Google Glass has been very big on the news since 2012 and recently we've even seen venture capitalists claiming that its advent would create a new space for investment in start-ups. It's worth hearing how Sergey Brin presents that initiative and then consider things carefully from the standpoint of human behavior, not technology.
I recently came across this TED Talk and watched it several times because I was impressed with the unusual use of a discipline like design to tackle a challenge of social development. Another reason was the pragmatic approach of Emily Piloton and her partners in taking feasible steps first, in creating a positive initial experience with design and in engaging the local community. So once again, the only thing that truly matters is practice. "An ounce of practice is worth tons of preaching"...
This is an example of something that is going on in a lab right now and has the potential to become a really big product. It can become:
The trailer of a new documentary on Art called "Lives of Artists" published by excellent and Restless Contagious Magazine provides an inspiration to share some thoughts about the importance of art for business and also to make a few predictions for 2010 and beyond, indulging the game of futurology as it sometimes occurs. Those predictions were shaped by the excellent content shared by the people I follow on Twitter and elsewhere; so I'm grateful to all of them for what they share and teach. Of course these are my predictions and therefore I'm solely responsible for any issues of rigor and overall quality.
"Lives of Artists" is supported by Coca-Cola and makes the case that Art should be disruptive, aggressive, intelligent, attract attention and push us out of our zone of comfort. The core message finds me in complete agreement, if only because no innovation and no evolution can happen unless we are projected into a different space from the one we are accustomed to. Being projected into the space of difference, change, imagination, dream, daydreaming, vision, possibility and openness is something that can happen either through internal forces of each one's psyche or through external factor and sometimes there are exceptional disciplines that create a link between inner and outer space. Most of the disciplines involved in Art are like that. It's an invitation to think, dream, dare, be-Start-Treky (blodly go where no one else has gone before), imagine, transcend current state, nudge yourself and others out of the comfort zone, flow, freeze, grow, disrupt... BE!
On a much more prosaic and practical level, the movie is supported by Coke and I think it shows the importance of content in capturing human attention and creating brand awareness and goodwill. It's among those signs that make me feel like indulging in the game of predictions:
That's it for predictions and vision today. It's not a round number like 5, 10 or 20, that headlines are so fond of, but, hey it's a prime number :)
In my various projects with customers of such varied industries as music distribution, microelectronics, online and interactive marketing, new media, satellite radio, timber trading and banking, I've had many opportunities to discuss issues facing those organisations that required some form of transition to a next level of maturity. Whether that was for migrating to a completely new software platform, for changing established practices in marketing teams, for reworking the business model or for (re)inventing the product roadmap, we always ended up discussing people and leadership.
These are two fields in which one can hardly do a good job without having a very clear position and mine has always been that people should be treated as responsible adults and that leadership is just not about gorilla chest thumping or "alpha" dominance as is perhaps too widely believed. To me Gandhi has been much more of a leader than a cowboy president I will not name since he's now in the closets of History. That's because "one ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching", which also means that consistency between what someone thinks, says and does becomes an ever more important element of leadership. As do concepts that have historically been considered as disjoint or even at odds with what a leader should be: mindfullness, compassion and hope. It's what Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee call Resonant Leadership. Today I came across The Builders' Manifesto (via AgileMinds), a great piece on the next level of leadership, which finds me in complete agreement. Quick quote of something I particularly liked, but you should really read the full article:
The boss depends upon authority; the leader on good will. The Builder depends on good.
The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm. The Builder is inspired — by changing the world.
The boss says "I"; the leader says "we". The Builder says "all" — people, communities, and society.
The boss assigns the task, the leader sets the pace. The Builder sees the outcome.
The boss says, "Get there on time;" the leader gets there ahead of time. The Builder makes sure "getting there" matters.
[...]
The boss knows how; the leader shows how. The Builder shows why.
The boss makes work a drudgery; the leader makes work a game. The Builder organizes love, not work.
The boss says, "Go;" the leader says, "Let's go." The Builder says: "come."
This is excellent stuff.
Just read a piece about where Google might be in ten years and considering the success of Gmail between 2004 and now, the author might just be right even though his forecasts may seem wild at times (e.g. Android prevailing in the mobile OS wars). That gives me an opportunity to comment and discuss a bit further Google's amazing ability to execute beautifully a bold strategy of massive innovation to deliver on an audacious vision to organize the world's information.
Interestingly Devinda Hardawar (@devindra on Twitter), the post's author, reminds us that Gmail was launched only in 2004. Few people can argue it's gaining traction in the segment of people who use predominantly email in SaaS mode and even making inroads into the segment of more traditional users who are stuck with legacy solutions like Outlook Express. Gmail grew 43% in 2008 and took #3 spot in August leaving AOL behind. It's gaining momentum and is probably a good indication of what Google can do in terms of winning market share with a patient approach that it can afford thanks to its advertising revenues.
Furthermore Devindra makes a couple of very powerful statements regarding Google Wave, stating his belief that it's much more important than it may seem on the surface and could well revolutionize the way knowledge work gets done. In keeping with a recent post on this blog, I very much agree with him and do intend to spend more time testing Wave, not dismiss it as Scoble has done, foolishly in my opinion.
Google ability to consistently pursue specific targets is an amazing characteristic of the company. They've been able to roll out a number of major services over the past decade accomplishing key strategic targets with each of them:
Arguably, there's more and there are other ways of viewing what Google is doing, but in every case you'll find great consistency and clarity of purpose in strategy execution.
Looking at the string of their acquisitions over the past decade (another way to assess strategy execution), the consistency of purpose is obvious and their ability to integrate acquired companies and technologies is impressive. Some people tend to focus too much on plays that did not turn out to be successful and fail to see the bigger picture: Google successfully embeds 80% of its acquisitions in the Google system, when the market average is much much lower (I'd say 20% based on the business news I've followed for the past 20 years).
Significant and successful moves included:
Google is recorded as having purchased 59 companies for a total amount that is hard to assess but likely stands in the region of 15-18 billion USD. The track record of acquisitions can in no way be considered as bad. In fact I know only of one company that is better: Cisco. Both Google and Cisco are hugely analytical players, with extra smart employees on board, giving huge attention to recruitment and equally huge attention to acquisitions.
Another thing worth mentioning is Google's creation of an arm dedicated to early stage investments, which is called Google Ventures, a fund that started this year with 100 million USD. Google Ventures has made a couple of very smart bets in clean-tech with smart grid technology (Silver Spring Networks) and biotechnology (Adimab)...
Through a recent post of one of my contacts, I got to view for a second time a presentation Tim Berners-Lee gave at TED for the 20 years of the web. What had not struck me the first time I saw the presentation is the claim Berners-Lee makes that everything we have today of the web resulted from the idea of hyperlink / hypertext. A big bang of sorts.
It's almost a stereotype of the kind of claims brilliant conceptual types do, because they're so focused on discovery, innovation in its rawest form, beginnings and not necessarily finished forms... which is also one of the reasons why Tim Berners-Lee was not the many economic beneficiary of the discovery. Can you imagine the turn of events had he decided to patent the hyperlink idea and ask for a trillionth of a Euro for each hyperlink created? One of the reasons why I'm not a fan of extreme patenting and rigid copyright.
In this presentation Tim Berners-Lee calls from a new leap, which he thinks is as important as the hyperlink: open availability of raw data. Can you imagine what that means if he's right? I'm ready to bet he is and I'm ready to bet it's a matter that's far more important than data: it's a matter of civilization and a defining factor for civil liberties.
His presentation mentions several examples and he mentions the excellent work of Professor Hans Rosling that I covered in December 2006 in this post (here are the notes of Rossling's talk back then).
Daniel Pink makes once again a great case for non-conventional thinking on the topic of the drivers of motivation. He debunks a number of assumptions that most of us take for granted just because we grew up in a world driven by the fallacy of rationality of economic agents, "carrot and stick" or "reward - punishment" paradigm. Pink shows how reward schemes actually force people to narrow their thinking down to obvious paths and therefore are mostly counter productive when it comes to really challenging situations, which is where rewards would be completely justified...
Perhaps an additional proof, if there was need for one, that money does not buy motivation, talent and ability to apply knowledge. There has to be something else. Something the builders of cathedrals in Europe knew centuries back when they were not only looking for capable craftsmen, but also looking for craftsmen that had a personal win in the success of the project to build a cathedral. And in a way Pink rediscovers and refines that by identifying three key aspects to motivation:
Furthermore Pink's points are highly compatible with the attributes of Resonant Leadership as discussed by Boyatzis & McKee.
Just watch a fascinating presentation:
The launch of Google Wave has generated various reviews and left many with a feeling of perplexity or outright rejection because what they saw seemed so little compared to what had been promised (a lesson for every marketer out there IMO). In fact people who've accessed the platform reported several important issues summarized here.
However GoogleWave is indeed completely revolutionary and could well transform the way we deal with information, interactions, collaboration and value creation... perhaps even transactions some day.
This wiki (kindly provided on Wave by my friend David Dossot) is proof of the revolutionary aspect of Wave as it deals with bots, each of which has a special function within the Wave ecosystem allowing it to connect and interact with other formats, platforms, logical spaces, communities and online properties. What's still very much unclear in what I've read so far (not nearly enough) is the security model and the degree to which bots can be configured with standard behaviors but if secure and with extensive ability to configure and string together (with some of these objects providing flexibility analogous to Yahoo Pipes), then Wave could well be the equivalent of the "one ring to rule them all" and probably also "an offer we can't refuse" as the Godfather would say.
On the even more interesting side of things, once adopted Wave becomes a real Complex Adaptive System with a greater potential for structure emergence than the open web because of the existence of rules and constraints that are neither too many (as in collaborative systems like blueKiwi or SharePoint) nor too few (as in the open web). The concept of wave being so open and so flexible provides for an ideal combination of rules and flexibility, which is necessary for CAS dynamics to really operate.
Now this is a first impression and I have not tested this stuff a lot, but if it is what I understand it to be and if it becomes what I imagine it can become, then this thing is not simply big, it's huge.
Some interesting inspiration at a time when it's so "normal" to always be reachable and connected and active and "oh-my-Gosh" so busy...
What inspiration and fun Philippe Stark can be! There's more than meets the eye in what he says in this presentation...
Impossible is sometimes an excuse for not trying enough different ways for reaching a goal. Many thanks to Anne (Institut Ressources), Sylviane and JH (Media4) for letting me have this gift today.
 Are You Going To Finish Strong?Awesome video! If you watch only one video today make sure it is this one! Nick Vujicic has no limbs but he leads an incredible life! |
Earlier today I had a quick personal thinking session as to what could well define business organizations of the future in a world of constant (and radical?) change, requiring permanent morphing to adapt and adopt the most relevant form for ever more unpredictable (and improbable?) events. The thinking was prompted by a question someone asked me "what's a 2-tier business?", 2-tier referring to the concepts of Spiral Dynamics. Here's my take in 17 + 1 bonus points.
