🔽 This study by Mckinsey is going to be 10 years old in 2 days… Originally published on July 1, 2012!

“The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 per cent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks.”

🤯 It means that every week, out of 5 working days, we spent 1 day responding to our emails and 1 day searching for the relevant colleagues/information 🤯 Crazy!

Since the internet, we spend on average more time searching!
Why? because we have more content to search from and we haven’t increased actual collaboration much.

Technology can create a hive hub, a collective mind to share information and knowledge seamlessly but this is only possible if participants trust each other, in a more open and nonhierarchical structure.

In that context, I do believe distributed teams, remote first companies have a huge competitive advantage to leverage those social technologies and obtain that productivity gain

Remote first companies had/have to integrate those social technologies fully and I would not be surprised to see more and more companies to make the move to full remote.

#technology #collaboration #knowledgemanagement #knowledgesharing

(source: this 184 page 10 years old report is still a gold mine, haven’t found better yet… link in first comment.)

Report: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/technology%20media%20and%20telecommunications/high%20tech/our%20insights/the%20social%20economy/mgi_the_social_economy_full_report.pdf

When you’re sick, you rush to google and type your symptoms, you end up with more questions than answers. After reading for 2 hours, you have 2 options: either it’s the flu or cancer. The only way to cut the noise and limit the risk of misdiagnosis is to speak to a doctor…

2) Free data is not cheap!

My former company, Brainsfeed, was offering research reports on demand. We were exclusively using secondary research and I always wonder why companies were paying experts hundreds of dollars to have some answers they could potentially find online for FREE.

After running this Uber of research for years, I can tell you that dealing with free content is anything but free. It takes time to process, digest, verify — all of that without knowing you can actually find the insight.

Why do you pay 1000, 2000 per hour to call an expert?
Because it costs 10X more and takes 10x more time to process all the free data you can get by yourself. What’s your return on information?

(I am not saying you should always talk to an expert, in some cases you are better off paying someone to search and find some data points)

3) A head start is not a shortcut

People take pills to lose weight, and subscribe to those “book summaries” to get smarter fast, etc, etc — that’s all part of the same vein, taking shortcuts. We all know that those shortcuts are lies. To master the content of a book, you must read it — no shortcut. Otherwise, you have superficial knowledge — the belief that you know when you actually don’t (more dangerous than ignorance itself!) — Talking to an expert, might be seen as a shortcut. That’s not.

Experts will tell you where NOT to look and HOW to look. They help you navigate safely.

Subject matter experts are not your shortcut to knowledge, they are smart GPS, or smart lifts to bring you to the right location. You still need to think, still need to ask smart questions.

💡 Insightful graph from Scott Galloway — US Information sector is growing faster than the US growth. It shows clearly the beginning of the information age. 🤖

🏝️ As knowledge workers mainly move information around, they can do this task anywhere in the world. Just need wifi and a lappy.

This new paradigm enables a profound transformation, a new work culture where the location does not matter anymore. This signals the end of the office as the monopolistic place where things get done. 🏝️

“If you can do your job from Boulder, it can be moved to Bangalore.” Prof G.

We’re going to experience increased competition for knowledge workers. The office was one of the last moats…

🌐 Many announce the end of globalization, I would nuance. This is the end of industrial globalization only.

For the knowledge economy, the distribution of work will continue and web3 will play a big role in it.

#remotwork #knowledgeeconomy #web3

When I interview students, I often ask them if they know how much access they have and if they use the university portals…

The answer is always more or less the same: “no, the UX is bad, I mostly use google”

Students have no clue what they have access to. …

Some students come to realise how much value they had/have access to when they get hired as interns or start their professional careers.

I have had interviews with both clients/companies and students telling me the only reason they got hired or hired interns was because they had access to paywall-protected resources via university libraries. The value is REAL and TANGIBLE.

Big consulting outlets and corporates have a huge information ecosystem and pay millions too.

Meanwhile,

Independent management consultants, freelancers, SMEs, startups have no way to pay those amounts to maintain a healthy information ecosystem.

I do believe there is a problem worth solving here.

Is anyone working on this problem in my network?

Happy to chat!

Building companies in the knowledge economy is one of the best ways I found to have a constant reminder of how little I truly know.

Despite the thirst for knowledge. We can’t grasp it all… which is both frustrating and extremely exciting!

Knowledge is expanding the same way our universe does. And this speed is accelerating. While we came up with new tools to explore outer space (e.g Hubble, James Webb Space Telescopes), we are yet to see similar breakthroughs in the knowledge space… something big that changes everything! Maybe a way for a single individual to feel empowered by limitless knowledge, with a real sense of control, a feeling that you know how to get anything when you need it, and without the information overload that leads to severe anxiety… tricky equation!

When you orchestrate 800,000 experts globally, there are approximately 799,999 people that know more than you or at least know something you don’t. And you might benefit from talking to them. Hard to prevent you to think you are missing out on so many things! Curiosity can turn into chaos if the focus is not around to control it.

Another and better way to put it…

“Each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests . . . civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess. And one of the ways in which civilization helps us to overcome that limitation on the extent of individual knowledge is by conquering ignorance, not by the acquisition of more knowledge, but by the utilization of knowledge which is and which remains widely dispersed among individuals.” in The Use of Knowledge in Society — Friedrich Hayek — 1945

Among other things, the mountain guide told us that “the weights of our bags are the weight of your fears”. Better keep only the essentials to climb to 3000m!

Is life a long mountain hike? full of ups and downs?
Are we letting our fears dictate what possessions we shall carry?
Are minimalists free of fears?
Which knowledge shall we accumulate to manage those fears?
What information shall we digest?

One thing for sure, my years of experience in startups, market research, knowledge mngt etc are beyond useless in the mountains…

What we decide to learn or unlearn tell a lot about us. This is a daily decision that shape the direction we’re heading to!

It’s funny how our own perceived value changes based on the environment we are in. In the mountains, I feel stupid…

We can’t carry all knowledge in our primitive brain…
Daily choices pave the way to summits.

Our brains are our knowledge bags to hike life… Be mindful of what you decide to carry!

Picture: after reaching the Roc de Diolon at 3071m, we put our feet in the cold water. Simplicity.

We have about 2 billion websites
Yet, only 3% of all the information is available/indexed.
Most is beyond paywall, in the deep web.

How much of that content can we safely consume?
Are we drinking salty water without knowing it?

Water that we can drink is rare
Information that we can consume is rare too.

If we were to put all the data of the world into encyclopaedias, it would be 52 layers of books on the surface of the globe. Madness!

Meanwhile, only 3% of the information is available/indexed on google

Only 2% of the books at Harvard are borrowed every year…

50% of research papers are not read…

Yes, most of the things we’re producing are useless.

How can we extract the value out of the noise?

The only wise way to proceed is with strict and effective curation.

In the current information age, the value might no longer comes from creator but curators.

Khabane “Khaby” Lame became the most followed person on Tiktok. He is more a curator than a creator?

140M+ people are following him to see what he is going picked up on.

Many businesses are building information, data, knowledge business. They are mostly curators. They structure data, verify the reliability of the information and help individuals to leverage trustworthy knowledge!

Free information means you have to “curate” by yourself.
Curation is a cost…

Curation might be the most under-valued, under-rated yet super-valuable activity.