Silicon Valley - Old Guard, New Guard

Last week was a very good week for me.  It was the epitome of academic life, where old and new are encountered, and both bring insights.  On Wednesday, I had the extreme privilege of meeting Tom Peters over lunch here at the U of A Business School.  An affiliate of great universities and scholar himself, Tom made himself available for an open and free-flowing exchange of ideas about economic policy, management education and New Zealand's comparative advantages in a global marketplace, especially for talent.

At one point in the conversation, I asked Dr. Peters what he thought about the rise and rise of new forms of connectivity, especially in relation to small isolated economies.  Instead of his usual rapid fire response, he stared at me, in thoughtful contemplation and then said, 'I am not 100%, but I am about 85% buying the act,' which is his way of saying that he thinks it's real.  He then made the connection between the notion of 'social business' and its potential impact on conventional business models.  The main thing is that social business is still about 'people' and Tom Peters has been advocating the power of people ever since his most famous book (with Robert H. Waterman), In Search of Excellence, was published in 1982.

That the most prolific and well-recognized management guru of our age, who lived for 35 years in Silicon Valley, believes in the new age of business based on social and technical connectivity should not surprise us.  However, I think that Tom is speaking for a lot of the 'old guard,' who 'get' the new stuff, even if the new stuff is represented and carried forth by a 'new guard' of super-young, super-smart, super-charged talent, all hoping to make their mark in 'their time.' We may not be getting (or want to get) jobs at the coolest places to work, but we are nonetheless on the sidelines, supporting (with our hearts and wallets) the brash and brilliant young technorati.

On Friday, I had the great pleasure of having Emma Dawson, Director of Leadership Development at LinkedIn join my Executive MBA classroom via WebEx to discuss the culture and values of LinkedIn and its drive to develop the best leaders on the planet. I am very proud to have worked with Emma, first as an undergrad and then as supervisor of her first Masters degree. The class was then also joined by local entrepreneur, Duncan Shand, co-founder of Young & Shand, a New Zealand-based communications company building a global business. As Emma points out, hyper-growth companies like LinkedIn and Young and Shand see leadership development, not as a luxury, but as an imperative.  The link here is that leadership development is what Tom Peters has espoused—evangelized--for years. 

Over the weekend, the 'old guard, new guard' divide in Silicon Valley was explored (exposed) in a long, but well-crafted essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Yerin Lu (edited by Deane Robinson), called ‘Tale of Two Valleys.’ The on-line version, which is attracting lots of searing criticism, is entitled, ‘SiliconValley’s Youth Problem.’  But, does Silicon Valley have a youth problem, or is this sub-set of industry simply, finally heeding the call from management gurus and management scholars over the past 3 decades to take organizational culture and values (including fun and play, as well as nerdy obsession with detail) seriously? 

Critics of Lu’s article bemoan the fact that too many talented software engineers are choosing to write yet another derivative social check-in app, rather than say help make healthcare.gov work better.  And, yes, one cringes at the elite East Coast old boy networks that are being replicated in the otherwise meritocratic and relatively democratic ‘melting pot’ of the Valley.  Lu himself talks of West Coast internships where he encounters and hangs out with friends from Harvard.

Lu himself also acknowledges the angst that his generation feels about purpose and meaning, or the lack thereof, in the quest for another Farmville or sexting app, as shown in this excerpt:

“Yet for all the glitz and the glory and the newfound glamour, there is a surprising amount of angst in Silicon Valley. Which is probably inevitable when you put thousands of ambitious, talented young people together and tell them they’re god’s gift to technology. It’s the angst of an early hire at a start-up that only he realizes is failing; the angst of a founder who raises $5 million for his company and then finds out an acquaintance from college raised $10 million; the angst of someone who makes $100,000 at 22 but is still afraid that he may not be able to afford a house like the one he grew up in.

Tech is fun now, deliriously so, but this fun comes with a built-in anxiety that it must lead to more. As an engineer, coding should be your calling, not just a job, so you are expected to also do it in your time off. Interviewers will ask about side projects — a Firefox browser add-on maybe, or an Android version of your favorite iPhone app — which are supposed to indicate your overflowing enthusiasm for building software. Tech colloquialisms have permeated every aspect of life — hack your diet, your fitness, your dates — yet in reality, very little emphasis is placed on these activities. In a place with one of the best gender-ratios in the country for single women, female friends I talk to complain that most of the men are, in fact, not available; they are all busy working on their start-ups, or data-crunching themselves. They have prioritized self-improvement and careers over relationships.”

Lu's clever peers are not immune to the superficial follies of youth with too much money and privilege, but they are also likely to be the next generation who can make a difference in engineering (according to Lu, 39% of Harvard’s CS50 introductory computer science course are now women, something Marissa Mayer would be pleased to hear), organizational and, dare I say, American culture.  

Coming back to Tom Peters, for all its obliviousness in some sectors and regions, Tom suggests it is hard to write off America when you consider how Silicon Valley continues to represent the pinnacle of not just innovation, but also of organizations (large and small) where the human spirit soars.  I think both Tom Peters (‘old guard’) and Emma Dawson (‘new guard’) would agree that the tradition of social as well as technical excellence in Silicon Valley bridges and transcends any ‘old guard, new guard’ divide.   

What is hyper-connectivity?

While the Economist picked up the theme of technology's impact on jobs at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, the BBC focused on another major concept that seems to both unite and challenge all developed and developing nations.  That concept is 'hyper-connectivity.'

But, what is 'hyper-connectivity'?

In his article, 'When machines take over: Our hyperconnected world,' Tom Brewster of the BBC writes, 'What is hyperconnectivity? A term coined by scientists studying person-to-person and person-to-machine communication in networked organisations, referring to use of multiple means of communication, such as email, instant messaging, phone.'

The stats are impressive, as is the graphic of the 'Hyperconnectivity Range,' which I have posted outside my office door.

- By 2020, the number of smartphones, tablets and PCs in use will reach about 7.3 billion.
- 2 billion 'things' were connected to the Internet in the year 2000.  Today there are 10 billion. By 2020, there are expected to be 30 billion.
- 81% of companies have or are planning to have a machine-to-machine (M2M) initiative; 45% of those are motivated by cost savings.
- 40% of companies have a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy, but 79% of those have not trained employees about the risks of BYOD.
- 52% of consumers have heard of wearable technology; one in three are likely to buy wearable tech, like Google Glass.

Brewster goes on to suggest that, 'We are entering the age of hyperconnectivity, an era where billions of workers worldwide will have multiple devices plugging them into the internet 24:7. Many of the tech gurus attending the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Cisco boss John Chambers, are raving about the opportunities this ‘Internet of Things’ will deliver for businesses, with machines talking to each other, controlling environments and delivering automated instructions. There are significant possibilities but also risks.'

There are indeed risks associated with hyper-connectivity, which is one reason why defining our era or world as 'hyper-connected' is problematic; 'hyper' means 'too much' and should therefore be associated with the risks of too much connectivity.  The other reason is that, notwithstanding the trends and the hype, not every part of the world is 'hyper' connected.  We still spend a fair amount of time over-coming 'hypo' connectivity (blank spots in mobile coverage, poor Internet speeds, low battery life, fragmented communications infrastructure).

Being one of the social scientists Brewster refers to, my colleagues and I have defined 'hyper-connectivity' as follows:

'Hyper-connectivity means too much connectivity, such as information overload, attention-taxing workflow and interruptions in collocated spaces. … Hyper-connectivity does not necessarily undermine performance, as individuals and teams often cope and some even thrive on constant contact. There does come a point, however, where individuals and/or groups can no longer successfully complete tasks or maintain processes effectively due to the inefficiency associated with information overload, invasive connective media and/or social contact.  We suggest that teams (this article was based on our research on distributed teams) must work to achieve a threshold of requisite connectivity in order to be productive, but simultaneously avoid hyper-connectivity, which can have a negative impact on performance and productivity.' (Kolb, Collins and Lind, 2008, 'Requisite connectivity: Finding flow in a not-so-flat world.' Organizational Dynamics, 37(2), pp. 182-183).

We define requisite connectivity as, 'the state of having robust and reliable communication and/or transportation media/modes, with operable alternative work-around options, so that contact may be initiated or maintained at the rate, richness and intensity that we desire for a given task or social outcome.' (Kolb, Collins and Lind, 2008, pp. 182).

The point here is that, in an era of dramatically increasing connectivity, understanding states of connectivity matters more than ever.  As we have also noted, 'States of connectivity reflect 'how much' connectivity exists in a setting.  As with other resources--say, for example, money--simply noting that one has connectivity or not is generally less informative than determining how much of the resource (i.e., how much money or connectivity) one has at a given point in time.' (Kolb, Caza and Collins, 2012, 'States of connectivity: New questions and new directions.' Organization Studies, 33(2), p. 268).

Given the stats listed above, there is little doubt that connectivity will remain on the agenda of thought leaders as well as the practical folks trying to make sense of a world where sometimes it does feel like 'machines are taking over.'

Facebook turns 10: What will the next 10 years be like?

As Facebook turned 10 years old this week, you have to be impressed by what this company/movement has done to our social world. See, for example, Hanna Ingber's blog post by the New York Times Bits Blog about the 'transformative power of Facebook.'

But, you have to also wonder what the FB of the future will be like?  And, will it even be Facebook that continues to serve such a key role?  For hints, see the Mashable stats on how many teens are leaving (or avoiding) Facebook.  Other media allow them (pre-teens and teens) on earlier and since FB is what their parents are doing, they want to be different.  Plus, Facebook's interface is not as simple as others.  If Microsoft would have learned the lesson of simplicity say 20 years ago, or even 10, it might not be in the shape it is in today.  Once folks have seen simplicity, there is no going back.

There are also cultural alternatives to Facebook. See, for example, consider the massive uptake of Weixin or WeChat in China and around the world. See article.

In 10 years, social media has gone from the curious fringe to the mainstream of day-to-day life for billions of people around the world.  Platforms like Facebook have taught and allowed us to share our thoughts, feelings and photos with those we love and with those we don't even know and those we probably will never meet.

However, just as Marshall McCluhan declared 40+ years ago, 'the medium is the message,' which means the choices we make about 'how' we communicate--i.e., through which social media platform we communicate--are as important, if not more important, than 'what' we say or share with others. That is why Facebook will continue to be the standard social media platform for a while, and why new platforms will no doubt emerge.

Technology's Impact on Jobs

Skiing at Alta, Utah last week I noticed that RFID (radio frequency identification) cards have replaced traditional paper lift passes, which had to be scanned by humans like farmers counting stock.  The question that went through my mind in those winter mountains is this.  Is it better to have a simple, seamless passage through an RFID reader gate than have a (generally young) person standing in the cold doing what could be seen as boring 'mindless' work?

Of course, as most of us know, such jobs allow so-called 'ski bums' to support their passion.  And, from the resort's point of view (many ski areas still employ staff to scan tickets), the scanning transaction provides a valuable customer service interaction.  The staff member welcomes the skier to the mountain, sometimes with a smile and often nowadays with background data, including your name, which is a nice touch.  It personalises the interaction. You are no longer a stranger in a strange land.

That same week, those gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (possibly while skiing) were discussing why an economic recovery may not bring back more jobs, in large part because investment is increasingly being focused on capital rather than labor.  See, for example, the McKinsey article on, 'Why every leader should care about digitization and disruptive innovation,'  which includes this excerpt from a conversation between James Manyika, a director of McKinsey's Global Institute and Andrew McAfee, from MIT Sloan School's Center for Digital Business and the author of The Second Machine Age.  They begin talking about digitisation and carry on to discuss the impacts of technology on employment.

Disruption everywhere

"James Manyika: The reason disruptive technologies are very important to all leaders—whether they’re CEOs or policy makers—is because, for the first time, we now have technology affecting every single sector of the economy. Every sector, whether it’s retail, financial services, shipping, manufacturing, and even agriculture, now takes inputs and uses technology to drive much of what it does.

Andrew McAfee: By now we’re all familiar with digitized text, digitized audio, and digital video. One of the profoundly interesting and important things going on these days is that lots of other information is being digitized. Our social interactions are being digitized, largely thanks to all the different social networks and social media that we have. The attributes of the physical world are being digitized, thanks to all of these sensors that we have for pressure, temperature, force, stress, strain, you name it. Our whereabouts are being digitized, thanks to GPS systems and smartphones.

James Manyika: We also have other forms of digitization. Physical products and goods continue to be quite physical but are coming wrapped in data. Think about your container on a ship that’s tagged, and it turns out that even the actuarial models for how the tracking of that is valued and insurance contracts are constructed is different whether the thing is tagged and tracked versus not.

Andrew McAfee: If this encroachment really is taking place faster and more broadly than it ever has before, there are a couple of implications. There’s good news and challenging news here. The good news is that the variety and volume and quality of things that we’ll be able to consume will go up, and the prices will go down. The challenge comes from the fact that if this encroachment really is happening quicker, more broadly, and deeper than before, the phenomenon is that technology is going to race ahead, but it could leave a lot of people behind in the capacity of folks who want to offer their labor to the economy. And how we deal with that challenge and what we do about the fact that technology is racing ahead but leaving some people, potentially a lot of them, behind is one of the great challenges for our generation.

The employment challenge

James Manyika: Between the period of 2000 and 2008—2008 because that’s when the recession started, so we have a clean look—the US lost something like 5.8 million jobs in manufacturing. If you look at those jobs that we lost, only at most 20 percent of them were due to what you might call globalization, so offshoring and outsourcing. Whereas the rest of them, which is the majority, 80 percent of them, can be explained by looking at the effects of technology and the other key culprit, which is what happens to demand.

And we know that one of the things that happened in that period between 2000 and 2008 is that the demand growth for the outputs of manufacturing coming out of the US actually fell. So that was one of the big drivers for what then happened to employment. Where you had productivity growth without the demand growth, employment tends to suffer.

Andrew McAfee: There are a couple policy implications that come out pretty quickly. One is that over the longer term, we can’t rely exclusively on economic growth alone to solve all of our employment problems. Now, in the short term, economic growth is absolutely the best way to get the hiring engine kicked in again. The robots, the androids, the artificial intelligence can’t do everyone’s job yet by a long shot. So the right way in the short term to grow employment is to grow the economy. But over the longer term, it honestly feels to me like we might be in a situation where enterprises can grow and thrive and not need nearly as much labor as they’ve needed historically.

James Manyika: Certainly education will help. We know that there’s a big gap between what most economies need and what the educational training systems create to meet those needs.¹ But I would argue even that’s not enough. So, while I think it’s comfortable for policy makers—and, in fact, correct—to say, “Let’s focus on innovation and let’s focus on entrepreneurship and let’s solve education,” those are correct, but they may not be complete answers to how we tackle employment.

So think about what Uber and its like and its kin are doing. It’s making it possible for people who have cars to suddenly turn that into a potential income-generating opportunity. Think about what models and businesses like Airbnb are doing where people can then use assets that they have, like their houses or their flats, as ways to generate income. Those are just examples of ways where, if you think about it as an income-generation question as opposed to a full-time employment problem, you expand the possibilities.

Claiming the prize

Andrew McAfee: I foresee a big change coming in the way the very best organizations are making some of their key judgments, forecasts, predictions, decisions. The tough transition is going to be getting the people and the alleged experts out of the way, and teaching them to be a lot more humble and a lot more data driven.

The other very big change that’s coming is the fact that we have access—again via technology, networks, and very powerful devices—to a worldwide body of knowledge and talent and skill. And what we’re learning over and over is the truth of Joy’s Law, named for Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. He said, “The smartest people work for somebody else.”

What we’re seeing is that when you can articulate the problem you’re working on or the challenge or the thing you want help with, and float it up so that the world’s community of innovators and problem solvers can work on it, you get very good results. You get them quickly and you get them from unexpected quarters. Thinking that all the expertise that you need is in-house or that you know where to go to go get the expertise or the help for the big challenge that you’re working on—that’s a really dangerous assumption."

The Economist coincidentally published the same week a cover story feature on technology's impact on jobs, including an excellent historical perspective.  See article.

As the following excerpt from that article suggests, the reduction in need for labour in a world of advancing technology is something most societies are not prepared for.

"INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.

For those, including this newspaper, who believe that technological progress has made the world a better place, such churn is a natural part of rising prosperity. Although innovation kills some jobs, it creates new and better ones, as a more productive society becomes richer and its wealthier inhabitants demand more goods and services. A hundred years ago one in three American workers was employed on a farm. Today less than 2% of them produce far more food. The millions freed from the land were not consigned to joblessness, but found better-paid work as the economy grew more sophisticated. Today the pool of secretaries has shrunk, but there are ever more computer programmers and web designers.

Optimism remains the right starting-point, but for workers the dislocating effects of technology may make themselves evident faster than its benefits. Even if new jobs and wonderful products emerge, in the short term income gaps will widen, causing huge social dislocation and perhaps even changing politics. Technology’s impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too. No government is prepared for it."

As technology brings new work opportunities for some, it also destroys jobs or at least disrupts the work of many others.  And, according to the commentaries above, there is no guarantee that a return to normal employment levels is likely in the near future.  If we think that technology is central to contemporary life, it is important to remember that work has always been tied closely to our search for meaning.  Gaining technology without losing jobs is a conundrum facing economies large and small around the globe.

Is speed the new digital divide?

I have written a lot about 'connects' and 'connects,' (see blog posts, here, here and here; and this article), but increasingly it is the speed (or lack thereof) of a connection that makes people fighting mad.  In my own case, my neighbourhood has never had great internet speeds.  Five mega-bits per second (5 mbps) is promised and most of us are used to about 3 or less.  But as the speed of our broadband (we're not talking dial-up here) sank and remains below 1 mbps (on average .8 mbps) over the holiday season, people (nice people I might add) are getting pretty fed up with the situation.  In fact, they are ready to take on the telecommunications companies and our national broadband initiative, which is aimed at getting Kiwis onto high-speed ('ultra-fast' in their words) broadband.

It appears we are not alone in our angst about the speed of our connections and the relative advantages of fast Internet.  A New York Times article claims, 'There is ample evidence that faster broadband spurs economic growth. The White House cites a study of 33 of the largest national economies worldwide, which found that from 2008 to 2010, doubling a country’s broadband speed increased gross domestic product by 0.3 percent. In its report, “Four Years of Broadband Growth,” the Obama administration says that since 2002, Internet access has contributed an average of $34 billion a year to the economy, or 0.26 percent of G.D.P. growth.' The NY Times does note that such arguments are not entirely one-sided and there is debate about just how much speed matters.

To see how your country fares on broadband infrastructure, you might check out the World Economic Forum global competitiveness report. The US ranks 35th out of 148 countries (New Zealand is 56th).

Returning to the local 'glass struggle' over fiber-optic cables, there are a few significant differences between being disconnected and being sluggishly connected.  The first is that if you're suffering from too much connectivity, you can exercise choice to moderate your own consumption.  This is not always an easy choice, but it can normally be made and if not, well, at least not making the choice is mostly your own fault (notwithstanding the fact that your employer or customers may make it difficult to disconnect). However, in the case of digit drip syndrome, i.e., connections so slow that they make you less productive and effectively waste your time, you have no choice in the matter, i.e., you have little direct or immediate control over the speed provided you by the infrastructure around you and/or your Internet service provider (ISP).

The second distinction of this sort of connective hassle is that there is often a power imbalance between those who provide Internet services and those who consume it.  And, guess who has most, if not all, the power?  My neighbours feel they are in a 'David and Goliath' situation, wherein the telcos and broadband corporation call the shots and decide who gets fast Internet and who does not. It is the power dynamics that make such situations worse than a simple disconnect.  Slow-speed Internet is a constant, annoying reminder of what you are missing, that is the requisite connectivity to get on with your life!

My first job was in Northern New Mexico, the setting of a popular book, which became a movie (directed by Robert Redford) called 'The Milagro Bean Field War.'  The story portrays a courageous farmer who defies the corporate monopoly on water by watering his bean field.  The plot is driven by the David vs. Goliath theme, but also picks up the very real situation in the West, where those who own the water hold a lot of power.

Professor Susan Crawford, who is also a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, says in the NY Times article that, 'American cities should take on some of the responsibility for building fiber-optic networks and providing broadband service. It is a necessity similar to electricity, she said, “something that no neighborhood or private company would have an incentive to provide on its own to everyone at reasonable prices.”   

Crawford has has written a book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, that offers a critique on the information age in the United States. As another NY Times article puts it, 'She is on a permanent campaign, speaking at schools, conferences and companies — like Google — and in front of Congress, asserting that the status quo has been great for providers but an expensive mess for everyone else.'   

Just as we all need water to live, increasingly we all need connectivity to support our lives.  (In 2012, the United Nations declared access to the Internet a basic human need.)  The first thing most of us do when we travel is seek a serviceable and reasonable connection to the Internet.  If we can't get a connection on the road, we can change hotels.

Similarly, in our homes, where so much of day-to-day life takes place, if we feel constrained by the speed of connection available to us, the first thing we naturally want to do is correct the situation. And, once you have moved beyond dial-up, there is really no going back.  But, when you're told to 'wait your turn' and you have no alternative, you feel a little like that farmer who defiantly opened the ditch to water his beans, except since our ditch has only a trickle of data in it, we want a bigger ditch.
There may never be a war fought over the Internet like there have been over water and oil, but who knows?  When people can't get satisfaction on-line, they might take the fight to the streets.

The connected life

The feeling of connection presents itself at this time of year in the form of holiday greetings from long-time friends.  For example, a former Outward Bound student of mine recently got in touch announcing his retirement from medicine, based in part on his own health challenges.  These voices from the distant past connect us across vast spans of time to unite the people were then with who we've become now.  I don't mind that holiday greetings are shifting from paper to on-line variations.  As they say, 'it's the thought that counts.'  You are thinking of me and I am thinking of you as we move into another year.  Thinking of others connects us to our past.

We connect with our present through the daily practices that put our minds back into our bodies, be it in the garden, on a run or walking the dogs.  Our wilderness work days are long behind us, but running the trails near Bethells Beach and looking forward to skiing in Utah in a few weeks keep that spirit of the mountains alive deep within us.  As we lose dear friends, we redouble our commitment to live 'on the loose' at least some of the time we have left.

This year I thought of buying an iPhone for my mom.  It was a good idea from a safety point of view with the added benefit that she might vicariously learn how to navigate my dad's iPad.  A better idea, however, was to buy her a yoga mat and take her to her first yoga lesson on her 80th birthday.  Not many people in my home town are yoga people, but the seniors at yoga are fantastic.  They instantly offered a connection to my mother beyond her normal family and church life, just as yoga connects spirit to mind and body. But, the best upshot of this story was that Mom is now teaching her great grand-daughters yoga.  Having made the trip half way around the world to be there for the birthday celebration, I was delighted to hear of this new connection between generations.

There were also some profound professional connections this year.  My new title has meant an opportunity to meet with senior executives at telcos and broadband providers.  A chance meeting at Cambridge last year resulted in high-level meetings within the US military that I could never have imagined.  What I also could not have imagined was the warm welcome and friendship afforded me after overnight flights and sharing a basement bedroom in Arlington with a golden retriever named Hudson.

The connected life doesn't begin with an iPhone. It begins with living in communities, inviting and being invited into networks and relationships. It begins by reaching out across generations and time and staying connected to our bodies and the natural environment.

The connected life starts with well-lived moments coupled with reflection on action.  Events--like a promotion, an Outward Bound course, the death of a loved one or cherished pet--do not constitute our experience, they merely provoke and evoke our interpretation of the event.   Our pattern of sense-making over time makes up what might be called perspective, or even 'wisdom.'  I don't know that I am particularly 'wise' as events and memories appear and re-appear in my life, but when they do--and I pay attention to them--I feel I am living a connected life.

Five Ds to manage your 'In Box'

Toby Ruckert has been working for many years on a solution to information overload and other problems of ubiquitous connectivity. In a recent post, he outlines why and how new tools might help us deal with the volume of contact we recieve from various media.

He writes on his blog:

For several years it was assumed that multitasking is something that would help us to increase our intelligence. It was heavily promoted around early 2000 along the rise of our computer’s ability to do so, but it’s now clear, that except with the Dual N-Back task (which is a quite specific use case of multitasking), the increase of intelligence promoted by multitasking actually is a myth.

So for the two main ways in which people communicate, unification of both is possible, but given a user can only focus properly on one conversation at a time, unifying synchronous communication is less practical at this time.

That said, then why have asynchronous channels not been properly unified yet?

In fact, the sorting and prioritizing of such incoming messages could easily be done as per the users personal preferences (noted above) and such a system could even learn from the users behaviour eventually, making it a more intelligent inbox that gets better and better over time.

Such a Unified Inbox has the ability to sort all incoming messages and conversations according to the individual users relationships, their current focus/interests and related context, rather than just by date, subject, or sender – independent of the source of where the messages came from.

A layer with “unified inbox management features” on top of all asynchronous communication channels would further enable an information worker to deal with such messages in much the same way, rather than having to learn using different systems with different functions for the individual channels where there are frequent media breaks in conversations and synchronicity around contact data.

So what are we doing to give our users a better inbox management experience?

We’re using the concept of 5 “D’s” to empower our users managing all inboxes centrally and completely from one place, namely:

1. Do/Deal with it (Reply/Move etc.)
2. Delegate (Assign/Transfer responsibility, like ticketing & task management)
3. Delete (and Archive)
4. Defer (Delay / with or without reminder – until later)
5. Distribute (i.e. Share a Tweet/Email on FB / vice-versa / Export to other systems etc.)

With them, it’s possible to create structured processes and workflows from previously unstructured (inbox) data, even across communication channels. While every email, tweet or facebook message is a task, because I have to deal with it somehow, it’s still the user’s personal choice of whether to manage tasks within or outside an inbox.

Making this experience (which has become such a big part of our private and working lives) easier, fun and more productive, that’s what Unified Inbox is all about.