Make money with skill, skull or scale

The following is not meant to be comprehensive, but illustrative of the different TYPES of ways to make money.

People will make money with their:

• skill
• skull or
• scale

As we all know, skills can be picked up fairly quickly, especially with e-learning. Skills, therefore, are no longer a source of competitive advantage in anyone's career. This is why Indian or Chinese workers can and will catch up quickly in the global economy and will do the jobs that were formerly done in North America.

Making money with your skull (that is, your specialized knowledge, knowhow, expertise, etc.) is the next level. Because knowledge is more flexible and can be deployed non-personally (for instance, you can coach someone via Skype), there are more opportunities to leverage it in order to create more value (hence, more wealth). Not surprisingly, people in knowledge-intensive professions tend to earn more than their corporate counterparts.

For instance, a consultant specialized in manufacturing will earn TWICE as much money as the manager of a manufacturing plant.

Lastly, people who make money via systems that allow them to scale upward their operations, will likely be the richest.

Notice, by the way, that Bill Gates built a company that leverage BOTH the skull of his employees (who actually own stock options -- he's made 10,000 millionaires so far) and the scale of his operating systems and global marketing clout.

Most people are probably at the "skill" level. Even a knowledge worker (attorney, accountant, graphic designer, marketing VP, etc.) who uses and applies knowledge in his/her line of work, but does NOT share his/her knowledge, has not yet reached the "skull" level.

Most professionals and managers that you know, in fact, might have a lot of useful and expert knowledge in their head (called tacit knowledge). However, they might be trapped by old ways of thinking, where people associate "work" with "making money."

In the new knowledge-based economy, knowledge = money. More accurately, knowledge = BIG money.

This is why Robert Reich, in his book The Future of Success, says that "People who do not export knowledge, do not become rich."

Fortunately, it is never too late to learn how to package and export one's knowledge. There is an abundance of free tools on the Web to allow a person to do so: Gcast, Odeo, Blogger, Feedblitz, geocities, Slideshare.net, Bubbleshare, etc.

If you'd like tips and advice on how to market your knowledge, drop me a line at superscribe@gmail.com