The Taylor Swift Inspiration

This post has been inspired by last week's Taylor Swift/Apple dialog, which didn't last longer than 24 hours; when Apple swiftly responded to Taylor's audacious complaint, at the speed of tweet! Yes, with an average of 6,000 tweets a second, the speed of tweet is a thing now.

Imagine the amount of information exchanged through these tweets. With a modest cap of 140 characters a tweet, considering that everyone tries to cram their tweets into the cap, the total number of characters comes to 840,000; that's 168,000 words, assuming an average word length of 5 characters. Assuming an average of 300 words a page, that's equivalent to 560 pages; that's A Short History of Nearly Everything!

This means that If you follow the right people and engage in social media, you can exponentially increase your knowledge and teach yourself a book worth of information every second! Today, with the efficiency of the web, we can tap into the minds of opinion leaders and influential figures conveniently and at no cost. Instead of going through the hassle of applying to the Harvard Business School and pay hefty fees to sit at Michael Porter's lectures, for example, you can follow his twitter feeds and engage in thought provoking conversations from the comfort of your home.

And that's the so-called Web Quotient. You've never heard of it because I just made it up. WQ is the wisdom of connectivity, interactivity, synergy of minds, and leveraging the forces, people, data, and information exchanged by borderless nations.

An application of WQ is the recent and familiar story of Taylor Swift and Apple, which ended in a win-win paradigm. The revenue model of the digital music industry saw a massive change in less than 24 hours and on the other side, the tech giant enjoyed the positive publicity.

Today, there aren't many firms that don't have company blogs, a Twitter account, and a Facebook page, to say the least. Companies like Apple are actively engaged in the Web world to learn about their customers' behavior as well as competitors. They constantly monitor the world of social media and read into and respond to what's being said about them. They continually fine-tune their strategies to keep up with the changes in a world of uncertainty. In many cases, they cannot stay on top of the WQ race on their own and so they hire employees and organizations that have a degree in the WQ "science".

The New Measure of Intelligence

Some day IQ was the only measure of intelligence. As we approached the end of the 19th Century, Emotional Intelligence (EQ) was introduced as the true identifier for the human intellect and continues to be one of the prominent skills in today's world. The 21st Century, however, is not just about EQ anymore; a new dimension of intelligence seems to be emerging, rapidly and softly.

WQ is the wisdom of connectivity, interactivity, synergy of minds, and leveraging the forces, people, data, and information exchanged by borderless nations.

Millennial Generational Expert, Market Research Data Miner, and Social Media Manager are just some examples of jobs that never existed before the advent of today's technology. Think about the pace at which new words have been appearing in the dictionary; Google, Digital Marketing, SEO, Cloud Computing, Crowdfunding, Big Data, Selfie, Hashtag and thousands more are the building blocks of the 21st century language.

Thanks to the power of the WQ era, now you can scientifically figure out which university and what degree would likely land you at your dream job. LinkedIn University Finder aggregates the data from its users to help prospects in making an educated choice in planning their future. PayScale delivers an array of reports and guides about incomes, career paths, salary negotiation techniques, and many more services based on real data. Today, the sophisticated and interconnected web of people, technology, and information supplies countless services and products at arm's length, efficiently and effectively.

So What? Why Should I Care?

You should care because the employee of the 21st century is at risk of commoditization, more than ever. With the speed and efficiency of the WQ era, ideas like outsourcing and crowdsourcing seem quite rational and effective for businesses to pursue as part of their HR strategic planning. This is partly why, as many of you have heard, job security is the thing of the past.

The Modern Employee needs to a take a differentiated approach to de-commoditize and hedge against risks of being victimized in a perfectly competitive world. One way the current article suggests is to attempt to attain a balance of the three intelligence measures discussed above. While IQ may not be a controllable factor, EQ and WQ may very well be acquired through learning and experience.

What are you doing to keep up with the pace of the WQ age? How are you re-positioning yourself in a rapidly changing environment?