A Billionaire’s Manifesto

The Eyes of the Future Are Looking Back
and Demanding We Act… Now.

I have the honor and privilege to be among IBM’s 50-plus outside social influencers and futurists. The following are my three big Ahas connecting billionaire opportunities with the FUTURE OF WORK. (My insights: I do not presume to speak for my cohorts or for IBM.)

His passion, ideas and joy leapt off the stage. He is on an unstoppable mission. Jason Silva, host of Nat Geo’s Brain Games, opened IBM’s recent Connect social business event.

Channeling Marshall McLuhan, Silva wants all of us to realize our potential. “We build the tools, the tools build us,” he began. “What we design, designs us in return. A young person in Africa today with a smartphone has better communications technology than a U.S. president…than a head of state…had 25 years ago. This person with a supercomputer in his pocket can now achieve what only corporations and governments used to be able to achieve. When we look at [these disruptive forces], we should see them through the lens of exponential opportunity. We must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become….

“We are now the chief agents of evolution.”

Solving Billion-Person Problems

Silva closed with an idea from Peter Diamandis: “We must redefine the term billionaire for the age of exponential technology. A billionaire is not someone who makes a billion dollars, but rather someone who positively affects the world and touches a billion people in a positive way. Each of you, empowered by these tools, and your own creative capacities, can now conceive of things that can positively impact a billion people…. ‘I will positively reach and positively affect the lives of a billion people.’…

“This should be our goal. This is our responsibility.”

The Future of Work:
A Three-Billion-Person Opportunity

The top 50 industrialized countries hold a labor force of nearly three billion and McKinsey estimates that by 2020 we will have close to 30% too few workers with college and secondary educations, and an oversupply of 11% of people with low-to-no skills.

Some say the way we work is broken.
Some say it is just poorly designed.
Some say it is designed to get the exact outcomes we’re getting: high valuations on monetary capital and far too low valuations on human capital.
Some say it is disproportionally designed to serve the needs of the
top 1% to 20% —the new knowledge worker and social media elite.
Some say solving educational needs would solve many of our work needs.

NO ONE says the way we work now is working for enough of us.

At the core of our problem, as CEO of management consultancy Undercurrent, Aaron Dignan, puts it: “We didn’t pick our way of working at all. We inherited it. We mimicked it. We absorbed it through countless interactions over decades.”

The tough choice ahead is that we — leaders, business, workforce, society — have to abandon what we inherited a lot faster than we currently are.

Because the shit is hitting the fan.

According to the brainiacs at the 2016 World Economic Forum, we have already entered the fourth Industrial Revolution. [1. Steam/Mechanical 2. Mass Production 3. Electronics/Digital 4. Cyber-Physical Systems.]

Robotics, AI, the Internet of Things, Analytics, Cognitive Systems, Blockchain Technologies, the Sharing Economy, and more, are poised to completely disrupt ALL our systems.

That means great opportunities for some businesses and some approaches: e.g., IBM is making a major play into cognitive collaboration. And healthcare companies are morphing into tech companies. And very soon, your car will drive itself!

But not everyone wins in this highly disrupted world. The biggest shifts will be in how work gets done and who gets those jobs. One estimate puts 47% of all current U.S. jobs at risk. Another report predicts increased class wars, as Revolution 4.0 is designed to benefit the haves, and will likely shackle the have-nots, and will shrink the middle class.

We’ve reached a tipping point where — as long as we keep organizing work and businesses the way we do now — technological advances will continuously destroy more jobs than they create.

We have a three-billion-person, fucking-wicked problem.
And tweaking around the edges ain’t gonna fix it!

Isn’t it time that, a la Silva/Diamandis, we start viewing it and approaching it like a three-billion-person opportunity?

Three Tracks to the Biggest
Billionaire Opportunities

A Leadership Revolution

Clingers be gone

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Or… Apparently… Judging from the leaders who are dragging their feet… We should be scared shitless about changing the way we work.

Simplified, there are now two separate and unequal worlds of work:
• Disruptors: Those businesses, leaders and workers who are reinventing, reimagining, and blowing up every system, structure, process, approach and business model created in the 20th century or earlier.
• Clingers: Those businesses, leaders and workers who have embraced bits and pieces of the disruptive revolution, but are still clinging to as many 20th century modes of leadership, business models, revenue generation, structures and processes as they can, for as long as they can.

The number one barrier to billion-person opportunities:
Clinging Leaders.

And unfortunately, they are still the vast majority. Especially among corporate, quarterly-driven leaders.

In my team’s Future of Work Study: 2015–2020, our number one finding was that too many of today’s leaders are actually holding back the future of work. Because embracing the future means freeing human capacity from today’s hierarchies and business models. And that comes wrapped in risks —specifically, personal risks to the leaders in charge. Oh no! Can’t have that!!

Clayton Christensen got a lot right in The Innovator’s Dilemma: That leaders must adopt disruptive innovations before they are comfortable doing so, to stay ahead of customer and marketplace needs. What he under-anticipated and under-appreciated was how hard leaders would fight to ignore the innovator’s dilemma within their companies, in how we work.

The Hare and The Tortoise. Our study: Leaders have been hyperfast in pushing cost-efficiency changes, marketplace changes and risk-management changes… But they are glacially slow in rethinking hierarchies, planning, budgeting, managing, resourcing, training and development — people-focused ways of getting work done. Most corporate leaders are doing all they can to hold back the future of work.

Industrial Revolution 4.0 is a People-First Revolution
According to Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum: “In the end it all comes down to values. We need to shape a future that works for all of us by putting people first and empowering them. …[The fourth revolution can] lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a shared destiny. It is incumbent on all of us to make sure [that] prevails.”

And here’s why so many leaders profess people-first values, while they are actually dragging their feet…

“It is not the corporation that is in the center, but the intentions and choices of individuals. The architecture of work is not the structure of a firm, but the structure of the network.” — Esko Kilpi

As articulated by Kilpi, a Helsinki-based thought leader on digital environments, (as well as from our study and from most thinkers on 21st century leadership), there are two crucial dimensions to the billionaire opportunity before us: 1. Acknowledging freedom of choice within everyone who works. 2. Networks, not hierarchies, are the way to go. …What some are calling The Platform Economy.

Those dimensions scare the hell out of many leaders. Far too many are willing to be out of sync with the needs of the workforce, and the future, because embracing that future of work means higher risks for them, higher uncertainty for them, and (perceived) loss of control of outcomes for them.

We will will remain stuck with a three-billion person problem for as long as most leaders hold back this future.

We will have a three-billion person opportunity when our corporate leaders rush towards this future, instead of away from it.

A Technological Revolution

It’s time for corporate IT to live up to its promise and potential

The elephant in the workplace room: 100% of the workforce are consumers. And nearing 100% of those consumers have experienced some form of intense personalization, connections, joy, passion or achievement though their phone, tablet, gaming, entertainment, education, shopping or online community experiences.

And, having had those amazingly wonderful experiences outside of work, they’re figuring out how sucky corporate-designed processes and tools are, in comparison.

For the future of work workforce… The standard for evaluating any work experience is no longer work… It’s life.

Meaning: The standard against which the workforce will evaluate all corporate IT, infrastructures, work processes, as well as company culture, managers and leadership, as well as engagement…. is each individual’s experiences outside of work.

The standard for great employment, great engagement, or a great company is no longer just comparing one employer to another. It’s whether one’s work experiences are as good as their other life experiences.

And, as it is fast becoming the primary user of people’s time and attention, corporate IT is the biggest driver of those experiences.

Companies will start moving into Revolution 4.0 when they are focused on experiences that would be picked up in survey questions like…
• Corporate-built tools and processes are as good as or better than any app or tool I can buy, or build, for my own use
• Learning and development within this company exceeds anything my social network or I could design
• My manager provides the same quality (or better) support, guidance and resources as my social network
• My company understands that I am investing my assets — time, attention, ideas, knowledge, passion, energy and social networks — to make the company go, and is providing an appropriate return on my investments

Is Business At War With Its Workforce?
Since 2002, my team has been asking survey questions like those above. The Is Business At War question is the subtitle to our first report. In the 14 years since, while there are amazing exceptions, overall: business seems designed to keep the battle going with its workforce…

• Only 12% of the workforce feel that their employer respects their time
• Only 22% of the workforce feels that their employer meets their work needs as quickly as it expects employees to respond to company and customer needs
• Only 33% feel their workplaces tools and processes are as user-centered and as useful as what they can purchase on their own as consumers
• Only 40% feel they get workplace information the way they need it, when they need it, to do their job

It appears that business — especially corporate IT — IS at war with its workforce. Certainly, corporate IT is a long way from being as user-centered as the tools we can get on our own.

And that’s the standard corporate IT must finally own:
The consumerisation of IT. The need for deep design thinking, and intense user-centeredness, and amazing experiences.

First, Mindset Shift…
Then, Redesigns…
Then, Sense-Making
From an IT perspective, NO company will properly enter Revolution 4.0 until its internal IT experience meets the same user-centered, joy-driven and usefulness standards as set for external consumer experiences.

Once that mindset shift occurs, here’s the biggest 4.0 need…

Yeah… tools like Slack, or Workday, or Hipchat, or Periscope, or Basecamp, etc., etc. are great and helpful. But Revolution 4.0 workplaces need far better sense-making and meaning-making tools than we have today.

And not just tools for sophisticated knowledge workers. We need new sense-making tools that help us solve everyday challenges for a workforce that needs greater help with critical thinking. Jensen research: The average person receives about 325 pages of work information every day, but only needs about 5 pages to do their job. And unlike most IT solutions today, the problem is not finding the right 5 pages (or video snippets) — it’s in making sense of them and connecting all the dots within them! Siri, Echo, Cortana and Now are good starts… But we’ll need lots more solutions like IBM Watson’s analysis of 2,000 TED talks which can help people understand and explore no-one-right-answer questions like What’s the meaning of life?… Tools that are rich in meaning-making.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will need to focus heavily on sense-making and meaning-making. For the harried two-job single mom in Grand Rapids, for the eighth grader in Guangzhou, for the first-year programmer in Gapchariapur.

The Fourth Revolution will require far more sense-makers, storytellers, design thinkers and educators driving corporate IT than are employed and leveraged today. We need more people like TED’s Hans Rosling, Maysoon Zayid, David Kelley, John Maedea, and John Hunter on our corporate IT teams.

Then and only then will corporate IT start living up to its promises and potential.

A Worker Revolution

Borne of 21st century needs, desires and standards

No, not Marxist.
Capitalist.
Entrepreneurial.
Humanist.
Educational.
Caring.
Sharing.
Raising the standards for corporate leadership from the bottom up.

Since the dawn of commerce, leaders have been forced to adjust their strategies when resources became scarce.

If enough people started their own companies, instead of working for The Man… If enough contract workers freelanced their efforts, instead of becoming employees… If enough innovators made their own products and services, instead of doing so for an employer…

…We’d see a super-rapid shift in 1. and 2., the Leadership and Technological Revolutions. We’d hit the Billionaire’s Club really fast!

Granted, promoting this track alone is Pollyanaish. Too HowardBeale-ish, especially for those who truly struggle to make a living wage.

But here’s the thing: Based on my 30 years of research and observing corporate behavior —
I don’t see the other shifts happening fast enough without intense bottom-up pressure.
Too many leaders will cling
to outdated 20th century mindsets and corporate tech
will cling to too much
corporate-centeredness.

I’ve come to believe that the only way to boost us into the 21st Century Workplace Billionaire’s Club is through some form of bottom-up upheaval. Beyond just more Uber drivers or more Airbnb-ers or more contract workers. The kind of upheaval where enough people are abandoning corporate environments in significant numbers, that leaders and tech are forced to shift faster than they’d like to.

What would happen if people said Hello to new career paths as fast as Adele’s Hello went global? What if the next big viral app was designed to facilitate a global workforce revolution? What if there were massive global one-day walk-offs to push for better diversity or healthcare or education or working conditions? Cards Against Humanity recently bought 100% of its Chinese factory’s capacity for a week, paying them to produce nothing, just so every worker there could get vacation. What if every major company using third-world labor instituted something similar?… Or, better… What if there were lots of trusted crowdsourced platforms that allowed individual global citizens to improve working conditions or pay anywhere in the world? What if none of those ideas are any good or not doable, but they spark an amazing billionaire idea that is?

What if…?
If we choose to be 21st century billionaires, the possibilities are limitless.
Each of us is now the chief agent of evolution.
What if…?

Which revolution will you lead?…
Support?… Join?… Promote?…

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Thank you. I hope this was helpful to you!

— Bill Jensen owes much to his fellow IBM Futurists and his other future-focused communities. Thank you!! #NewWaytoWork #FutureOfWork
Jensen Site, Twitter, FB, LinkedIn

Bill’s latest book, Future Strong, is about the five deeply personal choices each of us must make to be ready for all the disruptive tomorrows heading our way.