How to Fail

Here are my top tips for failing with greater frequency and style:

1. Fail as often as possible but never make the same mistake twice.

2. Set up failure targets for each and every employee.

3. If something fails kill it fast (and cheaply) and move on.

4. Set up an annual noble failure award*

5. Think like a kid sometimes – keep asking “Why?”

6. Hire curious people and don’t get too hung up on experience.

7. Ensure that teams have a mixture of ages, sexes and disciplines.

8. Do things that don’t appear to make any sense.

9. Go the wrong way on purpose some times.

10. Never follow lists of rules.

* If this is too successful you will obviously have to stop it.

The death of the internet is exaggerated

Did you know that the volume of data traffic on Youtube in 2006 was equal to the volume of traffic on the entire internet six years earlier? Moreover, according to a US think tank (the Discovery institute) the volume of data on the internet is growing at a rate of 60% per year. As a result of this data deluge people are starting to talk about exafloods and zetafloods whereby the internet jams up or becomes almost unusable due to ever increasing volumes of traffic.

Of course the idea of an impending internet meltdown is nothing new. Back in 1995 Bob Metcalfe, a founder of 3Com, predicted that the internet would grind to a halt towards the end of 1996. A more recent prediction, this time from Nemertes (a research firm), is that internet demand will outpace internet supply by next year (2010).

So is a major failure really imminent? I think not. First the rate of traffic growth is actually much slower than some people imagine. Second the problem can be solved — like most problems — with enough time and money. Third it is clearly in the interest of certain companies to talk up this threat (i.e. people selling pipes and cables want to sell bigger and better pipes and cables to as many people as possible).

Furthermore, it is not entirely inconceivable that demand will actually slacken. People may simply get fed up with what’s on offer on Youtube or walk away from faster connectivity and digital friends. We could all suddenly decade to unplug, unsubscribe and slow things down. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible.

What Am I Saying?

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As you can tell I’m not as busy as I have been. I’m also obsessed with Tag Crowd. The image above is what happened when I fed about 0,000 words from a failed book experiment into the tag machine.

People again!!! Don again????

So I’ve been thinking. What if you could capture what people are saying (talking on phones), texting and typing (email) and do a tag cloud for each minute, hour, day, week and so on. Wouldn’t that be fascinating? What would we all be saying? I know there’s Google Zeitgeist but that’s not quote the same thing. That’s just internet searches. I’m talking about what everyone in the world is saying to each another.

Twitter This

Interesting piece by David Rowan in The Times last month (I read everything after everyone else).

Apparently there are 15 million members of Second Life but there’s a good reason why the early adopters have moved on — it’s got too mainstream. Since big business (Coke, BT, Toyota) and governments set up shop there, it changed the nature of the site from sought-after cool to yesterday’s dull idea. Like Twitter, it became boring when everyone else started doing it.

Even so, its currency is stable and the game is profitable for its owners, Linden Labs. Much the same might be said for any cool brand; Twitter, eBay, Friends Reunited and Facebook swiftly became mainstream. But social networks need more than 100 users to generate the same revenue as that generated by a traditional media customer, such as a newspaper subscriber. With these figures, a site has to become mainstream to make any profit at all. Cool gets the attention, but only the continued visits of the rest of us will make it worthwhile.

Tag Clouds

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I’m having a useless day. Can’t think. Can’t write. Can’t do anything.

Normally I’d go for a walk, shop or Google myself silly. This time I thought I’d try something different. I fed the entire text of my new book (89,800 words) into a tag cloud generator called tagcrowd.com. The image above is apparently the word frequency in the text. It’s not 100% accurate. The word Don for instance only appears twice in the whole book but for some reason it shows up here. Interesting nevertheless. Also quite useful for thinking about possible book titles.

Corporate Memory

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Did you know that you can buy a pen that not only transfers your scribbling to a digital file but also records any conversation made whilst you are writing. Useful? Frightening? Maybe both.

But this is nothing. In the future it is entirely conceivable that every thing that you say in a meeting will be recorded for posterity and will be searchable by anyone. This could be quite useful. If you miss a meeting you’ll be able to find it and watch it later. If you are threatened with a lawsuit you will be able to defend yourself by proving that certain things were said or were not. But then again do you really want your every utterance to be remembered forever?

What if you make a particularly stupid suggestion in a meeting and minutes later it ends up on Youtube for all to see? Or what if companies use verbal expression and body language software to analyse when people are lying? Talk about total recall. Scary.

Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

picture.jpgWe’ve had the Spanish flu (1918-19), the Asian flu (1957) and the Hong Kong flu (1968-69). More recently we’ve had SARS, bird flu and most recently we’ve had (or probably haven’t) swine flu. There is also seasonal flu that appears every winter and kills about 250,000 people annually.

The phrase “community of anxiety” was coined in 2004 by the writer Ian McEwan in a novel called Saturday about the events surrounding 9/11. A similar idea is that of information pandemics. The idea here is that fear and anxiety are spreading throughout the world, fuelled primarily by digital communications (i.e. interconnectivity) and low-cost travel.Fear can start with a single email, spread to a blog and end up on Twitter. The result is global panic on a scale hitherto unseen and outbreaks can be difficult to contain because drugs don’t generally work.

In early May the World Health Organization talked about the need to stockpile food and water due to the swine flu outbreak and raised the threat level to 5 out of a possible 6. Meanwhile, airports were installing thermal scanners and newspapers were revelling in the story as it grew every more scary and spectacular. The whole world seemed to be running for cover wearing a variety of (mostly useless) facemasks. Fear was spreading fast, fed by a mixture of confusion and impotence.

Of course the threat is real enough. The 1918 outbreak killed somewhere between 20-50 million people in less than 18-months while the Black Death in the 14th Century wiped out 1/3 of the European population in just two years. Even the Asia and Hong Kong pandemics killed about 1-2 million people apiece. But we are confusing what’s possible with what’s probable and the reason that we are doing this is that there is a collective feeling — a mood if you like – that something big and nasty is coming our way. This is partly because of a string of events, ranging from 9/11 and climate change to the economic collapse have left us feeling unsure about what’s next. It is possible that a pandemic will eventually emerge. It will probably start in an over-crowed Asian city and travel economy class on a jet to the US and Europe. We might be able to intercept it or we might not. The science surrounding such things is uncertain.

Interestingly though, there also appears to be a sense that we deserve things like this to happen to us in some way. We are collectively guilty (because we borrowed too much money or damaged the planet with our selfish, materialist ways, perhaps) and we need to be punished. There is also a warped sense of curiosity at play. What would the world look like after a genuine pandemic?

Another example of the fear factor was the jet that flew low over New York in early May. People automatically assumed another terrorist attack was taking place and panic whipped around Manhattan like wildfire.
It turned out to be someone talking some photographs but by then it was too late. And this, perhaps, is the point. Information now flows around the world too fast and there is not enough time to properly react or to separate fact from opinion, anecdote from analysis or sensation from science. It is now also next to impossible to figure out what to believe. There is too much information and much of it is unreliable. Thanks to Web 2.0 the old hierarchy of knowledge, where source related to trustworthiness and reliability, has broken down. We just don’t now whom or what to believe.

Furthermore, the people that we used to trust (scientists, politicians, religious figures and so on) are now so widely distrusted that we ignore them or take anything they say with a large pinch of salt. So far swine flu is killing about 0.1% of those that it infects. The mortality rate for the 1918-19 varieties was 2.5-5.0%. So far very few people have actually died. This could still change but I doubt it. Nevertheless, the sense of doom and gloom and impending apocalypse remains.

Supersize Me

So United Airlines has decided to charge really fat people that want to fly extra.The idea is that if you can’t fit into one seat you have to buy two. Will the idea get off the ground? With 2/3 of Americans clinically overweight some people are calling this action discriminatory but I can’t see what the fuss is about.

Why should I have my plane trip turned into a sumo wrestling contest simply because the person sitting next to be can’t stop eating cheeseburgers? This has happened to me twice. Let’s just say that there is ‘flow’ under the armrest.Actually, I’ve got a much better idea. Low-cost airlines are now starting to charge people for baggage so why not charge passengers by body weight? Even better, people with anorexia nervosa could sell the bits of the seats they don’t use to clinically obese people, thereby creating a kind of secondary trading market for seating.

Where will this end? Maybe sports stadiums will start doing the same. What about cinemas, automakers:the list goes on.

PS – I’m joking.

Reverse Brainstorming

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Where’s Wally? I’m in Hong Kong. The airport is scary empty. London Heathrow was much the same. Is it the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) or just the GAP (Global Anxiety Pandemic?). I think a mixture of both. Anyway, no trouble ordering a bacon sandwich in the Virgin Clubhouse.

Great talk by the CEO/Chairman of Cafe Nero at the Retail Forum I was speaking at in London. He mentioned that he ran a regular one day event for all regional and area managers – about 160 staff- in which he wasn’t allowed to speak for six hours (he could write things on flip-charts but that was it). Staff were not allowed to say ANYTHING positive whatsoever about the company during the day. In other words, the aim of the session was to identify problems and weaknesses. He didn’t seem to have a name for this idea but I like the idea of reverse brainstorming. In short, build a problem factory and the innovation will come….