“The only way to save the Euro is to print it” (I can’t remember who said this, but it was possibly Niall Ferguson)
Future in a Box
I’ve had an idea. I’m not sure if it’s really any good at this stage, but I’m going to try it out. The idea is the future in a box. A physical box containing a handful of movies, novels, factual books, articles and perhaps some physical items that help to explain, or at least illuminate, what the future will be like five or ten years hence.
The only thing is, what’s in the box? I’ll post my box contents in a week or two.
Quick quote
Running off to London to see the King’s Fund so here’s a quick quote. If I had more time I’d tell you about getting into trouble with one of the world’s top 100 companies by showing a video containing fifteen “F**ks” and one “Mother*****r”. I got away with it but did officially get told off.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Buckminster Fuller
Museum of Endangered Sounds
I love just this!!! (just in via Australia – thanks Matt).
Link to site right here. BTW, slightly reminds me of the time I wrote something about the value of total silience and wanted to allow people to download 2 minutes of pure nothingness. Problem was (still is) you can’t have a file with nothing on it. There has to be something there – even for nothing!
Barcelona & Brainmail
I’ve just been in Barcelona for the day. Interesting how there isn’t something close to a revolution going on in Spain. The unemployment rate is around 25% peaking close to 50% in some regions and among some segments of the population. So why are things so calm relatively speaking? One reason put forward today was the Spanish social structure. Two and three generations living under one roof, or close together, is quite common, so there are informal support and community networks in place. Compare and contrast this to countries where more people live on their own or in smaller family units and the consequences could end up being very different indeed.
Anyway, that was my discovery for the day. A linked thought is that data analytics is starting to destroy semi-skilled jobs. We’ve had automation killing unskilled jobs for decades, but I suspect this might be something quite new. This, in turn, links with another thought I had on the plane about the death of entry level jobs in some areas. Going are the days when a young person could start out at the bottom with next to no qualifications and work their way to the top. If this is true, what are the implications for social mobility?
Brainmail bonanza
My Brainmail newsletter is almost back. Two issues are ready to go with a third in the wings. Here are some highlights.
A study of over 500 US high-tech and engineering companies with turnovers in excess of $1 million found that the average age of founders was 39. Furthermore, there were
twice as many founders aged over 50 than under 25 and twice as many over 60 as aged under 20.
Motorola has developed a phone that adjusts its settings according to its location. For example, if the phone knows it is in an office, the ringer volume will be lowered, whereas outside it might be raised.
Google is believed to be developing Android-powered virtual reality glasses that will display contextual information right in front of a wearer’s eyeballs. Meanwhile, Apple is understood to be working on an Apple TV set.
A study led by James Flynn, which compared IQ scores of UK teens in 1980 and 2008 says that average intelligence has fallen by two points over the last 28 years. This finding reverses the finding of earlier studies that showed intelligence increasing by around 3 points per decade.
In 1950, 4 million people in the USA (9% of US households) lived alone. Now the figure is 33 million – or 28% of all Americans.
In the early 1960s, 6% of the UK student population went on to attend university. By 2012 the figure had risen to 40%.
In the US, around 1% of companies create around 40% of new jobs.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
“Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“It is seldom at the frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin.” – Alan Bennett
WEB SIGHT OF THE MONTH
It’s an app this month – Evi, a virtual assistant. www.evi.com
Holographic telepresence – the early years
Not sure whether you will have seen this, but it’s very interesting indeed. It’s a video hologram of the dead rapper Tupac performing ‘live’ with Snoop Dogg. Beware of the language if this kind of thing offends, but it’s ****ing fantastic. Link here.
Image of the day
Just been cruising around Lynda Gratton’s blog on the future of work and found this gem of a picture. Question is, of course, is this an indication that Apple has peaked and one should sell shares or an indication that the company is still going up and one should buy shares? The other question, perhaps, is whether or not anyone in the picture is paying attention!
Afternoon update. Just found this too – the world of work that awaits…
Happiness
There’s a good daily stat available from the Harvard Business Review. Here’s one that caught my eye last week. No doubt it will end up in brainmail at some point.
“Between 1985 and 2005, the number of Americans who said they definitely felt satisfied with the way their lives were going dropped by about 30%, and the ranks of the most dissatisfied rose by nearly 50%, according to a study involving thousands of people by Chris M. Herbst of Arizona State. The reasons appear to be related to Americans’ declining attachments to friends and family, lower participation in social and civic activities, and diminished trust in political institutions, Herbst says. The only good news: The rate of decline in satisfaction appears to have slowed during that two-decade period.”
Ref: ‘Paradoxical decline? Another look at the relative reduction in female happiness’ by Chris M. Herbst.
Celebrate Failure
Just been in the car on the way back from a meeting. Listening to Leonard Cohen’s album, Old Ideas, and in particular a line about “a manual for living with defeat.” It reminded me about this, which I wrote for Fast Company magazine many moons ago.
You don’t read about failure very often. And I’m not just talking about ideas that don’t see the light of day. I’m talking about people too. Why is this? What are we afraid of? After all, it’s not as if it’s unknown. Most companies — indeed, most people — fail more often than they succeed. It is the proverbial elephant-in-the-boardroom. And yet by being scared of failure, we are missing a great opportunity.
The point about failure is not that it happens but what we do when it happens. Most people flee. Or they find a way to be “economical with the actualite” as a former British Government so elegantly described it.
“We launched too late.” “Consumers weren’t ready for it.”
No. You failed. Own up to it. Own it. This is a beginning, not the end.
The problem is this: Most people believe that success breeds success and they believe that the converse is true too, that failure breeds failure. Says who? There are plenty of people who fail before they succeed, some of whom are serial failures. Indeed, there is rumoured to be a venture capital firm in California that will only invest in you if you’ve gone bankrupt twice.
Take James Dyson, the inventor of the bag-less vacuum cleaner. He built 5,127 prototypes before he found a design that worked. He looked at his failures and learned. He then looked at his next failure and learned some more. Each adaptation led him closer to his goal. As someone once said, there’s magic in the wake of a fiasco. It gives you the opportunity to second guess.
None of this is to be confused with the mantra of most motivational speakers who urge you not to give up. Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration they say, and if you just keep on trying, it will eventually happen. And if it doesn’t, you’re just not trying hard enough. This is a big fat lie. Doing the same thing over and over again in the hope that something will change is almost the definition of madness. What you need to do is learn from your failure and try again differently. All of which brings me to my first point. It is what you do when you fail that counts.
Remember Apple’s message pad, the Newton? This was a commercial flop, but the failure was glorious. Indeed, who is to say that the tolerance of failure that is embedded in Apple’s DNA is not one of the reasons for Apple’s success with the iPod and iTunes?
Does this mean you abandon your failures? Yes and no. Your idea could be right but your timing, delivery, or execution could be wrong. Who could have guessed that the one-time AIDS wonder drug AZT had been a failed treatment for cancer or that Viagra was a failed heart medication that Pfzer stopped studying in 1992?
As Alberto Alessi once said, anything very new often falls into the realm of the not possible, but you should still sail as close to the edge as you can, because it is only through failure that you will know where the edge really is. The edge is also where real genius resides.
So what I’m interested in promoting are the people whose ideas never get off the ground or rather get somewhere other than where they intended. These are the people who fail on our behalf. The unknown innovators that push things so far to the edge that they fall off. The unlucky or naïve few who open up a new trail — and get scalped — before someone else can see a way through with the wagons. (How’s that for a new historical definition of second-mover advantage?)
So here’s my idea. Rather than putting up statues to people who did something that was successful, let’s build a monument to the people who didn’t. Let’s celebrate the lives of people who invented things that didn’t work or tried to do something that was just plain crazy. A monument to the unknown innovator in pursuit of an impossible dream. The people we watch with perverse envy when we are too scared, too self-conscious, or too constrained to fail ourselves. Because without these wonderful people, there would be no progress or success.
Here are my top five tips for failing with greater frequency and more style:
• Try to fail as often as possible but never make the same mistake twice.
• Set a failure target as part of each employee’s annual review.
• If projects are a failure, kill them quickly and move on.
• Create a failure database as part of knowledge management.
• Set up annual failure awards.*
*If this gets too successful, stop it. Stephen Pile’s Book of Heroic Failures spawned the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. Unfortunately the club received 30,000 membership applications and had to be closed down because it was a failure at being a failure.