Introduction

The interconnected individual is personally meaningful to each of us. While our professional careers have each spanned over 40 years with different phases, roles, and expertise, neither of us started as connected, privileged individuals.

Certainly our fathers, who experienced the Great Depression and World War had neither the experience nor the contacts for either of us to be inducted into what C.S. Lewis in 1944 named “The Inner Ring”¹—those who have perceived status that others aspire to attain. Like many, we had to stumble through and discover how to navigate our own careers and acquire whatever guidance we could from mentors, colleagues, and inspiring authors such as Peter Drucker and Marshall McLuhan for Jeff, and Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek for Hunter.

Jeff

I have taught working professionals and graduate and undergraduate students in universities since 1985. In that role, I have encountered aspiring thousands, who were taking business courses to advance their careers and open opportunities. Many were foreign students, who came to the United States at great financial and personal sacrifice to get a shot at improving their lives through up-skilling and new knowledge.

Many have found their way to successful careers. Their success is meaningful; I found purpose in helping others to achieve their goals through contributing to their education. I was inspired by business graduate students who mortgaged their homes, left babies in their native countries with family, stepped out of their careers at great financial sacrifice, returned to learning after raising their children, or simply committed to a transition from the known to the unaccustomed.

However, I came to understand that many of the students whom I taught at San Francisco State University (from 1995 through today) and other educational venues experienced limitations on the work they could apply for, limited access to prestigious and well-paying jobs, and limited confidence that they could compete and chart their own course for work that could matter for them. Most of them, like me, had come from lower middle-class homes, where their parents worked in jobs, not careers, and were familiar with only a few career paths that they themselves experienced in their community. They were not the “connected individuals” that the biased work recruitment system has traditionally favored: Those from the right families, communities, schools, and those with the right past employers, clubs, ethnicities, race, sexual orientation, and gender.

Hunter

I was born in England, in the midst of its socialist experiment. In a class-riven society; my parents were tagged as “working class,” which automatically limited access to “The Inner Ring.” I was able to escape as a result of education and the fortuitous happenstance of joining an American headquartered company, which led me to the United States.

In this land of opportunity, I have been able to live an entrepreneurial life, as a manager of others’ start-ups, then a founder of my own, and lately by helping new founders via venture capital.

I am acutely conscious that this path has not been open to all, until now. With the advent of the interconnected individual, I hope to contribute to the ideas that will make the path wider and less steep.

Together, we discovered first-hand the importance of being well connected in the conventional hiring system when we cocreated a project-based learning program at Hult International Business School. We were tasked with developing professional relationships with multinational companies in the San Francisco Bay Area who could provide real challenges to our students, guided by using our book on service thinking to apply to their project work. We fully expected that our graduate students who were teamed with professionals from IBM, Cisco, SAP, and other companies would have access to recruitment for professional tracks in marketing, sales, and management. We were surprised to learn that, for professional track positions, in line with conventional practice in many other companies, these employers recruited exclusively from the top-ranked schools or those universities with whom they already had long-term relationships. In short, the connected people had access to the recruiters and others did not. We saw the pervasive bottleneck to opportunity.

While many of our students went on to terrific positions in other companies, the experience of this hiring bias seared our determination to devote our work together to fostering the democratization of opportunity for more than the chosen connected.

Fortunately, our aspirations are aligned with a rising tide of many who are dedicated to opening opportunity for all. There are new paradigms for more permeable organizations, and new individual career paths for seizing opportunity through the adjacent possibilities of cloud, mobile, data analytics, cognitive assistants, social networks, and regional geographic clusters interconnected through global exchanges. Enterprising individuals now have a greater chance to create opportunity for themselves by interconnecting freely with others. We call this person the interconnected individual: He or she can navigate a career with greater autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and can make progress through collaboration with others in ways that were never possible before.

This book is intended to help those who seek to do work that matters, to start a company, to grow a business, to pursue an individual career, or to innovate with others. We provide the workplace context in Chapter 1 and a conceptual framework in Chapter 2 for how the interconnected individual fits in and contributes value in this new era. Chapter 3 explores how new technologies enable spontaneous order to redefine organizations and work connections, and Chapter 4 describes the individual economy that is enabled by an entrepreneurial mind-set. The second part of the book illustrates how these concepts are applied in individual career planning, entrepreneurship, finance, education, work recruitment, and new wealth creation through opportunity in regions.

Throughout the book, we cite specific resources and references for further exploration. Accordingly, we have organized this book around some key themes and interviewed some leading edge thinkers and practitioners to present ideas for individuals to continue to develop their own singular plan.

Key Themes

1. The individual—and individualism—will play a new and different role in the emerging socio-technical system, where humans are augmented by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
2. Augmentation will be activated via interconnectivity—universal networked connection to people, knowledge, resources, and subsystems. There will be fewer built-in barriers, and interconnectivity can benefit all individuals.
3. Every individual must be an entrepreneur in the new socio-technical system. Our mind-set for life must be that of a start-up: how to serve others in new and ever-changing ways, how to assemble resources to do so, how to stay on the leading edge to avoid replacement or redundancy.
4. Empathy for the needs of others is at the core of the entrepreneurial mind-set and the technology-augmented service ecosystem. The entrepreneur’s role is a moral one, making life better for all. The entrepreneur-driven dynamic system will generate a more just society that unleashes the creative innovation of its citizens.
5. The individual must master systems thinking to understand how best to contribute and how best to fit in. The systems will be decentralized, distributed, and democratized, and where innovation flourishes, so will the people in the broader community.
6. Spontaneous order will emerge—entrepreneurial systems will self-organize as a result of empathic individual behavior linked to other like-minded people. This entrepreneurial order will generate new organizational forms that we can’t imagine today, replacing conventional and traditional institutions.
7. Local and regional clusters of organizations and opportunities characterized by transparency will thrive and be magnets for interconnected individuals.
8. Lifelong learning and lifelong up-skilling will become a normal practice. Each person can understand his or her own aptitudes as a first step to building a lifelong workplan and lifelong pursuit of opportunities.
9. New metrics will replace productivity measures (such as GDP and quarterly corporate profit—the leveraging of human labor) with connectivity measures, the enabling of access and collaboration for new opportunities and approaches to meaningful work in an augmented intelligence world.
10. Self-reliance, networks, lifelong learning, and values-based transitions will support a purpose-driven life, aligning individuals with what matters to them.

Who Is an Entrepreneur?

There are many ways to become an entrepreneur. Cloud, platforms, apps, cognitive assistants, and social networks enable infinite opportunity.

Here are some examples:

• Adam Neumann was raised in a Kibbutz in Israel, where he experienced community and interdependence. He recognized that many young U.S. professionals were working in isolation on the web, yearning for a place to be with like-minded people, yet still have privacy. He founded WeWork: matching local people (through AI algorithms), who work independently or are telecommuting for companies, to reasonably priced shared work spaces. WeWork purchases and reconfigures offices with amenities, office equipment, and ambience for online virtual work, but also provides a community for individuals who want to meet and have personal contact with those of common interests. WeWork demonstrates how to create communities of spontaneous order with drop-in flexibility that serves both individual business and personal needs. Today, WeWork is valued at $16 billion and has 60,000 participants in cities throughout the United States.²
• John Yang, is a former financial advisor, who never married nor had children. Now 68 years old, he wants to teach children in a safe, structured environment where he can have the flexibility to plug-in and have autonomy. John enrolled as a substitute teacher in the San Francisco School District. He checks the District Platform the evening before class to see which schools, grades, classrooms, and subject areas need substitute teachers. John can choose to bid on a class and shows up the next day, ready for work.
• Eve Blossom was appalled at global sex trafficking and wanted to do something about it. Twenty years ago, she decided to provide women who were trafficked an opportunity to start a new, self-sustaining life through sales of their crafts and artwork. She founded and directs a B Corporation, Weve, hosted on a global platform. She sources from women in cities and villages anywhere, and places orders for retailers such as Target.
• Malcolm Franks had a career as an interior designer. At age 67, living in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, he was seeking work that would connect him with children in his religious community, give him autonomy, and freedom for a flexible daily schedule that suits his lifestyle. He drives 15 children to religious school in a van each day and returns them home in the afternoon. He also house-sits for several people who live in Florida during 6 months of the year, taking care of their pets, pools, and household. He uploads photos and videos to the owners of their homes so they can verify his work.

Note that in these examples, each individual has created a values-based enterprise. Each can succeed whether in a large-, medium-, or small-sized business, because of interconnection on platforms, apps, and social networks in systems that transcend conventional limitations.

Become a Maven and Maestro

These individuals, and millions more, have already reimagined their own futures to direct their work and create value and contribution. To do so, they have developed knowledge and orchestrated the fruition of their goals.

These entrepreneurs have become both mavens and maestros to create something uniquely crafted to their own needs.

A maven (derived from Hebrew/Yiddish meaning expertise and knowledge at a deep level) can take both factual and intuitive knowledge and create a fresh insight for innovation.

A maestro (derived from Italian meaning to orchestrate with others to create a successful collaboration) can bring together different people, who have different expertise, and create a successful venture.

Reid Hoffman describes this entrepreneurial mind-set, combining knowledge and the ability to collaborate with self-developed networks to produce new work opportunities.³

They take stock of their assets, aspirations and the market realities to develop a competitive advantage. They craft flexible, iterative plans. They build a network of relationships throughout their industry that outlives their start-up . . . Their approach to life seems every bit the Silicon Valley way: they were self-reliant in spirit, resourceful, ambitious, adaptive, and networked with one another.

A technologically augmented individual will emerge to create a better future for himself or herself, working with others in evolving organizations and work structures, to utilize the new technologies to enrich themselves, their communities, and the common good on a global level.

To understand how this can happen, we begin with the context of a different, emerging world.

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¹C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. “The Inner Ring” was the Memorial Lecture at King’s College, University of London, in 1944.

²WeWork. https://www.wework.com

³R. Hoffman, and B. Casnocha. 2012. The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (New York, NY: Crown Business Books).