BLOG: About Chess, Tesla’s and Moore’s Law

In the news this week an item about the AlphaGo software beating South Korean player Lee Sedol 4 out of 5 times in a game named GO. That same week I read about the nearing end of Moore’s Law in The Economist. So how are these two related? And what will eventually be the impact on our business?

Let’s start with Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who claimed in November 1971 that the

processing power of a computer chip would double roughly every two years. And how right he was. For over 44 years his Law stood firm and dictated the rhythm of the industry. The first ever microprocessor in 1971 held 2,300 transistors (electrical switches that can be turned on and off, representing the 0’s and 1’s of digital language). The 2014 Intel Xeon Haswell chip holds 5 billion.

It is difficult to grasp the full impact of Moore's Law. But think of this. In 1997 the US government needed a super computer to maintain its nuclear arsenal. It was named ASCI Red of which one customer made copy was built by IBM. It had the size of half a tennis court and was capable of 1.3 trillion calculations per second. In 2006 Sony presented the PlayStation 3. This machine doubled the speed of the ASCI Red, weighed 5 kg, could fit in a bag and was sold over 65 million times worldwide. Now that is the impact of Moore’s Law!

About Chess, Rice and Tesla's

Us human beings have difficulty understanding exponential growth. But an old parable might be the best story telling option to get to grips with it. Centuries ago an advisor created the game of Chess for his king. When asked what he wanted as a reward, the advisor asked for one grain of rice on the first section of the Chess-board, two on the second, four on the third and so on, doubling the amount every next section. The king laughed and said that he must be joking, and if he didn’t want anything else?
When the counting started only halfway the chess-board, the numbers where very large, but on the second half they were just vastly larger.

Only halfway, on the 32nd section, the king had to deliver 2.147 Billion grains of rice. And

remember, the 33rd section, this amount would double. To cut a long story short: more rice had to be delivered than was produced all over the world for years. The King learned the power of exponential growth (I wonder what happened to the advisor).

This is exactly what happened with computing-power since 1971. Imagine that the computing-power that allowed all Tesla Model S cars to drive themselves since October 2015, will have doubled in October 2017. And all robots that already are replacing work formerly done by humans, will have doubled their processing-power in two years time. And again two years later.

Through exponential growth, what sounded like science fiction a couple of years ago, now has become reality.

The End of Moore's Law

But, according to The Economist, we are approaching the end of Moore’s Law, as the
shrinking of transistors on a microchip is nearing it’s physical limits (the size of an atom). Intel admitted end of 2015 that the investments in R&D, needed to make chips quicker, have started to outpace the increase in speed that resulted from those investments. So chips will still continue to get better, but at a gradually slowing pace.

Two things are happening in parallel and/or in response to that. The first is an increased power to the big cloud-computing companies like Amazon, Google, Alibaba and Tencent. They are improving their cloud infrastructure and will be able to increase their offered computing-power the coming years by combining every single processor of all servers in their global datacenters. With ‘cloud’ we mostly think about storage, like Google Drive or Dropbox. But Cloud-computing offers especially computing-power to customers. Power that is far larger than one could get of a stand alone PC or server.


Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning

The second movement is not about speed but about intelligence. This brings us to the
other news story last week: the AlphaGo software, built by Google-acquired startup ‘DeepMind', beat the best human player in the game of Go. GO is an ancient game that looks deceptively simple, yet is the most complex game to be solved by a computer, as it has an unpronounceable number of scenario's: 10 to the power of 80. Plus: it is rather a game of intuition than rational strategies.

This game can only be won by a computer when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is involved. Computer-learning, supported by hundreds of algorithms that learn and can copy instinctive moves from humans. This is called ‘Deep Learning’.
So if we have come to the point that computing-power (processing lots of data) combined with machine-learning algorithms (AI), the whole 44 years of Moore’s Law might turn out to be just a lightweight introduction to the real digital age.

The (business) game is on

These two examples, small news articles that you could easily miss, paint a picture of the business environment we have to operate in. The era where not only repeatable patterns are being automated and scaled in the cloud, but where intelligent predictive and prescriptive decision making and AI based consultancy will become part of our business life.

So what will this eventually mean for our rapidly changing world of work? What happens if even the Lee Sedols of this world can be automated? I have a hard time gathering my thoughts around that to be honest.

BLOG: My trip to London pt. 6 (final) - ‘How social is changing our trip completely'

Monday, 9AM, time for the business purpose of my trip to London. After the one-minute touch-screen checkout at CitizenM I am walking to the ManpowerGroup Office in London City. Today I will meet with my Northern European colleagues for a two-day session on how social media is impacting our business, and how we can leverage our combined strength to use the huge potential of social for our candidate branding and engagement. While walking, I am thinking on how social influenced my trip so far.

First of all I came across the CitizenM Hotel-concept while reading slides on Business Model Innovation on the social sharing platform for presentations: www.slideshare.net. As I got interested, I looked up the hotel on TripAdvisor. This travel website has become thé review portal for all hotels, apartments, flights and restaurants. A great business model by the way, where almost all content is user generated (reviews and photo’s of travelers) and the money is earned with advertising. I filtered the reviews on ‘traveling alone’, and got 126 ratings that averaged 4.5 stars. Sounded good! Also the photographs matched the atmosphere that CitizenM where displaying themselves on their Facebook and Pinterest pages. On my way to the airport, I visited the Twitter account of EasyJet to check with a tweet what the extra costs were for taking an extra bag with me, and swiftly got a reply from their webcare team. 

Once in London, I used Yelp to find a nice restaurant in the neighborhood. This social review site lists all types of bars, restaurants and clubs. Search on the map, using your GPS location, filter on the amount you want to spend and the average rating of the restaurant’s guests. When I found a nice place, I could easily reserve it online with the ‘opentable.com’ connection, where I had reregistered for former trips already by connecting my Facebook-profile. When talking to a freelance writer during dinner in the hotel, I looked up her profile on LinkedIn and made a connection to see on what accounts she had been working on. After sharing my run on Sunday morning around the Battersea Power Station on Runkeeper, I received a couple of ‘hearts’ from my fellow-runners to motivate me. And in the evening, while writing my blogs, I shared my stories on our internal Google+ network. The comments and ‘+’es’ I was receiving, motivated me to continue writing and sharing with you. 

So if I am to point out the two most critical impacts that social has on today’s world, it would be these:

1. Traditional organizational hierarchy is soon history*

(* from a great Wall Street Journal article on ‘the end of management’)

Before we had the internet and social media, organizations needed a clear hierarchy and managers to organize people and allocate resources. Now we are online and social connected anywhere, anytime, any device. The internal ManpowerGroup Google+ is proving more and more to enable collaboration without the need of hierarchy. And guess what: the pace of creativity, collaboration and innovation is only increasing because of it. Employees no longer only need to make themselves valuable through what they know, they can develop more knowledge by collaborating in a much more fluid format. 

2. Reputation is the new cash

What became very clear of my social media influenced trip to London, is that reputation is key to succes for business in the future. Social media is bringing transparency. Via websites like TripAdvisor, it becomes transparent what the hotels’ value propositions are. Do they live up to it? And their own customers decide if the service, food, location and wifi is up-to-standard by rating it with 1 to 5 stars. The same is happening in a lot of industries. Uber is bringing ratings to taxi drivers. Would you order a cab with a driver that was rated with 2 stars by 24 people? And the Holiday Inn that I ‘rated’ in my blog. Would you book it?

And there is Glassdoor, a US website where employees and former employees anonymously review companies and their management. You could say: the TripAdvisor of the work-related part of business. It's already quite big in the US, and it will be coming over to Europe as well. Our services, operations, candidates, communication and style of doing business will be more and more rated by growing crowds of customers, candidates, employees. 

BLOG: My Trip to London pt. 2 - Stansted Airport without Humans

It was 9.40 AM when the plane touched the runway at Standsted Airport and taxied to the gate. After disembarking the plane, signing guided me to a driver-less mini-train. Passengers cued up before the doors, watching the countdown on screens to when the train would arrive and stop exactly at the designated door openings. The doors slid open and the train moved, while a sweet but cold digital woman’s voice told us the safety procedures and asking to keep our passports ready. 

Via escalators I arrived at the e-Passport gates located at the immigration checkpoint in the arrival hall. The gate number lit up of the available gate and I stepped forward. On screen I got instructions to put my passport on the scanner, while a camera, hidden behind a mirror, moved up to meet my length and clearly scan if I was really Radi Jaarsma. After a couple of seconds a green light flashed and the UK border opened itself for me in the form of sliding doors opening automatically. Meanwhile screens showed me at which bagage belt I could collect my overpriced extra hand luggage and after that I used my credit card and a touch screen to get my Standsted-Express ticket for a travel by train to London. I withdrew some pound notes from the ATM, grabbed a coffee from the coffee machine and the last thing I saw from Standsted Airport, where the automated gates on the train platform that opened in response to my ticket. 

Apart from my fellow travelers, there was no human interaction involved in this whole process from stepping out of the plane to stepping out of the train in London. It left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the white steel and spacious environment of Stansted Airport struck me as a cold mechanical atmosphere. On the other hand: my trip went very.. very smoothly. To be honest, the first human interaction that I had during that trip was in the train, when ordering a coffee (I need a lot of coffee in the morning). The guy was foreign and could not speak English very well, nor understand it. As an extra, he did not have change and when finally I overhauled him to use his credit-card terminal, it looked like it was the first time he saw that machine. After finding out that he was only allowed to use the credit card terminal for a minimum amount of 5 Pounds, I decided to treat two passengers in front of me for a coffee in order to get to that amount. 

This is what ManpowerGroup calls the Human Age. And almost as a paradox, a lot of tasks humans did the last decades are replaced by technology and robotics. All studies show that especially jobs that consist of some form of repetitive and routine tasks, are automated at a very rapid pace. Gartner calls this the ‘De-Routinization of Work’. And that is exactly what happened at Stansted. No more train drivers, ground services, immigration officers, ticket office agents and cafeteria staff.

The best contribution that people can bring to work, are not routinized processes that can be automated, but in the added values that are distinctively unique for us human beings: creativity, leadership, innovating, empathy, relationships, discovering. To put it more simply: the unique talents of people will flourish best in non-routine work. Helping workers to make that change is part of the ManpowerGroup ‘Dignitiy of Work’ statement.

BLOG: My Trip to London pt. 1 - easyJet and Ancillary Revenues

At exactly 9.35 AM on Day 1 of my trip to London, the easyJet airplane was taxiing down the Schiphol Amsterdam Airport runway. I am on my way to London for a few days off, followed by three days of Northern European meetings with ManpowerGroup colleagues on Social Media and Digital Strategy. 

Why I am flying easyJet? It was the cheapest fare. I typed my destination in on www.skyscanner.nl and the white/orange carrier topped the list. And that is exactly the competitive playing field most airlines are in today: be on the first page of any air tickets list or you are gone. Flying from A to B is such a homogenous product, that price is almost the only differentiator for most people. And yes, of course I prefer a comfortable seat and leg room. A hot coffee included and a short movie would also be nice. But if it increases the ticket price? No, it’s just not worth it then. Both on private trip as well as business trips. 

It reminded me of a Finnair presentation I attended recently. Finnair did not make it to the first page of many ticket selling websites. Main reason was their ‘all inclusive’ pricing. Travelers were allowed an extra piece of hand luggage, could pick a seat and have a newspaper on board. Competitors like easyJet, Ryanair and Norwegian stripped all this, offer a low price, land on the first page and get more sales. Do these low-cost carriers offer less? Well, not necessarily, they just offer a basic price to get from A to B. And additional services come at a premium. Airliners call this ‘Ancillary Revenue’. The ticket price is the basis and makes the sale. Ancillary services are the real money makers. Once a tourist trip has started, people are more willing to draw their wallet. And the best thing for a company? High margins and hardly any competition in this stage of the sales-cycle. The customer is already ‘hooked in’ and the moment of ticket purchase forgotten.

In the top 60 of airline ancillary revenues, easyJet takes ninth place, with ancillaries taking

account of 19,2% of the airlines’ total revenue.

So how does that compare to the staffing industry, where our biggest brand - Manpower - is in? Traditionally we tend to charge our customers one price for all staffing services: a markup on the hourly wage of our flex workers. The staffing product is quite homogenous as well price plays an important role in decision making. Our industry is adopting the Airlines model. Start with a basic pricing and offer additional services at a premium. 

And while the plane was descending for London Stansted, I thought of how I coped with easyJet's business model. Well… With my plans to do some running in the morning, my hand luggage was completely stuffed. So I had to take my laptop bag with charger, iPad, etc. as a second piece. EasyJet charged me € 30 extra for it. That is 20% of the ticket price. And I paid it without a problem, happy that I was able to take two bags on board now. Together with a coffee during the flight of € 3, I contributed € 33 to easyJets ancillary sales.