the ki work blog

Ki Work social enterprise

Ki Work has recently won a sizeable government grant under the UK's Future Jobs Fund. This is to employ 40 Green Energy Specialists to provide green audits and to offer related services/products to third sector organisations and SMEs.

As the venture is a social enterprise, Ki Social Enterprise CIC has been set up as a new initiative to provide energy consultancy, services and products for small- to medium-size organisations in the third sector, especially charities and social enterprises.  The company will initially employ, train and mentor young people that are long-term unemployed and people over 25 who are in areas of high unemployment as Energy Specialists to deliver these services.

Besides receiving full training, these Energy Specialists will be provided emotional and practical support through coaching, counselling, and mentoring to help them find satisfying and sustainable jobs through government, private and third sector initiatives. In the first instance, Ki Social Enterprise's activities will provide benefit to

unemployed jobseekers - especially long-term unemployed and people in areas of high unemployment throught the provision of

• sustainable employment in the green energy sector by the creation of new green energy jobs
• training, coaching, mentoring and counselling

small and medium size organisations in the third sector -  through the provision of energy efficiency consultancy enabling those organisations to benefit themselves, their communities, and the environment through the leveraging of green energy technology.

Community benefits

The community will benefit through the provision of energy efficiency consultancy to third sector organisations such as charities and social enterprises. The objective is to help all involved to leverage green energy technology and initiatives. By demonstrating best practice in energy efficiency, third sector organisations will be benefiting their members, local communities and the environment by

• reducing their carbon footprint;
• saving costs and thereby being able to increase their services to the community; and
• demonstrating their leadership in this critical area of social change.

With respect to the unemployed youth, the community will benefit through the provision of coaching, counselling and mentoring support to young workers entering the workforce. This enables jobseekers to manage the traumatic effects of unemployment.

 

Challenging 2009? Why not make 2010 your Best Year Yet!

Have you, like me, had a really tough year and feel that you need to make some changes in your life?

If so, here’s an effective strategy to identify and focus on what you really need to make that difference. It’s a program you can do on the web, either on your own, or guided by a coach. It’s called Best Year Yet!®

2010 - your Best Year Yet!®

View more presentations from Ki Work.

I did my first Best Year Yet® program as a whole day workshop 18 years ago. That was a turning point. It completely changed the direction of my life within a week. Today I’m facing new challenges, but now, over 100,000 users later, the program is so much easier to use:

• it’s quicker

• lasts for a whole year

• is less costly, and

• is much more effective.

In fact you can start making the changes in a few hours at about the same cost as a night out on the town!

So why not make the change now? In just two hours on the web, you can make YOUR OWN personal plan for the coming year that

• identifies the results you really want and need

• provides a strong sense of confidence and clarity, and

• motivates you from the inside out to make your dreams come true!

And if you need support, one of Ki Work’s accredited life/career coaches can be there for you.

Just click here to get started: http://ki-work.com/best_year_yet

Free career coaching support for unemployed UK professionals

If you’re a recently unemployed professional in the UK and want to make this your “Best Year Yet”, read on.

This is a FREE service available through Ki Work, sponsored by the UK government. The programme includes:

-   personal goal setting and tracking

-   up to three hours personal coaching.

Your coach will take you through the acclaimed Best Year Yet goal setting and planning programme supporting you to:

      acknowledge and appreciate what happened last year
      define useful lessons
      create a positive internal focus for producing results
      identify the top 10 goals for the coming year
      create a plan of action for delivering the top 10 goals.

Depending on your individual needs, you will be coached in how to

      rebrand yourself
      source suitable work experience
      understand employers’ recruitment practices
      improve your job applications
      improve your interview techniques.

Eligibility

The Jobsearch Support Service for Newly Unemployed Professionals, is targeted principally at professional or executive jobseekers in receipt of Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) who have become unemployed after a period of long term employment.

This support service is funded by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).  Eligible customers will have little or no experience of current job search channels but will have the confidence and motivation to seek work independently.

The aim of the programme is to give customers with professional and executive occupational backgrounds the knowledge and skills to enable them to identify and secure relevant jobs using up-to-date job search techniques and to exploit diverse recruitment channels.

To apply, contact Michael Wolff at coaching@ki-work.com

Now available: The Ki Work Team Widget

Hot off the development press we now have a Team Widget. You can now easily embed your Ki Work teams into your website and blog, to give your site visitors an instant idea of who you are working with. Perfect for teams of consultants and distributed virtual organizations.

Here's an example using the Ki Work operations team:
It's still very much version 1.0, but let us know how we can improve it for your needs, and we'll do our best to adapt it.

For more teams on Ki Work, check out the team search section.

Aviation Consultancy flies high using Ki Work teams to get off the ground

IAGBlog - a series of podcasts and blogs about the aviation and travel industry - recently featured Martin Hedley in a piece about using Ki Work's team building features for high-value consultancy work.

Martin is currently leading the way in using Ki Work to build multiple 'micro-businesses', or small teams of consultants to handle niche projects in the aviation industry.

As the IAGBlog puts it, "Martin Hedley, COO of Sharpresouces.com is creating a novel offering for the travel industry with virtual consulting teams made up of established experts. Planning on offering top tier consulting work at 50% off regular costs, he expects to have a busy year. Headhunters, talent and especially firms needing help pay attention to this idea."

There are countless opportunities for team creation using the Ki Work platform. Check out Martin's and other teams in the team search section. Or create your own teams for free by becoming an Expert in a specialist category.

Listen to the full IAGBlog interview here

Dog Days for Local News

Hardly a day goes by without a new story about another struggling newspaper. The US has had it particularly bad recently, with the high-profile closure of the 150 year old Rocky Mountain News, and even the San Francisco Chronicle is struggling.

In the UK, things aren't much better. The Independent posted an article today highlighting the crisis in local news. It paints a pretty bleak picture. "Some 60 regional papers have closed in the last year. Guardian Media Group... has this week embarked on a bloodbath of job cutting, slashing 150 jobs in the North-west, and closing offices in Accrington, Ashton, Macclesfield, Oldham, Rochdale, Rossendale, Salford and Wilmslow. GMG, which publishes The Guardian national newspaper, also this week cut a further 95 jobs from its titles in Surrey and Berkshire, reducing its flagship paper for the region, the Reading Evening Post, from a five-day to a twice-weekly publication."

The future for printed local news looks pretty grim to say the least. But as that classic over-used (and probably totally inaccurate) Chinese proverb goes, in every crisis, there's great opportunity. And especially in how digital media can play a part in solving this problem.

The Guardian's Open Platform is certainly a step in the right direction, leading the way in making news data open to developers. There's also local aggregation services like Hophive. which makes local info easily available (if you happen to live in London that is).

But what happens to the art of newspaper journalism, and the stories from local courts, police and community parishes that were traditionally supplied by skilled, trained writers? Are we facing the end of local news as we used to know it?

We hope not, and have been working on a solution, using the ki work team building platform to help journalists easily build editorial teams. We welcome anyone interested to get in touch and get involved.

Journalists team up online to take on newspapers

Recently ki work introduced a team-building function. In this post I'm looking at the way it could be used by colleagues in my former industry.

Newspapers are suffering from the current economic crisis every bit as much as banks, car plants and construction. Already hit by falling circulation, declining advertising revenue and crippling debt the credit crunch could be the fatal blow for many publishing groups.

But newspapers won't begin to close until there's been a massive amount of cost cutting. Skilled journalistic jobs are being lost in increasing numbers, but the way managements are going about saving money is certainly not good for quality and may not even be cost effective. To understand the challenge and how ki work could help requires a basic knowledge of newspaper production works

A simple introduction to newspaper editorial production

When most people pick up a newspaper they probably neither know nor particularly care how it was put together. It's a complex process and one where by-lined journalists may play less part than you might think.

Named writers are only one of the many sources of content that are brought together to create a newspaper and nowadays its associated website. There'll be classified and display advertisements; copy from agencies such as Reuters; press releases and photographs from a variety of sources.  All this material has to be brought together to create a coherent product ready for printing or the web.

Although job titles do vary from newspaper to newspaper and from country to country the basic organization remains the same. Headed by an overall editor and editors who are responsible for sections, teams of specialists called 'sub-editors' in the UK and 'copy editors' in the US, polish and pull together material to create a coherent whole.

Copy editors or sub-editors will generally be responsible for: fact checking; writing headlines and picture captions; ensuring text complies with the house style of the paper and pointing out possible legal issues. Most importantly they'll improve copy from reporters who may be great at getting stories, but aren't so good at writing them. And editing also means cutting what may be thousands of words from different sources to fit the hundreds of words of  finite space on a newspaper page.

Conventional outsourcing is less than perfect

Despite the skill involved , editorial  production is a candidate for outsourcing. Reporters aren't. Even though they may work mostly on the phone, reporters still need to meet contacts and go to press conferences. Production journalists work at a desk and theoretically that could be anywhere, even Australia or India.

London's Daily Telegraph has already outsourced production of its travel pages to Fairfax in Australia. Other  groups are centralising their production so that one “subbing factory” provides services for all the newspapers.

Of course journalists aren't happy about these developments. They point out that editing really requires local and specialist knowledge. It's easy to make howlers and miss nuances even if the grammar and spelling are technically correct.

Outsourcing this way doesn't optimise savings for newspaper companies either. It's always possible to find somewhere with lower rates of pay. Conventional outsourcing uses an intermediary who needs to make a profit and cover the cost of premises, communications technology and staff. A rule of thumb is that salaries will only account for half the charges.

Virtual outsourcing is better all round

The alternative is “virtual outsourcing” which in this case is essentially a high-falutin' way of describing newspaper production experts working from home. Their costs are negligible because they probably already have the essential tools of the trade, a computer and an internet connection. They could even save money because they won't have to travel to work.

Until recently the problem was that the benefits and savings from virtual outsourcing were generally theoretical. If individuals have to be hired and managed centrally the savings from having them working from home will be minimised.

The ki work alternative is to create self-organised teams, initially quite probably composed of people who have already worked together. Later it could develop to bring in others that team members have met offline or online. Teams are intended to be agile, fluid and flexible so they can involve the most appropriate professionals to complete a project.

In my next posting I'll look in more detail how a team can be set up in ki work to bid for the production of newspaper sections. This is only one application of ki work's team building function click here to find out more.

Meet the new capitalists

Since the credit crunch started the phrase 'New Capitalism' has appeared with increasing frequency from the mouths of journalists, pundits and politicians. What does it mean? What are the implications of 'new capitalism' for ki workers?

From my research all I can say is 'new capitalism' is best defined as 'old capitalism'. Yep. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as Pete Townsend wrote.

The fate of the term was sealed at a meeting on 8 January which brought together French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and, er, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a politician as sorely missed as George W Bush will surely be. 

I'm sorry, but when three such enthusiastic supporters of unfettered free markets are suddenly converted to 'new capitalism' it brings out the skeptic in me. (And I should add all the views expressed are my own and are not necessarily those of ki work.) 

Out of gas

These politicians sound too much like the board of a car company trying to get another year's sales out of an aging model. So they add some chrome, different shaped headlamps and an upgraded stereo system. Now it's 'new'. But under the chrome it's the same old gas-guzzling, inefficient, outmoded vehicle.

'New capitalism' is a way of describing the desperate measures that are being applied to keep the sinking globalized economy afloat. The fond hope of Merkel, Sarkozy and that English bloke is that sufficient patches can be applied to the ship of market capitalism so that it will appear to sail as well as it did a year or so ago. Of course, there's no chance of that.

Their form of 'new capitalism' has as much chance of success as Mikhail Gorbachev's new communism a couple of decades ago.

As politicians they do have an impossible task. They cannot say what everybody else knows. We have no idea what is going to happen to the global economy. Change is the only certainty.

Corporate death

That's why I'm so enthusiastic about ki work and believe me I'm not one of nature's natural evangelists. I'm at heart a cynical old hack ready to see the worst in most things. But I do see the future of my livelihood is through flexibility, adaptability and low capital outlay. 

We may not know where the economic system is heading, but we can see some of the forces shaping it. I've been impressed by the work of Harvard's Umair Haque , Director of the Havas Media Lab. He talks of the change from symmetric to asymmetric competition. To over-simplify, capitalism used to revolve around competition between corporate behemoths. Think General Motors versus Ford. Brands such as Coca-Cola took decades to build. Then along comes Google, achieving its position of power and brand with next to no marketing and without attempting to destroy its competition.

I'm slightly disappointed that he chose Google as an example, not that it's inaccurate, but it is another corporation even if it has a very different structure and philosophy compared with its predecessors. Far more interesting to me is the way small businesses can now successfully challenge and beat the big guys. 

The strength of the old corporations lay in their size. Now that's what holds them back. Encumbered by debt, real estate and old working practices, they cannot compete with adaptable, flexible and relatively debt-free small businesses.

Join the revolution

That's where ki work comes in. A team of professionals each working from home, linked to colleagues anywhere in the world via the internet, has negligible overheads. As a result they can beat conventional bricks-and-mortar companies on both quality and cost. 

Visit ki work's main site and see how you can use our online marketplace to fulfill your project requirements or create your own virtual business as a ki worker. 

How Workforce Management magazine predicts glowing future for ki work

New year's the time for 'experts' to make predictions. They're all pretty gloomy. There's no debate as to whether the cup's half full or half empty. Instead optimists hope for a refill in 2010 while pessimists or, perhaps, realists expect a longer wait. That probably makes 'sobriety' one of the key words for 2009.

Fortunately ki work offers a home-brew alternative to fill your own (virtual) glass or better to share a pitcher. Who wants to work (or drink) alone? The good news is ki work's collaborative, work-sharing, guerrilla outsourcing model is finding friends everywhere, even if they don't know it yet.

The leading HR magazine and website Workforce Management lists 60 top predictions, most of which are in total accord with the ki work model. In fact there's so little to contradict the ki work philosophy that it makes my job hard. 

Normally I'd point readers to some small nuggets that back up my argument. This time I can only recommend you read the whole article. Believe me, it's fascinating.

Indeed, the one key prediction that writer Ed Frauenheim picks out to introduce the article is: "There will be more emphasis on collaboration and using technology to support it." Well, of course.

Another couple of quotes I'd pick out are:

"The talent market will look a lot more like eBay than Monster or Yahoo HotJobs."

And:

"The concept of offshoring will cease to exist. Talent will exist globally and companies will go where the talent is. The purpose will not be to get the lowest-cost labor, but rather the highest-quality talent."

There are a couple of key points where I think the article is fundamentally wrong because it assumes most conventional business organizations will be agile enough to cope with the seismic changes that are taking place. I believe that most current business models will prove unsustainable. (But then if I was writing an article for HR professionals I'm not sure if I'd want to be the one to tell them their profession was on the verge of being swept aside by the tide of history.)

My other disagreement with the Workforce Management article is it's postulating these changes ten years away in 2018.  The dramatic shifts in the way we work are going to happen an awful lot sooner than that. Sign up free for ki work and see how you can be part of the work revolution.

So what have gorillas got to do with business process outsourcing?

Image via Wikipedia

So what is ki work "virtual business process outsourcing" (or VBPO for short)? Is ki work "collaborative capitalism"? Is ki work "guerrilla outsourcing"? (That's as distinct from "gorilla outsourcing" which is monkey business.) Or is there a better way to describe ki work?

I know you might say: "It's all just words. What matters is the ki work concept." But words are very important to me, not just because they're how I make my living.

Say I meet somebody in a bar, a cafe or whatever and they ask me what I'm doing. I reply that I'm editing a blog for ki work. They'll ask: "What's that?" I could say: "Oh, it's a platform for virtual business process outsourcing." Maybe it's just the company I keep, but instantly the by-now uninterested party would suddenly remember an urgent appointment, spot somebody they just had to speak to or develop an impossibly weak bladder.

Do you see my difficulty?

The erstwhile CEO and founder of ki work Michael Wolff tells me this isn't really a problem as people in the world of outsourcing talk of nothing but BPO or VBPO (obviously that's "business process outsourcing" or "virtual business process outsourcing). Apart from the way it doesn't make outsourcerers sound as if they're the most exciting people to spend time with, the terms and acronyms are probably as clear as mud to the average ki worker. Hey, until a few months ago my eyes would have glazed over.

Michael and the other top ki workers have come up with a couple of other suggestions, most recently "guerrilla outsourcing". This is actually a very descriptive term for ki work.

Guerrilla warfare involves small groups of lightly armed, highly mobile combatants challenging better-equipped, but less mobile, conventional armies. Ki work enables small organizations of highly-flexible online workers to take on large corporations and win. 

While I can absolutely see the parallels, there's something on an emotional level that I find slightly uncomfortable about the phrase "guerrilla outsourcing". The problem I have is that I don't feel as if I'm some sort of successor to Che Image via WikipediaGuevara as a I sit banging away at my keyboard. 

In the same vein I always laughed behind the backs of people who called themselves "road warriors". A software salesman - not many women want to class themselves as "warriors" - dressed in chinos and a polo shirt is not Mad Max. Ditch the laptop and the mid-range Ford, get a spear and a chariot, then I'll believe you're a "road warrior".

As I said, my reaction is totally emotional and irrational.

This brings me to the other description of ki work as "collaborative capitalism". I've blogged before about how ki work represents part of the future as old-style managerial capitalism falls apart.  

I love the idea of the internet providing new ways to work where we collaborate online, across national borders, to undercut and replace traditional corporations. Certainly big isn't always beautiful any more. 

The benefits of economies of scale are disappearing in the digital world. Who needs a big office building with a sophisticated computer network and thousands of employees when your big business can be undercut by a bunch of homeworkers linked by the internet? 

So again, "collaborative capitalism" offers a good description of ki work, but as a term it comes with baggage. What I mean is, in a strangely contradictory way, some people seem to believe that if you talk about "capitalism " you must be a communist. It's nonsense of course, but it's hard to escape the emotional subconscious impact of words.

So how do we describe ki work: collaborative capitalism, guerrilla outsourcing or virtual business process outsourcing? Perhaps you can offer a better suggestion. I'd certainly be interested to hear what you have to say.