Monthly Archives: October 2011

2012 Food Trends (or not)

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Tempting as it is to comment on Liam Fox and where his departure would leave William Hague, I’ll focus on some food trends instead.

Something that caught my eye recently was from satedepicure.com in the US. Check out the link, but if you don’t have the time here’s a summary with a few comments.

1. Modernist or Molecular Techniques in Cooking
“The science of food and cooking, otherwise known as molecular or modernist cuisine, will blossom in 2011 and reach full bloom in 2012.” Really? I’m not so sure about this. Maybe it’s moving outwards into the mainstream in the US, but my feeling is that it’s reaching it’s eat by date in Europe.

2. Seafood with Integrity
I agree. Pressure on wild fish stocks is rising (thanks to rising incomes and shifting eating habits in emerging markets). Hence the variety of eco-labelling in the US, UK and elsewhere (“including MSC, ASC, ISO, Friends of the Sea, Global Aquaculture Alliance”). However, another note of caution. Is this, like bottled water boycotts, just fashion?

3. Cafe Cuisine and Culture
“An extension of the smart casual shift in fine dining of the past three years.” Yes, but watch for a rise in no-frills eats at one end of the spectrum and formal dining at the other as a counter-trend (as a form of culinary escapism if the economy turns really bad).

4. Necessity of Social Media and custom Apple/Android Apps
“In addition to applications for mobile devices chefs and restaurateurs will increasingly use social media and digital communications to build their customer base and increase customer loyalty.” Yeah yeah yeah…

5. Source Mapping and Transparency
” It is likely that food purveyors, manufacturers, distributors, and restaurant operators will engage in increased source transparency and use technology to do so. Leo Bonnati, a researcher at the Media Lab at MIT, has developed a source tracking system and established sourcemap.org as an open source platform for tracking products through the supply chain and estimating their carbon footprint.” Yes, but again I’m not sure that carbon footprint is the main reason for doing this. I think localism (10-mile diets, provenance etc) is also connected to a growing distrust of big business, government regulation, anti-globalisation, cultural identity and so on.

The Same Old Fears

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If you aren’t nervous enough already, here’s something else to worry about. In December 1929, at the time of the Great American stock market crash, America suddenly fell victim to a pandemic. The disease, called psittacosis, had been known about since 1892, but such was the state of that fear that gripped the nation in 1929 that it’s existence and threat was blown out of all proportion.

On 6 January 1930 a doctor that examined one of the first cases sent a telegram to the US Public Health Service in Washington DC that read; “Can you please supply parrot fever serum for our disposal immediately.” Further panic about contact with diseased birds then ensued. One US Admiral even ordered sailors to toss their pet parrots overboard, while the New York Times ran a front page that read: “Parrot Fever Kills 2 in this country.”

There were 169 confirmed cases of parrot fever in the US and 33 Americans eventually died. So was America in 1929 a dangerous place or just a gullible one? Parrot fever exists today in the US (and elsewhere) and infects between 100 and 200 Americans every year. The only difference is that over-exposure to social media is currently spreading economic anxiety rather than parrot fever.

Innovation: Lessons from the ‘Big Apple’

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I wrote this for Fast Company magazine back in 2007. It’s still pertinent I feel. The question, of course, is what will happen to Apple post Steve? I suspect the answer is more or less what happened to Sony post Akio Morita.

Ten years or so ago Apple Computer was almost bankrupt. Fast forward and Apple (the company no longer uses the word computer) is now regularly cited as the most innovative company in the world. So what can we learn from the comeback kid?

Rule #1 
Orchestrate and integrate. Ideas can come from anywhere, including outside the company. For example, the iPod was originally dreamt up by a consultant and most of its parts were off the shelf.

Rule #2 
Build products around the needs of users. This may sound obvious but too many products are still designed by engineers or marketers for engineers or marketers. 
Thus Apple places the emphasis on simplicity (such as design) rather than complexity. For example, the iPod wasn’t the first digital music player into the market but it was probably the first that was easy to use.

Rule #3 
Trust your instinct. Don’t allow the customer to dictate what you do. This may seem contradictory to Rule #2 but customers can only tell you about what already exists. 
As Akito Morita (the founder of Sony) once said: “The public doesn’t know what is possible but we do.” Also don’t forget that as well as measuring public opinion or tracking the latest trends you can create both.

Rule #4 
There’s no success like failure. Fail often, fail fast and fail well. In other words, don’t be afraid to make a mistake but always learn from your mistakes – in Apple’s case products like the Apple Lisa and Newton.

Rule #5 
Safe is risky. Develop products that define new categories and markets rather than products that compete in existing markets.

Reputation management

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Just back from Paris (I love saying that). I think I may have fallen in love – no, with the city, although…anyway, get yourself over there.

So what’s up? Well I’m doing something for Telstra at the London Business School today, the Japanese edition of Future Minds arrived in the post today (The South Korean edition came yesterday) and I note in today’s newspapers that 73% of employers now offer counselling services to staff suffering from the negative effects of stress in the workplace.

I also note from the papers that 40% of workers would rather see a colleague fired than take a pay cut and that 60% would sacrifice green initiatives rather than lose the office coffee machine. Good to see that anxiety and individualism are still in full swing.

On a separate note two more things in the post. First a book of the physical variety.
It was supposed to be new but ended up being slightly used. What was interesting was the handwritten note that came with the purchase (from Amazon) saying sorry and enclosing a free movie.

Simultaneously I received a new phone from Hong Kong (via eBay). My £2.95 phone bought a week earlier from Carphone Warehouse didn’t work too well (- do you think!) so I upgraded. Anyway, same story. Along with the phone came a note saying that if I had any problems with it whatsoever please do not leave negative feedback on eBay but contact the seller and he will resolve the problem (postal address, land-line, mobile and fax all included).

The positive power of connectivity. Looks like all that stuff about reputation becoming really important might actually be true.

Feed your mind with a brain snack

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It’s October so, naturally, the August issue of brainmail has just gone up.

Here’s a tiny taster…

Human hair heists
You couldn’t make this up. In the US the crime of the
moment is human hair heists by criminal gangs. Examples
include the recent murder of a beauty shop owner in
Michigan and the hair raising robbery of My Trendy Place
Salon in Texas that netted $150,000 worth of human hair.
Ref: New York Times (US)

Go figure…
China’s current 5-year plan includes a promise to build 36 million new houses. This is more than the UK’s total housing stock. The 5-year plan also includes a quadrupling of China’s railway system and 54 new airports.
Ref: The Economist (UK)

Read the whole brainmail issue (for free) here or right  here if you want to read it on a smartphone.

Anger – It’s all the rage these days

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Why is everyone so angry ? Why is grim survivalism the current zeitgeist? To quote a leader in the Financial Times a few years ago, it might be that “The ‘nice’ decade – for Non-Inflationary Continuous Expansion – is behind us”. In other words we, in the West, are entering a nasty period where economic anxiety is becoming a catalyst for all kinds of attitudinal and behavioural shifts.

For example, the real issue might not be peoples’ anger per se but the increasing number of people and events that provoke the anger that lies under the surface. This can range from traffic jams and bad customer service to falling house prices, increasing food and energy costs and the economic rise of the BRICs. If the economy really turns sour people in places like London and New York will be screaming for protection from the likes of Dubai and Moscow. In other words, economic issues will bring nationalist attitudes to the fore much in the same way that racism and patriotism grew during the 1930s depression.

You can see this anger already in the form of ‘Wrath Lit’ on the shelves of your local bookstore (OK, those have gone so try Amazon). But is the world really getting more angry or is it simply that the likes of camera phones and YouTube are making more of us aware of incidences of anger?

Put slightly differently, the way to create an epidemic of something like anger is simply to use the word in politics or the media. Another explanation for the rage trend is that in many societies anger is a badge of honour. It is seen as a virtue. It is the individual being true to themselves and expressing their feelings. Well bottle it up buddy because you are making the rest of us anxious.

In closing it is probably worth mentioning Elizabeth Kuber-Ross’s five point model of how people deal with death. Stage 1 is disbelief, stage 2 is yearning, stage 3 is anger, stage 4 is depression and stage 5 is acceptance. Is it possible that societally (in the West) we are looking at what we think is an abyss (i.e. economic recession, global warming, the rise of China and so on) and are reacting in exactly the same way as if we were facing terminal illness or the death of a loved one. We are currently in the collective anger stage, falling into depression.

But soon we will adjust and accept whatever the new normal is.

Quote of the Week

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Off to France for the day to speak about the shift of power eastwards among other things, so this is somewhat appropriate.

“Ici repose un géant endormi, laissez le dormir, car quand il séveillera, il étonnéra le mondé.” ( “Here lies a sleeping giant, let him sleep, for when he wakes up, he will shock the world”).

Napoleon, speaking about China in 1803.

BTW, chapter one of Future Files in French (for free) here.

2012 Trends Map (Maybe)

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It seems that people now expect me to do a new trend map each year. I was starting to think I’d run out of ideas about what to do with colours and lines when I had another thought – crosswords. Here’s a very early draft. The difficult bit, obviously, is linking one trend directly to another. For example, you can run localism directly off globalism, but some of the other connections are proving more difficult.