Digital Digressions

Why Do We Blog? That is the Question

A great post by Scott Adams, the famed creator of Dilbert has got me re-thinking this whole blogging thing, well - re-thinking it for the fourth time at least as those of you who read this blog will notice.

He says:

I’ve decided to blog less. I posted daily (mostly) for two years, with the theory that my efforts would be compensated in four ways.

1. Advertising dollars
2. Compiling the best posts into a book.
3. Growing the audience for Dilbert
4. Artistic satisfaction.

Readership of The Dilbert Blog is growing rapidly, but at about the same rate people figure out how to use RSS feeds to get the content without the ads. So there’s no longer a correlation between how hard I work and the ad income I earn..

My book based on the blog posts, STICK TO DRAWING COMICS, MONKEY-BRAIN! got great reviews for content, but angry reactions in people who feel that other people, who didn’t read the content on the Internet, and never will, should not buy the book..

I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert..Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it..

I enjoyed being relatively uncensored, and interacting with the readers on fun topics. That’s why I will continue blogging, albeit less controversially..It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.

So all this nonsense about social media and blogging and how it all makes us famous.. naah, it's more likely to make us (in)famous as Scott puts it so well above. So here are my top 4 reasons:

1. Cleaning up the mental jumble known as my brain
2. Hoping that these insightful posts would in 2 years remind me of insights I had 2 years ago and then promptly forgot about
3. Writing for other reasons than work!
4. Gathering the best posts (as voted by visitor numbers) into a book

I'm your classical definition of a knowledge worker. I used to be a skill worker (people employed me for my skill in translating complex ideas into designs that sold toys). Now they employ me to make sense of a ton of stuff happening around us and suggest ways for the business to cope with it all. That means my brain is devouring information continuously to stay ahead of the game. Some ideas stick around and mature into business opportunities, others are forgotten about. Much like you have to clean your office every now and then, I like to clean my mind by putting some thoughts down in a post. Utterly selfish I know.

So occasionally I have some useful thoughts and I find that unless I jot them down I forget about them. I had this dreadful interview recently where they asked me to list a pile of my accomplishments. I couldn't have been asked a more grating question as I'm stuck in this rut where whenever I accomplish something my satisfaction is very short lived and simply serves to highlight all the other things that still need doing. Much like the more you learn the more you realise how little you know and how much more there is to learn out there. So the important thing is to catalogue the learning, not the accomplishment.

So being this 'knowledge worker' I find I spend my life writing emails, letters, and presentations - in fact most of my writing is exclusively for purposes related to work. How boring! At least here is a chance for me to vent my spleen about stuff, which doesn't have to fit into a Power-point and be only 20 slides, in 30pt font size for a presentation lasting 45 minutes.. hurrah!

My highly erratic and diverse topics mean a book of my blog posts would be every editor's nightmare and the posts that are most popular on this blog is my collections of bumper stickers - which are funny, sometimes profound and but always funny. Difference is, I collected them together in one place people can find them and laugh about them, but I didn't invent them. Therefore I'm not sure they should be in the book.. so you can see where this is going. I'll stop now.

1. Advertising dollars
2. Compiling the best posts into a book.
3. Growing the audience for Dilbert
4. Artistic satisfaction.

Readership of The Dilbert Blog is growing rapidly, but at about the same rate people figure out how to use RSS feeds to get the content without the ads. So there’s no longer a correlation between how hard I work and the ad income I earn..

My book based on the blog posts, STICK TO DRAWING COMICS, MONKEY-BRAIN! got great reviews for content, but angry reactions in people who feel that other people, who didn’t read the content on the Internet, and never will, should not buy the book..

I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert..Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it..

I enjoyed being relatively uncensored, and interacting with the readers on fun topics. That’s why I will continue blogging, albeit less controversially..It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.

So all this nonsense about social media and blogging and how it all makes us famous.. naah, it's more likely to make us (in)famous as Scott puts it so well above. So here are my top 4 reasons:

1. Cleaning up the mental jumble known as my brain
2. Hoping that these insightful posts would in 2 years remind me of insights I had 2 years ago and then promptly forgot about
3. Writing for other reasons than work!
4. Gathering the best posts (as voted by visitor numbers) into a book

I'm your classical definition of a knowledge worker. I used to be a skill worker (people employed me for my skill in translating complex ideas into designs that sold toys). Now they employ me to make sense of a ton of stuff happening around us and suggest ways for the business to cope with it all. That means my brain is devouring information continuously to stay ahead of the game. Some ideas stick around and mature into business opportunities, others are forgotten about. Much like you have to clean your office every now and then, I like to clean my mind by putting some thoughts down in a post. Utterly selfish I know.

So occasionally I have some useful thoughts and I find that unless I jot them down I forget about them. I had this dreadful interview recently where they asked me to list a pile of my accomplishments. I couldn't have been asked a more grating question as I'm stuck in this rut where whenever I accomplish something my satisfaction is very short lived and simply serves to highlight all the other things that still need doing. Much like the more you learn the more you realise how little you know and how much more there is to learn out there. So the important thing is to catalogue the learning, not the accomplishment.

So being this 'knowledge worker' I find I spend my life writing emails, letters, and presentations - in fact most of my writing is exclusively for purposes related to work. How boring! At least here is a chance for me to vent my spleen about stuff, which doesn't have to fit into a Power-point and be only 20 slides, in 30pt font size for a presentation lasting 45 minutes.. hurrah!

My highly erratic and diverse topics mean a book of my blog posts would be every editor's nightmare and the posts that are most popular on this blog is my collections of bumper stickers - which are funny, sometimes profound and but always funny. Difference is, I collected them together in one place people can find them and laugh about them, but I didn't invent them. Therefore I'm not sure they should be in the book.. so you can see where this is going. I'll stop now.

Earning the Affinity of Your Consumers

Some years ago I came across an excellent paper by Juan Pablo Valencia and Taryn Westberg at the London Business School, where extensive investigations were conducted into how experiences people have with brands influence their perception of it and how best to generate value from Brands through experiences.

Their paper (Experience and the Brand) discusses this in elaborate detail, which makes for some interesting reading in itself and one of their conclusions is to use a consumer affinity pyramid where you place your consumers based on the level of their affinity for your company. The people who love your brand are at the top and those who hate you are the very bottom. Interestingly people at different levels of the pyramid have specific consumption patterns, thus generating different revenue for the company. Moreover, as they move to higher segments the bring more value in the following ways:

• Higher consumption rate and repeat usage
• More willingness to pay price premiums
• Longer relationship with the brand (decreased churn)
• Word of mouth/brand ambassadorship
• Community Effects

There are alternative models to the one just described. For example, brand impact can be evaluated by calculating the advertising and PR expenditure that would be needed to get the same results in terms of changes in customer behaviour. The concept is simpler, but can only be used for comparative purposes. Alternatively, if customers can be tracked through CRM or other means, then the actual impact on sales can be measured. Sales impact can then be used to determine effectiveness with an ROI model.

So then we get to the interesting part. If this is indeed the case - the big question then becomes: how do you influence people's movement upwards in the pyramid? What creates higher levels of affinity in consumers? Is it a fancy marketing campaign? Is it friendly staff? Is it the ability to customise your own products? Well, as far as I can tell - it is not that simple. Despite the transformative power of experiences (as extolled in the paper), consumer affinity is made up of a range of factors, if one is to consider affinity from a long-term perspective, where it can truly have an impact on the company and its sustainability. Ultimately there is no gimmick solution to this problem, but in fact it is one that demands a profound re-evaluation of the company as a whole, what it is, what it stands for and how it treats its supporters: the consumers.

Broadly speaking we know that higher levels of affinity means people have a deeper emotional bond with a company. Experiences that are meaningful have a capacity to create an emotional bond by virtue of our participation in them, which moves us from objective observers into being active participants. If the experience we participate in is a positive one, or even transformative, our affinity will be higher than it would be if say, we just heard about it from someone else. That means we care more.

We care about the product and the company, we worry when things are not going well, we get more disappointed than average consumers if we are let down and we are also more willing to personally contribute to the company with content, ideas or even help our fellow consumers with advice and ideas. So with this in mind, the responsibility of companies is huge in making sure to respect and value every single last contact with its consumers and not consciously and repeatedly fail its most staunch supporters. That is a radically different approach than merely keeping a bunch of shareholders and investors happy. It's about ensuring every one is happy and consumers first and foremost. So can that even be possible I hear you asking?

Why not? The rate of change in technology, software, CRM and the growing number of online contacts a company receives, it should no longer be impossible to consolidate all these connections into user profiles that can be used, not for endless marketing campaigns and bombarding users with offers, but as a means of going back to basics: of listening and anticipating and respecting, being deserving of that emotional bond people have with you. And for that, you as a company have to behave more like a trusted reliable friend that some faceless bully in the playground that sometimes has a great offer to tempt you with and next minute leaves you in some quagmire of call-centre hell and bad service. The question is as a company: are you worthy of your consumers' affinity?

Visions of the Future: Understanding Trends

Back to that time of the year again, I'm busy collaborating with people across the company and externally to pull together insights and inspire a new bout of business development for next year. It's a fascinating subject, mapping the competitive landscape around any company, because some things you can control and knowing about them in advance will really help and other things, well, they just happen and sooner or later some of it or all of it will have an impact on you too, whether you like it or not.

For my own sanity's sake I keep following a 3-pronged approach when it comes to understanding trends, an approach I originally came across courtesy of Unilever and having chewed on it for quite some time, I've come to the conclusion that it is a very powerful way to understand the difference between cause and effect in the arena of trends.

The word 'Trends' in itself has become somewhat of an overused term and tons of institutions now deliver trend reports of various calibres, sometimes causing more confusion than clarity and this because everything is muddled together: Macroeconomic drivers meeting consumer anxieties in some niche expression through one single on-line service provider isn't exactly a trend, it is an expression, which may be the correct expression to capitalise on a nascent consumer trend, but it's longevity as a business is dependent on other factors in addition than the survival of the potential trend that spawned it. Thus it has to be evaluated as an expression, not as the mother trend - if that makes sense?

Back to the 3-pronged approach: Firstly we must seek to understand

1. Drivers
• External drivers - these are out of the control of individual consumers, but somewhere along the line they may have an impact on your life. Examples are the global economy, climate change, political risk and so on.
• Internal drivers - These are value, aspiration, needs and demands driven and influence the life of consumers.
2. Trends - trends are really about how consumers respond to the above drivers through their behaviour. It's not about whether black is in our out, it's more about understanding that fundamentally our needs don't change that quickly, but external and internal drivers will create new opportunities for those needs to be met, which conveniently leads us onto the third point:
3. Expressions - These are ways in which the trends are expressed in consumers' day to day lives, examples illustrating how businesses for instance are exploiting the trends today.

So bearing this distinction in mind, it is easier when you come across anything labelled a 'trend' to understand whether this is in fact an external or internal driver, a consumer response to the former in the form of behaviour or indeed an expression of the trend in the form of a business.

By keeping a keen eye out for the drivers, both internal and external over time it becomes possible to stay ahead of the curve so to speak, to anticipate trends and expressions, rather than merely notice more and more obscure new businesses cropping up. This is hard and of course it helps constantly being on the look-out for many different kinds of information, sources and so on, but also consciously engaging in monitoring something will gradually make you more sensitive to small changes and being able to identify the crucial indicators in a field that tell you when something is about to change.

Helmets aren't just for Astronauts.

Nick Larsen, the man behind the uber-cool Charge Bikes and the Charge Plug fixie I keep staring at longingly whenever I see one, just sent me this great video explaining the importance of wearing a helmet when cycling. I couldn't agree more as my run-ins with squirrels and most recently a car (!) are ample testament to the fact that helmets do work, they save your precious noodle and if you do bang your head, rather the helmet take the impact than your brain. We can get new teeth, new arms, skin will heal and bones will mend, but brains are harder to fix and since we only have one it's worth looking after as the kids in this video explain -

Exoforce for Real: Fully Functioning Exoskeleton for Humans

Some years ago I worked on LEGO Exoforce and inspired by the exoskeleton that Sigourney Weaver uses in the Alien movie, in addition to the Manga inspirations of Gundam and NeonGenesis Evangelion, the exoskeleton robots operated by tiny mini-figures took form.

Little did I know that only a year or two later, the technology would be available not just to play with as an idea in a toy, but something for us to try out for real. This video demonstrates the exoskeleton and sadly, here it is shown as something for the military to use, whereas I could see tons and tons of uses for it to help people in their day-to-day activities. Imagine no longer needing a wheel chair, just step into your exo and off you go.. dancing, running, walking up the stairs, playing ball - you name it.

Why the Era of the Insider is Over

Now this is intentionally a controversial title for a post, but hear me out. I'm not saying that we no longer need people who know stuff, in fact we will need them more than ever before - but what I am saying is that information and expertise is becoming so ubiquitous (through the Internet) that some of the models for profiting from expertise and insider knowledge are rapidly becoming redundant.

So back to the post. Let's start by a poignant example. Here in the UK estate agents have been running amok with property prices of late and been trying their best to prop up property prices all around the country. Why? Because the higher the sale price, the better their fee (as it is often calculated as a percentage of the final sale price). So whether you like it or not, it is in estate agents' interests to get as high a price for a property as possible. [Don't even get me started on whether it is reasonable to pay half a million pounds for some house built over a century ago, where heating mostly benefits the pigeons outside and no angle in the house is 90 degrees, making office chairs on casters spontaneously migrate to one corner of the room.]

Anyway - the game has been that of poker: If we tell you the price is going up and you better get on the property ladder soon, (pandering to the human weakness of dreading to lose out) people invariably believe it and more often than not in recent years, have been extending themselves far more than what could be recommended to just get on that property ladder.

Interestingly this began changing not too long ago, first with Nethouseprices, an on-line facility that keeps track on the actual price for which a property was sold. Certainly this began drawing a lot of interest and curiosity from people, but there was still room for estate agents to jump in the middle and say - 'weeeelll, that was then... this is now and I tell you it is hotting up big time!'. What do I mean? Well, the prices listed on Nethouseprices are lag measures - they only tell you the news AFTER it has happened. It's like saying - I would like to lose weight and tracking your weight only by getting on the scales every morning. The scales will tell you your weight at that precise moment in time, but not whether you are likely to be losing some weight anytime soon.

Well, I hear you ask - how could you measure the likelihood of losing weight? By finding a lead measure instead. So if you measured how often you took some exercise and how many calories you burned every time you exercised, offsetting that against how many calories you took in and going on the theory that if you burn more calories than you eat - you will find that sooner or later you begin losing weight. That's a lead measure. Keeping track of that will tell you before you get on the scales what the scales are likely to tell you. How does this apply to the housing market?

The fact is that the housing market is catching up too and instead of reporting lag measures (i.e the price at which properties were sold and no use to you since the property is no longer on the market so you can't jump in and buy it instead!) we, the consumers are beginning to have a chance to peek into that precious secret folder that only estate agents and individual sellers had access to before - that is, how much the price is coming down WHILE the property is still on the market. Ooops! The emperor no longer has any clothes as PropertySnake, interestingly named to be the opposite of the property ladder, will show. PropertySnake tracks how much prices of properties have fallen over time and by looking up areas by post-codes you get a good sense of the overall trend in that area in addition to what is happening to a particular house. If you then are so intrigued by what you find, you can look up with what estate agent that house/flat is listed with by clicking on the listing.

It is also a step on from traditional price comparison sites, which have mushroomed recently, because again - although those sites compare the prices right now, they seldom give you any indication of where the market is going. The same phenomenon is what happens at Ebay - because everyone can bid whenever they like and only by keeping track of something over time can you see whether the demand for that is heating up or not, it means your powers of detecting broader trends are limited to your own power of observation and whatever little software widget you might have that gives you the bids that are just about to close so you can bid in the last few minutes.

All those are still tactical tools, and up till now the strategy has been left to experts, but as we begin to see with house prices and no doubt with other areas too - the last vestiges for insider knowledge is becoming undone.

Why So Few Women at the Top: The Weight of Many Small Things

An excellent article recently appeared in the Harvard Business Review analysing why so few women have made it to top management in Fortune 500 companies. Their take is an interesting one, highlighting the fact that commonly perceived reasons for lack of female career progression, such as 'the glass ceiling' are in fact outdated metaphors for what is today a much more complicated picture.

They highlight the fact that times have changed and

the glass ceiling metaphor is now more wrong than right. For one thing, it describes an absolute barrier at a specific high level in organizations. The fact that there have been female chief executives, university presidents, state governors, and presidents of nations gives the lie to that charge.

At the same time, the metaphor implies that women and men have equal access to entry- and midlevel positions. They do not. The image of a transparent obstruction also suggests that women are being misled about their opportunities, because the impediment is not easy for them to see from a distance. But some impediments are not subtle.

Worst of all, by depicting a single, unvarying obstacle, the glass ceiling fails to incorporate the complexity and variety of challenges that women can face in their leadership journeys. In truth, women are not turned away only as they reach the penultimate stage of a distinguished career. They disappear in various numbers at many points leading up to that stage.

The article goes on to explain the very complex and nuanced world, to be seen more like a labyrinth rather than a single unsurmountable obstacle that provide the reasons why so few women indeed make it to the top. A series of actions are also suggested as ways for companies to address this problem, making a strong point of the fact that there is more to empowering women than putting quotas in place.

Summarising:

1. Increase people’s awareness of the psychological drivers of prejudice toward female leaders, and work to dispel those perceptions.

2. Change the long-hours norm.

3. Reduce the subjectivity of performance evaluation.

4. Use open-recruitment tools, such as advertising and employment agencies, rather than relying on informal social networks and referrals to fill positions.

5. Ensure a critical mass of women in executive positions—not just one or two women—to head off the problems that come with tokenism.

6. Avoid having a sole female member of any team.

7. Help shore up social capital.

8. Prepare women for line management with appropriately demanding assignments.

9. Establish family-friendly human resources practises.

10. Allow employees who have significant parental responsibility more time to prove themselves worthy of promotion.

11. Welcome women back.

12. Encourage male participation in family-friendly benefits.

Full version of article

The Business Jargon Buster

Back from my lengthy travels this week I picked up the Economist's The World in 2008 again, a report I always look forward to reading as it is diverse in points of view and always packed with insight, in addition to being spiced up with the occasional slice of current affair humour thrown in for good measure.

Andrew Palmer's The Good Jargon guide is an excellent example of just such an article - close enough to remind all of us of the buzzwords we use, but witty enough to make us laugh at ourselves too. Some of my favourite witticisms from this articles is the references to globalisation. First everything was supposed to become the same (Coca-colonisation), then local differences made all the difference (localisation). Now some things are the same and others different (glocalisation) and because of Thomas Friedman's bestseller we are even debating 2D vs 3D - is the world flat or spiky? It will appear insightful in a business meeting to state that the world is round - but a 10-year old could have told you that.

Also the references to emerging markets by acronym means Brazil, Russia, India and China are a BRIC, China and India are Chindia and my favourite, Palmer is rooting for Spain and Latin America to be referred to collectively as SPLAT, I love it. Furthermore it's not about making heads or tails about stuff no more - instead it's the size of your tail that matters, apparently. The Long Tail is of course the theory of how niche audiences can be catered for through all of us being increasingly connected on-line and thus coupling supply and demand is easier than ever before. The thinking is that lots of niche products are more important than a few blockbusters, but then we have Fat and Heavy Tails where extreme events occur more frequently than theory predicts, but if you do away with tails altogether and go for a Black Swan, you are into territory that is wholly unexpected.

I also totally agree with the point of labelling anything 2.0 - yes we've heard about web 2.0, but do we really need books like The World is Flat 3.0, (making you think of infinite software upgrades where there's no discernible difference, but somehow you still have to pay for it) Lunch 2.0 (Silicon Valley canteens serving free lunches) or Government 2.0 (where citizens become more involved) - seems like we are creating a whole league of BS 2.0 too? Or what about Greenwash - the environmental version of whitewash, or forgetting marketing campaigns and going for 'poking' people instead. It's a ridiculous world out there and somehow we need to describe all these ideas, but it appears that there is an entire industry devoted to dreaming up silly names for things, massclusivity anyone?

Teaching in the Age of the Digital Native: LEGO Exploring Creative Learning Solutions for Developing Countries

Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past ...a really big discontinuity has taken place.. This is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century. Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video-games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives. (Marc Prensky)

With this realisation in mind, a radical re-think of education and skills development is needed. It's no longer about a teacher at the head of the class-room lecturing a bunch of disinterested students, too busy txting their friends, but about ways to utilise children's competencies and curiosities in the digital fields to improve learning. Another layer to this is the growing digital divide, where said media is becoming more and more important in our lives, but the rate of technology adoption and access is of course the greatest in the Western world, where developing countries are often left behind.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media lab, pioneered a solution to this growing problem through his One Laptop Per Child initiative, where the goal is to create a hundred dollar laptop, available to kids in the developing world to ensure they will not grow up to be the Digital have-not's whose abilities to learn, network and build a livelihood for themselves is hampered by a lack of key skills. As Negroponte puts it: "Any nation's most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children's innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children's machine designed for “learning learning.”

Drawing on 10 years of research, product development and success as a consumer robotics pioneer with LEGO MINDSTORMS®,  LEGO Education, The LEGO Group's educational division, today begins testing of creative curriculum solutions in three schools in Brazil to establish the best technology platform for bringing 21st Century skills to students ages seven and older in underserved and developing countries.

LEGO Education is exploring how to harness technology to bridge the physical and virtual play worlds to provide advanced teaching methods that integrate science, math, engineering, language, social skills, and more. The plan is to provide selected classrooms with concept products that foster the hands-on, minds-on creative play for which the LEGO(R) brand is universally known. Ultimately LEGO Education is aiming to provide cost-effective, high-impact, versatile tools that foster creative exploration and learning for those schools and students who need it most to prepare for the future.

LEGO Press release

21st Century Skills