repairs, renovations, landscaping, and even growing their own food.
Home and automobile energy conservation have become very fashionable.
With the continuation of food scares and a reaction against conditions
in factory farms, the proportion of vegetarians in the population has
grown rapidly.
- Health, more than anything else, is driving the economy,
with an older, more health-conscious population. There has been a shift
from treatment to prevention of illness, and from reliance on health
professionals to self-diagnosis and self-therapy.
As a result of these changes, the economy of 2015 is vastly different in some key ways from the economy of 2004:
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2004
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2015
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Critical Business Skill
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Enterprise Management
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New Enterprise Formation
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Critical Competitive Advantage
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Intellectual Assets & Brand
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Agility & Innovation
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Hot Topic at Learning Institutions
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Outsourcing
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Entrepreneurialism 101
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What Keeps CEOs Awake
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Cost & Risk Management
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Reputation
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What are the implications of this to those of us in, or looking for, careers in tomorrow's business?
- Your networks are critical: Your success will depend on who
you know, but not necessarily who you know well. Because of a
phenomenon known as 'the strength of weak links', your future employer,
employees, customers and business partners are all likely to be two or
three degrees of separation away from those you know personally. Who
your associates know is probably more important, therefore, than who
you know directly.
- You need to know how to run a business, from start-up to
dissolution. Not the sheltered academic skills of large corporate
administration, but the down-and-dirty skills of entrepreneurship,
where every decision is make-or-break. Your network can help here, too.
You're probably three times as likely to be self-employed or unemployed
in 2015, as you are to be an employee of someone else, so you'll need
these skills.
- You need to be extremely focused on customers and well
tuned into customers' needs. Computer databases of compiled customer
intelligence will be valuable, but the personal intelligence you can
get customers to voluntarily give you access to will be even more
valuable. That will require reciprocity and building trust, a difficult
challenge in an age of consumer cynicism and concern for privacy.
- Your product or service will need to strike a delicate
balance between quality, price, durability and upgradability. Customers
will demand and expect all of these things, and will be much more
careful shoppers than today's. And they'll have a lot more choice and a
lot more information for competitive shopping as well. An earned
reputation for quality, responsiveness and responsibility, not brand
name, will allow you to command a premium price for a premium product.
Your company will need to be socially and environmentally responsible,
not because corporate charters will have changed, but because citizen
and consumer groups will call you to account if you're not.
- No industry is going to be immune to these changes and
demands. Today's oligopolies will give way to a much more open and
diverse competitive environment. The scare that companies like ING
Direct have given the banks, discount brokers have given the majors,
and small regional carriers have given the debt-ridden big-name
airlines, is just a taste of what's to come.
It's always fun to predict the future, and I hope you've found my
prognostications interesting. I'd like to thank my weblog readers for
helping me qualify these ideas and make this presentation more
informative and credible than it might otherwise have been. [Conclusion
& Questions].
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
