The world is drying up. Yesterday we learned that the mighty Danube is so low that there is not enough water to cool nuclear power plants along its course. The day before, we were told that the drought in Central America is taking greater hold, causing problems in the Panama Canal. Much of the UK has been officially in a drought for several weeks. However, I thought rescue was on the way when I heard a water company director being interviewed on the radio.

He proudly announced that work should start soon on building a new massive reservoir in Oxfordshire. Whoopee, I thought. But the answer to the interviewer’s next question stopped me in my tracks. “When will it be delivering water to the system?” he asked. The director’s answer was “In 2040”. I thought I had misheard, but the radio presenter confirmed my thinking by asking why it takes 14 years to get water from a reservoir. The water company boss appeared to avoid answering the question.

I know it is complicated, but a reservoir is not much more than a big hole in the ground. Why does it take 14 years? You could ask the same for HS2, the UK’s new “high speed” train line. It will save travellers between London and Birmingham less time than they might queue in the buffet car for a coffee. Yet it will not be open to passengers until 2039, some 27 years after it was given the go-ahead. Compare that with the world’s longest road tunnel in Norway, which was built 30 years ago in less than five years.

The problem here is not bureaucratic Britain. Nor is it the time taken for legal challenges, nor “health and safety gone mad”. But beneath all those explanations lies another problem: accountability. Nobody, other than a journalist on the radio, seems to question why a reservoir takes 14 years to deliver some water. As a result, not a soul appears to be held accountable. Delays in the construction of HS2 are bound up in decisions made by groups of people and an array of committees, meaning that nobody is really accountable.

True, bosses often say “the buck stops with me”. But they are not really accountable for the plethora of small delays that ultimately create bottlenecks and hold-ups. The people really responsible have a boss who takes on the accountability and passes that to another boss who then becomes accountable to a manager up the line and so on. The result is that the person who ought to be accountable for delays and problems has passed that accountability to someone else who can’t actually deal with the difficulties causing the lengthy delays. The project is swimming in treacle.

You’ve probably worked out by now that I get annoyed by delays and problems for which people seem to have no accountability. “Nothing to do with me,” is the mantra in many workplaces. However, my level of irritation seems to be shared by many.

According to a recent Ipsos study of “digital authenticity”, a lack of accountability is a significant problem. The study showed that “human accountability” was required by 95% of people. However, only 56% of respondents felt brands achieved accountability. This 39% gap between expectations and experience was the biggest issue for brands, according to the study conducted for the software company, Sitecore. The study also found accuracy and honesty to be significant customer concerns. They do not always perceive honesty, with a 23% gap between expectations and reality.

The research shows that our customers want us to be honest and accountable for what we do. That should come as no surprise. What is concerning is the level of the gap between what customers want and what they experience. Customers do not always perceive businesses as entirely honest, and the accountability gap is even more striking. As businesses hand more decisions and customer interactions to AI, knowing which human is ultimately accountable becomes more important, not less.

Earlier this year, the Center for Creative Leadership explained how to create a culture of accountability. Managers of large infrastructure projects, in particular, might enjoy reading it. One element of increasing accountability, the article says, is allowing staff to experiment and innovate. Who knows, by doing that, they may discover how to dig a hole in the ground quicker than 14 years.

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Somehow, I missed the eclipse the other evening. I was travelling and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time to catch a glimpse of the moon obscuring the sun. Indeed, I arrived at a motorway services at around the time the eclipse was due, to find hundreds of people standing by their cars all looking through special glasses, or holding up a cardboard box that served as a pinhole camera. But it turns out they were just seeing the last remnants of the eclipse and I was too late again…!  I had searched Google for the relevant times and places, but my journey just didn’t quite match.

The following morning when listening to the radio, I discovered that I had not been the only person searching on Google for information about the eclipse. Indeed, according to Google, there had been an 800% surge in searches for help in dealing with sore eyes during the previous few hours. My search for information about the eclipse, and the huge rise in people subsequently searching for information about painful eyes, shows just how reliant we have become on Google.

However, maybe it is time to reconsider our relationship with that behemoth of finding things out. Like me, you will have noticed that when you search for something on Google you mostly now get an “AI Overview” of information before you see any search results. Just a few months ago, the magazine Search Engine Land revealed that clicks on search listings have dropped by 42%.  That’s due to the fact that people are using the information in the AI Overview instead. This is bad for business. As the Guardian newspaper revealed a year ago, companies that are at the top of the search results lose up to 79% of their traffic when there is an AI Overview above them.

Further changes at Google are leading us away from traditional search results. Earlier this year they introduced the “Intelligent Search Box”. This now replaces the old box in the centre of the Google search page where you enter your request. The intelligence is deliberately designed to steer you towards AI-derived material. Indeed, you may have noticed that when you look at the Google search box, there is a drop-down list of items. These are all your previous interactions with Google’s AI search system. 

In the past, you could switch off this display of previous or trending items. Now, though, that ability has been removed. There is no way of preventing this list from appearing, unless you play about with ad-blockers. You might think that you could prevent this list from appearing by not engaging with the AI overview system. But as Google points out in its FAQs, the AI system is a “search feature” and “cannot be turned off”.

In addition, Google has recently confirmed that it is conducting an experiment where an AI-powered search page replaces the traditional search box. The “Android Headlines” news source says that Google’s changes that are focusing on AI demonstrate “the company’s aggressive push to pivot its core search experience”.

In other words, if you have got used to making your own decisions as to what to click on, and what to accept or reject from Google’s search engine results, you are going to have to get used to a new world. That world is where Google will be making many of those decisions for you. From everything I have read about this topic, it seems like a strategic move by Google to shift away from traditional search in a significant way.

Of course, Google has never promised to show you some objectively ‘best’ set of results. It ranks them according to its own systems, which businesses and search-engine optimisers have spent decades trying to influence. However, with traditional Google search, as users, we still did much of the final selection and synthesis. With an AI Overview, Google increasingly ranks, selects, and synthesises information before we encounter the underlying sources, even if we go that far.

Google’s AI system will now do much of the filtering we might otherwise do ourselves. Some might argue this will save us time and produce clearer, more reliable results. But it depends on how good the AI is. 

Is there anything you can do about it? Well, you could accept it and just go along with things, because there is no way you can take on the search giants and get them to change their ways. Or you could learn more about writing good search queries for the age of AI-enabled search. Alternatively, you could switch to a service like Brave, which offers strong privacy and operates as a traditional search engine without the AI interference of Google. 

What you probably can’t do is keep using Google in quite the same way you always have. Google is shifting from a service that points us to answers to one that increasingly provides the answer itself. That means we need to become more conscious of what has already been selected, filtered and interpreted for us. If you don’t adapt the way you search and the way your business expects to be found, that could increasingly become a problem.

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The other day I was talking to a colleague about a student who I described as “so laid back they are almost horizontal”. This young man has been achieving good grades, but is so chilled it makes it seem as though he does no work, yet manages to get everything done. It’s particularly annoying to the rest of us, apparently running ever faster on our own little hamster wheels to try and complete all of our work.

My student is in the minority. Most people I know are working hard but also saying they are finding it tough to get all their tasks completed. They feel as though they are on a never-ending journey. It is so commonplace, that the charity Mental Health UK, disclosed last year that 91% of people at work experience high pressure and stress. According to the charity’s study, more than four in ten workers said a high or increasing workload was contributing to their stress.  

So while thinking of stressful events, can you imagine then how it must have felt to people travelling back to London Heathrow Airport yesterday to discover it was closed to aircraft following a fire near a runway. Some flights were diverted to Manchester, only for the poor folk disembarking to discover there was travel chaos there due to a power cut on the rail network. Everyone’s stress levels would have been sky high, which is where the passengers would have rather been instead of amongst the ground level chaos.

Wherever you look, there are triggers for increased stress and anxiety. Last week Huff Post was one of many media outlets reporting a rise in “heat anxiety” following the unusually long period of warm weather. Plus, Ipsos reported last month that the nation is suffering from more “crime anxiety” than before. This is despite the fact that, according to official statistics, many forms of crime have actually been falling over the past decade. Whether it is the heat, crime or travel, we are increasingly getting stressed out.

Combine that with pressure at work and it is easy to see how so many people are ending up with burnout. Worse still, according to a British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) report in June, almost one in five UK adults say they are experiencing work-related burnout. Yet BACP therapists say burnout is often ‘the last thing people will admit to’. We seem to be anxious and stressed and try to battle on regardless. Stiff upper lip and all that. 

The world around us is increasingly stressful at the same time as work pressures are also mounting for many people. It feels like you are working harder than ever, but the job just doesn’t get done. Against this background, however, are two new pieces of research that could provide a way forward – unless you are like my chilled-out student and don’t need any help.

The first study from Athens, reported in Nature a couple of months ago, showed that our resilience depends upon five factors. These include whether we can imagine a worthwhile future, experience a sense of success and, importantly, have sufficient spacing between demands to allow recovery. It ties into the second piece of research published last week by Australian psychologists. 

This particular research found that workers who take several small breaks each day feel more energised and less stressed than people who keep on working. The study showed that repeatedly stopping work and doing something else allows time for something of a reset. This matches the Athens study, which also found that breaks provide respite.

Simple things like taking a walk around the building or chatting to colleagues about what you watched on TV last night are enough to provide the rest break needed for stress levels to fall. 

We live in a stressful world, with mounting work pressures. By keeping on working to “get the job done”, we are making things worse for ourselves and steering towards burnout. Instead, it appears that the best way to get the job done is to stop doing the job several times a day. So, if you want to get more done, perhaps the most productive thing you can put in your diary is an appointment to stop working.

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Today is “World Wide Web Day”, when we are encouraged to celebrate the creation of the WWW. Nobody quite knows why today was selected as a global day of celebration of the web. The date does not coincide with Tim Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the web. That was submitted on 12 March 1989. Nor is it the date on which the phrase “World Wide Web” was suggested. That was 12 November 1990. And it is not the date on which the first website was publicly announced. That was 6 August 1991. So quite why today, 1 August, is “World Wide Web Day” is anyone’s guess. 

Even so, it gives us all a chance to reflect on what the web has achieved for us. It’s given us access to information like never before. It has given billions of people new opportunities to create, collaborate and publish their work. Plus, we’ve been able to communicate in real time anywhere in the world. In its 35 years of existence, the web has achieved an amazing amount for humans. 

Of course, it has not been all good. The web has helped create online trolls, for example, and it has spread violent pornography as well as enabling organised crime gangs to become more powerful. On top of this, it has allowed the production of some truly dreadful web pages that look horrendous and are impossible to navigate. Let’s hope that the Norwegian shopping site, Arngren, is not one of your favourites. 

However, it has also meant that many businesses now rely on the web for day-to-day communications and all their marketing. I know of one business, for example, that claims the “only” way to get customers is through sponsored links on search engines. They even point me to the “evidence” showing me all the business they got through these adverts. Of course, they don’t have any data on people who could buy their service through other means, as they rely solely on the web. 

That’s a shame, because they could probably increase their business if they looked outside the web. However, the problem extends beyond marketing. Whenever an organisation moves an activity online, it risks losing information that exists only in human relationships and physical settings.  Indeed, recent research from YouGov shows that most people discover new products through recommendations from family and friends. Good, old-fashioned word of mouth is still more important than anything the web provides, it seems. 

Similarly, when looking at what makes people buy from a company, a recent study suggests that the Top 10 factors do not appear to include anything specifically related to the company website.  

The convenience of the web and the ability to be creative and have great-looking websites is a bit of an illusion for businesses. They can produce something wonderful, track all the activity and then believe they have done all they need to do to attract customers. We can get vast amounts of data about our clients’ web activity, so it is easy to forget they live the bulk of their lives outside the web. Even the magazine Search Engine Land appears to be suggesting it may be time to do less online than we have in the past. 

This all coincides with the new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, suggesting that businesses should focus more on real-world recruitment rather than virtual interviews. Before the Prime Minister made that announcement, I heard a recruitment expert on the radio talking about the same topic. He pointed out that recruiters get so much more information from being in the same room as a job applicant. His point was not that web technology has no place in recruitment, but that excessive reliance on it may prevent employers from seeing qualities that emerge more clearly through personal interaction. 

Back in the summer of 1991, when the web began, the Number One song was “(Everything I do), I do it for you” by Bryan Adams. It looks like we’ve taken that rather too seriously, expecting the web to do everything for us. Perhaps today of all days it is time to reflect on the real position of the web in our business. Maybe, just maybe, it can’t do everything.

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On Monday, the UK got a new Prime Minister, and he set to work straight away trying to make everyone happy. Even before he set foot inside Number Ten, he promised to eradicate rough sleeping. The next day, he gave every household a £45 tax cut by dropping tax on electricity charges. Then he announced that pubs would get a discount on their business rates. And that was all before he set off for a day in Manchester to start the relocation of some of Downing Street’s activities to his home town. It was a week of giveaways and announcements designed to make everyone smile.

Except, of course, not everyone is happy. Businesses on the same High Street as pubs say they have been “left out in the cold”. Plus, there is unhappiness that the focus on Manchester means the West Country will be ignored. It turns out, you can’t make everyone happy. 

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. An interesting new study has mapped happiness across the world and identified five ways to improve it. Researchers from Poland found that a nation’s overall happiness depends on five factors. This new research shows that the main factor in a nation’s overall happiness is people being empowered to be autonomous within a caring society. That’s typical of Scandinavian countries, which regularly appear among the happiest nations listings. Being part of a community increases happiness. However, it can also decrease happiness if that sense of community goes “too far” and sets the group against others. 

The second factor in overall happiness is being in a society based on science, evidence, and critical thinking rather than dogma. The study confirmed that when people have good food, shelter and access to healthcare, they are also happy. The fourth factor was effective governance and the security it brings. Finally, happiness is driven by feeling closely connected to the people around you. 

None of this should come as much of a surprise. What is interesting is that it was published at around the same time as a study of emotions in the workplace from researchers in Barcelona. It appears that there are significant connections between the two studies.

The Barcelona study found that people are happiest at work when they have higher levels of autonomy. That micro-managing boss is bound to make you unhappy…! A collaborative environment was also important for positive emotions at work. The researchers pointed out that it was inevitable that there would be setbacks in business that led to negative emotions. However, they added that the impact of these issues could be minimised by creating the right environment to foster greater positivity.

In her book, The Win-Win Workplace, Dr Angela Jackson suggests that creating a positive work environment increases a range of business outcomes, including productivity and profits. Her ideas are backed with evidence from a range of companies. Indeed, research has shown that increasing happiness in the workplace improves innovation. Research at the University of Oxford a few years ago demonstrated that employee happiness increases productivity by 13%. Also, a Gallup study has shown that engaged employees boost profits by 23%. Wherever you look, there is evidence to show that happy people who are engaged in the workplace have multiple benefits – including staying with your business longer.

However, much of this depends upon one crucial thing: the behaviour of the boss.  A boss who is willing to “let go”, to give employees more freedom and to encourage them to work together to achieve things, will create a happy workplace. A boss who insists on controlling every decision is much more likely to generate frustration, anxiety and disengagement.  

The test for Andy Burnham, therefore, will not be how many announcements he makes in his first week. It will be about whether he can resist the urge to control everything himself and instead give ministers, officials and communities the freedom to deliver. You heard it here first…!

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I am not a football expert. So, let me get this straight. I understand that the team that wins is the one that scores more goals than the other side. Is that right? Your job as a highly-paid footballer, therefore, is just to keep on scoring goals. The more the merrier. After all, the more you score, the more likely you are to be the winning team. Gosh, it is such a simple game, after all. Who knew?

Well, clearly not the England team on Wednesday night when they lost their World Cup Semi-Final to the foul-playing Argentina. The man paid a reported £5m a year to manage the England team seemed to think that, having scored just one goal, it was time to stop trying to score and just to defend. His strategy appeared to be to hope that Argentina would not score. As the consultancy firm McKinsey points out, “Hope is not a strategy”.

It might not be a good idea for you to follow Thomas Tuchel’s management style. Yet, like me, I am sure you can come up with several examples of business leaders who have done exactly that. They have thought they were in a strong position, so spent time defending that, only to be ultimately beaten by the competition. BlackBerry defended the keyboard, Kodak defended photographic film and Blockbuster defended the video store. Their competitors were not trying to play the same game more effectively. They were changing the game.  

These companies were once full of attacking players. They stormed their way onto the market and led a march against their competition. Then, for whatever reason, they stopped and appeared to hope that a defensive position against future attack against them would be all they needed to do. 

Being defensive in business came up in conversation this week in a meeting with university colleagues. Once again, the Business School where I teach was ranked as the Number One in the UK for “Academic Support” and “Freedom of Expression” in the 2026 National Student Survey. This is conducted each year by the Higher Education regulator, the Office for Students. 

However, at the meeting where we discussed this I suggested we should not focus on defending our position. Rather we should come out fighting to ensure we improve upon our current status. In other words, if this were a football match I’d be saying, “regardless of how well we have done, I want more goals”. It’s the only real way in which we can be sure of future success. Sitting back, being defensive, merely opens up the possibility for competing universities to leapfrog us in the rankings. 

In business, though, the concept of “defensive marketing” is widespread. Consider Telstra, the dominant Australian telecommunications provider. This is frequently cited as an example of “defensive marketing”. However, when deregulation threatened to bring new competitors into its market, it did not simply erect barriers around its existing customers. It changed its prices and made itself more attractive. Marketing textbooks may describe that as market defence. In practice, it was an attack. 

The problem with much marketing literature is that what it describes as “defensive marketing” is nothing of the sort. It is where companies go on the offensive. The result, inevitably, is that it defends their position. In much the same way that attacking footballers who score goals defend their winning position.

However, as the Argentinian players discovered on Wednesday, when the mental framework of their opposition is “defend”, they give up attacking. Once an organisation adopts a defensive frame of mind, following that textbook advice, its attention changes. Instead of asking how it can win more customers, it asks how it can avoid losing the customers it already has.  The result, just like Blockbuster or Kodak, is that it is so very easy for opponents to find a way through and win. 

If I had my way, I’d ban the phrase “defensive marketing” because it puts businesses in the wrong frame of mind. In psychology, this is called a prevention focus: the organisation becomes preoccupied with avoiding loss rather than achieving gain. That’s precisely what happened with the England football team.

The only way to defend your market position is to go out and win more customers. That is attacking marketing, not defensive marketing. Can someone tell the England team?

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Tomorrow afternoon, around 9 million people will sit down to watch two grown men grunt and sweat as they fight for tennis supremacy. The Wimbledon Men’s Singles Final attracts huge audiences every year. Indeed, last year the BBC broke records, with a further 69 million viewings of the Wimbledon Championship online. 

The coming week, though, will see even higher viewing figures. That’s because there are two semi-finals for the FIFA World Cup, with the final showdown a week on Sunday. At the last World Cup in 2022, there were 5.6 billion viewers of the competition. This year, the pundits are expecting more because the competition involves so many more nations. 

If someone told you that “TV was dead”, these figures suggest otherwise. Even after years of predictions about television’s decline, we still spend a substantial part of each day watching broadcast TV, streaming services and online video. Despite the competition from social media for our eyeballs, we are still watching an average of 2.25 hours of TV every day. That’s before you count the amount of video we watch online. At any moment of the day, StreamCharts shows that over 10 million people are watching something on YouTube. That’s before you add in the other 3.5 million individuals soaking up what’s on the other Internet streaming channels. 

This matters for business because video is no longer just entertainment. It is where attention, trust and familiarity are being built. 

The fact that we are hooked on video content was made clear with new data from Forbes Magazine, which listed the Top Creators of online content for 2026. The Top 10 of these are all YouTubers who create vast amounts of video content. So popular is their video material that, between them, they are earning $634m. 

We are clearly hooked on TV and video. Humans can’t get enough of it. Some clues as to why this is the case can be found in the research conducted by ThinkBox. They have been researching why people watch TV for decades. One of their studies shows that there are eight main reasons why we love watching TV and video. Almost half of our TV watching appears to be for the simple reason of unwinding, having a bit of an escape, and feeling comfortable. It is the simplest, most effortless way to put our feet up without worrying about anything. In fact, TV watching triggers brainwaves associated with relaxation and a pleasant feeling. It is a psychological drug.

There is also research showing that mediated experiences, such as watching TV, help us confirm our sense of self. We spend much of our time in conversation with people, asking questions that ultimately are about us, ensuring that our sense of self is reliable. Media experiences seem to help achieve the same psychological outcome. 

Much of the video and TV we watch is straightforward storytelling. Whether it is news broadcasters relaying the latest human-interest stories or a scripted drama that makes you cry, stories engage people. We get drawn in by stories and find them fascinating, so much so that we cannot stop watching. Psychologists from the University of Sussex demonstrated in a study three years ago that all this TV watching is actually good for us. Watching TV and video has powerful psychological effects that improve happiness and reduce anxiety. 

As you will have gathered by now, there are compelling reasons as to why TV and video are valuable. We love moving pictures. But the question is, how much do you love them for your business?

Given that TV and video watching are seemingly here to stay, isn’t it time that we all capitalised on their value? Why are we letting other video creators get all the revenue? Why is your business letting the competition attract those video watchers? 

When I mentioned this to a colleague the other day, they wondered if we’re all too late. Has the ship sailed and we missed it? Not according to this blog on Social Media Examiner. It explains how to start your video-based activity, suggesting that it is never too late. So, what’s stopping you? Get that camera out, your TV make-up kit at the ready and start attracting those avid viewers. I will see you on YouTube.

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Today is “Alice in Wonderland Day”, and if you head over to Oxford, you will find all sorts of events and activities to celebrate the fantasy world created by Lewis Carroll. Now, before you go down a rabbit hole investigating all those things, let me explain why we should all be curiouser and curiouser about the story of Alice.

For a start, Alice was real, and Lewis Carroll was not. Alice was the daughter of Henry Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford. Working for Henry was a young mathematician, Charles Dodgson. On the 4th July 1862, he took Alice and her sisters for a boat trip on the River Thames, ending up at Godstow, just outside Oxford. There, he gave the children a picnic and entertained them with a story about Alice’s adventures, which he made up on the spot. Later, he wrote the story and had it published under his pen name of Lewis Carroll. 

The curious thing about this incident is that this young mathematician, bound by numbers and rules, was able to step outside those constraints and be completely creative. Something removed his restrictive world. 

There is one clear difference. His normal world was in the cloistered corridors of an Oxford college. True, Christ Church is a beautiful place, but it was created in the 16th Century and is so traditional that it was part of the film set for Harry Potter. Once the young Charles Dodgson left the confines of this academic world, he was freed to be creative.

Being out in the open air appeared to have given him the freedom to think beyond the walls of Oxford. Indeed, research about to be published from the University of Oxford itself shows the importance of space for our ability to think creatively. The study looked at how creative people were in environments such as coffee shops. It turned out that when the environment was less cramped and more open, people became more creative. 

That should not be entirely surprising. A survey from almost 20 years ago found that the worst place to be creative, 30th in the table of 30 places, was “in the workplace”. Being out in nature was mid-table in this study, but there were other situations where people felt more open, such as travelling, that made people feel more open and triggered creativity. 

Research from the University of California, San Diego has shown that space, and how we manage it, is an important aspect in how we think. Indeed, a study from the University of British Columbia found that ceiling height has a real impact on the way we think. When ceilings are high, we are more creative. 

In psychology, there is the notion of “construal level theory”. This suggests that the greater the distance between us and objects, the more abstract they become. So, when a ceiling is only a foot or two above your head, you sense it as very real. But when you are in a room where you may have a ceiling ten feet above you, it becomes less of a real ceiling to you. It is further away and therefore more abstract. Architects call this the “Cathedral Effect”. 

When we are forced to think more abstractly, because things are far away, we tend to become more creative. The open space that the nascent Lewis Carroll enjoyed simply allowed him to become an abstract thinker.

So, how can we become more creative and solve more problems? We do not all need cathedral ceilings, but we do need to pay attention to space. If your office is cramped, cluttered and full of reminders of routine work, it is unlikely to produce Wonderland-level thinking. Leave the office. Walk outside. Work somewhere more open. Choose a spacious coffee shop rather than a crowded corner table. And if none of that is possible, declutter your workspace. Sometimes, creating mental space starts with creating physical space.

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Here in the UK, we’ve had record-breaking temperatures every day this week. Yesterday, the mercury got to 37.3 degrees. We all wish we had air conditioning.

Indeed, in the space of a few days, air conditioning sales in the UK have rocketed. That’s not surprising, because air conditioning remains far less common in the UK than in countries such as Japan or the United States. Nine out of ten people in Japan have air conditioning, and almost two-thirds of homes in the USA have it.

Clearly, there is an “open door” here, with a significant market opportunity in the UK. However, it’s probably too late. Those businesses that saw the opportunity several years ago will now be raking in the cash. By the time you or I could get up and running with an air-con company, we’d be in the depths of winter, and nobody would be thinking about getting cool.

This is a conundrum for entrepreneurs. What business can you start now that will have a significant market in the future? Consider Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. They did not start working on microchips for artificial intelligence when we all heard about ChatGPT in 2022. Nvidia had invested in the work needed to create AI chips way back in 2006. They had a 16-year run-up. When they began developing the programming required for AI, it was almost a decade before OpenAI was even a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye.

The pioneering entrepreneur is often the one who establishes a market and can hold onto it for a long time. Research from the University of Michigan suggests that market pioneers are not more likely to fail than later entrants. They may face higher costs at the start, but over time, they can earn stronger profits. In other words, waiting for someone else to prove the market exists is not always the safer strategy. 

Clearly, there’s no way we can become pioneers in the decades-old air conditioning sector. The people making money out of the heatwave will have been in business for years. The question is: what business can we start now that would enable us to pioneer a new sector? 

To start our search, it is worth looking at the kinds of things happening now that are going to become mainstream in the future. One of those trends is the ageing population. In the UK, there are currently around 3 million people aged over 80. In 20 years, that number will have risen significantly, says the Centre for Ageing Better. At the same time, the proportion of younger people aged under 35 will fall. There are plenty of services and products aimed at older people. So we need to look for what is missing. One area could be in care coordination. Older people will have a variety of care services in the future, but who will organise them? The NHS cannot cope as it is. There’s a clear gap here for a business that is not likely to be needed on a significant scale now, but in a decade, your business could be the pioneer.

If that doesn’t interest you, what about cashing in on the “right to repair”? New laws, such as the EU’s Right to Repair, mean that from this July, manufacturers will have to design products so we can repair them ourselves when they break down. The UK also has legislation on this. Part of the thinking behind such laws is that expensive repairs mean products are just getting thrown away. Remove that expense, and countries can improve sustainability. But who is going to teach people how to repair things, or support them? There’s another gap waiting to be filled.

What about the impact of AI? As the world becomes increasingly filled with manual labour robots, digital bots, and AI-driven work, human contact will be missing. Filling that gap is likely to create significant demand for which someone could start a pioneering business right now.

Finding gaps that few people are filling now is what is needed to create a business for the future. Rather than looking for businesses that bring in cash now, being a pioneer that looks to money from the next decade is where you want to be. That’s exactly where those air conditioning companies are now. I bet their friends said they were mad when they set up their firms, while the UK didn’t have high temperatures. 

It reminds me of Sir William Preece, the Chief Engineer of the Post Office in 1878, who said, ‘The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.’ My guess is that ten years ago, more than one person said the UK would not need air conditioning. I bet they are hot under the collar now, wishing they had started an air conditioning company.

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Regular readers might think this weekend’s heatwave has gone to my head. Last week, I suggested that working from home had its problems and that returning to the office might be a good idea – assuming the office is a nice place to work. Now, I’m encouraging you to give up working in the office and head off to your local coffee shop. I’m not suggesting you give up your career and become a barista. Rather, I reckon you should pick up your laptop and set up your “office” in your nearest coffee emporium or village tea shop. 

The fact that I am suggesting this today, World Productivity Day, might be a clue as to my reasoning. Productivity is not good. Indeed, it has largely flatlined since 2008. Had it continued to rise at previous rates, we would be around 40% more productive by now. 

There are, though, some simple things we can do to improve productivity. For instance, we could check our emails just once or twice a day, rather than constantly. Plus, we could actually deal with the email rather than keep going back to it time after time. Research conducted by Microsoft and MIT showed that revisited email is opened and re-opened an average of 10.7 times. That’s just a waste of time, which affects our productivity. It is also making us stressed, adding another barrier to being productive.

Then there is filing documents. The productivity expert Thanh Pham wrote about this on his Asian Efficiency blog recently. He pointed out that without proper file naming conventions, things could get confusing for any AI agents we use. In turn, that will reduce productivity. Besides, how many times do you open a file thinking it was about one thing, when it turned out to be something else? Backwards and forwards we go, wasting time, because the file names seem sensible but are useless. Just calling it “meeting notes” might sound OK at the time, but when you really need to check some notes, you have no idea which file to look at amongst the collection of files with names like “meeting notes”.

Poorly managed email and a lack of file-naming conventions are examples of technology usage that are defined by the Solow Paradox. The term, named after the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, suggests that the more technology we use, the less productive we become. However, if we change the way we work to match the technology, then our productivity increases.

So, what does all this have to do with working in a coffee shop? Even if you check your emails too many times a day and have poor naming conventions for your files, you can get a productivity boost by heading off to your local coffee shop. 

This is due to the “novelty effect”. This happens when your brain pays more attention because it perceives something new. When you sit staring at your screen in the same office, your brain switches off a bit. It doesn’t have to do much because it already knows your office. So, it starts to slow down, and you become less productive. Heading out to the coffee shop makes our brain go “oh, this is new, I’d better take notice”. The novelty effect triggers dopamine. That increases your motivation and attention, in turn improving productivity.

Coffee shops have another advantage. They have a gentle level of background noise of people chatting away. Research from the University of Western Ontario showed that such ambient noise improved creativity levels. Those are likely to boost productivity, as increased cognitive flexibility can help you complete difficult tasks. The researchers called it the “coffee shop effect”, and there is an interesting twist in going to such an establishment to do some work.

Researchers from the Business School at Columbia University in New York found that the introduction of Starbucks in an area had a profound impact on the level of entrepreneurship. In areas without a Starbucks, the number of new business start-ups was lower than in areas with a Starbucks. The researchers suggested that the coffee shop facilitated greater networking, which contributed to the production of start-up ideas. So, working at a coffee shop will boost your productivity and help your business in other ways through this networking effect.

Sitting alone in your office is not helping you. A change of scene, particularly if you head off to a coffee shop, can trigger an increase in dopamine that will help enhance your productivity. There is one other thing worth noting as we head into a heatwave. You will gain even more of a productivity boost if you sit at one of the tables outside a coffee shop. Working outside improves our task performance compared with working indoors. At last, we could be close to getting permission to work on the beach…! Happy World Productivity Day.

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