One of the things that’s hard at at time like this [meaning a deep recession coupled with an high-innovation environment alongside a major generational changing of the guard] is what rulebook do you use?  It’s obvious that many of the old rules no longer apply: You will not get ahead dedicating yourself to a single company, you can lose money in real estate, the stock market may not be the best long-term investment vehicle and early to bed and early to rise may have no substantive effect on wealth, wisdom and health.  Sorry Ben.

A mistake I’ve seen made over and over again by change-challenged companies back when I was a strategist was the idea that because the rules had changed that there were NO rules.  That is a road straight to an epic fail, and it’s as bad as trying to play by an outdated rule book.  

But it’s also terrifying to stare at a system you thought you knew well and realize it’s been totally upended by new realities.  When physicists first got into Quantum mechanics many of the best minds pushed back against it because it seemed so anarchic.  Even Einstein never embraced Quantum weirdness.  But even something as  fundamentally strange Quantum mechanics has laws, and so does the new economic and social universe we inhabit.

I’m going to drop what I think five of the new rules are, we’re interested to hear yours.  At the end I’m going to tie it to what we’re doing.  We also want to hear how it ties to what you’re dong.  

Ok, let’s do this:

Rule 1.  We are no longer in a deprivation-based economy.  Adams-Smith-style capitalism is based on the idea that it’s pretty hard to produce manufactured goods, IP and agricultural products.  That is no longer the case.  Silicon chips are gong for pennies apiece, wikipedia offers massive value for free and huge farms feed us for a fraction of the cost of localized agriculture.  All this progress screws shit up all over the place.  It becomes harder and harder to find business models that sustain individuals who are otherwise participating at a fairly high level in the creation and innovation sphere.  Time for a new model- one that recognizes and rewards innovation and creation that is otherwise “Too cheap to meter”?

Rule 2.  Manufactured goods are a dead-end street.  Pretty soon, and I mean within 15 years, there will be very few consumer goods that are manufactured en masse.  Just-in-time fabrication is coming as the fabbers get better.  Everyone knows digitization screwed up publishing, music and film.  You think that process is over?  Oh no, the next revolution is the digitization of actual, physical stuff.  The current economy is only pushing that process forward at an accelerated pace as people look for buisness models that are scalable and don’t require massive capital investments.  Check it out: China, be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Rule 3. We are now in a post-wealth society.  Rich people were thought to be better, to have worked harder, to have superior breeding or to have had some kind of particular talent or skill that was of value.  Now there is a new concept of what wealth and reward is.  Your broke neighbor might be someone who’s company collapsed.  Or they may have decided to be a single income family to spend more time with the kids.  The people in the nice house up the street may have inherited it.  It is no longer true that we defer to rich people because we all assume we’re wealthy-in-waiting.  The majority of people are today thinking that they may be hobos-in-waiting and that the rich are part of the reason they are in the place they’re in.  This is new for the United States in the postwar era.

Rule 4. Smaller is better.  As covered in this space previously- in the Industrial Age the corporation was king. Building dams and ocean liners, car companies and winning world wars you needed large groups of hierarchically organized people.  Now, not so much.  Small groups of self-organized people with powerful tools are as or nearly as capable in many, many areas as a massive enterprise.  Wikipedia is better than Britannica.  YouTube is much better than most of what’s on TV.  None of these were massive enterprises, but visions built by visionaries.  The future lies in small, smart, connected and empowered teams.   

Rule 5.  Bigger changes are on the way.  Stem cells.  Nanomaterials.  Quantum computing.  Pervasive sensing technology. Genomics.  Robotics.  Artificial Intelligence.  Stuff is going to get really, really weird and more and more embedded interests are going to be completely upended.  We’re used to transition times.  The change over from scribes to printing presses took hundreds of years.  Cell phones were less capable than landline phones for a couple of years.  But as the pace of technology growth increases the rapid outmoding of the familiar is going to begin taking on head-spinning properties.  People who can adapt will win.  People who want to remain static, and there is going to be more and more internal pressure to do so as things ramp up, will be left behind.  It’s that simple. Ok, wrap-up:

What part does HelpGuest have in this?  We think we’re providing tools that people can use to help people adapt to the changes, that allow people who are in the creation part of the current “economy” to actually have an outlet that will allow them to earn a living.  Linking people up in productive ways is so much about what the future is about, it’s what’s going to let those individuals and teams bring about the future.  And, as optimists, we at HelpGuest totally know that the future, hard as the changes will be for a while, are going to be much better than the past.  Evolving is painful, but it’s the rule.  Take that to the bank [but make sure it's FDIC insured].

Lemonade Maker: Jim Dowd, IT Entrepreneur

Profiles of people who are seeing opportunity in a pile of economic lemons.

Jim Dowd, 40
Gloucester, MA

Before recession: Technology Strategist
Now: Entrepreneur and Co-founder, HelpGuest Technologies. HelpGuest connects people who need tech support with people who can provide it.

Q. When did you notice a shift in the economic climate?

A. In the summer of 2005 I was running simultaneous research projects, one for a start-up charter private air service, the other for an online lending company. On the one hand, I was interviewing [more...]

Corporations make sense if you are building ocean liners.  You don’t want to try doing that alone.  They make sense for big efforts that require lots and lots of people.  Building highways, dams, canals, all of that stuff takes big groups of hierarchically organized people.

Most of what people do today doesn’t.  We could easily live as as nation of freelancers with the tools at our disposal.  Between FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogging and HelpGuest, we can make our own specialties known and services offered without the need for an umbrella overhead.  

Read Wikinomics  It’s all coming true.  People are moving to a “gig” economy.  This is going to mean big structural changes in the way we live, work and buy.

HelpGuest has a big role here.  We’re there to deliver individuals expertise right to the desktop of people who need help- people who don’t have a corporate IT department sitting in wait or a room full of colleagues with different specialties to help work through an IT problem.  People working from home on small teams on individual projects are not going to have that going forward.  There are going to need to be replacements for the corporate IT department and for IT in general.  

This is a big-change moment in history.  Really big change.  Lots and lots of things are going to go by the wayside and lots more are going to see their days numbered.  Change is painful, but in the end it’s going to make for a world with a lot more opportunity for individuals outside big companies.  

Hang in there, everybody!

…The company they have created is based on remote access software that Abrams designed a few years ago.

They decided the best way to utilize the technology was to offer an online “store” where people can find experts who sell computer and software support. Experts who join the Web site sell their services by the minute.

About 120 experts have already joined, and the Web site was launched Oct. 1, mostly for the use by friends and family until the kinks can be smoothed out.

The average session is expected to cost between $15 and $20, with HelpGuest taking a 30 percent commission. The pair have a total of four employees including themselves. They see opportunity in the growing home office market as baby boomers retire and many become consultants.

“Whose going to support all of those home offices?” Dowd said. “Finding experts is really not very hard. What we need to do is get the traffic.”

QuickTickets were designed for experts to help users who they already know and have a relationship with.  So if you want to say, help your mom with that vexing technology problem she’s having and you don’t want to charge her (and you shouldn’t, c’mon!  Who would charge their mom?  Sheesh!) this is the system to use.  So, here are the steps:

1. The expert, the person who is going to be doing the helping, goes to HelpGuest.com.  If the expert already has an account they should sign in at the top right of the page.  If not the should click the “Become an Expert” Tab which is located here:
2. Next enter the required information on the Expert Sign-up page.  The trickiest part is at the bottom where it asks for categories and “tags”.  Simply select the areas where you have the most expertise [or select "personal" and "general"] The “tags” are simply words you choose to help describe your expertise. If you are posting as a business generalist, then your tags would be the things that you want to help with such as blogging, presentations, spreadsheets, etc.  Hit enter between each tag.
3. Once you agree to the terms and sign in, you are on the expert profile page.  Here you can write more about who you are and what you are good at, upload an image of yourself and set your per minute price and you preferred session length.  This is also where you, as an expert, enable your expertise [actually turning on the screen sharing application from the expert side] and where you get your Quick Ticket number for use with experts who are not paying.  More on that in a sec

4. Once the “enable my expertise” icon has been clicked there will be a quick Java download.  You may need to click on it to download [Java is an icon that looks like a coffee cup] You may need to click “Ok” or “trust” to get it to load on your operating system.

NOTE: Some people have found that they don’t have the most recent version of Java on their computer.  You should go to the Sun website and download the latest version.  You need this for more than just HelpGuest.  Once you’ve got Java, you can go back to launching the HelpGuest application.  You won’t need to do this again.

5. You, as the expert, will now see a box that looks like this:

6.  The expert now sends the user the quick ticket number.  Once the number is entered the user’s name will show up in the “guest list” [and you will hear an alert noise].  Highlight the user’s name and click “connect to client” [see above]

For the “User”:  

The User is the person being helped.  It is the person who’s desktop the expert will be able to see, the person having the problem they want solved.

1. The User takes the quick ticket number that the expert has sent and enters it into the “quick ticket” number on the main page 

2. The user winds up at the expert’s profile page.  The user should click the “I agree with the terms and conditions” and then “connect”

NOW BOTH USER AND EXPERT ARE CONNECTED!  NICE JOB!!!

You will both see a window that looks roughly like this:

You can use the window for chat.  When the User presses the “See” button, they should tell the expert with chat- then the expert should click the See button as well.

NOTE: The user’s background image will now go away. Do not be alarmed.  This maintains user privacy and serves as a reminder that this is a shared session.  THE BACKGROUND WILL RETURN once the HelpGuest application has been closed and quit on the user end.

At this time the expert will be able to see the user’s desktop, will be able to move their cursor.  To make it easier, the user should try and not use the mouse or keyboard unless they want to break the connection with the expert.

If there are any problems from the expert side, the expert can hit the “see” button again to refresh the connection.

When the session is over there is a short survey.  Please fill it out.

THANKS FOR USING HELPGUEST AND TELL US HOW IT’S WORKING AND ANY OF YOUR COMMENTS AND THOUGHTS AT: listen@helpguest.com

And don’t forget to read and comment on the blog.  Lots of good content on the blog!