How to Operate in a Brave New World | How Companies and Employees Must Change

the focus of the presentation I'm going to give today is about how the world is changing and specifically how six societal and corporate trends are going to change the way we live and work and so when it comes to us as employees when it comes to companies how should we operate in this brave new world how can we succeed and I wanted to start by talking to you about this quote from Lancie Megan sands speaking on Darwin's Origin of Species the states it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives it is not the strongest that survives but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself and so as I continue through this presentation please keep this quote in mind and think about in your own specific situation if you believe me if you believe in the trends that I'm about to describe how will you be able to

adapt and adjust to this changing environment how will your company adapt and adjust to the changing environment that we will soon find ourselves in for a little bit of background in terms of my career in gaming that started out 10 years ago when I founded a mobile game studio called play views and from there did some consulting for large Asian mobile game publishers like small gates and renren games I then joined a company called thumb Plus and was able to spend some time in China specifically in Beijing and led the game development for a game called king of Avalon and then having worked in on the game development side I kind of shifted into publishing working both at Sega and NBCUniversal and some of you may also know me from some of the social media stuff that I do so I have podcast that I co-host with a few other folks with on the Deconstructor of fun and have the game makers YouTube channel as well but given

that let's go ahead and jump into the presentation and I'd like to start with the key societal and corporate trends that I had mentioned and specifically there are actually three societal trends want to talk about and then three corporate trends I would like to discuss on the societal trends it first starts with the proliferation of social media which may sound obvious but I'll go into that into more detail secondly what I call the emergence of the digital footprint third work-life integration in on the corporate trend side the rise of globalization and communication fifth the externalization of the enterprise and finally the impact of culture and values so now upon hearing these trends part of what you may now be thinking as well jeez these six trends are sounds really boring or this is kind of obvious but please bear with me please walk through a couple of these trends with me because I do think that what you will find is that there are implications that are a lot more relevant than you may

otherwise think but let's go ahead and jump into this first trend around the proliferation of social media and again we start with something that does feel and sound very obvious that the growth of social media has been very dramatic and it's been increasing dramatically to the point where we can almost expect everyone to be using social media and the point is is that now we now have not only this dramatic proliferation across everybody but that there is this one to n and potentially one to everybody connection that exists because of this social media fabric that exists in our society and when we think about two major consequences of the social media proliferation there's really two points that I want to make as far as this trend is concerned the first has to do with increased transparency that now because of this connectedness that we have that whatever you do has a potential to be very open and public and so make sure

you can live with the publicity of any actions that you have and secondly is emergence of personal brands and when I talk about personal brands I don't mean just very famous social influencers but if we think about brands a little bit more generally right now think about how consumers think of brands generally speaking consumers think of brands at two levels either the company level or at the product level that's how consumers typically think of brands but what's starting to happen when we think about the proliferation of social media that went to end connection is that that gives us the ability to break through the company level to break through the product level and to really have a connection with the people that are a part of the company the people that are making the product now does this happen well when we look in other industries for example entertainment it does so people aren't just interested in the movie or the

television show they're interested in who is the director who are the actors and at that level in that industry that occurs that these actors these directors get huge followings on social media because that level of fandom has broken through the product and to the people making the product now I believe that this trend will actually become more generalized in that the tension is going to shift to the people making the product and so let's dive into each of these areas in a little bit more detail starting with increased transparency with a few quotes from the very famous social media expert in entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk and so two things that he talks about that happens with this increased transparency is that one good intentions become very important and so he states quote in a world with all

these social networks everything is transparent in an environment like this people who have good intent are going to win and people who come from a bad place are going to lose and so what we've been seeing whether it's bad actors being exposed on Twitter as part of the me2 movement or just general bad behavior that's been posted on Facebook today every single person has a mobile phone and can record and distribute accessible to everybody in the world any kinds of bad behavior that actually occurs in the second point that Gary Vaynerchuk makes is around authenticity and so he states quote the truth is people who are fake will never last the best strategy for building a personal brand is to be a hundred percent you without watering down your personality in any way and so again implications in terms of the transparency is one to be to have good

intentions and two to not try to fake it to really be yourself and now let's talk about the personal brands aspect right and just more generally speaking I think if we think about what social media is doing allowing this kind of personal connection that hasn't existed before and I mentioned this ability for social media to pierce through the company layer to pierce through the product layer to the person not only kind of social media stars not just people in the entertainment industry but other people that work on products that people love are going to get the same level of exposure that a lot of these social media guys are getting today and when we think about what's happened now because of YouTube because of Twitter because of Instagram and in the slides I show for example ninja who has over 14 million followers and has become so influential because of twitch in YouTube that he was paid 50 million dollars to stream on

mixer instead of twitch the guys like Jonathan Blow who may only have 120,000 followers but because she's so well-respected that he has a very strong audience and a lot of people that really pay a lot of attention to him and Kylie Jenner who because of her social media following has been able to become a billionaire right and create Kylie cosmetics which I think now is valued even more but I think at the time was valued at 1.2 billion dollars and this is all from the power of creating a personal brand all from the power though it's been enabled by a lot of these social networks that have proliferated our society to you such a strong degree so now I want to talk about the second trend which is the emergence what I'm calling the digital footprint and I wanted to start this conversation by talking about the comparison of a resume to what I'm calling the digital footprint and today a lot of people have

based job interviews in the ability to evaluate in hire talent at companies based upon this essentially piece of paper and what I've noticed is that in my own experience when it comes to resumes one a lot of resumes did not have enough information about candidates in that also when I looked at a lot of resumes and when I discussed a lot of points in resumes with candidates very often times there was a false necessity that weren't even true and so my belief is that this thing that I call a digital footprint is going to be more important so what do I mean by that so for me the last three jobs that I got were because I had this blog this game makers blog which I have now more focused on YouTube but that because of a lot of the stuff

that I had written in terms of in games industry that that had a disproportionate impact on me being able to get the jobs that I got you know in addition to that when I mean by digital footprint or all of your work all of your thoughts your ability to show your skill as a potential future employee now whether that's a blog a YouTube channel a podcast or stuff that you have on Instagram Twitter or LinkedIn I believe that that increasingly is going to be a bigger determinant in terms of employers evaluation of you as an employee relative to this thing that we call a resume now I'm not saying that the resume is going to be completely worthless but in my view so this is a conceptual drawing that I'm showing my prediction for the digital footprint is that increasingly what I'm calling the digital footprint is going to have a stronger and stronger impact in terms

of candidate evaluation than this resume which began oftentimes is very false and does not paint a full picture of a candidate relative to actual projects that you've worked on actual thoughts that you have that you've written down that you've digitized that you've put into a format and into the internet that people can access and evaluate and I'm actually quite shocked when I look at candidates and I evaluate people how few people have a blog or how few people have written down their thoughts and have posted them but I will say that anytime someone does have a blog or a YouTube channel or podcast I've always went and researched what they have done so kind of tying back the first trend to the second trend I want to talk about actually talk about the PageRank algorithm so in 1996 Larry Page

developed the PageRank algorithm which was it was essentially the basis of the search engine at that time that we now know as Google and just looking at Wikipedia in terms of how this PageRank algorithm works Wikipedia describes it as follows PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is the underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites in this PageRank algorithm was essentially the basis so back in the day you have like Alta Vista like us you have all these search algorithms but really it was this algorithm that really was the basis of competition it was the key driver that allowed Google to compete against all the other sort of directory based and other types of search engines that existed at that time so why do I bring this up why do I talk about PageRank

this algorithm for websites well I like to direct your attention to the diagram that picks conceptually and graphically PageRank for websites and now look at the diagram that shows you the social graph and if you can notice you notice the similarities and in fact conceptually these are just nodes a website is a node with links people because of the social networking and social graph infrastructure are just nodes with links and so my argument is that the more of a digital footprint you have the more connections to you the quality and quantity of those links based upon your digital footprint is going to give you a rank and I would submit to you that this already exists to some degree I believe that in facebook you have a number I believe that in LinkedIn you have a number

YouTube definitely has an algorithm for your YouTube channel and so this notion of being ranked based upon your social graph based upon your digital footprint is something that I believe is going to become increasingly important and relevant in the future so when I think about my own activities from a digital footprint perspective I would argue that it's actually a great time to be building up a social media following but as with all platforms the earlier the better and you do need to be consistent so on the left hand side I show the Deconstructor a fun podcast growth so since we started this kind of new segment on the Deconstructor podcast you know it's grown very quickly I think we're at like 200,000 listens now but like the growth has been quite dramatic

and the advantage was that we got into podcasting much earlier than other folks on YouTube it's been a slog I've noticed that the more it's very slow but steady growth I'd say it's actually plateaued for me a little bit it's been a lot harder but this is a platform I think where I'm gonna have to play the long game but the point is is that you have to pick the channels that make this that make the most sense for you I think you have to be consistent and I think you have to invest over time for this digital footprint to drive value for you but just to also give you a sense of how how powerful this can be so this is a YouTube video that I created it was an interview with a friend of mine who works at Riot Games that talks about product management at Riot Games and you can even see that I've been struggling with YouTube and I'm very open about that and you can see that the growth on YouTube was like very very

flat but even with a very small audience you can get dramatic reach and so I show here in this slide kind of the reach that this post has had after I promoted it on LinkedIn and so you can see here that this post got over 300 people from riot that had viewed this post and you we've got a lot of relevant people from Riot to Electronic Arts to Blizzard to Amazon to Google to Rovio that checked out this post and you know certainly many people watch the video one of the first videos that I did on YouTube has over 5,000 views in so I just want to underscore just how powerful even my youtube channel which is you know very small how powerful that can be like how many people will attend a GDC conference will you get 5,000 people to view your

talk even with a small focused audience that you can actually reach very many relevant people that could potentially have a dramatic impact on your career and your future okay so what are the implications of this PageRank model against people or employees so to kind of concluding thoughts here is one I believe you should start now start building your personal page rank now because if it's anything like when I'm trying to do on YouTube it takes years and even the Podcast which is now again it's been growing very very significantly that's something I've been working on for you know almost two years and I think the second thing is to do real valuable work my point being that the more actual real work real thinking projects you've worked on that you do and document the better for you to start building this personal PageRank

I believe these social networks and the right one is going to be different for every person but what you post how you post which challenge you use is that's going to be personal but these platforms should be a channel for you to communicate and distribute information about your personal value all right so the third trend is work-life integration and when we look at a lot of the headlines today in fact we hear more about work-life balance and so the headlines books Harvard Business Review often talk about work-life balance and how important work-life balance is for your personal and mental health and things like that but on the flip side in 2010 I was able to attend a talk by the CEO of Evernote at that time a guy by the name of Phil Lydon who talked about a completely

different concept that he called work-life integration and the point I want to make here is that you know one of the things that he argued for is that sometimes balance is not actually good in that instead of trying to run away from from work why not integrate your personal life and your work life one of the quotes that he had is is as follows I don't believe in work-life balance I don't think those are two things that you balance against each other I believe in life's work I believe that you work on something that's sufficiently epic and that's what you want to spend your time on and so when you think about it I not to take anything away from people who do believe in work-life balance and that's a personal choice but on the flipside I believe that you should also consider the option of spending your work on something that you believe in so much that you will also

spend hours outside of normal working hours in that you love it so much that your personal life and your work life that that boundary disappears because it's more efficient it's more efficient to blend your personal and work life and you know what's the argument for why you should completely separate the two if you love your work so much it shouldn't make a difference now I want to also talk about some other related trends to consider in light of work-life balance and really three things first is this concept of 10,000 hours and so in the slide you can see a picture of Billy Eilish the famous singer and her brother Phineas and that picture that you see that says 10,000 hours was written on top of Phineas's bedroom door that he looked at that every day because that's what he used to drive himself to become so talented at such a young age that he

loved what he did so much and he practiced so much he put in the work and the effort and so one of the questions that I have for you is that given the world that we're living in if you have people like that putting in their 10,000 hours there are 20,000 hours there however many hours how can you be competitive in the second trend is that we are living in a world of increasing complexity and competition and so the feature is Kevin Kelley in an essay that he wrote talks about how over time this is kind of like a universal trend that complexity increases and with increasing complexity is 9:00 to 5:00 does that make sense in order to compete given such depth and such complexity in the world we live in it's going to be harder and harder to just have that 9 to 5 in

my opinion and finally is the impact of AI and machine learning on jobs that there was a technology created by Google the contact center AI and it was found that in a study that the artificial intelligence was able to serve customers better in terms of phone support than actual people so the point I wanted to make here in the context of work-life balance work like integration and again I don't want to take anything away from people who desire work-life balance but in the face of the requirement for depth higher competition and potentially fewer jobs because a lot of jobs are limited by AI work-life balance may not be a luxury that everybody has and so just keep that in mind when you consider work-life integration relative to work-life balance so some concluding thoughts on all of

this as one I really think you need to find something you love because if you love it you'll be able to build depth and expertise over time you'll be able to really really spend time with it and it won't feel like work secondly I do believe that greatness does require imbalance to do anything truly great in life you have to really focus on it I think it's a fantasy to think that you can just try and dabble in something and be great at it I don't think that exists and then finally eliminating inefficiency so my point here is that in the face of the you know depth complexity etc that for you to be more efficient and effective you're going to have to eliminate inefficiency everywhere so whether it's ineffective meetings how you manage your time even how you dress to work like ties actually don't make any sense at all it's just a waste of time right and so all the unnecessary stuff in your

life if you eliminate that that can also help you live a little bit more of a balanced life and that'll give you more time to spend towards developing the depth and expertise that you need to be more competitive so I want to now shift over to the remaining three it's the corporate trends as we've now wrapped up the societal trends and those three trends are the rise of globalization and communication externalization of the enterprise and the impact of culture and dollars so let's jump into the rise of globalization and communication so I wanted to open with this question of what is the impact of increasing globalization and communication on companies today what you think the key implications of these two key trends are in in my view it's really three things first increased competition globalization opens up competition to anyone around the globe in that with increased

communication the ability to become aware of and to compete for different projects globally it becomes that much easier and even for them when we think of a platform that's a global platform like for example mobile phones that from a single on a single platform a developer can creat in applications that's access from anybody globally so we have that first impact in terms of increased competition the second is emergence of highly efficient and distributed teams which I will talk about and the third is information linkage which I'll save for a little bit later in this presentation but let's now talk about the emergence of highly efficient and distributed teams now last year in August there was a company by the name of seriously that was acquired for 275 million dollars by play tikka there were a mobile gaming studio and I profile them here as a model of this move towards highly efficient and distributed teams and so they are an example of a company that

took advantage of geographically advantageous regions and distribute their companies across these different regions for maximum efficiency and effectiveness and you know there were other reasons why seriously was successful but I do think a key area of structural and competitive advantage came from the fact that first in terms of the Finland team they were able to have most of their development come out of Finland which has lower salaries it also has government tax credits and has a highly efficient and well skilled labor force to make mobile games and then the other part of the company be located in Los Angeles so certainly California is a lot closer to first party platforms you have access to a lot of great user acquisition talent and they were located in LA close to the major Hollywood studios because in addition to the original IP they were developing B wanted relationships with major IPs and brands and so I think that

increasingly this type of a structure taking advantage of geographical differences and regional advantages is going to become increasingly popular and all of this is enabled again because of these things the the increase in terms of globalization that increase in terms of communication and we think about the impact of this cost structure advantage for example when we talk about a company seriously we see that it's pretty significant that if we were to look at the average software engineering salary by location and compare San Francisco to Helsinki well it's on the face of it not super dramatic it's you know 40s about 45 percent of San Francisco but when you then factor in the tax breaks from the government it becomes about the forth of the cost of San Francisco now compare that to Chang's out China and that's 18

percent so you know let's say 20 percent so about one-fifth the cost of San Francisco and we can just look at the public financial statements of some of the from a gaming perspective companies like Zynga and glue which have SF based offices and look at their R&D spend against bookings and we can see that these companies which have headquarters in San Francisco relative to their offshore counterparts like Nexon Rovio gung-ho and ncsoft are half of that so my point is is that these companies that are able to take advantage of geographical cost advantages are going to have a significant cost structure advantage and so all things being equal who wins with a four to five x advantage and cost structure so it's like baseball let's say we gave one team twelve strike said that relative to another team that gets

only three strikes at bat well this is a pretty significant advantage and so all things being equal over time I think this is an advantage that cannot be overcome and now I wanted to talk about externalization of the enterprise so you know from the advent of the internet and we take it back to 1995 and when we look at the structure in the way that workflow and processes worked in corporations back in 1995 we saw that almost everything was internalized so whether it was the workflows or processes with strategic partners and customers when it came to applications employees everything was on site on-premise and captured within the company but with the internet with the improvement of security protocols and with increasing globalization communication what we found was that increasingly what we had were a lot of

these a lot of these functions starting to get externalized and so whether it's applications that became increasingly web-based and delivered from the cloud whether it's employees that weren't necessarily on-premise that could work at different offices that could work from home could work in a different office geographically and the workflows information sharing and data with strategic partners and customers also became increasingly externalized and so I believe that this trend that occurred between 1995 to 2015 will experience a second wave of externalization and so I'm arguing that what we will now see with some of the trends that I've talked to with the proliferation of social media with personal brands with people talking about how they work and with

globalization communication the last the last trend that I talked about how many of you are on slack channels with a group of your peers in similar functional roles sharing information I'm arguing that what's likely next in terms of the second wave of externalization are going to be things like processes best practice strategy that increasingly it's going to become very difficult to keep these things a secret and locked within a specific corporation so if this is true if this trend continues then the key question that remains here is then what remains as core strategic advantage within the corporation and so a couple of implications that I'd like to conclude this section about is one feature corporate identity what keeps a company together what does it actually even mean to be a company when so much is going to be increasingly externalized

and secondly how will you retain employees for many companies this they will only be a loose organizational structure that pays the bills so those companies that want to retain their employees and create value are going to have to dig deeper into what it means to be a company and now we come to our final trend the impact of culture and values now I wanted to start this section by first thinking back in terms of the early work environments right so when we think about you know the manufacturing area in the early 1900s in the old days the culture of an organization in those days actually didn't matter it didn't really matter that much because the work in the corporate environment were actually very simple so you had simple tasks you had highly structured work you had this complete separation of work and home life and work from different employees was relatively

indistinguishable on the factory floor right but today the increasing complexity of the environment in which we work the increasing complexity of the products and services being worked on creates a massive challenge for management and around coordination so the impact of increasing competition and complexity includes things like one for the corporation for employees you have to work harder and smarter you need good communication you need to eliminate politics and personality clashes you need a system or a number of systems delivering competitive advantage you need to understand where the market is going you need to understand very complex products very deeply you need processes and practices for complex design and development you need all these different things being driven off of the back of increasing competition and complexity and so the question then becomes what is the solution how do you deal with the growing requirements from increasing competition and complexity

what is the solution and I would argue that the solution to all of this is actually culture and values as a corporate foundation and I would submit to you that if you read no other business book in your life read principles by Ray Dalio that if you believe me in terms of some of these other trends that are happening with the increasing external ization what remains at the core of what it means to be a company and that is exactly this the principles right and so why why culture and values because as Ray Dalio states and principles companies fundamentally are just two things culture and people and so culture on values is the engine upon which a company will build and grow and culture unlike information cannot be easily taken or stolen by your

competitors right so culture and values helps organize manage and motivate teams to perform to their best capability and this is what is going comprised strategic competitive advantage over the long term okay so those were the six trends and just in terms of a quick recap the three societal trends proliferation social media emergence of the digital footprint work-life integration and three corporate trends the rise of globalization communication externals is externalization of the enterprise and impact of culture and values and so another thought I wanted to leave you with is that just kind of taking it back to the very first message that quote about Darwin's Origin of Species right and when we think about technology technology actually over time changes exponentially it changes very quickly but take that in comparison to people and I would say that when it comes to

people that people change very very slowly people are very difficult to change and so if you believe in the trends I described how will you change how will your company change what will you do so let's take it back to Leon see Megan says quote it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives and it is not the strongest this device but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds himself Thanks [Applause] [Music] [Music]