Why is the robot looking at me?

This past Sunday the seemingly inevitable march towards humanity's future domination by our robot overlords took a pretty significant if old-fashioned step - with a feature story on the venerable news magazine show 60 Minutes titled 'March of the Machines'.  In the piece, (video embedded below, email and RSS subscribers will need to click through to watch), CBS' correspondent Steve Kroft provided a well-balanced overview of many of the recent advances in robot technology, and how automation plays a critical and complex role in the nature and future of many types of work. 

60 Minutes - 'March of the Machines'

The piece, and supported by interview comments from 'Race Against the Machine' authors Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson from MIT argues that some, if not most, of the jobless nature of the economic 'recovery' of the last few years has been driven by increased automation and the reduction in human workers required in those industries where this kind of automation, (manufacturing, logistics, even in health care), has become more widespread.

The piece, if you follow these developments reasonably closely, doesn't break much new ground, although simply by virtue of being covered on a well-known and widely watched show such as 60 Minutes, will bring the issue of the potential threat robotic automation into greater awareness.

In addition to the 13 or so minute piece that aired on the show, (the video you see above), the show's website also posted a shorter piece, with some additional footage and some out takes, that has the segment host, Mr. Kroft interacting more with some of the robotic technology from the story, (embedded below, same click through message as before). 

60 Minutes - The Robot Waltz

This little piece of B-roll cuts a little closer to some of what will be the inevitable issues and concerns that will arise from people working more closely with robots and robot technology. Fear, anxiety, trepidation, unease and more - all summed up in Kroft's telling question - Why is he (the robot) looking at me?'

Why is the robot looking at you indeed.

If you take a few minutes to check out the clips, please let me know what you think - are those of us that keep writing, talking, and thinking about the changes in the nature of work due to these kinds of advances in robot technology over reacting?

Or should we truly be teaching our kids how to better relate to their future robot colleagues?

Great places to work are like great sports franchises

The nice people over at Glassdoor.com released their 'Top 50 Best Places to Work for 2013' list today, and as usual it is an interesting collection of all kinds of organizations - large and small, high-tech and old-school, and relatively young to long lasting.

The full list can be found here, as well as on the image to the right, (click the thumbnail for a larger view).Click to expand

The important aspect of the Glassdoor 'Best Places' list, unlike any of the other, similar types of lists that are around, is that it is determined not by some kind of expert panel of thought leaders, judges, or academics; but rather it is calculated from the company reviews and ratings about the companies that have been left on the Glassdoor.com site.  So these ratings are the closest equivalent to say, the Amazon.com book review or the Yelp restaurant review for the workplace.

But since I like to compare, evaluate, and assess just about everything through the prism of the world of sports - rather than give you a (lame) take something along the lines of 'Facebook is the Best Place to work again, I wonder what lessons you can learn from this', I thought I'd make it fun, (for me at least), and cherry pick a few big names form the list and juxtapose them with the big time sports team they seem the most like.  

Why do this?

Why not?

Here goes:

2. McKinsey & Company - Easy, these guys are the New York Yankees.  Big name, big reputation, have a kind of mystique about them and have had it for a long time. The name that the rest of the market compares themselves to.

4. Bain & Company - Again, pretty easy. If McKinsey are the Yankees, then Bain are the Boston Red Sox. Also have a big name, have had some success, but will always be looking up at the big dog on top.  It is fitting that McKinsey came in a couple of notches above Bain.

11. Careerbuilder - Not as obvious as the McKinsey and Bain comparisons, but I will go with the basketball's San Antonio Spurs.  Consistently good, with some legendary performance in the recent past. But also consistently overlooked and sometimes underrated despite their pedigree. Finally they both have a bit of 'I can't believe they are still relevant after all these years' kind of feel to them.

24. Trader Joe's - I will go not with one team with which to compare the eclectic grocer, I will go with an entire league - the National Hockey League (NHL), currently not playing their current season due to a labor/management dispute.  Like the NHL in sports, Trader Joe's is kind of a niche player in the grocery business, has a kind of weird appeal, but if it was gone hardly anyone would really miss it. Think about it - does anyone really need a Trader Joe's?  Or the NHL?

35. General Mills - Time for a football comparison. Let's go with the Green Bay Packers.  Midwestern organization, been around forever, everyone can recognize them by their brand, and kind of hard not to like, even if you don't care about cereal or sports. Feels like they will be a part of the landscape forever.

50. Starbucks - I'll go international on this one and call them Manchester Uniited from English football soccer. They are both ubiquitous, have a global presence and instant brand and name recognition, and both have the most annoying fans/customers that you will ever encounter.  Man United fans and Starbucks customers are really similiar - smug, kind of annoying, ('Quad-soy-no whip-light foam-hazelnut-extra shot'), and somehow think being a fan/customer grants them some kind of unearned social status.  Disclaimer: I am a Liverpool/Dunkin' Donuts person. 

That's it - I need to stop there, but I am sure you have your own ideas. There are 45 more companies on the list that need a sports team equivalent assigned to them, have at it in the comments!

Avatars and office decorations - sometimes little things matter

I've never been one for personal office decorations - family pictures, inspirational posters, desktop golf putting games, etc.  I always kind of felt like putting up pictures of the family or the pets on my desk or walls was sort of dumb - after all it was just work, I wasn't going to prison or on some kind of arctic expedition. I'd just seen all these people and animals in the morning, and I'd see them all again that night. I would put a calendar on the wall maybe, but that was about it.  And for me, that was perfectly normal and acceptable. If other folks wanted to 'personalize' their work environment with photos and other items, more power to them, I mean to each their own, right?

Except for some folks, and surprisingly even some leaders I have known over the years, my decision to leave my office free from flair was (at least sometimes), interpreted as a demonstration of a lack of commitment to the position and to the organization. For some folks, a colleague that doesn't take the time to put up a few pictures reads to them like someone that doesn't really intend to stay very long, and/or doesn't really care enough about the job to make the space more warm, welcoming, and personal. While I wish that workplaces would be free from these kind of petty and trivial situations, I am also enough of a realist or pragmatist to understand that is often not the case.

I thought about that former job of mine when I caught this recent piece on Business Insider, A Simple Illustration That Shows How Steven Sinofsky Wasn't a Team Player, about former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky, who up until a few weeks ago, ran the huge and lucrative Windows business. Apparently, and for reasons that remain unclear, (probably forever), Sinofsky did not join the rest of the Microsoft executive team by replacing their corporate website headshots with a cutesy Microsoft Kinect-style avatar.  Check out the image below, and notice how this lack of participation stands out.

According the BI piece, this seemingly small, unimportant detail spoke to a larger point, that it "symbolized Sinofsky’s reputation inside Microsoft — (he) focused intently on controlling the success of his own division, and not all that interested in playing along with the rest of the company."

Silly right?  I mean Sinofsky was an important, busy executive. He probably couldn't be bothered to supply an avatar image, (or more likely, just approve one), for the website. I mean, who cares anyway? What does that have to do with building great products?

I suppose nothing. But somewhere, someone, maybe more than a few folks, interpreted this as Sinofsky's lack of 'buy-in' to the team.  It's likely people that felt that way probably felt it all along, and this little example helped to cement their feelings about him.

Either way, and whether we like it or not, sometimes these tiny, insignificant things matter. It would not have killed me to put a few photos up in my office, heck, I could of just bought a couple of new frames and left the stock images they usually come with in them. No one would have known the difference.

But it would have at least made them feel like I was more like one of them, and I was indeed also part of the team.

And that is not insignificant.

Can there be a middle class if there are no middle class jobs?

If there was one term we heard more than any other here in the USA during the recent Presidential election contest it had to be 'middle class.'  

The 'middle class', sometimes depending on what group is doing the defining, consists of that large swath of average, normal, or 'regular' people - neither rich nor in poverty, and that have typically worked in a wide range of jobs that provided solid but not spectacular earnings, some potential for growth, were fairly stable, and crucially, were generally accessible to just about everyone who was willing to put in the effort.

In the election both sides talked a lot about the middle class, mostly coupled with words like 'save', 'strengthen', or 'protect'. While the opposition parties advanced different proposals and philosophies that they felt would be in the best interests of the middle class, there was at least consensus across the board that the welfare of the middle class is of significant importance to the health of the nation overall.

But no matter what political philosophy you take up with, one emerging reality about the overall job market seems to be this - that the recovery from the 2009 recession, (such as it is), has not extended to many of these 'middle class' type jobs. 

The below chart showing how 'routine' job levels have been impacted by recent economic recessions is from a piece by Economics professors Henry Siu and Nir Jaimovich titled 'Jobless recoveries and the disappearance of routine occupations' that paints a really grim future for the middle class and many of the professions that have typically been held by middle class workers.

Take a look at the data, with some additional comments/analysis to follow.

From the author's analysis of the data in the above chart:

Figure 1 highlights our simple point; it plots per capita employment in routine occupations (in log levels) from 1967 to the end of 2011. Since about 1990, there is an obvious 28 log point decline in routine employment.

What is equally clear is that this fall has not happened gradually over time but that the decline is concentrated in economic downturns. 92% of the 28 log point fall occurred within a 12 month window of NBER-dated recessions

Equally important to identifying the dramatic loss of these historically middle class 'routine' jobs is the researcher's conclusion that once lost, these jobs do not ever come back - as firms elect to offshore, automate, or increase technology investments to maintain overall output using a reduced number of employees.

Jobs on the 'high end' like software engineers, analysts, and economists, (lucky for the authors, I guess), as well as ones on the lower income levels like in retail and hospitality, have shown to be resilient, and nearly recession-proof. But the 'middle' and by extension the middle class - well not so much.

Last, I will leave with this conclusion from the piece, about where long-term job growth has occurred, and where it hasn't:

Thus, all of the per capita employment growth of the past 30 years has either been in ‘non-routine’ occupations located at the high-end of the wage distribution, such as software engineers and economists, or in low-paying jobs, such as service occupations like restaurant waiters and janitors. For this last set of occupations, this has been especially true in the past decade. 

A conclusion, if indeed accurate, (and it seems to be), that makes the recent blustering and posturing in the election about 'saving' the middle class, which mainly consisted of arguments over a point or two difference in marginal tax rates and simply calling the other guy 'wrong', a demonstration of a deep lack of understanding, or willful ignorance of the realities in the job market and the economy.

Saving the middle class is going to be a much more complex and difficult task, no matter which side wins elections.

And yes, this a kind of downer post for a Friday - you have to cut me some slack, I may have just eaten my last Twinkie.

Have a great weekend! 

The Future Performance Enhanced Workplace

We all know, and if you are like me, have probably grown sick of, the Lance Armstrong saga.

The long story is really long, (and about as boring as a 200 mile bicycle race), but the tale more or less breaks down like this:

1. Armstrong begins his cycling career and has some initial success

2. Armstrong is diagnosed with and successfully battles testicular cancer 

3. Armstrong wins more cycling championships - including 7 consecutive Tour de France titles

4. Lots of folks think he must have been 'cheating', i.e. using performance enhancing drugs or other banned non-natural methods to have such sustained dominance and excellence

5. Armstrong denies all accusations and charges - primarily relying on the fact that he never failed any actual drug tests

6. Eventually, and in the face of what they claim to be overwhelming evidence of Armstrong's guilt, the cycling authorities strip Armstrong of his cycling victories due to this (still alleged) cheating

Your reaction to the Armstrong story, and similar stories about the use of (usually) banned Performance Enhancing Drugs by athletes in other sports like baseball, football, and track might be to simply shrug it off as a 'sports' story, and not particularly relevant to the real world, and certainly to the real workplace.

Or you might be some kind of 'purist' and feel a measure of outrage, indignation, or disappointment in how Armstong, (allegedly), and other 'cheating' competitors have sullied the games they play, and made it difficult if not impossible for honest, 'clean' athletes to have a chance to compete on a level ground.

Or perhaps you may be a realist or cynic and conclude that Armstrong was a cheater, but so were all the other top racers, and that in order to compete at the highest levels of the sport that is what was required. If you feel that way, then you probably still respect Armstong's accomplishments - cheater or not, he did win all those races.

But what if the ethical and medical issues surrounding the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs move from the world of sports, and into more mundane and routine forms of endeavor, and more workplaces, maybe even one that looks like yours?

Check out a recent piece from the BBC titled 'Concern over 'souped-up' human race', which describes how Performance Enhancing Drugs might potentially play a more significant role in the workplace of the future.  From the BBC article:

Four professional bodies - the Academy of Medical Sciences, the British Academy, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society - say that while human enhancement technologies might improve our performance and aid society, their use raise serious ethical, philosophical, regulatory and economic issues.

In a joint report, they warn that there is an "immediate need" for debate around the potential harms.

Chairwoman of the report's steering committee Prof Genevra Richardson said: "There are a range of technologies in development and in some cases already in use that have the potential to transform our workplaces - for better or for worse."

There may be an argument for lorry drivers, surgeons and airline pilots to use enhancing drugs to avoid tiredness, for example.

But, in the future, is there a danger that employers and insurers will make this use mandatory, the committee asks.

An interesting take and one that poses new and more important ethical and moral questions in the workplace than whether or not Roger Clemens should be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Could you see a future workplace where your front line staff is enticed or even required to take or leverage some kind of supplement to be more alert or mentally sharp?

As the workforce gets older, could you envision the use of workplace Performance Enhancing Drugs become more prevalent?

And in this potential future Performance Enhanced workplace what about individuals that want to work 'clean?'

Or is this all just crazy talk?