The Global Nomad Survival Guide</h1> <article> <h1>The Global Nomad Survival Guide</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 20:22:00 GMT</p> <p><br>Living on the road is like living in a city, albeit a very unusual one. When you spend enough time waking up in one country, and falling asleep in another - the boundaries blur. Different countries become like neighbourhoods, separate but strangely interconnected. You don’t have to be a gypsy, a spy or even just a frequent flyer addict like Ryan Bingham to be a global nomad. You just have to spend more than 100 days a year on the move. So if that’s you, you might find this list of ten survival tips useful.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>1. Automate Your Schedules</strong></p> <p>Keeping track of flights, airports, connections and gate changes is exhausting. So don’t. If you haven’t already, download two apps - Flight+ and TripIt. Firstly set up TripIt to automatically scan you email inbox for any hotel confirmation receipts or flight itineraries. Then the minute you make a booking, TripIt will recognise the information and automatically pass it to the Flight+ mobile app, giving you a schedule of your upcoming flights, tracking information for delays and gate changes, as well as automatically adding the flight departure and arrival time to your Google Calendar so you can share it with your team.</p> <p><strong>2. Live In The Cloud</strong><br>Your two biggest risks when you travel are losing your passport, and losing your laptop or mobile device. One of those things you can immediately mitigate. Sign up for Google Drive or Dropbox. Personally I use both, but you should investigate what suits you best. Store all your files, data and content in the Cloud - so that if you lose your machine, you can be up and running again very quickly. In fact, I believe in the very near future - you will be able to travel without a computer at all. After all, how many of you pack a TV when you stay in a hotel?</p> <p><strong>3. Book Mobile, Leverage Local</strong><br>Increasingly I’m researching and booking hotels using my phone. I’m doing this partly for aesthetic but also for practical reasons. There are a handful of apps such as Jetsetter and AirBnB that beautifully merchandise travel experiences. Design hotels in Mexico, Paris apartments in St Germain, safaris in Africa - all at discount prices and gorgeously arranged on your tiny screen. But the other advantage of using mobile, is leveraging local targeting. If you are in an area of town you like, use Expedia to search for highly rated hotels in your immediate vicinity. And if you are using an Apple device, you will probably be able to not only book a hotel, but save the confirmation information directly into Passbook</p> <p><strong>4. Route Around Roaming Charges</strong><br>I carry two phones. An iPhone 5 and a Blackberry Bold. The former may be de rigueur, but the latter earns me endless scorn and ridicule. That is, until I point out that the Blackberry is on a worldwide capped data roaming plan with PCCW, a Hong Kong carrier, for about $130 a month. When I travel, I leave my Blackberry on all the time as a dedicated email device and emergency voice contact line, but for all other calls and location services I buy prepaid sims for my iPhone. If you are doing this, make sure you also download <a href="http://www.unlockit.co.nz/unlockit/" title="unlockit" target="_self">unlockit</a>, an app that allows you to change your iPhone APN settings so you can also use mobile data. More advanced nomads will also be using Google Voice and/or SkypeIN to redirect calls to their local SIM number as needed.</p> <p><strong>5. Master Flight Hubs</strong><br>If you are a big corporate executive, you probably don’t book your own travel - in which case you can safely ignore this tip. But if you are running your own company, or are watching costs closely - understanding the dynamics of flight hubs and airline booking systems is essential. When you are planning a flight, use Kayak to understand how airlines vary their pricing models. You will quickly learn that originating flights in some cities is dramatically cheaper than others. For instance, flying from Sydney to Istanbul will cost you nearly $7,000 in business class as a return fare, but only $3,500 flying Istanbul to Sydney return. If you can, also find a good travel agent and learn how to incorporate round the world fares into your plans. They will save you a fortune when you need to navigate direct flights between business hubs which tend to attract premium pricing.</p> <p><strong>6. Speak Travel Geek</strong><br>When things go wrong, you will sooner or later find yourself talking to a call centre representative in a virtual facility outsourced to the middle of nowhere. These people can ruin your life in three mouse clicks. So memorise the airline call signs, more formally known as the Nato Phonetic Alphabet. As soon as they answer, bark your reservation number in code to them. Clarity will prevent mistakes and if nothing else, will make you feel like a master of the travel universe for a few seconds before they place you on hold for an hour.</p> <p><strong>7. Lose Yourself</strong> <br>The definition of sadness are business trips that constitute of airport, taxi, bland hotel, meeting, room service - and then the same in reverse. So take an extra day. Check into a cool hotel. Use networks like ‘A Small World’ to figure out where the fun bars and restaurants are - and take a moment to relish living in lots of places at once.</p> <p><strong>8. Become A Member</strong><br>Getting to elite status on airlines is not only an ego thing, it will save you a lot of time and heartache at check-in, security and while waiting for flights. Pick an anchor airline for each of the big travel consortiums (OneWorld, Star Alliance, SkyTeam) based on your travel patterns and regular hub cities. If you hit platinum on one alliance group, you can often get them to status match you on the others. Also very useful are new services like <a href="https://founderscard.com/membership?code=FCMIKE643" title="FoundersCard" target="_self">FoundersCard</a> that not only get you up to 20% savings on flights, but can also secure you heavily discounted rates on good hotels. If you join, you can use my VIP Promo Code, FCSPX11</p> <p><strong>9. Invest In Your Luggage</strong><br>When the world is your home, your luggage is your furniture. Invest in it. I’ve tried almost every brand out there, in infinite configurations. My conclusion? You can’t go past Rimowa. It’s industrial, tough and sleek. I use a aluminium four wheel IATA sized carry-on to store my laptop and breakable items, and a matte black travel trunk for my clothes.</p> <p><strong>10. Learn To Run</strong><br>It’s not glamorous, but when you arrive on an A380 packed full of tourists at LAX, just remember that each one of them that get ahead of you represents 10 minutes of your life you will never get back. So wear sensible shoes. And run.</p> </article> <article> <h1>The 3 Rules Of Freedom</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 22:38:00 GMT</p> <p>This is not a blog post for everyone. There are no innovation or marketing secrets here. Just something very personal. I believe that there is a point when technology stops being a solution, and instead, becomes a question. Namely, how do you want to live? The tools of the 21st century may afford us the luxury of working anywhere, but how much of our work lives are deliberate decisions as opposed to accumulated accidents? If you started with a clean sheet of paper, how would you design your day? It’s harder than it sounds, and I also quickly learned that there were three things that stood in my way. I ended up calling them the three rules of freedom.</p> <p>And here they are...</p> <p><strong>1. Fire Your Boss</strong></p> <p>Years ago, fresh out of law school - I almost took a job at a high profile management consultancy. The firm only hired five graduates a year, the interview process was a gruelling ten rounds of arcane analytical exercises and psychological probes, and finally getting the offer letter was like winning a video game. But to my family’s dismay, I ended up returning the sign-on bonus, trashing the letter and never taking the job.</p> <p>What forced my hand was a conversation with another consultant. He was in his early thirties and married to another professional. They were smart, neurotic, and miserable. Always on assignment, they never saw each other, held huge amounts of mortgage debt, and having become addicted to five star life, were terrified daily of losing their jobs and lifestyle in their highly political work environments.</p> <p>High income attached to high contingency is the opposite of freedom. That’s how I learned my first rule of freedom - find a way to make money without relying on someone else. Having a job is like having one client who can leave at any time. So I fired my boss on my 30th birthday. On that morning I quit my job, spent three months writing my first book in a cafe, and then spent three more utterly terrifying years learning to survive without the safety net of a pay check. Believe me, six years on, achieving that has been far more rewarding than any end of year bonus or executive corner office.</p> <p>So does mean you should go and quit your big company job tomorrow? Of course not. But it does mean, that when you evaluate your position you should ask yourself how contingent is your personal satisfaction on the whims of someone above you. Is your contribution valued and recognised throughout your firm, or is everything you do filtered through one person who has become the gatekeeper to your progress?</p> <p><strong>2. Fire Your Staff</strong></p> <p>I talk to a lot of managers, and believe me - most of the time their biggest source of stress is not their work, but their staff. As Sartre put it, hell is other people. I have hired a lot of smart people in my time, much smarter than me. I know that for a fact, because almost all of them have since gone on to become multi millionaires and industry pioneers in their own right. I always prided myself on hiring people that didn’t need a job, but about the time they learned Rule #1 for themselves, I also learned Rule #2. When you spend all your time managing people, you don’t get to spend that time doing what you actually enjoy.</p> <p>Sure - unless you write songs for a living or trade futures contracts alone in your home - it’s pretty hard to make money without other people. These days, I still work with a lot of people much smarter than me - but they don’t actually work for me. I’m not their boss. They are my agents, my contractors, my partners or collaborators. I don’t have to plan their careers, just make sure that I’m delivering on my side of the bargain.</p> <p>Shifting your mindset about working with people is a valuable lesson even if you have people working for you. The next generation have a different sense of the possibilities of life and world than we did. You may see them as your staff, but they will increasingly see themselves as freelancers.</p> <p><strong>3. Fire Your Clients</strong></p> <p>I know what you are thinking. How can you run a business, especially your own business, without clients? And true enough, Rule #3 is the one rule I’m yet to personally achieve. But hear me out. Clients are an anathema to freedom.</p> <p>Clients provide you with the funds you need to survive, but in doing so, they occupy both your time and can easily re-direct your purpose. Many small advisory businesses are destroyed by their one big client. They end up allocating their entire resources to that one account, who can either walk away leaving them hanging, or worse, buy them, and turn their business into a job.</p> <p>So if you fire you clients, how do you make money? There is a big difference between clients and customers. Clients tell you want they want you to do, but customers buy what you are selling. Clients hire you to help them achieve their dreams, but if you instead focus on your own dreams - your customers will find you. It is that distinction that makes websites like Kickstarter so important. Many of the people that use it to raise money to fund their projects, might have otherwise been simply been designing products for other people. But with the opportunity to find customers to back them, they get to see their ideas come to life. </p> <p>And what is that, if not the best way to live?</p> <p> </p> </article> <article> <h1>What’s Your Big Data Strategy for 2013?</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 09:11:00 GMT</p> <p>It’s easy to get seduced by the idea of Big Data. Data alone - well, that’s dull conversation fare. But throw in some hype, an adjective and a little capitalization, and you have this year’s big strategic topic. All that aside, there is one thing about this debate that makes it more important than the usual industry fad. Big Data is about Big Business, not just high tech startups. Traditional companies are hoping that by leveraging massive data sets and real time prediction models - that they can start making realtime decisions just like a Facebook, Google or an Amazon. Some will succeed, most will fail but either way chances are that sometime in the next twelve months you will be either asked to approve a big investment in this space, or have to sell one yourself to your board. And when that happens, will you know what to do?</p> <p>You have heard all the cliches, and they won’t help you. Data is more precious than gold. It is the new oil. <span>Theory is dead, long live the algorithm. </span>The sexiest job on the planet is a data scientist (seriously?). And so it goes. Yet ironically, despite the general exuberence, most people aren’t even sure what Big Data is, other than it must be considerably bigger than normal data. The real power of Big Data is the ability to make reliable inferences based on seemingly useless information. But what types of information are there? For the sake of simplicity, let me outline the three major types of data, from a business perspective, that you will need to worry about in the near future:</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>The Data Cloud</strong> - social interactions, mobile communications and digital entertainment consumption - consumers are creating and having more information created about them than ever before. Today it’s Twitter and Facebook, but tomorrow the ever expanding Data Cloud will swell with information from mobile payments, smart energy meters, connected cars and all kinds of network connected sensors.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>The Data Warehouse</strong> - most big companies have spent millions carefully collecting and organizing data that directly relates to their traditional business. This information, from customer records in a CRM system to inventory tracking data, is very useful when it comes to getting visibility into your daily operations. But as you may have already discovered if you have ever asked for a new kind of data report - it is neither flexible nor cost effective to make quick changes, to look for new patterns or combine your data with other external datasets.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>The Data Trash Can</strong> - if you start digging around, you will realise that companies also collect a lot of other data, mostly inadvertently. Their systems record information about ambient temperatures in their stores, products sold on certain days of the week in certain outlets, the geolocation of their sales staff, the number of cars that enter their car park and so on. Some of this data is in their warehouse, some of it in other systems - but it may as well all be in the trash, because for most purposes, executives can’t get a handle on it in any reasonable time to make decisions.</p> <p>When you look closely at these three categories of data in your business, you might start to understand that the true Big Data revolution is not just about the amount of data that has to be processed, but a mindset change about how data gets used in the enterprise. In an ideal world, you could combine the entire Data Cloud with information in your Data Warehouse and lost treasures from the Data Trash Can - then with the help of a giant IBM Watson type computer, end up with the answer to incredible profitability. Not as easy as it sounds, but you have to start somewhere. So here, in my view, are the five things you need to action next year:</p> <p><strong>1. Create a business intelligence team outside the IT department.</strong> <br>This may seem counter-intuitive, after all Big Data involves serious tech. However, chances are the team running your legacy systems may not be entirely comfortable with open source, exotic Hadoop clusters as they are with maintaining their traditional IT platforms. Take a leaf from <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/au/case-study-ing-direct-taps-big-data-to-understand-customers-7000003873/" title="ING Direct" target="_self">ING Direct</a>. In order to get traction with their plans, they created a new business intelligence team, formed from a combination of data warehouse people, analytics and marketing experts.</p> <p><strong>2. Focus on getting early internal case studies around small, tough problems</strong><br>You may know that at some point your company needs to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Big Data, but it will certainly be a lot easier selling that idea if you can demonstrate that there are real benefits to be had. My advice is to quickly identify a few, small, tough problems in your business, and then see if there are some simple data driven solutions to them. For example, <a href="http://strata.oreilly.com/2011/08/t-mobile-challenges-churn-with.html" title="T-Mobile" target="_self">T-Mobile</a> in the US took that approach by targeting a problem they had with customer churn. By leveraging social media data, along with transaction data from CRM and Billing systems they were able to significantly reduce churn levels.</p> <p><strong>3. Don’t get too distracted by the expanding consumer data cloud</strong><br>Yes, it’s exciting that you can see in realtime what every teenager in the world is saying, thinking and doing across Facebook and Twitter - but will overlaying this dataset with your rental car utilisation schedule really create that many new insights? Maybe yes, maybe no. But my prediction is that within the next few years there will be a lot more intemediary data providers who will do a much better job than you in eliminating the noise in the consumer data cloud. Different companies will specialise in different data types (e.g mobile location, social sentiment, retail or travel reviews), and allow you to subscribe to data streams cost effectively. For certain, keep an eye on trends in the consumer cloud, but don’t commit too much capital to it when there may be more to gain from leveraging up your own company data first.</p> <p><strong>4. Take visualization seriously</strong><br>Never underestimate the power of pretty pictures to get management buy-in. Data on a page may appear meaningless, but on a giant wall screen moving in real time, can be pure magic. Find the data, combine it in new ways, and then get some good interface designers and creative types to bring it to life. A great example of a world class data design team is Stamen, but there are many others now emerging.</p> <p><strong>5. Adapt your decision making</strong> <br>In the end, none of your new investments in Big Data will bear any fruit if you don’t also work on changing your management style. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson wrote a <a href="http://hbr.org/2012/10/big-data-the-management-revolution/ar/1" title="great piece" target="_self">great piece</a> in the HBR this October about how tomorrow’s leaders will justify decisions based on data rather than charisma. I only half believe them. Data driven companies are nothing new. Take P&G for example. But in a world of very large data sets, the hard part will not be just critically evaluating and articulating data assumptions but also being able to intuitively grasp new patterns as well.</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="hs-cta-wrapper" id="hs-cta-wrapper-e7594a7a-2b31-4c72-a487-f9f9ec0eba0c"> <span class="hs-cta-node hs-cta-e7594a7a-2b31-4c72-a487-f9f9ec0eba0c" id="hs-cta-e7594a7a-2b31-4c72-a487-f9f9ec0eba0c"> <a href="http://cta-redirect.hubspot.com/cta/redirect/87597/e7594a7a-2b31-4c72-a487-f9f9ec0eba0c" \=""></a> </span> <script type="text/javascript"> (function(){ var s='hubspotutk',r,c=((r=new RegExp('(^|; )'+s+'=([^;]*)').exec(document.cookie))?r[2]:''),w=window;w[s]=w[s]||c, hsjs=document.createElement("script"),el=document.getElementById("hs-cta-e7594a7a-2b31-4c72-a487-f9f9ec0eba0c"); hsjs.type = "text/javascript";hsjs.async = true; hsjs.src = "//cta-service-cms2.hubspot.com/cs/loader.js?pg=e7594a7a-2b31-4c72-a487-f9f9ec0eba0c&pid=87597&hsutk=" + encodeURIComponent(c); (document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0]||document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]).appendChild(hsjs); try{el.style.visibility="hidden";}catch(err){} setTimeout(function() {try{el.style.visibility="visible";}catch(err){}}, 2500); })(); </script> </span></p> <p> </p> <hr> </article> <article> <h1>The 5 Things Every CEO Needs To Know About The Cloud</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 23:00:00 GMT</p> <p>By now, you have heard, read and seen more about the Cloud than you probably ever wanted. And, for those of you who live in corner offices - you are almost certainly wondering why everyone keeps bothering you with something that surely belongs in the dark realms of your IT department. But from Amazon's new self-serve super computing platforms, Google's low cost enterprise productivity tools to Apple's vision for online entertainment - the Cloud is a business revolution that no CEO can ignore. Here is your cheat sheet on the top 5 strategic issues that you need to know about.</p> <p><strong>1. Cure Yourself Of Cubicles</strong></p> <p>A client of mine wanted to transform their staid bank headquarters into an office of the future. Most offices are designed to a simple formula - 70% desks and 30% communal spaces. The bank, to their credit - flipped the equation, replacing traditional cubicles with cafe style public spaces and meeting areas. Even better, in lieu of desks every employee was given a locker for their personal possessions and a Macbook Air to do their work. Staff loved the new offices - but there was just one problem. IT had installed old school productivity software on all the new Macbooks which ran unbearably slowly and at times, failed to work properly at all.</p> <p>Just as important as rethinking the spaces you work in, is challenging the tools you work with. Meeting in cafes to discuss projects is great - but you have to go one step further. When your teams can easily collaborate on documents, projects and presentations by simply accessing a Web browser or mobile application - you can start really creating a culture of innovation and disruptive thinking.</p> <p><strong>2. Reboot Your IT Department</strong></p> <p>IT departments, until very recently, believed that their manifest destiny was to defend the fortress at all costs. The outside world was full of threats - hackers, viruses and malware - and their role was to build high walls that kept marauders out, and some of the wayward employees in. Things have changed. Instead of a fortress, the role of IT is closer to managing a marketplace. And more importantly - as any CEO or business leader will admit these days - the suits really need the geeks to make their innovation agenda a reality. Open digital platforms, data sharing with strategic partners or the adoption of new 'software as a service' tools are the mark of a 21st century company. And that requires a new type of IT manager.</p> <p>Moving forward, you may no longer need massive server rooms in your building or teams of technicians to keep your fleet of devices and systems running. What you will need are smart, young technology innovators who can identify the best global enterprise platforms to partner with, assess the new generation Cloud based security risks, and help educate your people on how to manage passwords and their personal identities online. Put simply - this is a shift from ‘no’ to ‘know’.</p> <p><strong>3. Win On Customer Experience</strong></p> <p>How easy is it for your customers to do business with you? How many pieces of paper, forms, approval processes and other impediments to getting deals done has 'traditional business practices' put in the way of winning on customer experience? One of the great advantages of new Cloud based platforms is that they offer companies a chance to fundamentally transform how they engage, serve and ultimately delight their customers.</p> <p>Here's a simple example. Some time ago my company moved to Freshbooks - an entirely Cloud based invoicing platform. The benefits to my customers were immediate. Rather than paper invoices, my clients were emailed electronic invoices, which displayed in real time the status of payments as well as the entire history of prior billing transactions. From my perspective, there were also some unexpected benefits. The moment one of my clients receives and opens my invoice, I am informed - forever ending those infamous 'cheque is in the mail' or 'your invoice never arrived' conversations. Further, using clever comparative data analytics, I can also see how my business is performing on payment collections compared to other companies of my size and billings.</p> <p><strong>4. Disrupt Your Industry</strong></p> <p>If you could create a new product or service, at a fraction of the normal price but with a better service proposition for your customers - would you do it? Or would you wait for one of your competitors to disrupt your industry first?</p> <p>Last week I was speaking to the CEO of an accounting software company. For many years they had enjoyed a comfortable business selling practice management software to accounting firms. However in recent years, new Cloud based platforms had made life difficult - not just for them, but for many of their clients. When I asked the CEO to explain - he said that the problem was not that their competitor was giving away partner editions of their software away for free but rather the existence of a cheap Cloud based solution had led to the creation of thousands of cut price accountants, working out of cafes who were now making life difficult for traditional, high cost bean counters. Take this as your warning - from professional services, to healthcare, finance and retail - the disruptive impact of the Cloud on your industry is only just beginning.</p> <p><strong>5. Move To A New Cost Curve</strong></p> <p>The final, and perhaps most important thing you need to know about the Cloud is its impact on costs. In a traditional IT based organisation, costs are a step function. Launching a new division, adding more people or planning a new product or service will in the short term dramatically shift your cost base to a new level, which over time is hopefully amortised over new revenue growth.</p> <p>The Cloud offers leaders a very different calculus. Even the smallest of companies or startups can access world class applications, storage or computation services on a per user basis, allowing them to ramp up very quickly as demand increases. Think about it. Could Instagram have scaled to millions of users and sold for a billion dollars in twelve months on a traditional technology development model? And even if you can't imagine how your organisation could innovate as nimbly as an Internet startup - what would happen if one of your competitors did?</p> <p>The Cloud is not just a topic for technology types - the broader implications of on-demand, web delivered services is a strategic discussion that belongs in the boardroom, not in the basement.</p> <p>Here's my advice - plan an executive team meeting in the near future to brainstorm the issues raised by these five points, and while you are at it - put the most important question of all on the agenda. Can new technology not only change, but help you re-imagine the way you do business?</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="hs-cta-wrapper" id="hs-cta-wrapper-b4e1ba88-9b24-4f63-a728-af49dca4d40d"> <span class="hs-cta-node hs-cta-b4e1ba88-9b24-4f63-a728-af49dca4d40d" id="hs-cta-b4e1ba88-9b24-4f63-a728-af49dca4d40d"> <a href="http://cta-redirect.hubspot.com/cta/redirect/87597/b4e1ba88-9b24-4f63-a728-af49dca4d40d" \=""></a> </span> <script type="text/javascript"> (function(){ var s='hubspotutk',r,c=((r=new RegExp('(^|; )'+s+'=([^;]*)').exec(document.cookie))?r[2]:''),w=window;w[s]=w[s]||c, hsjs=document.createElement("script"),el=document.getElementById("hs-cta-b4e1ba88-9b24-4f63-a728-af49dca4d40d"); hsjs.type = "text/javascript";hsjs.async = true; hsjs.src = "//cta-service-cms2.hubspot.com/cs/loader.js?pg=b4e1ba88-9b24-4f63-a728-af49dca4d40d&pid=87597&hsutk=" + encodeURIComponent(c); (document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0]||document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]).appendChild(hsjs); try{el.style.visibility="hidden";}catch(err){} setTimeout(function() {try{el.style.visibility="visible";}catch(err){}}, 2500); })(); </script> </span></p> <hr> </article> <article> <h1>Why Successful Companies Think Small</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:44:00 GMT</p> <p>Why do some companies survive and others simply crumple? And stranger still - for star-crossed giants such as Yahoo, RIM and HP - why did major investments in innovation not save them from being blindsided by the future? In my view - it is all a problem of scale. Big leaders favour big solutions for big problems. But just the like the Higgs Boson, sometimes in order to understand how dramatic transformations happen, you have to start by looking for things that are very small.</p> <p>Top down strategy is sexy. Wall Street gets it, your board gets it, your employees get it - and most importantly if you happen to be the top dog at work - your ego gets it. But here's the catch. You can spend a weekend retreat thinking about blue oceans, innovator's dilemmas, and tipping points - but come Monday, you will be faced with a real challenge. How do you get the rest of the organisation to change their thinking and behaviour along with you?</p> <p>Resist the temptation to simply create an innovation department. Creating a new department where all the fun stuff is going to happen is like announcing to the rest of your team that their contributions are soon to become irrelevant. Trust me - politics and bureacracy will ensue. I call this the ‘Mirror Effect’. The bigger your innovation department, the more likely it will become a microcosm for all the things you are trying to change in the first place!</p> <p>Successful companies think small. They focus on the most basic particle of change in the enterprise - the project. Money people like projects. They value them by analysing their cash flows over time. But as a change agent in your business - you should learn to love them too. They are the building blocks of how interesting ideas gain mass, and become real. More importantly, the diversity and quality of projects in a business is the best litmus test for your company's chances of surviving the future.</p> <p>Here's a thought experiment for you. Think of it as your own personal innovation Hadron Collider. Grab a piece of paper and rule a line down the middle. Write a list of all the projects you are managing or involved in at the moment. Now place the ones that are focused on protecting your existing business practices and fighting fires on the left. And now, add any of the remaining projects that involve new ways of making money, new markets or challenges to the status quo on the right. Review your results. How much of your time is spent on defending the past as opposed to building for the future?</p> <p>Of course, it is not enough just to get excited about your particles of change without thinking about what makes for a great project. From our research at Tomorrow, we have observed that great projects are defined by five important characteristics. They are:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Bottom up</strong>: championed by the people closest to the customer's pain points</li> <li><strong>Horizontal</strong> : supported by a cross functional team of people from different parts of the business</li> <li><strong>Visible</strong>: transparent and actionable by the rest of the organisation</li> <li><strong>Quantifiable</strong>: a clearly defined payback or monetary opportunity</li> <li><strong>Small</strong>: nimble, focused, and targeted to a well defined problem</li> </ul> <p>For me - the real question at the heart of the business transformation debate is not how much money or resources you spend on coming up with new products or ideas - but how quickly can you innovate around your innovation process.</p> <p>Business leaders today are under incredible pressure to perform against the backdrop of uncertain markets, changing patterns of customer behaviour as well as disruptive technologies. Frankly that calls for an entirely new type of enterprise - one that is flexible, adaptable, and natural born for the 21st century.</p> <p>So, are you ready to <a href="http://www.mike-walsh.com/flex-keynote/" title="re-imagine the way you do business" target="_self">re-imagine the way you do business</a>?</p> <p> </p> </article> <article> <h1>Five Ways To Weaponize Your Brand Storytelling</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:52:00 GMT</p> <p>As you read this the world’s most dangerous symbol is only a few inches from your eyes. That small, blue thumbs-up icon may look harmless enough but not if it distracts you from the real game in town - arming your brand to tell better stories.</p> <p>The future of your social media success is not chasing friends and followers, but rather influencing what they are talking about. Here's my prediction - your most important decision this year will not be the amount of money you spend recruiting fans on Facebook, but rather the investment you make in the stories through which your brand tells your customers what it stands for. Let me explain.</p> <p>When a fighter jet approaches an aircraft carrier to land, after a high G turn to throw off speed, they then do the unthinkable - they rev to full throttle. The idea is simple. If the jet misses the arresting gear wire, it needs enough velocity to take off again. But stranger still, is the fact that I learned this not from talking to a pilot but the marketing director of IWC watches in Geneva.</p> <p>At the SIHH watch fair this year, IWC staged an incredible, immersive brand environment that created the illusion you had stepped on board a high tech naval vessel. Awash with a cast of real life Top Gun veterans and celebrities - all recruited to do the one thing that luxury brands do better than just about anyone else - telling sophisticated brand stories to sell IWC products.</p> <p>According to Karoline Huber, head of marketing at the Swiss watch brand, IWC tells two kinds of stories to attract its customers. There are horizontal stories that establish heritage, explain provenance and reassure customers of the brand's long history of quality, engineering and authenticity. And then there are vertical stories - annual themes like military aviation, deep diving, ship navigation or Italian south coast lifestyle - that support specific product lines and provide a contemporary edge to the core brand values. In the luxury industry, stories are what establish a brand's prestige - not just because they defend premium pricing, but because they provide something for their customers to believe and talk about. The brand becomes an expression of the customer’s beliefs and it is this they want to share.</p> <p>So why should this matter to you? Luxury brands are one thing - but you sell washing machines, industrial tunnelling machines, legal services or mortgages. Truth is - whatever business you are in - if you want to engage your customers on social platforms, you need to think very deliberately about what you want them to talk about. You need to be telling them the story that they will want to express in turn to their network.</p> <p>It is no longer enough to just hire a team of copywriters to invent clever fictions about your brand. In the very near future, you will need to think about how you turn your stories into weapons of mass attention.</p> <p>Here are five ideas to get you started today:</p> <p><strong>1. Build A Dedicated Content Team</strong> <br />The worst thing you can do is outsource your storytelling and content to your marketing agency. Think seriously about bringing your content resources in house - even if it is just the editors to drive the content strategy. If you don't have them already - you need a strong set of video assets for YouTube, regulararticles for your blog and newsletters, whitepapers and controversial thought pieces, and other interesting content for people to share on their networks.</p> <p><strong>2. Close The Loop</strong> <br />Storytelling may seem like an art, but these days it is also a science. Spend time understanding the new tools of inbound marketing, and track which articles and videos attract the most leads, and which of those leads end up becoming customers. Platform integration and data analytics can be tough to implement, but when you can understand exactly what types of content really engage and convert consumers, it will transform the way you think about your brand stories and further inform how you allocate marketing funds.</p> <p><strong>3. Bring In The Anthropologists</strong> <br />Study the lives of your tribes. You may know what kinds of stories you want to tell, but what stories are your customers listening to or already telling each other about your products? How are these stories changing, and what is driving these changes? These questions are a study anthropology, not academia. Immerse yourself in your customers’ lives to gain critical insights into how to make your brands truly a part of their story.</p> <p><strong>4. Leverage Pinterest<br /></strong> The persona board is already a favourite tool for brand experts. They are a quirky way of illustrating a consumer segment through a collage of products, pop culture and activities that best represent them. Spend some time on Pinterest and you will realise that the future business model of that platform may lie in the incredible data on product and brand affinity it offers marketers. As a very early example, check out the Women's Inspiration Day <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVCoM4ao2Tw" title="campaign" target="_self">campaign</a> by Kotex in Israel, where the brand used Pinterest to find out what inspired fifty women from their pin-up boards and sent care packages based on their contents. By being creative you can quickly apply this approach to any product. For example in mortgages perhaps you ask your customers to collect images of what they will buy with the savings you have achieved for them over the life of the loan. Surely a more interesting story than a 0.75% reduction in their interest rate!</p> <p><strong>5. Scale Global, Talk Local</strong><br /> The most compelling stories always have a local twist, and social media is no exception. I've been watching for some time how global brands like Converse have successfully engaged new consumers in markets like China by contextualising global brand values with hyper local content strategies. And in emerging markets, local celebrity endorsement whether on Weibo in China or Orkut in Brazil - is a critical part of local engagement. Social platforms may standardize in many markets, but consumers will retain a very native perspective on the content and individuals that influence them. Global CMOs will have the increasingly tough challenge of navigating the tensions between global values and local context - but the companies that become adept at this, will be clear winners in the digital space.</p> <p>When I first started giving my <a href="http://www.mike-walsh.com/futuretainment-keynote/" title="Futuretainment" target="_self">Futuretainment</a> presentations a number of years ago - I predicted that brands would need to behave more like media companies, and media companies more like brands. The advent of social media has made this shift a reality today. When so many are competing for 140 characters of consumer mindspace, brands have to be consistent, clear, deliberate and ruthlessly strategic about how they craft and articulate their stories in order to achieve cut-through.</p> <p>Oscar Wilde's said it best - 'the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about at all.' Sage advice. The marketers of the future will arm their customers with stories worth talking about, or risk the fate of having thousands of friends with nothing to say.</p> </article> <article> <h1>The Social Side Of Trust</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:12:00 GMT</p> <p>Getting a little help from your friends was easy enough for Lennon and McCartney, but in an age of Google Circles, Facebook lists and Twitter followers - it is far from clear what friendship actually means. Worse still, marketers are muddying the waters. Brands used to want to brainwash us - now they want to be our friends. But consider this for a moment. What if social marketing was not about getting your customers to like you on Facebook but rather fixing a much bigger problem? Namely, trust.</p> <p>I grew up in a retail family. My old man used to manage department stores and when I was a kid, one of his favourite 'father and son' activities was to take me around the store and check whether the products that had been advertised in the newspaper that day were actually in stock. Perhaps it was his very Irish way of giving his nine year old a home-made MBA. Anyway - one Saturday morning, I remember him pointing out one of displays and asking me whether I knew why there were so many mirrors on the walls? I shook my head, puzzled. 'When people see themselves' he explained with a wry smile, 'they are less likely to steal things'. </p> <p>Like it or not - 'being seen' - is one of the strange, uncredited forces that keeps civil society in balance. There are a lot of things that people would do if they thought no one else would see them doing it. And in rare moments, like the London riots in 2011 - you get a glimpse of just what those things might actually be. But ironically - the very social platforms that have been behind so much revolution and unrest in recent times, also have the potential to improve the way that your customers behave online. And it couldn't come a moment too soon. </p> <p>The Web has changed - and in some ways, not for the better. When was the last time you tried to buy or sell something on eBay? What was once a friendly community of amateurs and garage sale enthusiasts now feels to me like an unruly mob of fraudsters, identity thieves and shady offshore merchants. When I recently tried to sell a camera - my advertisement was deleted halfway through an auction. A terse email informed me that my listing was considered potentially fraudelent, and when I re-listed the item and it finally sold - the transaction was voided one final time - because the seller was apparently a fake. Hardly the model of friction-free commerce.</p> <p>Some argue that new sharing models of commerce will change everything. After all, isn't the popularity of new platforms to share your home, your car, and other posessions indicative of a more responsible online community? Perhaps, but potentially not for long. In my view, like eBay, once digital platforms become mainstream, it is inevitable that the community spirit forged by early adopters becomes tainted by the actions of a few willing to abuse the system.</p> <p>One solution may be finding better ways to use the social graph to make your customer's networks more transparent. Already, to defeat spammers, many websites require you to login with Facebook before you add your comments to an article. If you connect AirBNB with Facebook, you can see which property owners have common friends with you. Co-working space provider, Loose Cubes, offers a similar feature. Picking an office where friends of yours have worked before helps customers choose between the listings and also provides the owner with a sense of who they are. However, these integrations are only the beginning of what might be possible when you start to combine data with smart consumer pyschology. </p> <p>The strategy of making your customer networks transparent is not just limited to the digital world. When Grameen bank makes a micro loan, they hold the borrower responsible not only for their debt, but the repayment actions of those in their lending circle. You can see how this logic can be taken a step further ont he Web. Imagine if AirBNB allowed householders to only rent their places to people within one or two degrees of friendship from their network? And when someone did make a booking, the system showed you the pictures of their common friends so that you knew who you would have to answer to should something go wrong. It would be like catching a glimpse of yourself in a store mirror, just when you were thinking of shoplifting.</p> <p>True - there is something slightly distateful about this. No one likes to be reminded that we live in public. And rightly or wrongly, many still believe that the Internet is some kind of protected space from the rest of society where different rules might apply. That's a delusion. Consumers may want to be Mark Zuckerberg by day and Julian Assange by night, but you can't have it both ways. Either you are connected and you take responsibility for your actions, or you are anonymous, cut-off and on the run. </p> <p>As social media matures, consumers will discover that their networks, recommendations and behaviour will become a passport as valuable, if not more relevant, than their credit rating. And for business, reaching such an agreement with their customers will be equally essential - literally, a new social contract. Without it, increasing levels of fraud, spam, and abuse will cripple the new economy. </p> <p>So the next time your marketing manager tells you proudly how many new fans you have on Facebook, ask them to think about the more interesting question. How can you leverage social networks to better shape your customers' behaviour?</p> </article> <article> <h1>The Dual Horizon Problem</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 00:25:00 GMT</p> <a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/10/dualhorizon/yacht/" rel="attachment wp-att-684"></a> <p>I don't like boats. I get sea sick easily and my worst nightmare is being caught out in the middle of the ocean in a storm. When that happens my original plans - however grand - go straight out the porthole. Business leaders face a similar dilemma. You can spend a weekend retreat discussing the far future, but on Monday the only scenario that counts is the immediate future of cash flow, customers and competitors. So how do you reconcile two distinct timelines which require radically different strategies for attainment? I call this paradox the 'Dual Horizon Problem'. <br /><br />In the Dual Horizon Problem, there are two timelines to consider. The first horizon is what you can see from your present vantage point. It might be the next quarter or the next year - but the important factor is that the measures for survival are based on growth in your current business model. In a crisis, you may realise instinctively that you are heading in the wrong direction - but in fact, you are likely to be so consumed with trying to salvage your position using your traditional strategies, to worry about re-orientating to a new business model.<br /><br />To see beyond the waves to the next horizon, you need to exercise a little imagination. Try this quick exercise. Start with a clean sheet of paper with two columns. Write a list of your major products and services (what you sell), business models (how you sell) and customer channels (where you sell) on the left. Now take your best guess at what direction consumer behaviour and disruptive technology might take in the next few years, and then push your ideas a bit further. Use this to write a list of items in the right hand column that should neatly oppose your current business. Congratulations! You have just sighted your second horizon. <br /><br />Without a plan to reach your second horizon, you may survive the present only to fall short of the future. It is like escaping a storm, only to discover that don't have a final destination. Are you heading to an island paradise or the rocks of death? Not something you want to leave to chance! But before you get too excited, keep in mind that focusing on your second horizon alone is just as bad as ignoring the future altogether.<br /><br />Consider HP. The company recently made headlines when they announced an intention to exit the consumer PC business. HP's management recognised that in the future, margins in the consumer hardware business were shrinking, competition intensifying and product commoditising. They imagined shifting to a second horizon business based on the Cloud - a platform that seemed to offer much more attractive growth prospects. The only catch - as HP's senior leaders discovered when their stock price plummeted - was that shutting down divisions that contribute large chunks of your present day operating revenue without a clearly defined vision for the future, is unlikely to win much support from investors. <br /><br />Arguably, IBM handled their horizon transition much more effectively in 2004 when they made a similar shift to technology services away from PC hardware. A key difference between the two companies is that when IBM sold their PC business to Lenovo, they retained both a significant shareholding and strong management influence in the old business. They were also clever to structure the deal to increase the market awareness of the IBM brand throughout Asia. Only when Lenovo achieved a profitable market position did IBM gradually reduce their shareholding. In doing so, IBM not only gracefully segued from their first to second horizon business model, they were able to neatly re-organise their cost structures in the process. <br /><br />Sometimes companies can have the right dual horizon strategy, and yet slip up on their customer communications. A good example is Netflix. Netflix were very astute in building a horizon one entertainment aggregation business using mailed distributed DVDs at a time when broadband speeds and Hollywood licensing arrangements were not sophisticated enough to handle a streaming model. Using their revenue and customer base from horizon one, they then started to ramp up an online model that enhanced their primary proposition - all of which came dramatically undone when the company announced sudden hikes in pricing and a decision to split the two businesses. Netflix lost a devastating chunk of customers and their CEO was forced to publicly apologise. <br /><br />Navigating a path to the future is not easy. And worse yet, the pace of both technological and consumer change today means that you no longer have the luxury of waiting until the market catches up before you make your move. That's why I believe that as a leader today you have to cultivate 'Dual Horizon' thinking, which although somewhat schizophrenic, will give you the perspective to lead your company through a transformation process without sinking it in the process. <br /><br />When working with many of my clients at <a href="http://www.mike-walsh.com/growth" target="_blank">Tomorrow</a> on this problem, I have advised them not to destroy their horizon one business, in their question for new growth. If you turn everything upside down overnight, you run the risk of either becoming overwhelmed by the reality of corporate inertia, or worse, irrevocably destabilising your current profit engine. Better instead to spin out a new unit - empowered to make a clean start, to trial emerging technologies, break business rules and most of all, to think big. <br /><br />The best way to get things moving is to round up all your trouble-makers, dreamers and hackers and give them the space and protection to try new things. Watch closely. At the right moment you can either bring them back into your business, or fold your business into the new venture. And be assured that you won't be the first to have sailed that route. To paraphrase the late great Steve Jobs - if you have ride out the storm of the present into an uncertain future - its better to be a pirate than join the navy.<br /><br />- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -<br /><b>Need some help with leveraging technology in your present business? <a href="http://www.mike-walsh.com/growth" target="_blank">Find out more</a> about our innovation lab at Tomorrow. I'd be happy to schedule a free advisory session with you to talk about your business goals.</b></p> </article> <article> <h1>The Economics of Immortality</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 05:13:00 GMT</p> <a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/09/economics-of-immortality/brics/" rel="attachment wp-att-670"></a> <p>I once asked a well connected friend from the Valley what the stock rich digerati spent their billions on once they exhausted their penchant for Ferraris, Gulfstreams and obscene boats. ‘Secret labs’, he replied cryptically. ‘Now that they are richer than God, most of them are scared of actually meeting him. So many are busy funding scientists and private institutes to keep themselves alive for as long as possible.’ Eccentric, wealthy centenarians are one thing - but to me the real question is what happens when life extension moves from the realms of the super-rich to the masses. In other words, what impact will the economics of immortality have on the rest of us?<br /><br />Let’s try a thought experiment. <br /><br />Imagine that life extension technology now exists. It could be in twenty years or a hundred - but for the purpose of discussion, there are two key assumptions that matter. Firstly, it will be expensive. Regardless of the actual production and implementation costs of the treatment, the companies who develop it will need to recoup their significant R&D investments and maximise their opportunity for making money while still protected by their patents. Secondly, longevity is unlikely to be a once off process. Similar to servicing a car, extending life is likely to require a program of regular treatments, physical monitoring, and constant adjustments in lifestyle to achieve maximum effectiveness. Given these two conditions, here are my predictions for the future impact of mass market immortality. <br /><br /><strong>The Rise of Info-Pharma Giants</strong><br />Living longer is a problem whose solution may well be part medical and part informational. Rather than a generalised elixir, life extension is likely to require highly personalised medicine. In other words, your treatment will vary depending on your genetic background and the way you live. Accordingly, the companies that will dominate in the space are likely to combine the medical rigour and research funding scale of large drug companies, with the information processing and data analytics of software or cloud computing giants. In fact, by the time life extension becomes a reality - the merger of an IBM and a Pfizer, may actually be more plausible than today's shotgun marriage of a Google and Motorola.<br /><br /><strong>Immortality As A Service</strong><br />One possible way that longevity could be made affordable will be to structure it as subscription service. Your monthly charges may vary depending on your individual condition, conformity to certain lifestyle parameters, and how early you begin preventive treatments. ‘Immortality as a service’ providers will monitor their clients very closely - most likely using technology that evolved from today’s mobile bio-informatics apps. So be warned - unhealthy lifestyle choices or dangerous physical hobbies are likely to be met with severe subscription rate hikes or even a cancellation of service.<br /><br /><strong>P2P Meat Markets</strong><br />The alternative to a subscription funding model` is someone else paying for your extended lifespan. It is not uncommon for rockstars to securitise their future earnings from their back catalogue and get their money upfront, but what about ordinary people? Financial institutions may baulk at the uncertain risks of securitising an individual, but what about a P2P loan market for medical treatments? Consider this scenario - browsing through a virtual stock market of individuals, weighing up their career prospects and capabilities, their influence networks and personal projects - before deciding who you are willing to back with your funds. However, peer funding will be a double edged sword for those who take it. Imagine having to justify quitting your job or taking a holiday to your own personal board of directors.<br /><br /><strong>Social Stagnation</strong><br />If you want to picture the potential social impact of extended lifespans, the best place to start is Japan. According to the World Bank, the average life expectancy in Japan is 82.9 as compared to the global mean of 69.2. Due to both longer life spans and a strong cultural deference to family elders, young professionals entering the workforce in Japan often have to wait until well into their middle age before gaining positions of influence or power. In our future scenario of extended lifespans - this may become a common global phenomenon. When the rich and powerful hold onto their toys way beyond a normal lifespan, you will see increasingly aged company boards, the indefinite delay of retirement, and a calcification of inherited wealth. And if the new rejuvenated elderly are smart, they will concoct elaborate changes to the educational system to keep people in training longer and even encourage an extended adolescence in ambitious juniors - all to distract them from the reality of their continued grip on power. Bread and circuses indeed!<br /><br /><strong>Black Immortality Markets & Rogue Rejuvenation States</strong><br />Whether you are a Hollywood Studio defending your movie library, or a luxury brand protecting your handbags from rampant imitation - piracy is already a global epidemic. But now consider the consequences of companies or countries stealing technology to prolong life. Prohibitive pricing and the divisive politics of life extension would certainly be sufficient incentive. Would some emerging market in 2050 proactively encourage reverse engineering longevity technology to provide their citizens with a competitive edge against other nations? Whether it be cosmetic surgery or pregnancy terminations - patients already travel to arbitrage different regulatory regimes and the relative cost of medical treatments. Will we abandon our countries of birth in the future, in order to live longer in some other one? And in the spirit of the oil wars that defined the twentieth century - what kind of future geo-political conflicts could the battle for immortality inspire? <br /><br />Of course, you should read all of this with a grain of salt. The true consequences of widespread longevity will be impossible to fathom until we actually have to live through it. But as the post war baby boom, China’s One Child Policy and India birth gender selection all demonstrated - small changes in demographics can have devastating impacts to human society. In the meantime, keep a close eye on the world’s technology billionaires. When one of them runs a decent time in the New York Marathon at the tender age of eighty-five, you know a brave new world is almost upon you.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Why Inspiration Trumps Imitation</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:11:00 GMT</p> <a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/08/inspiration-trumps-imitation/sony/" rel="attachment wp-att-652"></a> <p>You can have too much of a good thing, especially if it wasn’t yours to start with. Here’s the perfect example - brands that shamelessly imitate the strategies of their major competitors. I was scouting the Westfield complex in Century City, LA last week and noticed a new Sony concept store a few feet from a classic Apple retail shrine. It was striking how similar both stores appeared, except for one crucial distinction - Sony was devoid of customers.<br /><br />Years ago I remember watching a fascinating interview with Steve Jobs. He was comparing himself to Microsoft and Bill Gates, explaining that their mission at Apple was to take as much as they could from art, music, history, science and technology - in his words ‘the best things that humans have done’ - and cram it into their products. That’s why, he said while people use Microsoft products, they love the ones that Apple makes. The difference was passion. <br /><br />Apple’s retail strategy is also no stranger to appropriation. Next time you are in front of one of their stores, stop for a minute and squint your eyes so that the laptops and screens disappear and all you can see are abstract shapes, materials and lighting. Anything look familiar? When they designed their stores, Apple took direct inspiration from the world of luxury boutiques with their expensive construction materials, theatrical street presence and sparse merchandising, They ruthlessly imitated, but importantly - it was not from the playbooks of their immediate competition. <br /><br />That said - there are some limited scenarios when direct imitation works as a disruptive strategy. For example when you take an expensive product, and deliver a comparable substitute at a dramatically lower pricer point. Although their customers might deny it - low priced imitation is the secret behind the success of fashion brands like Zara and H&M. They directly copy high fashion styles from established luxury brands, and rapidly manufacture and curate market appropriate products at prices mass market consumers can afford. Not so dissimilar is the practice of Chinese ‘shanzhai’ or bandit phone manufacturers, who offer clones of high end smartphones at substantial discounts to their originals, and in doing so, open up entirely new consumer niches.<br /><br />The distinction between inspiration and imitation might be nuanced, but the competitive differentiation can be vast. Steve Jobs was always fond of the infamous Picasso quip - 'good artists copy but great artists steal'. But what does stealing really mean? When you steal something, you don’t just take it - you make it your own. Sage advice for the next time someone asks you to look over your shoulder and mindlessly mimic something your competition does.</p> </article> <article> <h1>A World Without Apps</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 13:06:00 GMT</p> <a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/08/world-without-apps/apple/" rel="attachment wp-att-643"></a> <p>I love apps, I hate apps. Their ingenuity and variety has brought fun and delight into my life, but I also long for a world without them. That is to say, a world without a handful of companies circling their wagons around my content and how I interact with my community. Fortunately something happened this week that should fuel a glimmer of hope for an alternate mobile future.<br /><br />The real issue is not whether Apple or Android will win the war for your mobile phone, but rather the nature of the game they are forcing us to play. The digital revolution is at a crossroads. The Web was designed to be an open platform for the networked navigation of content, but increasingly it is under challenge by those who would allow it to become a walled garden for social media monopolists or a background pipe for proprietary mobile applications. In that context, Amazon’s lastest challenge to Apple’s control over your smartphone is a welcome development.<br /><br />I still remember the day I made the heart wrenching decision to move all my physical books into storage and embrace the Kindle. Dust, space, and endless hours on airplanes finally killed the romance of ingesting words on dead trees. Now I read my books on my phone, my iPad and, when in direct sunlight, on a Kindle e-reader. After this week, I also have the choice of reading them directly from the Cloud. At face value, <a href="https://read.amazon.com/">Amazon’s new HTML5 Kindle app</a> might not seem that game changing but think for a minute what it actually represents. One brand platform, no App Store, no software downloads - just your content, on any web enabled screen wherever you are. <br /><br />HTML5 has been kicking around for a while, but now that platform providers are playing hardball on their approval processes and demanding a greedy bite of third party revenues on content sales - publishers have a growing incentive to bypass them altogether. Amazon will not be long alone in this nascent uprising. Magazine and newspaper owners are growing uneasy at losing their direct billing relationships with their audiences. The Financial Times has already launched its newspaper on the HTML5 platform. More will follow. <br /><br />There is a deeper thread to this conflict worth noting. At the moment, mobile application development is a nightmare in diversity. Different screen formats, multiple device profiles and divergent operating systems add up to costly duplication of work and complex testing processes. For CIOs in particular, this creates all kinds of headaches when deploying services in the enterprise. But in the future, what if you could virtualise any application and deploy it in a web browser? Music, productivity tools, secure communications, video games, newspapers - all hosted and deployed from the Cloud, irrespective of what device you are using. <br /><br />Cloud virtualisation is not good news for everyone. It erodes the platform power held by Apple who have used the iTunes ecosystem to defend the high margins of their hardware products. And while in the short term, a shift to the Cloud might help challenger brands like Samsung, Sony, LG and HTC - in the longer term, even they will suffer as hardware and bandwidth commoditises and value shifts to a hyper-competitive era of platform agnostic applications. <br /><br />Don’t sell your Apple stock just yet, but I do think we will look back and remember 2011 as the year this innovative company and its CEO were at the historical peak of its powers.</p> </article> <article> <h1>The 7 Motivators Of Sharing</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 08:56:00 GMT</p> <a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/08/why-we-share/balloonday/" rel="attachment wp-att-623"></a> <p> </p> <p>Now that it is fashionable to be sociable, those wretched share buttons are turning up everywhere. Read an article, book a flight, buy some shoes, finish a book - you are endlessly encouraged to let other people know. Surely it won’t be long, before they even ask us to tweet about paying our traffic fines. But here’s the problem. Making it easy for people to share is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for social success. People are happy to share things when they feel like it. The real question then, is what motivates them?<br /><br />No one wakes up in the morning thinking they need to share something on Facebook. Perhaps you could argue that spending time on social networks nourishes the ‘belonging’ phase in Maslow’s infamous 'Hierarchy Of Needs'. Personally, I’m not convinced that human desires are even hierarchical to start with. But there is no doubt that when it comes to our online behaviour - we are just as emotional, irrational and driven as we are in the physical world. From my observations of digital consumers - I’ve created a list of seven motivating factors for why people share. Here they are in no particular order:<br /><br /><strong>1. To be a network alpha</strong><br />There is always someone in your group who likes to be the first to discover and share the latest pop culture meme, interesting article or crazy statistic. This is no accident. ‘Network alphas’ spend a considerable amount of time and effort to establish themselves as the primary node in your circle of friends. They share content because it establishes their status in their group. If you want them to pay attention to you, make sure you feed them your material first.<br /><br /><strong>2. To be more attractive</strong><br />If you thinking about human motivators, you can’t go very far without acknowledging the magnetic compulsion of sex. People share inspiring quotes, their dreams and passions, pictures of themselves having fun on exotic holidays or driving glamorous sports cars - not for the sake of pure content creation, but rather to signal their suitability to the opposite sex. If we reveal ourselves through what we share, ask yourself this - will sharing your content make someone look sexy, or a complete dork? <br /><br /><strong>3. To think out loud</strong><br />Sometimes people also share things for organisational reasons. Everyday I share dozens of articles on del.icio.us - not because I care whether anyone is subscribing to my feed, or because I’m trying to vote up a particular article - but for the simple fact that tagging and sharing means that I can come back later and access my research from the Cloud. <br /><br /><strong>4. To be part of something bigger</strong><br />Sharing can also be a way of participating in a groundswell of collective action. We can add our ‘likes’, comments and votes to a big idea, a timely charity, or an election campaign. The visibility of our sharing behaviour during this process is important - because it binds us closer together with people with similar views and passions. That is why the share counts on posts or webpages can create momentum effects. <br /><br /><strong>5. To build social ties</strong><br />Have you noticed that after a party or a work function, there is generally someone in your network who insists on uploading photos and videos and tagging everyone in them? Sometimes it is a nice way to relive the collective moment. Other times - it’s an embarrassing reminder not to drink Tequila in public. But social cohesion is a powerful force. Groups - social or work related - become more dynamic with a greater sense of common purpose when they participate in collaborative sharing behaviours. <br /><br /><strong>6. To get feedback</strong><br />Content creators are motivated to share content to get feedback on their ideas. There is nothing less inspiring than writing a blog post or editing a video, for it then to languish in isolation on your hard drive. People who write and produce, do so increasingly for a public audience. We share what we make with people we hope will in turn share it with others. <br /><br /><strong>7. To be famous</strong><br />The final, and perhaps the overriding motivation for online sharing behaviours - is to get noticed. There are many figures in the digital community who are largely famous for being famous, and who have used social media and frequent sharing as a way of building their fan bases. Super sharers like Robert Scoble, Gary Vaynerchuk and Guy Kawasaki have built large followings as a result of early adopter domination of new social platforms. Sometimes you don't have to offer free iPads or discounts to get people to share. Help them become more visible in their networks, and they will move mountains to share things for you.<br /><br />A few caveats. Firstly I'm not the only person who is thinking about this. The New York Times and Latitude Research recently put out their own research on this subject. You can read it <a href="http://markets.on.nytimes.com/research/stocks/news/press_release.asp?docTag=201107131000BIZWIRE_USPRX____BW5971&feedID=600&press_symbol=219915" target="_blank">here</a>. The other thing you should bear in mind is that any list like this needs to be taken with a cultural grain of salt. Consumers will behave very differently online and on social networks depending on their cultural programming. To be considered ‘digitally social’ in Brazil means something very different than what it does in the US, or in China for that matter. Nevertheless, if you are a brand or a professional marketer - understanding the true motivations for why your customers are willing to share your content and products is essential for your long term survival.</p> <p>The future of marketing may be social - but the brand consumers care about is theirs, not yours.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Appify Your Appliance</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 05:50:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/appify-your-appliance-as-a-coffee-aficionado-i-never-thought-the-day-would-arrive-that-i-would-love-an-automatic-coffee-machine-but-its-true-i-love-my-nespresso-machine-i-bought-my-first-in-hong-kong/tumblr_lp77nomgvq1qztuvxo1_1280/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349023"></a></p> <p>As a coffee aficionado, I never thought the day would arrive that I would love an automatic coffee machine. But it’s true. I love my Nespresso machine. I bought my first in Hong Kong when I struggled to find a decent coffee anywhere on the island. And I’m embarassed to say, I sometimes even choose hotels based on whether there is a similar machine in my room. But if Nespresso, owned by Nestle, represents the past triumph of applying the Gillette ‘razor and blade’ business model to beverage consumables - it also points to the present failure of appliance brands to capitalising on their captured consumer base.</p> <p>When you buy a Nespresso machine they ask you to provide your details to join their coffee club - ostensibly so that they can keep track of your consumption and prompt you to service your machine at the right time. Not a bad premise, and certainly a smarter engagement tool than the standard warranty database coupon. But what if there was a Nespresso app store that sold apps that let you customise your brew strengths or program automatic functions? How would that change the economics of the business? White goods manufacturers would certainly stand to benefit from similar thinking. You may buy a new washing machine only once every 5-10 years, but what if you could get consumers to upgrade their software applications that controlled energy usage, spin cycle programs and other features once every quarter? Turning durables into consumables was a neat magic trick for many appliance brands in the last ten years. But for the next stage in the game, they need to be thinking about the broader information ecosystem that surrounds their physical products.</p> </article> <article> <h1>How To Sell Out Your Friends And Influence Recruiters</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 01:54:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/recruiters/tumblr_lp77ufjuua1qztuvxo1_1280/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349019"></a></p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/recruiters/tumblr_lp77ufjuua1qztuvxo1_1280/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349019"></a>Selling out your friends might not seem the best way to nurture your relationships, but if the transaction involves hooking them up with their dream job - they just might forgive you. <a href="http://www.topprospect.com/?aid=718785">Top Prospect</a> is an innovative new startup that connects with your existing contact networks on platforms such as LinkedIn, and then allows you to suggest friends for job roles. If they get the job - you get paid a bonus - anywhere between US$5,000 and US$20,000 depending on the role.</p> <p>Before you get too excited at turning your colleagues into cash, at this stage most of the job roles are in the US, and there is also a heavy tech sector skew. Nevertheless, <a href="http://www.topprospect.com/?aid=718785">Top Prospect</a> is an intriguing concept and one of many new services that I predict we will see in the future that enable hyper-connectors to better commercialise their networks. By attaching a financial reward to the matching process, companies like <a href="http://www.topprospect.com/?aid=718785">Top Prospect</a> may actually enable the recruitment ecosystem to work more effectively.</p> <p>Think about it. Much of the talent acquisition market is broken. You hire an headhunter to fill a role. He either strip mines his own network of people he has placed for another client, or charges you to advertise the role with either outdated web ads or expensive print notices which tend to attract the disenchanted and perpetual job changers. For the very top positions, industry focused recruitment specialists generally know who the best performers are, and are well placed to defend their turf. But for middle tier roles, connected professionals may have better knowledge of who is smart and open to moving onto a new opportunity. It is in this space, that I see emerging platforms doing the most damage to the traditional model.</p> <p>During the first digital revolution, the Web killed print classifieds. Now that we are in round two, headhunters should stand warned.</p> </article> <article> <h1>What Does Your Airport Say About Your Country?</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:08:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/what-does-your-airport-say/tumblr_lownz0muk01qztuvxo1_1280/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349026"></a></p> <p>When you travel a lot, you start to care about the in-between places. I’ve always loved airports - the super efficient ones like Hong Kong and Singapore, the chic and gorgeously designed ones like Oslo and Denmark, the retro fantastic ones like Charles de Gaulle, and even the bizarre horrid ones like Harare in Zimbabwe. In a way, airports are the ultimate soft branding destination for any country. There is a lot of discussion these days about the virtues of soft power. Nations are vying for supremacy - not just in terms of military, political or economic strength - but also in people’s perception of ‘coolness’. And what better place to start, than the first port of call? Turkey seems to be no stranger to the concept. Check out the ultra luxe new Turkish Airlines business lounge in Istanbul. You start to wonder whether the developed/developing country paradigm is almost set to be reversed!</p> </article> <article> <h1>Working Alone Together</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 11:21:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/working-alone-together/tumblr_louob64d5b1qztuvxo1_1280/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349029"></a></p> <p> </p> <p>One of my favorite hotels in New York is the Ace. It’s hip, idiosyncratic, and they even put record players and vintage vinyls in your room to enjoy. Best of all is the lobby - with its free wifi, great Stumptown strength expresso and communal desks - in other words, the perfect place to work. And that, of course, is also the problem. As you can see in this photo I shot on my last visit, hotel guests aren’t the only ones who have decided that it’s more fun to work away from home.</p> <p><span>Of all the interesting sociological by-products of the digital revolution - the rise of ‘co-working’ is one of the more curious. The Web has liberated millions of potential office slaves. Either as entrepreneurs low on cash, digital freelancers with a global customer base, or simply creative types who like to pretend they don’t have a real job - coffee shops, hotel lobbies and newly styled ‘co-working’ centers are full of digital nomads who like to work alone, with other people around. As a writer, I totally get the paradox of social solace. If I’m alone at home, I get distracted by the echo chamber of my own mind. In a busy cafe, the white noise and activity can actually help me focus and be more inspired to create. </span></p> <p><span></span><span>One of players to watch in this space is <a href="http://www.loosecubes.com/">Loose Cubes</a>. Think of the company as an Airbnb for the nomadic global co-worker. Jump online and you can find literally thousands of potential cool spaces to work in for the day - whether it be an artist studio in Berlin, or a gamer friendly tech cave in San Francisco. A funky place to work is only part of the appeal. There are also practical benefits of sharing work and projects with similar peers that you might meet at co-working facility. Where Loose Cubes is particularly clever, is that they integrate with Facebook to make office recommendations based on who you know. The dashboard shows if any of your friends know the office host, or whether your contacts have used that space before. </span></p> <p><span></span><span>If you feel like you are missing out on all this fun because you are stuck at work - don’t despair. The good news is that ‘the office’ per se, is not the problem. Given the choice, freelancers seem to prefer somewhere to work rather than staying at home. So ask yourself this. How does your space stack up? if your office was listed on a website that people could choose to hang out in - would anyone do it? And if not, why not? Keep asking that question enough, and maybe someone will do something about it.</span></p> </article> <article> <h1>How To Hire Smart People</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 11:04:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/how-to-hire-smart-people/wall/" rel="attachment wp-att-562"></a></p> <p> </p> <p>Being interviewed to work at McKinsey was one of the more interesting experiences of my earlier life. Ten rounds of interviews, rigorous analytical tests, bizarre psychometric probes and a final cup of coffee with a senior partner of the firm that felt like a scene from a John Grisham novel - and voila, I was in. The story about how I never actually turned up for work is one I'll save for another day. But I do remember one thing from the process - McKinsey were obsessed with finessing their strategy of hiring and retaining 'smart people'.</p> <p>After one of the interviews, a manager at the firm described their ideal archetype as a 'spiky integrator'. In essence, their perfect candidate was someone who had an extraordinary talent spike (e.g genius chess skills, Olympian athletic discipline or knowing six languages), but were also capable of integrating that skill across a range of other capabilities and in association with other team mates. Or to put it another way - they wanted freaks with social skills. The only problem with that personality type, as many companies discovered when they put former high flying management consultants into leadership teams - is that spiky integrators need to be surrounded by other super smart people in order to thrive. Out of the fish tank, they don’t survive too long.</p> <p>For companies today, hiring smart people is still a critical priority. And it’s harder than ever. The digital revolution has had two major impacts on the war for talent. Firstly, you are now competing with the fact that the best candidates can earn significant incomes as free agents. With the Web offering a global customer base and infinite opportunities for fame, being a digital ronin or an entrepreneur has never been more seductive. But the second impact is just as profound. The concept of work has never been more challenging. Traditional industries are being disrupted, competition more nuanced, and the demands on managers more pronounced. Your old school spiky integrator might be able to draw up some rather pretty strategy slides describing your industry - but will they have the level headed poise to ruthlessly execute and get things done in an increasingly ambiguous and uncertain operating environment?</p> <p>In the future, I think there will be three capability attributes that senior managers will need to look for in their top performers:</p> <p><b>1. Super Synthesizers</b></p> <p>In the old days, smart employees gathered competitive information in traditional ways - phone interviews, focus groups and industry surveys. Basically - you were clever if you knew how to pick up the phone and make some calls. Now we have the opposite problem - too much information. Super synthesizers are people with the capability of scanning and processing huge amounts of information. They are like human meta filters. With enough technical savvy and familiarity with blogs, social platforms and search algorithms - they can assess the topography of available data, see patterns and collate them as trends, prioritize and then act.</p> <p><b>2. Hyper Connectors.</b></p> <p>One of these days we will laugh about the fact people used to get fired for using Facebook or LinkedIn at work. Hyper Connectors are people that know how to swiftly build and exploit relevant networks to get things done. They won't necessarily have the largest collection of contacts, but they will know how to use digital platforms to find and nurture just the right set of people to reach their goals. These could be internal networks in a huge enterprise, or external webs of journalists, industry influencers and taste makers. You will recognise them in meetings because they are the first to say in the answer to a problem, 'I think I may know someone who..'</p> <p><b>3. Change Optimists</b></p> <p>The final quality of the future super smart might sound a bit soft but in some ways it is the most vital personal attribute - positivity. The pace of change is accelerating and there are people for whom that is good news, and others who, if they are honest with themselves, view that fact with dread. You can reassure the change pessimists about the future all you like but believe me - in the end, when faced with disruptive change, pessimists fight for the status quo not for future growth. Your best performers may not know the future, but they should be happy to meet it head on.</p> <p>What do you think? Are there other attributes of what would make someone ‘super smart’ in the future?</p> </article> <article> <h1>Living With Lion</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 10:58:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/living-with-lion/tumblr_loun8oat3n1qztuvxo1_1280/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349033"></a> I've enjoyed playing with Lion, the new Mac operating system, this week. The native apps really fly, interface gestures have matured and desktop spaces finally feels intuitive enough to allow me to navigate multiple screens of work with ease. My computer doesn't just feel faster - I feel faster. So in a way, my mind got the upgrade. And that perhaps is really the most significant part of the Lion launch - the upgrade process. It was seamless. I clicked buy on the Mac App store, went to bed, and woke up with a new operating system.</p> <p>Compare that with the glory days of Microsoft. Now this may test some of your memories, but I can still quite clearly remember the launch of Windows 95. If the Baby Boomers got the summer of 69, for us Gen Xers - we had to make do with August 24, 1995. With the power chords of the theme song ‘Start Me Up’ - Bill Gates did his best to channel Rolling Stones cool, there were huge tech launch parties, and a promotional campaign that in the modern age, would have put a geek in the White House. The marketing circus was excessive but necessary - because a bit like an election, you had to persuade people to get out of bed and into stores, hand over a $100 (in nineties dollars) and then spend hours of their lives figuring out a complicated software upgrade process. <br /><span></span><br /><span>Now consider the Lion experience - $30, no retail packaging or disks, and an automated upgrade process that took me about 30 minutes. Good news for consumers, but maybe not for everyone. Because whoever wins the operating system wars in the future, you can be sure that retailers stand to lose. Already video games are disappearing from shelves, and now that enterprise software is moving to the Cloud - I doubt you will find any shrink wrapped products on shelves within the next five years. But don’t get too excited. If you really believe the Cloud manifesto - in the future, the whole concept of client side ‘software upgrades’ disappears too. </span></p> </article> <article> <h1>Synesthesia Stock Trading</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:21:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/synesthesia-stock-trading/tumblr_loe0c2dx1f1qztuvxo1_1280/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349038"></a></p> <p>If a stock market rally was a colour, what would it be? Strangely, enough there is a group of people on the planet with a condition who might have an idea. Synesthesia occurs in one in 10,000 people and is, at its most basic level - a blending and co-ordinating of the senses. Those with the capacity can literally ‘see’ sounds and ‘taste’ colours. The roll call of famous synesthetes includes Russian painter Kandinksy, physicist Richard Feynman, inventor Nikola Tesla, and founder of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett.</p> <p>I was reminded of this phenomenon when I started playing with an interesting new iPad application this week called <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stocktouch/id445170859?mt=8" title="StockTouch">StockTouch</a>. It takes a radically new approach to presenting stock movements and sectors - using colours and spiral patterns to visually demonstrate market movements. Thinking back to the revolutionary impact of ‘quants’ to stock trading in the late 70s, this app made me wonder whether in the future we would see new types of trading rooms with massive visual displays and synesthetic interfaces. It might take a math genius to write an equation that predicts market movements, but what about a savant that could look at a sea of colour and predict an impending credit crisis? Perhaps one day the world’s greatest funds manager will be an artist.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Three Social Mining Tools</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 05:54:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/three-social-mining-tools/redyellow/" rel="attachment wp-att-584"></a></p> <p>A key trend to track this year is social mining - the intelligent collation and cross-referencing of machine accessible data on your social graph and personal content. It is a controversial area and you can be sure the trouble will only escalate once the general public really understands how powerful these new data matching tools have become. Leaving aside the privacy issues for now - I’d advise you to spend some time thinking about how these technologies can be integrated into your business - and in particular your sales cycle.<br /><br />Here are three tools to start with:<br /><br /><strong>1. Connected </strong><br /><a href="http://www.connectedhq.com/">Connected</a> is a Cloud based address book that connects and syncs with all of your potential sources contacts and leads. Once the system identifies duplicates and merges records you are left with a new contact database gleaned from your email address book, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even your mobile phone directory. Where Connected is smart - is that it begins monitoring these connections and sends you a daily email with useful communication triggers like job changes or impending birthdays.<br /><br /><strong>2. Tout</strong><br />If you currently use Mailchimp or a similar advanced newsletter distribution platform - you would be familiar with concepts like open rates, click throughs ratios and bounce reports. <a href="http://www.toutapp.com/">Tout</a> takes these reporting concepts and combines it with web based templates. Connecting your web based CRM tool to it (e.g HighRise, Batchbook, CapsuleCRM) imports all of your sales leads as contacts. You can then begin firing off business development or follow up emails from your template list and then track which versions are the most successful. The team edition is particularly useful, as you can monitor how many of the emails your team are sending out are generating positive responses.<br /><br /><strong>3. Rapportive</strong><br /><a href="http://rapportive.com/">Rapportive</a> is a magical addition to the Gmail experience. It uses social data from Rapleaf to automatically identify the people you are communicating with. If you are already connected with them on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn it will load up their picture and recent status updates in a right hand column - or alternatively will prompt you to connect with them. In a sense - it creates the kind of information rich, business focused social network from your email inbox that Google+ should be doing for you.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Future Schlock</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 10:30:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/future-schlock/img_1936/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349047"></a></p> <p>One of my favourite airports in the world is Charles De Gaulle in Paris. Its sweeping concrete lines and internal transport tubes seem to promise an optimistic super sleek future that even decades later, never seemed to quite materialise. Certainly, I’m sure the original designers of the airport would have sooner conceived of space faring jets docking by 2011, rather than having to herd flocks of discount airlines and their attendant rabble of dollar diving tourists. I’m not saying that the future is more likely to be easyJet than than Jetset - but what is interesting is how our perceptions of the ‘futuristic’ are really an embodiment of our hopes and fears about the present. You could almost argue that there is an archaelogy of the future just waiting to be explored.</p> <p>Some time ago I came across a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ghzomm15yE" title="wonderful clip">wonderful clip</a> of Orson Welles narrating a documentary based on Alvin Toffler. From its psychedelic opening titles, to its melodramatic opening featuring Welles walking down an airport terminal smoking a cigar - it seeks to astonish with an array of now mundane statistics of rapid change. Of course, it is easy to laugh at yesterday’s future visions, but I wonder how well turgid web virals like ‘Did You Know?’ will hold up to scrutiny in ten years time? <br /><br />Predicting the future is hard enough. But even more tricky is finding ways to talk about it. Futurists have to walk the precarious line between highlighting the forces that will genuinely change the word, and the ones that sound like they will. Imagine being a futurist fifty years ago and identifying penicillin, refrigeration and shipping containers as the three forces that would underpin modern civilisation. Neither very sexy nor a great theme for selling books - and even if you turned out to be right, no one would remember it. I’d argue that we still revere theorists like Marshall Mcluhan today, not because he accurately predicted the future - but because, like Andy Warhol - he managed to combine stylish self promotion with enough ambiguity, that even years later - we can adapt his slogans to whatever point we are trying to make. Future Schlock indeed.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Even Better Than The Real Thing</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 10:23:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/even-better-than-the-real-thing/tumblr_lo2tnn90bw1qztuvxo1_r1_1280/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349053"></a></p> <p>One of the best exhibitions I have seen in a while was ‘L’Art De L’Automobile’ - a selection of stunning vehicles from the Ralph Lauren car collection in Paris. You will see the cars of your dreams - and I mean that literally. These are not the original cars as they rolled off their production lines. You may see a historic sports car, but from its unique colour, upgraded upholstery, and bespoke ornamentation - means that it was much built by Bugatti as finished by Ralph Lauren. The purists are enraged at the motoring sacrilege, but I was rather delighted. It reminded me of the wonderful ways that we imbue technology with design and materials that are emblematic of its underlying attributes. A car should look fast even when its standing still, it should look expensive even when we don’t know the price tag, and a sports car should look like a race car even when its built for fat, rich old men. And what is true for cars, is especially true for gadgets. </p> <p><span>Technological objects are by nature fetishistic. iPad, Blackberries, Android tablets - our devices in the modern age are our drowsing sticks, totems, and ritual wands. They make us feel more powerful, because they look powerful. I asked someone once in Turkey why people who couldn’t afford expensive smart phones spent months of salary on the latest branded device. In Ottoman times, my friend replied, when men met each other they would show each other the size of their knife or gun. And, he said with a wry smile - what else is a phone today but your weapon? </span></p> </article> <article> <h1>This Moleskine May Damage Your Health</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:18:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/07/moleskine/tumblr_lnnsiewee11qztuvxo1_r1_500/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349057"></a></p> <p>If I have learnt one thing from studying innovation in emerging markets it is that constraint is the mother of invention. When you are short of energy, money or resources - you are often forced to find solutions that are smarter, cheaper and more flexible. But there is another, darker example of constraint led innovation - tobacco marketing. As you can see from this photo I shot at the airport duty free the other day, Davidoff were more than a little inspired by Moleskine in their latest packaging design. Time for more regulation - the non-smokers and air puritans among you cry! But is there any point? The real issue in controlling Big Tobacco in the future will be not stamping out innovation but dealing with what consumers are already doing on their behalf. Social media is a minefield for tobacco regulators.</p> <p>So far, the big brands have exercised caution about lighting up on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But in a sense, they haven’t needed to do anything. Search YouTube for references to Marlboro and you will find thousands of videos - none of them created by the brand themselves. Clips from movies, old Marlboro Man TV ads, and bizarrely enough - smoker fan videos. Equally disconcerting - growing membership numbers on consumer generated fan pages and forums. All of this demonstrates one simple fact - in a network connected world - marketing is less about what brands say to consumers, and more about what consumers say about brands to each other. In the future, banning cigarette marketing will prove increasingly futile. Already in many countries, packet warnings seem tepid, and at times, even counterproductive. In Istanbul I saw one packet with a picture of a beautiful woman and an empty baby stroller. The label helpfully proclaimed that smoking makes it harder to get your girlfriend pregnant. The ambiguity of that statement is fairly self evident!</p> <p>So here’s the issue - you can try and stop Big Tobacco advertising, regulate their packaging and even force them to display their brands as generic texts - but the damage is done. The iconic metaphors of smoking - The Marlboro Man, Joe Camel and the millions of scenes in movies old and new - have taken on a life of their own. Like the artist Richard Prince’s re-photographs of smoking cowboy advertisements - our commercial unconscious is already full of the ghosts of prohibited brand icons roaming free in the landscapes of our mind. And can you really hope to ban consumers talking about the brands they love?</p> </article> <article> <h1>Luxury Brands Online</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 06:01:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/06/luxury-brands-online/iwc-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-589"></a></p> <p>One of the biggest challenges for luxury brands is how they preserve their aura of exclusivity in the digital domain. If you walk around a high end shopping district, you will see the investment luxury brands make in their retail experience. The luxury boutique is not where you go to buy, it is where reverent consumers pay homage to the brands they idolise. But how do you replicate that quasi religious experience when that same customer goes online and Google serves up pages of fake products, poorly merchandised wholesalers, and amateur review forums?</p> <p>Two things have happened in the last few years that indicate a shift in the way that luxury brands view the Web. The first is that many major brands have taken back control over the distribution and presentation of their products online. They have restricted online wholesaling and treated their own websites as a kind of master boutique designed to educate and extend the in-store experience. Secondly, some of the major luxury groups have started to purchase or establish their own retail platforms. Case in point is Richemont’s acquisition last year of fashion innovator Net-A-Porter.</p> <p>Watch carefully what happens next with luxury online. For many brands, and especially those in the prestige space - content and storytelling is a crucial component of the way that the luxury brand mythology is created and sustained. Transmedia is an ideal vehicle for this - and also for careful brand cross fertilisation. For example, if you venture onto the newly designed IWC website, you will note a new collaboration with the men’s department of Net-A-Porter, Mr Porter. Entitled the ‘<a href="http://www.iwc.com/en-us/experiences/portofino-watch-lovers-look/">Portofino Watch Lover’s Look</a>’ - the section is a clever integration between style advice, product merchandising and brand storytelling. And naturally - both companies are owned by Richemont. They say you can tell a man by his shoes - so what should a man’s watch say about his clothes?<br /><br /></p> </article> <article> <h1>Zen And The Art Of App Design</h1> <p>Mike Walsh — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 05:03:00 GMT</p> <p><a href="http://blog.mike-walsh.com/2011/06/zen-and-the-art-of-app-design/tumblr_lni1oqooox1qztuvxo1_1280/" rel="attachment wp-att-8296349061"></a></p> <p>I had fun this week playing with the GQ’s UK edition iPad app. With its slick interface, rich additional materials and engaging content - it was not only superior to its US counterpart, but also one of the better iPad magazines I’ve seen. That said, something was still missing. And, as is often the case - it was missing from my mind. One of the most interesting theories on mental states is ‘flow’ - proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. The theory is deceptively simple - during certain activities it is possible to be so happily immersed in your task that you reach a point when action and awareness seem to merge. Musicians, racing car drivers and Buddhist monks have all experienced it. And normally, while reading the print edition of GQ in a cool cafe with a strong expresso - I can also get pretty close. But alas, not so much on my iPad. Somewhere in all that exploring, poking, rotating, and sliding of screen elements - while admirably interactive - the experience of media flow is disrupted.</p> <p>Please don’t take this as a simple preference of analogue versus digital mediums. I can lose myself in a Kindle book, or while typing in a flow orientated interface like the IA Writer. The problem is more subtle. Years ago, when the first CD-ROMs made multimedia sexy, we envisioned a day when all of our entertainment content would become non-linear, multi-path adventures. It didn’t take long to discover that there is a reason that the likes of Stephen Spielberg and Ridley Scott are famous directors - they do a better job of selecting scenes and narrative options than the average Joe. Interactivity, quite simply, can get in the way of a good story. Or, it would seem, also a little glossy magazine gratification.</p> </article> </main></body></html>