Q. What is your book about?
The book is about the future of work and its turning out to be reasonably prophetic. It’s about new models of work, new ways of working, the changes in mindsets and how some revolutionary models of work have pre-existed in other countries for years. The key message of the book says that by using peer to peer models of production for both goods and services, we can increase our productivity by quite a magnitude and the fact is that we haven’t really innovated in our labor models since the industrial revolution. So it really explains why that’s all changing and some of the benefits that it brings.
Q. What has been the most effective innovation to help executives on
the move?
I think by far the most innovative creation we’ve seen over the past few years is presence, the idea you can know at any given time where you’re colleagues are and what they’re working on. And that tends to provide various signals to you as an individual about either dependencies you have on them or them on you. At the most atomic level that is probably one of the biggest innovations we’ve seen over the past few years but it is manifested in different ways, from being able to get Skype on your phone, to being able to use instant messenger clients on various machines both inside and outside the company. If you look at a lot of the major technologies on offer from large companies and corporates they all tend to be based around this idea of knowing exactly where your colleagues are, what they’re doing, and the meetings they’re going into. Social media comes in because they’re now able to publish both their thoughts and their output. So the impact of it is creating a degree of self organization that wasn’t previously possible with command and
control mechanisms.
Q. What’s next for technology in the mobile working field?
It was William Gibson who said “The future is already here - it’s just unevenly distributed”. I can’t see any major groundbreaking technologies that aren’t already here. What generally happens is basically the adoption curve. If I spoke to most people five years ago they would have said what’s a blog, an RSS feed? So I think a lot of the major technologies are already here, but the one technology that seems to be taking route in a big way is location
based technology.
Q. So how has this
manifested itself?
Well, it provides the ability to publish your location to a groups of friends so they can track you on various devices, so as long as you’re able to access it through a mobile or laptop you can start to essentially track people and that brings about all kinds of possibilities. In the U.S., for example, there is a big shift in young people caring for older people to check they’re taking their meds, and they do this through technology whereby you can send a signal to your local Wifi to tell you that your grandmother has opened the pillbox to take her meds. So pre-existing technology that’s used in innovative ways by people building innovative applications around things that already exist.
Q. Who is big in that sphere?
Google are in that space. A good one for execs on the move is Google Voice, and that’s quite powerful because if you’re a busy executive with a thousand contacts you get a lot of incoming calls, and Google Voice allows you to filter incoming calls so you can serve up a different voice message to friends or family and you can set the times you allow a call through, like having your own PA but in software. I see that as a major innovation for busy executives and entrepreneurs who can’t afford a PA and just want to be very efficient about the number of calls coming in. We live in an interrupt economy – the work we’re trying to do on a daily basis is interrupted, particularly by phonecalls so Google Voice is really being adopted heavily in the US.
Q. Exec Digital parent company White Digital Media is looking to build a business social networking tool. What advice would you give for this project?
The single most important piece of advice is that it’s not what you build, it’s your ability to change it. You have to keep in mind that things change, so you want to have the capacity or capability to say ‘next week something’s changed’. If you find out that people in the community need a new functionality and it needs to be build tomorrow, you need to be able to respond to that.
