The 12 Most Viewed Posts of 2012

The following blog posts received the top 12 pageviews at BrandedNoise in 2012.

In its upcoming January cover story titled ‘Better than humans’, the Wired magazine provides a compelling sneak peek into the future of our workplace / economy / and our lives where robots or industrial scale automations replace 7 in every 10 of our current jobs.

Image Source: Wired (Photo: Peter Yang)

One of the most insightful observations in this article is by a MIT professor Rodney Brooks the designer of Baxter – a new class of industrial robots designed to work alongside humans. He says:

Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within 5 miles of where they are needed.

The first thing that occurs to me is that soon enough Apple Inc., could finally do away with that painful euphemism of “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China” for a simple “Made in U.S.A” on its packs. Phew!

But it is only the tip of the ice berg. Some tectonic shifts seem to be underway at industrial scale – literally.

A recent story on The Economist about Foxconn: The Taiwanese-Chinese contract manufacturer that notably makes most of the iProducts, Kindles, PlayStations, Wii Consoles and Xbox etc, hints at those very shifts that are rumored to be already underway.

It is well known that besides Product Design, one of Apple’s key strengths is its Supply Chain. In fact with each iteration it does on its product lines (for e.g., the iPhone versions 2,3,3s,4,4s,5..) when there is only so much it can innovate through product design and specs, the obvious place where it would seek recourse would be its processes and supply chain – cut costs and drive margins. In other words, for every new iterative product version that Apple brings to market there is immense pressure on the company to optimize the basics ofits value chain. Now that’s when things start get interesting.

Tim Cook at a Foxconn Factory in China (Image Source: HuffingtonPost)

As the largest contract manufacturer in the world, Foxconn gets nearly 45% of its revenue from Apple, so if it has to keep growing and sustaining its lead position, it simply cannot risk alienating its biggest customer. So where do Apple and Foxconn focus their energies upon now? Arguably, one of the biggest innovations that Apple is intently working on is NOT necessarily some uber sexy orgasm inducing tech interface. Rather it is the less glamorous gears and guts of its value chain – these are innovations in:

Manufacturing Costs: Foxconn’s Chairman Terry Guo vowed to build 1 million robots and has hinted that the firm is just a year away from the big breakthrough – robotics that work at scale on commercial lines.
Transportation Costs: The article also acknowledges that there have been rumors about Foxconn planning to open a factory in the US.

Just come to think of the impact that these two changes in industrial production and transportation would have on Apple Inc, Foxconn in the short term as also on the economies of US and China in the long term.

Don’t miss the full Economist article (and don’t get misled by its title that seems to focus on Foxconn’s workers’ issues). The big picture is clear. It signals a dramatic yet a silent shift currently underway in the biggest manufacturing hubs around the world. A shift that can soon challenge the conception of developing markets as manufacturing hubs. A shift that can have a dramatic impact on assembly line jobs at the low end of the value chain. A shift that can eventually impact the very nature of economies around the world.

Interesting times. These are indeed.

High time then – the developing economies ought to seek more sustainable ‘business models’. Else let’s just say that things can only get even more interesting.

The Job Hunt – Part 3/3

Check out my previous two posts for the part 1 and 2 of this series.

For many job openings, getting the foot into the door – getting recruited – tends to be the most tricky part. Obviously different companies have different ways of going about this. 3 latest trends that I see playing out in the job hunt marketplace:

Recruitment by Resonance.
Recruitment by Challenge.
Recruitment by Algorithm.

This post shall be on the third trend.

Recruitment By Algorithm

In a recent interview with the renowned business psychologist, Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, he shares an interesting insight on the evolution of the internet. From a ‘consumer/user’ perspective, he says, there are three significant stages in the internet era. Loosely put they can be called as:

Knowledge Era: This was around 1998 when Google became mainstream. We searched for something on Google and the first hit magically turned out to be the answer to what we were looking for – this was a breakthrough from past search engines and a breakthrough in machine learning systems.
Social Era: This was around 2004 with the introduction of Facebook, when the focus shifted from retrieving information to ‘retrieving people’. Whereas Google connected consumers to information, Facebook (and other such Social media portals) connect consumers to each other and make ‘products’ out of consumers.
Social Knowledge Era: The third era, which has only just about begun, combines the two previous ones: it is the era where people can instantly capture and aggregate all the information on a given topic. And vice versa – all information about people out there can be aggregated and captured.

Welcome to the era where ego surfing – self googling — is now more important than updating your CV.

As a consequence of spending so much time online, we now leave traces of our personality everywhere. This social media foot print that we leave each single day (think of all the info that we leave on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Path, Renren, Orkut, Amazon, Gmail, Tripadvisor, or any multitude of other sites each passing day and you get the idea) manifests itself as a folio of Digital Reputation that we build over time.

Given this, and as aptly noted in the HBR blogpost, we are stepping into a time when employers are likely to find their future leaders in cyberspace owing to 3 reasons:

The web makes recruiting easier for employers and would-be employees
The web makes recruiting less biased and less clubby
Web analytics (speak of Big Data) can help recruiters become more efficient

Result: we will soon witness the proliferation of machine learning systems that automatically match candidates to specific jobs and organizations – not just based on our preferences/qualifications and experience (like the current day job portals) but on the basis of our digital footprint that is much bigger and more complicated that we can ever imagine.

For starters, how many times did you google your new boss or colleague? And that begets the question, how many times did you ‘investigate’ yourself and how many times did you reverse engineer your Digital Reputation…..in the recent past?