Posted on

Plain Talk: Lessons From A Business Maverick

There are nine principles of management that Ken Iverson holds himself to. These nine areas of focus helped him build a strong and long-term oriented company at Nucor:

1. Establish a higher cause
2. Empower your employees to trust their instincts
3. Destroy the hierarchy
4. Employees are the engine of progress
5. Give your people a stake in the business
6. Stay small
7. Take smart risk
8. Ethics > Politics
9. Cash performance = long-term survival

 









Establish a higher cause within your organization that employees and managers can rally around.

 













Give your employees a consistent set of tools that will empower them to trust their instincts and intuition.

 












Destroy the hierarchy and focus on establishing an egalitarian business culture that can sustain employee motivation.














Dedicate your management career to creating an environment in which employees can stretch for higher levels of performance because they are the true engines of progress.

 










Give your employees a simple stake in the business. The more they produce, the more they should earn.

 













Small businesses allow for things to really get done. That’s the virtue of smallness.


 













Aversion to risk can be deadly in business. Managers who avoid risk and fear failure spend a lot of time cheating themselves, their people, and their companies from good risks and adventures.
 
 












Place ethics over politics… simple enough








What really matters in a business is bottom-line performance and long-term survival. Focus your efforts there.

 
 
 
 
Posted on

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future









    There are 12 technological forces that will shape our future. Click links to see videos by Kevin Kelly discussing each of the 12 forces:

    1. Becoming – everything we make is changing
    2. Cognifying – we are making things smarter
    3. Flowing – every business is a data business
    4. Screening – screens will be on everything
    5. Accessing – switch from ownership to accessing
    6. Sharing – we are are going to share at a planetary scale
    7. Filtering – too many new things; not enough good personalized filters
    8. Remixing – unbundling and recombining of what’s best to make something better
    9. Interacting – all products will actively interact and engage with us or else they will be dumb
    10. Tracking – anything that can be tracked will be tracked
    11. Questioning – since answers are free questions are now more valuable
    12. Beginning – 20 years from now we look at today and realize that this was just the beginning

    Becoming

    • The world is in a protopian mode and things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better.
    • Technology is a slow creep of incremental improvements and mild progresses that ultimately add up to something large.
    • What we all missed with the internet is that formerly dismissed passive consumers have now become active creators of content.

    Cognifying

    • We are making things smarter every signal day.
    • The advantages gained from cognifying inert things will be 100x more disruptive to our lives than the transformations gained by industrialization.
    • The playbook over the next couple of decades will be to “take X and add AI” to it.
    • The three largest breakthroughs for AI come from the following:

      1. Cheap parallel computation
      2. Big Data
      3. Better Algorithims

    • Over the next 10 years, 99% of AI will be narrowly specific and the next couple of decades will go as follows:

      1. First machines will consolidate their gains in already automated industries
      2. Next, more dexterous chores like cleaning offices and schools will be taken over by late-night robots
      3. By 2050 most truck driving will be non-human

    • The cycle of how robots will replace humans will go as follows:

      1. Jobs humans can do but robots can do even better
      2. Jobs humans can’t do but robots can
      3. Jobs we didn’t know we wanted done
      4. Jobs only humans can do at first

    • All of this is a positive. Industrialization extended the average human lifespan. Cognifying will expand the realm of leisurely work.

    Flowing

    • We have moved fro daily to real-time as the default mode and thus the prime units of measure are flows and streams now… Think Twitter.
    • Eternal constant flow of data will be the new norm and content will become “freer”
    • In the state of flow, copies will become ubiquitous and things that can’t be copied will have more value like trust
    • How can one still add value in a world where content is freely copied:
      1. Immediacy
      2. Personalization
      3. Interpretation
      4. Authenticity
      5. Accesibility
      6. Embodiment
      7. Patronage
      8. Discoverability
    • The Four Stages of Flowing:
      1. Fixed. Rare
      2. Free. Ubiquitous
      3. Flowing. Sharing
      4. Opening. Becoming

    Screening

    • Cover the world in screens and see what human ingenuity can do.
    • A world with screens everywhere will lead to a world that is deeply interconnected (even more so than today).
    • Two major projects that will be undertaken over the next decades:
      1. Digital interlinking of literature – think networked reading
      2. Universal digital library

    Accessing

    • We will switch from ownership of property and goods to subscribing to access of property and goods.
    • Five major trends that are leading to this increase and rush towards access over ownership:
      1. Dematerialization
        • The amount of mass needed to produce one unity of GDP has fallen from 4 kg in 1870 to 1 kg in 1930.
      2. Real-Time on Demand
        • There are more ways to be a service than there are to be/develop products and our appetite for instant is insatiable.
      3. Decentralization
        • The decentralized internet has now become a central public commons.
      4. Platform Synergy
        • Think multi-sided platforms —> Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook.
      5. Clouds
        • The cloud is really just hyperlinked data with outstanding computational reliability .
    • As we continue to increase dematerialization, decentralization, simultaneity, platforms, and the could, access will continue to displace ownership.

    Sharing

    • We are moving towards a new socialism or dot-communism where our workforce is composed of entirely free agents.
    • The four levels of digital socialism are:
      1. Sharing – mildest form of digital socialism
      2. Cooperation
      3. Collaboration
      4. Collectivism 
    • Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, technological sharing can be seen as a new political operating system that elevates both the individual and group at once.
    • The goal of sharing technology is to maximize both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together.
    • The power of sharing is not just about the nonprofit sector. Three of the largest creators of commercial wealth in the last decade – Google, Facebook, and Twitter – derive their value from sharing.

    Filtering

    • In a world of abundant information, human attention is scarce.
    • In the U.S. TV still captures most of our attention.
    • The average cost to consume one hour of media to the consumer was $3.08 in 1995, $2.69 in 2010, and $3.37 in 2015.
    • The BIG OPPORTUNITY is to harness filtering technology to cultivate higher quality attention at scale.
    • “We will use technology to produce commodities, and we’ll make experiences in order to avoid becoming a commodity ourselves.”

    Remixing

    • Remixing is the rearrangement and reuse of existing pieces.
    • In 30 years, the most important cultural works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed the most.

    Interacting

    • The dumbest objects will be vastly improved in the future with sensors to make them interactive.
    • Anything that is not intensively interactive will be considered broken over the next 30 years.

    Tracking

    • Self tracking turns us into a quantified self
    • The constant-stream of data flowing form all of our sensors will eventually lead to a need for new and more sensors.
    • Everything we do will show up in our Lifestreams.
    • We are on our way to manufacturing 54 billion sensors every year by 2020.
    • Metadata is the new wealth because the value of bits increases when they are linked to other bits.
    • 5 years ago humanity stored several hundred exabytes of information. This is the equivalent of each person on the planet having 80 Library of Alexandria.
      • Today we average 320 libraries each.

    Questioning

    • Cisco estimates that there will be 50 billion devices on the internet by 2020.
    • Even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. 
    • Questions are the new power currency in the future with answers free, cheap and quick.

    Beginning

    • We a knitting a large scale global platform of connected devices, people, and companies. We are at the Beginning of the Beginning.
    • Right now, in this Beginning, this imperfect mesh spans 51 billion hectares, touches 15 billion machines, engages 4 billion human minds in real time, consumes 5 percent of the planet’s electricity, runs at inhuman speeds, tracks half our daytime hours, and is the conduit for the majority flow of our money.

    Brian Nwokedi’s Book Review on Goodreads
    Brian Nwokedi’s Twitter