Winning by Sharing

Rich poor gap is cause of UK riots

In 2003 some four years before the credit crunch a good friend of mine, Frank Dunn, a polymath and hedge fund expert told me he’d been researching the causes of financial collapse by examining detailed records from stretching from the first Wall Street crash (the Great Depression) to the Dutch tulip disaster and beyond.  It turns out the key cause of financial meltdown is when there is too high a concentration of wealth in too few hands.  When this happens, calamity, chaos and collapse aren’t too far away; mathematically, they are a sure thing.

In America, the top 1% of the population own 40% of the wealth.  To put this in perspective, that’s the same level of inequality seen in countries ruled by dictators and oligarchs or roughly the equivalent wealth inequality seen in Iran and Russia. 

Associated Press recently reported on the release of a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stating:

“A recent report by the International Monetary Fund destroys the myth that the current economic crisis—the worst in almost a century—was caused by fancy financial instruments, government intervention in the housing market or Main Street greed.  It concludes, rather, that the global brush with economic depression was the result of the colossal gap in incomes between rich and working Americans.

The sadly obscure paper argues that a dramatic concentration in wealth at the top—at levels not seen anywhere else in the industrialized world—created a fundamental imbalance that brought the entire system down on itself. The document shows that the origins of America’s last financial implosion, in 1929, were almost identical to those of 2008. In both cases, income inequality was the culprit. And even in the collapse’s wake, the chasm between the top 10 per cent and the remaining 90 per cent appears to be widening further.”

Not long after the most recent financial crash, the so called Credit Crunch, I noted in 2009 here;

During routine scanning of the London job boards throughout 2009, specifically Jobserve I've noticed a number of positions advertised by investment banks for a wide variety of skill sets to build applications for the very financial instruments that caused the meltdown of the global financial system in the past eighteen months. 

With the global financial markets in turmoil again and the prospect of more bail outs for European countries, most notably Italy maybe another credit crunch is the boil that has to burst?

But the masters of the universe, Tea Party activists and the ruling elite should beware.  As noted by Joseph Stiglitz:  “The top 1% may have the best houses, educations, and lifestyles, but their fate is bound up with how the other 99% per cent live.” 

I won’t be at all surprised if we see Middle East style uprisings in the West over the next few years as more and more people start to awaken and realise the economic crimes against humanity that have brought about this ‘colossal inequality’ .  Indeed this is the only thing the 1% fear.

 

 

We are all African now

Chantal Badjie, the UK's foremost diversity expert reports the launch of the BBC's Mixed Race Season.  BBC2 has commissioned a raft of programmes across genres for a mixed-race season, highlighting that Britain has the largest mixed-race population in the Western world.

Timely as us mixed racers struggle to complete the ethnicity section of the UK Census.  There is a section called mixed/multiple ethic groups and the choices are:

White and black Caribbean

White and black African

White and Asian

Any other mixed/multiple ethic background [fill in this box]

To be fair that last box does catch all the other variations but it's rather small.  How do you describe the children of parents who are;

Mother:  White English/Irish extraction

Father: Maltese, Italian, Sierra Leonean, Gambian

According to a recent Economist Intelligent Life article,  if a nuclear war struck and only the Kenyan Kikuyu survived, they would still have 85% of the genetic variation of mankind; with a similar history and conditions, they too would turn blond and blue-eyed under the northern sun.

We are all African Now.

Many are culled. Few are chosen.

Image by ixtlan via Flickr

So the Chancellor, George Osborne, has announced the details of his Comprehensive Spending Review and although the blows are being softened by spreading public sector job cuts over the life of this parliament, many will be culled with few people being chosen.  Those people who will find themselves in the court of the unemployed, in which there is no chance of appeal, will ask questions. Where and when will I find another job?  Where will I live if I can’t pay the rent or mortgage?  How long can I last before signing on? How will I keep the lights on?  When will things get back to normal?  They have.  This is the new normal.

But there is hope and there are alternatives but to exploit them, we’re going to have to see the world of work through a completely different lens, a world that has been impossible to perceive during the good times by workers and especially by the government. That lens can be defined by a single statement; the unit of work is no longer a whole job. The nature of work in the developed world has changed forever and the prospects are particularly grim for middle class, white collar workers, so called knowledge workers that form the largest group of those people directly affected by the cuts.

The perfect labour storm

In the past fifty years some 1.5 billion people have been added to the global labour pool  setting up what has increasingly been described as the perfect labour storm brought about by the wholesale offshoring of work to low wage economies.  This isn’t just about factory and call centre workers.  It’s about lawyers, medical specialists and the entire category of knowledge work. Research by Professor Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton University, suggests that somewhere in the region of 40 million jobs will be lost in the West across 817 categories of knowledge work within a generation.  In 2008, 1.4 million qualified people applied for jobs with one of India’s largest IT services company, Infosys.  In Japan, Yuji Genda, Associate Professor, Institute of Social Science University of Tokyo published a book in 2008:  A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity.  His research predicts that only one in two people will be employed in Japan in the year 2050 if current trends and policies prevail.  Earlier this year research in the US predicts that all new jobs are being created by start-ups. Recently IBM announced it would make almost 300,000 employees redundant and hire them back as freelance workers between now and 2017, although the political backlash it created forced them to retract the strategy.  In any case, the fact that many companies are thinking this way should send a powerful message to knowledge workers.  Big firms and the government aren’t hiring and traditional jobs in advanced economies are not coming back anytime soon.

The new permanent temporary worker

In January 2010, BusinessWeek published an article on the new permanent temporary worker in which it describes the story of a home based call centre worker living in the US who handles customer enquiries for consumer brands managed by a service provider called LiveOps. She logs on in the morning for 45 minutes then takes her child to school and returns to work for another couple of hours.  She is paid by the minute, in this case, 25 cents per minute. Last year Odesk, a kind of ‘eBay for work’ service that brings together buyer and sellers of ‘knowledge work’ had 350,000 workers registered and a value of jobs posted of $285 million and during the credit crunch grew by 400%.  The founder of LiveOps is starting a new ‘on-demand’ workforce service called ReadyForce.  The UK equivalent, PeoplePerHour.com has 68,000 experts and a £13 million value of jobs posted.  The nature of work is increasingly fractional.  Fractional workers derive their income from multiple sources online and offline.  Unfortunately public policy is still based on the assumption that careers are the most desirable form of employment, and that they can be offered to more and more of us. The government’s Work Programme initiative aims to provide services to white collar workers who’ve never had to look for a job until the onset of the global financial crisis.  Job centres refer these workers to private service providers, contracted by the government to help them prepare for another whole job. These service providers such as MyWorkSearch, CareerPlan4Me and many others are funded by the government to provide online tools to help white collar workers in a way local job centres can’t, others like The Plus Team provides an offline service that at least gives job seekers an opportunity to receive group coaching and network with each other. The problem is these services guide people to prepare for whole jobs that simply don’t exist.  We’ve seen weak, modest ‘whole jobs’ growth in the UK but tellingly, ‘the quarterly increase in total employment was mainly driven by part-time workers, which increased by 166,000 on the quarter to reach 7.93 million, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1992’. Charles Handy (The Empty Raincoat) and John Malone (The Future of Work) were right after all in that where in the past an organisation was like a castle, it will become more like a condominium: "an association of temporary residents gathered together for their mutual convenience".  This may take a generation to play out and the transition will be painful but the net benefits to individuals and society in the long term are far greater than those provided by traditional modes of employment.

The support economy

A promising new approach to harnessing the value of knowledge workers is being pioneered by Ki Work inspired by the ground breaking book, The Support Economy that has predicted the shift from ‘managerial capitalism to ‘collaborative capitalism’.  Ki work has developed a platform that enables individuals to form virtual companies that can provide services to any business anywhere in the world that in some categories can actually be cheaper than offshore labour because it can be provided on-demand.  It can be switched on and off.  With the right so called ‘deep support’, advice and guidance, knowledge workers in Britain can adapt and indeed thrive but need to realise that a ‘career’ has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life.  To adapt to new ways of working, knowledge workers need to prepare for, and seek out multiple sources of income.  More than this, they need to realise they’ll get better support from each other than from the institutions that are supposed to serve them.  They need to learn how to create value by collaborating to bring products and services to market that compete head-on with big brands.  They need to view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude.  An attitude everyone’s going to need. 

Grandparents urged to strike in Spain

The Guardian writes that grandparents are being urged by unions to strike in Spain because they can effectively bring the country to a halt by refusing to look after grandchildren while their parents are at work. 

"For a country where half of all grandparents look after their grandchildren every day – one in eight for more than nine hours a day – the strike call threatens to disrupt the working lives of a significant proportion of the population and expose the extent to which this unpaid work is propping up the economy."

The Stiglitz Commission, appointed by France president Sarkozy, estimates that at least 35 percent could be added to national wealth to account for all "domestic" services.

A massive secret GDP exists that is not accounted for anywhere.  We need new platforms that enable this kind of work to be accounted for with little or no cash.  It's not beyond the realms of possibility that in the future, there'll be economies based on giving everything away.

As an aside, Joseph Stiglizt said that whoever designed the Obama administration's bank rescue plan is "either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent"

 

A message for our leaders

Let us dream: A politician takes the side of talking to us about the world as it is, as it risks becoming; he or she forecasts not sweat and tears, but difficult tomorrows; she or he proposes that we talk about it, as responsible citizens, and allows us to perceive robust paths along which to advance, with a smile, towards the era of less ... A less that will consequently take on the character of better.

Let's stop claiming to dominate nature and the world; let's stop making possession a superior end. Let's put our cherished deviancies, such as the manufacture of desire and its bulimic satisfaction, back in their place. Today's progress must be situated on the side of being rather than of having.

Robert Lion, France, circa 2007

BP opens up. Not.

Image by ixtlan via Flickr

Way back in 2004 my first post here on Typepad was entitled Big Oil Companies Open up.  It's about Shell reaching out to stakeholders and the launch of it's 'conversation' platform called Tell Shell. 

It starts with;

It’s not often that a company publishes accusations of murder on its website, especially when the accusations are directed against the company. 

At that time it was a functional online forum although heavily moderated.  Now this is what you get;

Thank you for taking the time to send us your comments. Your message will be sent to our Customer Service Centre. A Shell representative will contact you soon.

It obviously didn't work out and was very quickly replaced with a citizen's alternative tellshell.org which documents how pointless and futile it is to attempt open, transparent conversations with oil companies.  

BP's recent oil spill disaster reminded me of the Jean Francois Noubel's statement about the survival of companies;

The future of a company is less about the nature of its issues, and more about its capacity to invent social structures able to solve them.  In other words, an ability to create and nurture networks.

Someone, somewhere on this planet has a solution to BP's oil spill disaster.  But because BP like every other large multinational is organised in command and control structures, it stands no chance of harnessing the wisdom crowds.  What do companies need to survive?

This form of organisation is unsustainable, and we all know it.  BP, where are your super connectors?

What is progress?

A recent article in the London Evening standard reports on French President Sarkozy's new initiative.

You can always rely on the French to ask difficult questions such as: what is progress? And set up an international commission to find out.

It's not what people say.  It's what's *behind* what people say.

France is the first country to at least indirectly open the debate on the case for 'steady state economics'.  That is, an economy with no growth.  Because what politicians aren't really telling us is that the future is about less.  Less of everything. Except for (and with apology) the most uneducated amongst us, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that stuff is going to run out eventually, actually quite soon.

The relentless pursuit of profit, systemic corruption, and rapacious greed is ruining us.  Humanity has to evolve very quickly to a state of cooperation between individuals, companies and nation states where there is a continuous, fair exchange of value, rather than the notion of "I win. You lose", as the default position of business and government.

A steady state economy can only be built and sustained by peer-to-peer, open source styles of organisation and production.

Sorry to burst your bubble but humanity's survival is going to have to be based on 'being' rather than 'having'.

How public companies are killing their own employees

Once again Leslie Thatcher picks out the best writings in the French press on subjects we just can't talk about here in the UK.  Patrick Apel-Muller writes in L'Humanité about the cause of employee suicides at France Telecom.

It was to take 21 employee suicides from February 2008 before the management of France Télécom would agree to assess the full scale of the dramas that play out within its walls. Now management mentions "prevention of psycho-social risks."

I've long argued that command and control organisation is actually killing people.  Research by the UK Work Foundation reached this conclusion several years ago when it found that the biggest contributor to the 2.7m people on incapacity benefits was workplace stress brought about by the oppressive nature of the traditional nature of the firm, which basically doesn't scale without the wholesale destruction of the workforce's self-worth and self-esteem leading to what is now referred to as 'work rage'.

I was working in Bangalore with Tesco a few years ago. I remember having conversations with successful upwardly mobile young Indian technologists about new houses, cars, holidays.  I pointed out that what comes with all this prosperity is the slew of western ailments associated with the export of capitalism’s model of organisation – diabetes, stress, obesity, jealously, distrust, rapacious greed and so on. They just laughed at me. This was published last week;

India outsourcing workers stressed to the limit. From obesity to sleep disorders – a healthcare crisis in the making?

....be careful what you wish for.....Patrick's article goes on to say;

It's the work itself that is sick because aspirations to self-realisation are denied and dignity often manhandled.

Among the messes and the waste capitalism brings about, human sufferings are not the least and they always accompany the destruction of the labor resource. How many broken hopes, wrecked feelings of self-worth are provoked by the precariousness of employment to which a majority of young employees are now compelled! The first steps into adult life become an obstacle course that goes on and on ...

Read the whole thing.

I'll be speaking at Africa Gathering about the dangers of the wholesale adoption of western organisational models.  More on this soon.

How to get fired on Facebook

A 16-year-old girl from Essex was fired after she described her office job as "boring" on her Facebook page,The BBC reports.

This is clip of the exchange she had with her boss.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin

Fractional work emerges

I've been writing about the emergence of fractional work for some time now.  The UK's Peopleperhour is a platform for sourcing people on a literally per hour/per day basis.  My contention is that the only area in which we've not seen serious innovation by large companies is with their labour models.  When big companies start to adopt a fractional approach to at least some areas of their workforce......

Winning by Sharing is a collection of true stories combined with market research and analysis about the future of work, how profoundly it will affect people in the next decade, and how this will take most people by surprise.

 

"Imagine organizations in which most workers aren’t employees at all, but electronically connected freelancers living wherever they want  to. And imagine that all this freedom in business lets people get more of whatever they really want in life – money, interesting work, the chance to help others, or time with their families.” Thomas Malone, The future of work