Category Archives: History

It's not what you know, it's who you know

This post’s headline are the earliest ‘words of wisdom’ I remember being given. Despite the fact that it often proves true and is, no doubt, a fundamental aspect of human nature, I have always disliked the phrase.

Thinking about it recently, I believe this dislike comes from the ‘overtones’ of corruption that are often associated with it.

There’s an implication that no matter how much effort you put into learning something and doing it well, someone else is going to do better not because they’ve put in similar levels of effort but because they just happen to be mates with someone in a better position than you.

I’ve seen some great examples of this over the years. In my early career, I remember questioning some expenditure on the departmental marketing budget that was going directly to some UK MPs. This was before the ‘cash for questions’ scandal broke back in the 1990s where it transpired that MPs were taking money to ‘ask questions’ in Parliament. In this instance this was to ‘ask questions’ regarding the future of digital TV which it was clearly in my employers interest to promote. The fact that I saw these budget lines and, indeed, related paperwork from the MPs themselves, with my own eyes means I will always be inclined to believe ‘there is no smoke without fire’ when it comes to these type of scandals. Once the US management took over, things became even worse, cluminating in massive debts and legal action for corrupt dealings.

Then there was Lucent, a company I had admired from a distance for a number of years before joining it. Oh boy, what a hotbed of corruption that place was. I was working there when Rich Mcginn was fired and all the dodgy dealings were exposed. It was often heartbreaking to see these loyal lifelong AT&T/Lucent employees cast out in wave after wave of subsequent redundancies – the many years of hard work and talent sullied by the greed and corruption of its senior executives.

In the hosted services industry, I’ve seen, first hand, how ruthlessly organisations like Microsoft can act through personal and partner networks and how it infiltrates the analyst and consultancy ecosystem to spread its own version of the truth. When I see comments on how it is ‘gunning for Google’ I can certainly believe it.

In the software industry, I’ve witnessed similar vendor and analyst dodgy dealings which are far more about money than they they are about unbiased truth. Likewise, I’ve seen how professional services organisations conspire with vendors to extract maximum cash from clients. In crowded and confused markets, like web marketing and information management solutions, it’s been encouraging to see the growth of truly ‘vendor averse’ organisations like The Real Story Group – we need much more of this type of ‘trustworthy’ analysis in other areas.

In recent years, I’ve had the displeasure of encountering the very worst example of wealth driven entitlement and superiority in my life so far, which helped me understand how a combination of dysfunctional personalities and money driven power could create the type of society where horrors like apartheid and ethnic cleansing could exist.

So, based on over 20 years of seeing the good and bad in the business world, I welcome the idea that Wikileaks intends to turn its attentions on business organisations. It would be good to see some real transparency rather than the faux transparency it is currently fashionable to proclaim.

Are you standing on a burning platform?

The ‘burning platform’ sits alongside ‘the flagpole’ and ‘the box’ in today’s business lexicon and has been used quite a bit in the web marketing and information management arena as a method to move projects forward. It is particularly useful where there isn’t a definitive deadline for something but there is a general consensus that something needs to change. The biggest current example in the web world is ‘social media’ – with many a guru suggesting that if organisations don’t get their act together, the platform they are currently standing on will be burned to a cinder.

The challenge with ‘burning platforms’ is determining to what degree they are contrived and to what degree they are genuine. This last year has given us perhaps the best ‘literal’ example of a burning platform in history – the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. There was no question the Deepwater Horizon was burning, you could see the glow from 90 miles away apparently. There was also no mistaking the tremendous issues that burning platform created – they could be seen from a 1000 miles out in space. This event was also an excellent reminder to those who like to cast predictions on the future (me included) that the biggest stories of the last year were entirely unpredictable – the biggest oil spill in history, earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, a volcanic eruption in Iceland that brought travel chaos across Europe and a bunch of miners rescued against the odds.

So, what about some of the less literal burning platforms? The biggest of these has got to be ‘the end of the world as know it’ – most readily described as ‘climate change’. I share the view, as expressed at various points on this blog, of those who identify ‘climate change’ as the inevitable consequence of a 300 year addiction to fossil fuels and that relentlessly rising population and ever increasing energy demands all contribute to a potential triple whammy of issues – that, all things considered, are simply too big to ignore. However, here I sit shivering in one of the coldest December’s on record at the end of what I’m being assured is the 2nd warmest year on record not really knowing what to believe.

In the last week I have read a very fascinating article in the Times Eureka magazine about ice core drilling in the Antarctic which has a graphic showing that CO2 atmospheric concentrations today are way in excess of anything seen in the data over its 800,000 year span (this appears to be an indisputable fact and I can’t help thinking there’s got to be a downside to it). Conversely, if you spend more than 5 minutes reading this highly Google ranked climatechangefacts.info site you get the sense that there’s nothing to worry about and the most important thing is to carry on living exactly as you are. Then the nagging doubts start to creep in that the interests of this particular site are driven by the US oil, gas and automotive industries. Then again, they could be driven equally by the climate change lobby trying to infer that US big business is trying to muddy the already oil drenched and acidified waters. At times you see why it is so much easier to attach the blinkers and play the dutiful role of corporate wage slave and brain dead consumer and just hope that things don’t get too painful for future generations.

In terms of the climate change ‘burning platform’, 100months.org sent me the latest update email telling me there is now only 72 months left to save the world. It doesn’t seem like 5 minutes ago I was writing Ten Hopes for the Tens – these last 12 months have rocketed by and what do we have to show for it progress wise on the world stage? I can’t believe it’s a year since the Copenhagen Climate Summit ended in what was widely described as a failure and here we are, a year later, with similar commentary being applied to the Cancun Climate Conference. At this rate, we will have reached the 2016 ‘tipping point’ as determined by 100months.org with little or no politically driven progress made.

If  the Deepwater Horizon disaster cost around $3 billion to clear up does this provide a more tangible illustration of what the costs of other ‘burning platforms’ might look like? The Stern report emphasised the potential costs of continuing the Business As Usual approach to energy, population and lifestyle and not taking significant action to address CO2 emissions. On lowest levels of warming, the impact was calculated at around 3% GDP and at the higher levels, around 10%. So, if we look at current levels of US GDP this would mean the lowest level of cost to the US economy alone would be equivalent to 150 Deepwater Horizons and at the higher level, 500 Deepwater Horizons.  Either way, after this last year, more than one Deepwater Horizon seems less than an attractive proposition.

Filtering out the noise

In common with around 9 million people in the UK and presumably similar proportions elsewhere in the world, I have hearing problems. Some of my posts on this blog have expressed experiences with this and the most recent one described the lipreading course I am currently doing.

Every week now, I spend a morning associating with a group of 20 people who all share the same or similar issues. The one thing we are undoubtedly all agreed on is that it is a very noisy world out there. If you don’t hear well, noise is the biggest problem. Unless you are profoundly deaf, the chances are you’ll hear the noise all too well but what you won’t get is any clarity.

The majority of us in the group have hearing aids that help filter out the background noise and this is undoubtedly the best innovation to have happened with the arrival of digital hearing aids during the last decade. This works, to a point, but we are all agreed we would prefer it to be better. If things get unbearably noisy, one of the options for the hearing impaired is to remove, or switch off, their hearing aids completely and rely on their lip reading skills.  There have been times over the last few years where it has been an utter relief just to ‘switch off’.

So, if the real world is getting noisier and noisier, the online world has got even worse.

I share the opinion of those who say that Web 2.0 is just Web 1.0 that works. What are often described as latest innovations and ideas existed in some form online 5, 10, 15, or even more years ago. What we’ve seen more than anything else in the last few years is mass adoption and a more ubiquitous web presence. In other words, it has got a lot more noisier out there. As in the real world, I don’t regard more noise as a good thing but it is the by product of growth, it’s difficult if not impossible to switch it off and we just have to learn to live with it.

Right now, I think the vast majority of organisations are in the same position with the web as a hearing impaired person is in the real world. They are bombarded with so much noise, it’s difficult to get any clarity.

So, what are their choices? Well they can choose to ‘switch off’ completely. However, although it may give temporary relief, in the same way that a hearing impaired person will become increasingly insular and insolated if they don’t join in the conversation, the same will apply to the organisation.

My advice, based on web development experiences going back to the mid 90s, is to focus on using the tools they’ve been using for years and not to get overly distracted by the growing noise.

Continuing the analogy of the hearing impaired person for a minute, the tool that acts like the button on my hearing aid that filters out the background noise is one that the majority of organisations know best – email!

One of the biggest lessons I learnt in web development back in the 90s is the value of getting web email traffic (sales, technical, service, general etc) copied into your inbox. Everything, and I mean, everything I’ve ever needed to know about the expectations of users, the type and depth of content required, the information flows for customer service, the hot buttons for prospects and, indeed, the best tips for furture product development has come via those emails.

In the last few years, when people have been talking about abandoning the tried and tested communication channels and methods in favour of Facebook and Twitter, I have done some direct analysis of what can be gained from Social Media Monitoring versus listening to the feedback gained via email. Firstly, analysing social media properly, even with automated tools, takes a lot of time and effort. What you end up doing is manually filtering out the noise through cross-referencing the context and determining whether sentiment is genuinely positive, negative or neutral or just laden with sarcasm. What you end up with is something that is still fuzzier than the direct and unambiguous feedback you’ve already got in the emails.

Ironically, I’ve also discovered on a number of occasions that negative feedback in social media often stems from poor email handling within the organisation. If questions are not responded to quickly and efficiently, that’s the point at which someone will take to a forum or start Twittering. So, if you focus on getting the basics right, more than often, that noisy old social media environment will take care of itself.

2020 Visions – Automotive innovations

I feel very fortunate and grateful to have followed a career path that has enabled me to work on a wide variety of projects across many different organisation types and markets. In the past, I’ve described myself as a bit of a ‘corporate gypsy’ which has taken on more significance recently after some research into part of my family does in fact show I share some Romany heritage with the actor Bob Hoskins – so maybe my desire to roam around in different places, soaking up new experiences and ideas is in the blood. Anyway, in the last few years I’ve roamed from software to cookware and from household appliances to automotive electronics. At any point I have been equally fascinated by the application of agile versus waterfall product development techniques, the material sciences that go into making a superior frying pan to how the design of a kitchen machine blade can make all the difference in mixing a smoothie. Right now, I am immersed in how smartphone technologies can be integrated safely into vehicle control and audio systems – a current growing concern in road safety. This last year working in the automotive industry has confirmed my earlier beliefs that it is ripe for some very fundamental invention and innovation. Our transport infrastructure continues to creak and groan under relentlessly growing demands and our over-reliance on fossil fuels looks more and more precarious as these resources become harder and harder to find, extract and process. In a flight of fancy that took off around this time last year I started to explore 3 potential routes of innovation that could help to address growing issues…

  • Making single person journeys less wasteful and more efficient
  • Modular and integrated transport solutions
  • Harvesting and trading energy through the transport infrastructure

A year on, I’ve spent some time looking at the concepts and innovations that are being explored in these areas and it’s clear that a great deal of thinking and experimentation is happenning, which hopefully will lead to some significant breakthroughs and fundamental changes. (note:– here is an interesting video from January 2011 illustrating some of the ideas of future transportation being explored) The established automotive giants keep playing with ideas…

Audi’s Snook Concept
General Motors City Car concept
Suzuki Mobility Concept

Most of the major car manufacturers have conceptual programmes underway for ‘city car’ designs.  With the US car manufacturers trying to regain some kudos for innovative, energy conscious thinking, GM has been pushing it’s experimental partnership with Segway with its development of the PUMA a semi-autonomous low footprint city vehicle. This side of the pond, another GM (F1 designer Gordon Murray) opened a few eyes earlier in the year with the T25/27 city car designs which rather unbelievably are said to be able to carry up to 3 people in a space that is 1/3rd the size of conventional cars. It was good to see Gordon Murray’s ideas win the 2010 SMMT innovation award and awards at the very successful Future Car Challenge. Although these unconventional ideas and experiments are often knocked by commentators I think it is encouraging that they are gaining coverage and recognition. Town planners dream of less congestion…

Integrated transport in Melbourne GM/Segway’s City Car Vision The GM stackable car concept

A couple of city engineering concepts I have seen recently have been pursuing the idea of integrating smaller transport units into other infrastructure. Some illustrations of an Australian concept show a tram type system that incorporates single wheeled/single person units that can join and leave the main vehicle at various points. Discovery Channel’s Mega Engineering, which looks at the potential massive build projects of the future, has examined personal pod projects underway at Heathrow Airport and an ambitious conceptual idea for Washington DC – described here in this Death of the Automobile clip. Mega Engineering shows an excellent example of potential transport robotics with amazing clips of Kiva Robots in action. Saving valuable space on roads and in parking areas…

The Mo Du Lo concept The EU ‘HOST’ Concept of modular vehicle systems

Projections of population growth, vehicle ownership and land restraints illustrate that the way we currently travel by personal transport is increasingly unsustainable. If we think traffic congestion is bad in the UK, particularly in the south – it’s nothing compared to the massive traffic jams that have been experienced in China this year.  So… it is understandable that concepts designed to automate traffic flows and reduce the physical footprint of vehicles on the road and in parking environments are gathering pace. Exploiting renewable energy resources in the transport infrastructure

An MX5 Solar Conversion Project Solar Collection Concept

The many millions of acres of car parking space and many hours that cars are parked in them seems like a criminally wasted opportunity to harness renewable energy. And because these vehicles then move from location to location there must be many an opportunity to trade the energy they collect in an ecosystem that rewards the generation of low carbon power. The Open Source Concept The most inspiring idea I have come across in the last year is Riversimple’s ‘Open Source’ Hydrogen Powered car project. The statement they have made on their FAQ’s about the importance of taking an ‘Open Source’ approach to their ideas I believe is fundamental to how we will address the challenges currently presented by the triple whammy of climate change, energy demands and population growth. It is encapsulated very well in this quote…

A window of opportunity has opened now that the flaws in our current model are self-evident and the need for a step change in our transport technology is widely recognised. We must seize this opportunity to establish new vehicle technology standards that are designed to optimise energy efficiency, because if zero emission but energy intensive vehicles establish themselves, it will be much harder ever again to question the basic architecture of cars.

When East meets West – what will the World look like?

Some earlier posts on this blog express my fascination with China and its increasing impact on the world. The marketing department I’m running in my current role shares its office space with purchasing and my two immediate colleagues are Chinese. Much of my day is filled with the sound of conversations in Chinese as information about our latest product innovations is exchanged with our offices in Hong Kong and suppliers in Guangdong. This is my 3rd job in a row where Asia has represented a significant part of the organisation’s operations and it has heightened my interest in Asian countries and cultures.

With this in mind, I jumped at the chance (excuse the pun) to take the family to see a preview showing of The Karate Kid at the weekend. The original film was a classic during my youth so I did have some reservations about the remake. The story is a good one, which is always a useful starting point for a remake and the passing of 26 years since the first film makes for some interesting analysis of how the world has changed – the biggest of which is the film’s location – from California to China.

Well, back in the cold war days of 1984, you wouldn’t imagine a US film-maker getting such uninhibited access to the authentic sights and sounds of Beijing (probably still better known as Peking in the early 80s), detailed shots inside the Forbidden City, such awe-inspiring views of those pointy mountains in the southern Guangxi province, amazing tours of the Wudang Mountain monasteries and incredible panoramas of the Great Wall in the north. For me, it was this Chinese authenticity and insight that marks the film out as a worthwhile remake.

It was with some sadness therefore that later on Sunday, I read the review of ‘When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind – Or Destroy It’ an assessment by journalist Jonathan Watts of the environmental impact economic advance has had on China. The review makes grim reading, as do the preview pages accessible via Amazon.

However, although I’m sure I will find this book fascinating and depressing in equal measures, it struck me that the immediacy with which I could satisfy an impulsive urge, place an order for it via an iPhone from my bed and have it delivered to my door the next day sits at the heart of the issues it highlights.

This is a monster of our making. Mass consumerism in the West has led to what the book preview describes as a ‘pass the parcel’ approach to the detrimental environmental effects of manufacturing – the tatty remnants of which China is now holding. But our excesses are just the start. Understandably, the Chinese wish to enjoy the fruits of their hard labour. For the majority of them to meet the levels of lifestyle enjoyed today in the West means a level of consumerism beyond anything this world has yet seen. So, this does indeed raise the question ‘when East meets West – what will the World look like? It’s undoubtedly a question we all play a role in answering.