Employee of the Month in the Era of Augmented Reality

The Alpha Male/Female/GenderAmbiguous of the 21st century business is about to undergo a revolution.  While much of the Social Networking Web 2.0 stuff hitting the office is causing true revolutions in synergy and productivity it doesn't do much to impact the current Machiavellian orders of office politics.  Knowing the right names, talking to people the right way, passive aggressiveness and chess-like strategy are still essential.   All these current (and longstanding) real-life processes just start to take up so much more typing, Facetime, Cisco technology and bandwidth.  

Politics will always matter. I'm not going to stand on a podium and tell you that just because we are undergoing a revolution in man/machine interface that suddenly "who has the best ideas/can execute ideas of others" is going to trump who's the "coolest guy to have a beer with/the hot-smart-aggressive girl".   The possibility of that trumping occurring though, is going to increase significantly.

We all remember PreCalculus and how we learned that we can add two functions, say f(x) and g(x).  Well, success in business, particularly when business means working under others in a business hierarchy as it so often means, is largely the result of two functions, where f(x) is your ability to execute short and long term objectives and g(x) how much you please those around you/who your family is/how cheery you are/how much you understand the dynamics of team play.  

These functions are then weighted, based on the nature of your business.  Businesses like IBM, Microsoft, Google, Zynga and Facebook obviously are looking for a higher weighted f(x) execution-pool than Wynn Resorts, a host of mutual funds, and nearly every Mom-And-Pop store on Earth, whom are weighing more g(x).  

Of course we live in a world that elected George W. Bush twice.  People loathe Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein for quantifying and avoiding obvious risk the world was willingly blind not to see.  The Great Steve Jobs got fired from Apple.  No office, sector or environment, big or small, tech-centric, sales-centric, marketing-centric, long-tail, short-tail or state-sponsored is putting more emphasis on f(x) than g(x).  Let's go nuts and say the global aggregate weight average is something like .20(f(x)) + .8(g(x)).  (Caveat Emptor: The United States probably is a lot more execution-centric than the global function as in places like Latin America and Eurasia you can often become a huge success without producing anything of value at all).  

Well Augmented Reality is about to drastically change the weights.  Augmented Reality, the great democratizer of the Social Web World.  The hotshot at the office will still be the guy with assiduously combed hair who gets on well with all the female associates and the CFO's nephew will still pool incredible projects out of non-effort magically at deadline time.  We will still be human beings with human tastes and preferences, after all.  Only now they're going to have to share the spotlight with two new archetypes, (really three as a sections of both archetypes share a large Venn diagram-style intersection), the Passionate Video-Game Enthusiast and the Fanatic Mathematics Hobbyist.

Both of these types have always been tremendous executers and have gotten on fairly well in office environments.  They're scattered across all departments from Operations to Sales although their mecca seems to be IT.  Their f(x) has always been so high that it's overridden their poor g(x) complement.  Until now though, f(x) has not generated returns valid enough to warrant increasing its weight.  Also, due to the vertical nature of information and the still-persistent Machiavellian environment of the office, their poor g(x) actually hinders their potential f(x) as they never quite know where to turn on large floors or who to talk to about what and their interlocutors consistently prize diffusing the immediate situation of their contact more than finding an optimal solution to their mutual problem.  

Augmented Reality promises to change all that.  I present to you David, my theoretical protagonist.  Obsessed as a youth with Rubix cubes, rabidly happy in his undergraduate Logic and Algorithms classes, Sim City trained to calculate derivatives on spot to specific amortizable time-oriented objectives he's gotten a job as an Associate to a Wealth Advisor (aka Broker with Rich Friends last century) at the Private Bank  of some anonymous large New York Bank.  

Although David seems to execute trades across various financial instruments for various clients over various distributions of accounts with ease and preciseness he's looked-on a bit as an oddball amongst the varied 60 or so Associates on the floor and although his productivity is in the range of the top eight Associates, he's generally valued by the floor managers and HR folks as much closer to the median.    Points against him include irrelevant topics like, "He's not that fun to talk to in the elevator" and "He eats lunch alone playing with his iPad".  Although nobody physically says it, they all find it spooky how it subscribes to the Financial Times to read it, not use it as cute fashion accoutrement.  As an intern rotating advisor to advisor, he'd almost been ruled out after the first couple of weeks due to his odd laconic conversational style and public school background.  Only his ability to calculate all kinds of Bach-like variations on options and dual-currency notes had saved him.  

Well in in the spring of 2012 the IT department declares that they've finally set up a great AR system and a really nonintrusive set of normal-looking glasses you can implement it with.  Suddenly you can run through clients doing all kinds of great search variations and even invent your own search algorithms, doing menial tasks like paying off American Express Cards for rich families you only want around to sell huge portions of Latin american debt to can be automated with a few simple precise if/then statements and while loops.  The employee phonebook gives you key personal talk-time information about each of your contacts as all of them have been asked to fill out a survey about personal tastes and gustos so while you work out a revolving loan with Ralph from Credit for a a family of Scottish architects currently living in a high-risk country in South America you are prompted to bring up the Dodgers (his favorite team) or Frank Sinatra (his favorite singer) whenever you reach information bottlenecks too large to keep talking about the business-task-subject while too small to warrant calling back to resolve later.  

David takes to the new changes like a fish in water.  Even Ralph later comments to Peggy from HR that he thinks "my man lil' Davey" is finally getting some serious action in the bedroom because talking to him is like talking to a new man.  Only possible explanation for such a huge, great change, claims Ralph.  Peggy makes a mental note on with virtual sticky widget placed in the upper right hand corner of her vision-field to investigate later. 

David starts to come up with great ideas.  He automates client-alert processes on great investments by creating a machine-written newsletter that advises on three-week trading trends on ETFs tracking major indices powered by a semantic parser that combs Reuters and AP newlines for key sentiment-phrases.  When he does trades with foreign language clients he uses an automatic translation system that would cost him significant time on account of constraints in live-time translation due to the ambiguity of phrases if he wasn't really just using it to mask the fact that the image of him in the telecommunication feed is just an earlier video he made smilingly making mouth motions on loop.  In reality he's juggling a loan to a real estate mogul in Honk Kong, selling a derivative that shorts the S&P 500 3x to a graphic designer in Colombia and getting a Bengali Fishing Company Magnate to load up on GOOG shares before they release their new Google Maps Integration Suit that lets you physically explore 3D simulations of foreign continents and have business conferences on top of Mount Rushmore.  

Carol, his arch-nemesis is climbing the corporate sentiment ranks by networking at parties and bars all over midtown Manhattan and Upper East Side.  He's quickly catching her by networking with data structures and algorithms central to daily and/or high-return processes.  

Soon, John Wu, the head honcho of the floor has a talk with Irene Bellanotte, the Wealth Advisor that David has been working under for the last 18 months.  

"He's just too valuable Irene.  I know he's made you a lot of money and you have compensated him justly with the increasing returns but the potential he has to automate the office and train the other Associates is just too great.  This isn't coming from me.  It's coming from the men upstairs.  They've created a new position for him, in fact, given his multitasking prowess they've given him two.  He's Vice President of AR integration on the floor full-time  and will consult as Automation Architect throughout the company periodically."

David is but an isolated case.  The consequences could be much greater.  Great adapters, the kind of people who speak two languages, play three instruments and delight at taking new, even lower-paying jobs occasionally  for the sole purpose of challenging their ability to change their skill set will become like East Hampton's Timeshares for great companies.  Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Apple and Asus will share some great Operations expert three months a year, cut up to the smallest distributions possible where said great employee can effectively execute given that he has the ability to instantly comb and manipulate gigantic portions of information (as opposed to data, what he would have to comb through and with difficulty attempt to manipulate today).  

Pilots and Soliders will have Cartesian planes laid over their eyes and manipulable targets that move based on complex environmental-factor modeling software.  Children will have tutors with graphical demonstrations and trial problems that respond immediately to key issues they cannot grasp.  Lonely people will have lovers.  Husbands and wives will work on separate continents without considering theirs a long-term relationship.  You will never be lost in another city for as long as you live.  When storage becomes sufficiently cheap, and storage is becoming cheaper faster than anything else in technology,  you will be able to videorecord your entire life and spot search to remember forgotten phrases, faces, names and passwords.

Social Networks will revolutionize the idea of "being social" in so as far as changing the scale and possibilities of what is considered "being social."  Augmented Reality will change the very parameters with which we define "being social".  Social Networks are changing the domain and resultant range of our function but Augmented Reality will change the formula of the function itself.  In the real world of love and entertainment we'll adapt as easily and thoughtlessly as we have to any great upheaval, but in the too-big-to-fail world of large corporations born of the 20th century where Homo Economicus  meets Vito Corleone and everything is fair if you do it with a cheerful attitude things are going to be flipped on their ears.   If the business environment was a TV show, today it'd probably be the "The Office" but in the world of Augmented Reality it will be some new show that feels like a mix of equal parts "The Matrix", "Inception", and "Tron."

Virtual Reality was a fantasy of long-dead losers with no imagination and no glimpse of the tech specs.  The real revolution is Augmented Reality.  Rappers is the 90s were fond of the phrase "Get yo' head right."  Soon Kanye West will have a song climbing the iTunes download charts called "Get Yo' Headset Right".