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How work itself has Changed

How work itself has changed:

(Excerpts from “Disrupt” -book by Dan Lyons)

“We are living in a period of huge economic transformation in which entire industries-retail, banking, healthcare, media, manufacturing are being reshaped by technology. As those industries change so do their approach to workers. Labour can be exploited by capital though.”

e.g. when employee status is denied (Uber).

Legacy companies get disrupted by new technologies, slowly going under, laying off workers.

Newspapers and magazines are dying all over the place- disrupted by internet.

Easy money, greedy investors and amoral founders are a recipe for “bubble” disasters as new tech companies create and design what companies want not what is in the interest of people.

Outbound marketing (cold canvas, sending messages out) has been replaced by inbound (draw customers to them by blogs, websites, and videos) marketing. Cloud computing companies sell to businesses rather than to customers. Software is its service. Customers do not install software on their own computer but instead connect to it over internet and pay a monthly subscription fee.

  • Tech companies have become like remote islands where people invent their own reality.
  • Astroturfing is the concept where “fake” visitors to sites is ginned up.
  • Even crappy content may sell as some of the biggest and best-known tech companies example twitter are actually totally dysfunctional. They seem to have survived in spite of management rather than because of it. The company may be valued in billions of dollars, yet Twitter has never reported an annual profit and has lost billions of dollars.
  • People in these tech companies live day to day. They do not know how to run a sales team. They do not have a sales process. They often do not even know what the product itself is going to be.
  • Most tech companies do some selling over the phone because it is cheap as they hire thousands of college students and cram them into call centers.
  • By the strange rule of “bubble” economics, companies do not have to generate a profit before they go public, they only have to demonstrate revenue growth! Get big fast, not profitable, is key.
  • A new kind of workplace has emerged, with culture codes, frat house parties and rhetoric about making the world better.
  • Some are not software companies but financial instruments that move money from one set of hands to the other.
  • Silicon Valley is a world where wealth is distributed unevenly and benefits accrue mostly to investors and founders. There was a time when companies felt obliged to look after their employees and to be good corporate citizens. Today that social compact has been thrown out. The result is, Silicon Valley has become a place where people are so performance driven that they live in fear of losing their jobs if they don’t get “hits”/ traffic.
  • Grow fast, lose money, go public is the new Silicon Valley model. People at the top are profiting from this game which they have rigged in their favour.
  • Companies do not last long. Years ago it was a 60 years lifespan.
  • The average CEO to worker income ratio is 300!
  • ” Meaningful lessness” and self-aggrandizement is at the order of the day. A new financial dichotomy has developed: make money by losing money then shift the risk to the public. The last dot-com bubble led to a crash that wiped out the entire stock market. This time the amounts are even bigger.
  • Silicon Valley, as is most markets linked to easy fiat money, is in a bubble. A bubble refers to a period when valuations of companies are no longer connected to their performance:
  1. Investments are overvalued
  2. A lot is invested into generating hype: hire publicists, make kooky videos, overpay to get into deals, PR people, journalists, researchers who produce blog posts, podcasts and market analysis reports, i.e. their own little content factory. As a result of an almost religious devotion to the company, people are tricked into thinking you have a huge audience/ hits/visits by sending out spam, click on link and subscribe bait.”

Comment:

Yes, the workplace has changed with new technology and digital pathways. However, as per Silicon Valley example, digital technology should be utilized as a tool not as a means to create wealth for upper-echelon players who use these merely to wash money through the system.

Key to digital marketing is to have a product and service launched from a platform of potent software. This will create a stable and smooth highway for marketing instead of the circus of gamblers dished up by Silicon Valley.

 

Reference: Digital Transformation Initiative Telecommunications Industry

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Celagenix

Celagenix® Group