The (Immediate) Future of Work

Interesting how things can change — and how fast. Only last year people were complaining about Generation Y at work. No attention span, unrealistic expectations and so on. I was even talking to a partner of a major accountancy firm four months ago who told me that during annual appraisals one of the main Gen Y criticisms of the firm was the quality of their muffins. Not anymore. All of a sudden Gen Y have changed. They aren’t moving around as much and comments like “what’s with the physical presence thing?” have disappeared.

Moreover, the skills shortage has temporarily evaporated. Senior and middle —ranking employees are now staying put and this means that annual employee turnover rates of 10-20% are slowing to 5-10%. This means less graduates are being taken on. It also means that average employees are being let go as employers up-skill their skill base.

Another Case of Bad Language

Here we go again. A report by something called the the National Organisation of University Art Schools says that schools should be teaching ‘visuacy’. The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) is similarly focussing on the “outcome” of visuacy being a stand-alone subject for years K-10 and the National Review of Visual Education says visuacy should be given the same prominence as literacy and numeracy.

So what is this strange new skill that will be so fundamental to students in the 21st Century? Judging by the fact that the report cites the example of deconstructing an advertisement for Elle Macpherson’s kickers to establish “conditions of value and meaning” alongside an examination of Picasso’s Guernica, visuacy appears to mean visual literacy plus post-modernism minus a sense of humour.

Am I taking the #*&!? Absolutely. It would be silly not to. Doubtless members of the Visual Education Roundtable (“a coalition of key stakeholders to be an advisory body to CMC and MCEETYA”) will paint me as a pedantic philistine but I can live with that. Newspeak like this is a mutant life form from outer space and needs to be killed off before it infects the whole planet.

To put the record straight I’m all in favour of visual literacy. So is my mum, who used to be an art teacher. Our brave new world is saturated with images and it’s going to get much worse in the future. Everything from walls and tabletops to cereal packets and clothing will soon have the potential to become screens displaying the almost infinite amount of information and entertainment created by you, me and everyone else.

Thus we will be drowning in digital dross and there will be a real need to filter this material, either by visualising information or by understanding the difference between semi-stylish eye candy and items of real substance.

But according to post-modernist academics with a love of Jerry built jargon all of this imagery is of equal value. A video by Kylie is as meaningful as a painting Van Gogh. We should be so lucky. My point here is not a discussion about postmodernism. What’s getting my goat is simply the use of bad language, especially in schools. Yes we live in a visually cluttered culture but that doesn’t mean that words don’t matter.

Some Statistics…

I did a talk a couple of days ago at the Group of 100 National Congress. This is essentially an audience of CFOs. Here are a few of the statistics that I used to illustrate a few trends…

1. The Power Shift Eastwards
• 85% of the world’s population will live in emerging markets by 2050.

• In 2005 there were 16 Chinese companies in the Fortune 500. By 2007 there were 22.

• Trade between India and China was worth US$2 billion a year in 2000. By the end of 2007 it was worth $2 billion per month.

• Today Asia (including Japan) represents around 13% of GDP. Western Europe represents around 30%. In 20 years these two figures will have converged.

2. Rising Global Connectivity
• There are currently 1.5 billion devices connected to the Internet. By 2012 there will be 14 billion and 95% of these devices will NOT be computers.

• There are 210 million Internet users in China

• 72 billion corporate emails currently sent every single working day. Predicted to be 150 billion within the next 3-4 years.

3. GRIN Technologies
• If you index the cost of robot labour to human labour with 1990 as the base (i.e. 1990 = 100) the cost of robots has fallen from 100-18.5 while the cost of humans has moved from 100-151.

• In 2004 there were 610,000 robots in ‘domestic service’ worldwide. By the end of 2007 this figure had increased to 6m.

• When the telephone was introduced in the US in the late 1800s/early 1900s it took 50 years for 50% of the US population to acquire one. With cell-phones it’s taken just 7.

4. Societal Ageing
• In industrialized countries the 60+ group was 12% of population in 1950. Now 20%.

• In the US between 2002-2010 the number of people aged 18-44 will decline by 1%. Meanwhile, the number aged 55+ will increase by 21% over the same period and the number aged between 55-64 will rise by 47%.

• In the UK, consumer spending by those aged 65-74 is expected to increase by 40% between now and 2017.

• The shortfall in the national pension fund in China to meet the needs of current retirees is $315 billion.

5. The Environment
• Demand for oil is likely to increase by 50% over the next 20 years.

• China will have built 562 new coal-fired power plants by 2012.

• Only 1% of city dwellers in China breathe air that is considered safe according to EU standards (300,000 die in China each year due to air pollution)

• 23% of Briton’s are bored with eco-news and 18% say they have exaggerated their commitment to the environment because it’s fashionable.

Always Turned On

Things are getting really weird. I have a female friend that goes to bed with an electronic device every night. Her husband is getting fed up and claims it’s ruining their sex life. Her response is that she’s in meetings all day and needs to take a laptop to bed to catch-up with her emails. This is a bit extreme but I know of lots of other people that hardly ever switch off.

You can see this first hand when passengers switch their mobile phones back on the minute their plane lands. What’s quite so important that it can’t wait ten minutes until they are inside the terminal building I have no idea. Perhaps it’s yet another example of how people feel insecure if they are not always available or constantly connected.

Something is going on here. Soon after the millennium (probably the Tuesday around 7.08am) we collectively decided to redefine the concept of freedom to include notions of speed and wireless connectivity. It’s certainly a seductive idea.

We are now free to work anywhere we want. We can do it on aeroplanes at 39,000 feet, in the back of the car, in bed or on the kitchen table. Should children be exposed to their parents doing this? Most people will say, “what’s the harm?” but I am worried about the signals these devices are sending out. Surely what people are saying is that I am more interested in being alone with my digital network than being with you?

The desire to be connected isn’t limited to work either. Twitter, as some people will know, is a micro-blogging service that allows people to answer the question “What are you doing?” by sending regular up-to-the-minute newsflashes of their daily existence to chosen friends. Messages are limited to 140 characters and, judging by most of the messages I’ve seen, most users are limited to an IQ of 110. (Actually that’s not true. Twitter seems to be the domain of uber-geeks with very high IQs but I couldn’t resist saying that).

It’s a sort of stream of consciousness thing that results in babblings about being “thirsty” or “going to lunch”. In theory Twitter is a fun way to keep in touch but I am starting to wonder whether it’s possible to be too in touch.

For example, I have a friend that’s a ‘Twit’. If I wanted to I could sign up and find out that he was “eating vegemite toast” at 7.08pm” or that “I’m in bed now” at 12.04am. But I don’t need to know this.

Back in the old days people kept certain types of information to themselves. I think it was called either privacy or security. Nowadays such digital exhibitionism is practically compulsory. Even the next President of the United States is on Twitter (“Just saw Hillary, she has a gun”?).

Are We All Going Google Eyed?

Here’s fun game. Visit an ATM and play “Guess your PIN.” If you win you get some money. If you don’t you loose your card, usually after the third attempt.Other versions of the game are available for credit cards and removable car radios.

In a survey, 63% of Australian’s said that they had difficulty remembering things like PIN numbers. Personally, I can’t even remember my own home phone number these days. I’m also starting to struggle with passwords to social networks that I’ve joined during moments of midnight madness. I even ‘lost’ my new bicycle for a few days last month because I couldn’t remember the padlock code and couldn’t remember where I’d written it down either. Still, it was better than last year. I padlocked my bike somewhere but, to this day, I can’t remember where.

This might be my age but I doubt it. My lack of memory is caused by too much data. Digitalisation has made it too easy to create and distribute information, with the result that I’m drowning in a sea of endless trivia.

But there’s a much bigger problem on the horizon. The Internet might be making us stupid. For example, have you noticed how attention spans are shortening? Perhaps you are scanning newspaper articles because they appear too long? Or perhaps you’ve read bits of books twice because you weren’t properly concentrating.

The problem is that infinite choice is fragmenting our attention. Digitalisation is also fuelling an obsession with speed with the result that Information and entertainment are now only acceptable if they are delivered in snack-sized formats. Similarly, speed of information retrieval is becoming more important in some instances than accuracy.

Google is also making us somewhat stupid because the first thing we do when we need information is do what everyone does. We go to Google and we look at the first few pages of results. This is a problem because if information isn’t ranked on the first couple of pages it might as well not exist. It’s also a problem because everyone is looking for things in the same place and everyone is using the same sources to create ‘new’ information. Hence, we are becoming increasingly self-referential and our knowledge is narrowing. Don’t believe me? Well the first thing I did when I started writing this was to Google ‘Google Goggles’. Guess what I found? Something I’d already written but forgotten about. Brilliant.

Brian Eno’s Diary

Spent the weekend on Dangar Island with no phone. It rained. Hence I managed to re-read A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brain Eno’s Diary, which I must have last read in about 1998. There is some truly wonderful stuff in this book.

For example, the question “What the **** am I here for?…. is a very modern question, only available at a certain level of luxury and self-importance.”

Other gems include the following:

8 January
“Spending lots of money is often an admission of lack of research, preparation and imagination”

24 February
“Young boy riding at high speed on a bicycle shouting repeatedly, “I am here”. Perhaps the central and single message of humanity”. (Twitter anyone?).

23 March
“The more ‘richly connected’ we make our world the more vulnerable we make it. Empowerment cuts both ways: as the complexity of things increases, so does the ability of an increasingly minute number of people to destabilize it.”

12 June
“Luck is being ready”

I also appreciated the idea of cosmetic psychiatry (made me think of cosmetic brain surgery in the future) and cities having ‘idea districts’.

Trends for 2009

Here are 100 words to describe 2009.

Anxiety
Austerity
Authenticity
Badoo
Basic
Blue
Busy
Change
Classic
Cloud
Community
Compliance
Connectivity
Control
Conviction
Core
Crisis
Debt
Deflation
Demur
Earthy
Eco
Enough
Ergomorphic
Eviction
Experience
Family
Factual
Fear
Free
Frugal
Gardening
Grateful
Green
Haptics
Home
Honest
Hopeful
Indebted
Inflation
Infrastructure
Intimacy
Juncture
Keepsake
Local
Meta
Natural
Overwhelmed
Pamphlet
Patina
Payoff
Polarisation
Privacy
Protectionism
Prudery
Purpose
Quality
Reassurance
Recession
Recovery
Redundancy
Regulation
Resentment
Resignation
Renovation
Restraint
Risk
Saving
Security
Serious
Shaken
Shortage
Shredding
Simplicity
Slow
Smart
Sparkle
Spike
Stress
Stagflation
Struggling
Surviving
Technophobic
Telepresence
Thrift
Tired
Traditional
Trustworthy
Uncertain
Unfashioning
Unplugged
Unwind
Unwired
Virtual
Volatile
Water
White
Xenophobic
Yearning
Zeitgeist

Travel and Tourism Trends

I did a keynote at an Eco-Tourism conference yesterday. Here are my notes for anyone that’s interested.

Society

Acceleration of just about everything
Increased stress means that people looking for stress-relieving activities
Rise of slow movement
Shift from products to experiences (links with search for meaning)
Increasing risk aversion but search more extreme sensory experiences
Increasingly visual culture
Culture of instant gratification

Demographics

Impact of ageing (growth in number of 55-65+)
Declining fertility – smaller families with less time and fewer kids
Fragmented families (more individualized behaviour)
Gen Y low spend per night
Gen X high spend but time starved
Boomers/seniors long holidays but low overall spend

Economy

Global slowdown most prevalent in US/Europe
Relative liquidity of CHIME/BRIC nations
Labour shortages create a war for talent within hospitality industry
Polarisation of markets between low-cost and premium segments
Longer term, the cost of oil will create a slowdown in tourism (maybe)
Polarisation between local SMEs and global brands

Technology

Growth of in-home leisure experiences
Development of virtual worlds (world’s first virtual travel agency)
Growth of telepresence and virtual conferences
Expected increase in cyber-terrorism and cyber vandalism
IT enabling further transparency of markets
Impact of mobile web, GPS, RFID

Politics

Shift of power from West to East
Increase in regulation and compliance
Increase in security and border controls

Environment

Increasing eco-awareness
Impact of social and ethical concerns
Changing weather patterns influencing destination development
Increased stress on natural resources
Development of carbon economy (possible red herring)
Expected swing back to local/domestic travel caused by cost/congestion
Future shortages of all key resources, especially water in some regions
Significant difference between customer attitudes and behaviour

Tourism

Development of enclosed or enclave tourism
Growth of cultural tours (edutainment)
Voluntourism no longer just a gap year activity (search for meaning again)
Dark tourism (extreme experiences)
Development of new Asian destinations (especially Gulf States)
Growth of natural and eco-tourism
Sustainability issue spreading from airlines to hotels and beyond
Impact of inbound CHIME and BRIC tourists
Tourists seeking balance between cultural familiarity (safety) and new experiences
Rise of branded hotels and experiences
Development of long-haul low-cost travel (temporary?)
New hubs
Eco-luxe
Camping (nostalgia)
Rise of sabbaticals

Key uncertainties

Economy
Oil price spikes
Influenza pandemics
Terrorism
CHIME/BRIC growth
Currency movements (e.g. collapse of US$)
Extreme weather events
Weather patterns
Space weather
Critical infrastructure failure
Anti-tourism sentiment
Eco-cynicism

Extreme Teens

Something important is happening and almost nobody is talking about it. That’s possibly because it’s happening in a parallel universe known only to teens and certain members of Generation Y. Did you know, for instance, that there has been a 500% + increase in requests for photo retouching services at Snappy Snaps, a chain of photo shops in the UK? Why is this? The reason is that people want to look as good as possible on online dating and social networking sites.

Teens have always been interested in how they look to others but things seem to be getting a bit out of control. People are now constantly connected and as a result they are under continuous pressure to be doing something interesting and to be looking good. Superficial? Certainly. Avoidable? Certainly not.

Nothing new in this in a sense but what’s changed is that there is now no real privacy or downtime and this is generating a new form of teenage angst. Thanks to mobile phones, digital cameras and social networking sites, teens are under immense pressure to be having a good time all of the time. It’s a bit like Hollywood celebrities being afraid to go outside without new clothes and a haircut but thanks to the likes of MySpace, Facebook and Twitter it’s now happening in Cricklewood.

This is the new normal for millions of teens and some of them are cracking up. The peer pressure to be constantly switched on and available – and looking good – is immense, especially at school.
A good example is a new website for busy young socialites called SQUA.RE (their caps not mine). This is a user-generated site where individuals can showcase their retouched image and luxury lifestyle to others.

Fortunately I’m not on it.