If you’re reading this and you currently work for a company you don’t have an equity stake in – I reckon there’s a pretty good chance you’re planning your cubicle escape route. Today I wrote a post for Pollenizer on my Top 10 things employees need to know before they jump ship. The thing about entrepreneurship is that it is a change in environment. And like all new environments we enter the biggest challenges we face are never intellectual, but cultural.
You can read it here.
Evolution itself does not have a strategy. It just lets what wins, win. If anything, it is the accumulation of a lot of in market testing. Traits, (or tactics) are tested for advantage, and those that work, keep on happening through natural selection. Nature tries everything. Nature lets things that don’t work die.
We too can help our business evolve. We just need to do what nature does. That is to not pretend to know what will work. Instead we should try everything and find out what does. The good news of course, is that it’s so cheap to try so much in a low cost technology world.
In a classic case of economic externalities, privacy has become the hot issue in the Digital Industrial Complex. It’s the industrial pollution equivalent of the digital era. There’s a lot of attention going to startups which circumvent or avoid centralisation of their services, or use what is becoming known as Block Chain technology. In fact famed Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson is calling their 2014 fund the Block Chain cycle. In simple terms, startups in which the information is distributed across the network of users, rather than stored in the companies server farms.
It got me thinking about how what seem like minor road bumps can become the key factors which entirely disrupt companies and industries. Privacy could be the type of road bump which up ends businesses, whose infrastructure is based on an old method. That method being, centralised data aggregation and distribution. I’m talking about brands like Google and Facebook. Companies who at this very moment seem entirely infallible, simply too important, big and powerful to ever lose their position of dominance. Personally, I don’t think it will happen, because unfortunately most people have a level of apathy where they usually don’t care about a potential problem until it really becomes one. And even then they sometimes still don’t care – just look at the climate change issue. Why this is interesting is that the thing which disrupted the recording industry, the retail industry and many others was that the infrastructure they set up became a distinct disadvantage. I’m starting to wonder if internet based companies with centralised data systems are creating an infrastructure which isn’t in line with a shift which technology seems to wants to make happen. The shift to distributed data.
Some recent numbers on a search engine called Duck Duck Go – a privacy based search engine are interesting. It is growing rapidly. Here’s a description of what they do straight from Wikipedia:
DuckDuckGo is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by deliberately showing all users the same search results for a given search term. DuckDuckGo also emphasizes getting information from the best sources rather than the most sources, generating its search results from key crowd sourced sites such as Wikipedia..
Here’s a chart of the recent growth that Duck Duck Go has achieved:
While this search engine doesn’t operate on a distributed system, it is interesting to see how a slightly different proposition to the incumbent can have a lot of meaning to groups of end users. Yes, it’s tiny in the scheme of search, but this is how change begins. Every disruptor was insignificant at some point. And we’ve already seen the disruptors being disrupted. For example streaming music impacting iTunes business in the space of under 10 years. It seems like dominance occurs in shorter life spans now.
The key thing that we shouldn’t forget is that once powerful organisations can fall quickly. They seem infallible, untouchable. But the two things we ought remember are that companies like Ford once had a Google-like air about them and in a digital world the barriers to entry and dissemination of change are lower than ever.
It’s good to remind ourselves of what we already know. One of these things is the really important stuff which our financial position has no influence on. Here’s my top 10 list.
Why did I decide to write this blog post? Well, last friday I had lunch with a friend who I hadn’t seen in a while. During the lunch I got to thinking about how there was nowhere I’d rather be at that moment. That no amount of wealth would change how enjoyable it was, or create a desire to be elsewhere. That moment was in itself one which existed outside of our financial construct. Turns out, that most of the important things do.
Innovation is an interesting word which gets thrown around lot in organisations. No one seems to disagree that it is the life blood of long term organisational survival, but I think it’s clear that the definition of what it actually is happens to be wrong. The definition tends to be most wrong in large stable industrial companies. I should know, once upon a time I was the ‘head of innovation’ in one such large organisation. I was recently pointed to this article which goes a fair way to demystifying innovation, versus novelty and invention. But for me it doesn’t go far enough. I think the problem with innovation in many large companies is this:
They confuse Asset Utilisation with Innovation.
A colleague of mine works in a large industrial concern heading up the product innovation area. Here’s a bunch of constraints they’ve placed upon him:
– All innovations must be able to manufactured in their existing factory.
– All innovations must use the existing machines in the existing factories.
– All innovations must focus on the existing core users of the brand.
– All innovations need to be able sold in the existing sales channels and retailers.
– All innovations should have a price point in and around the existing price points their range of products are already sold for.
– All innovations have exactly 13 weeks to prove themselves in market, because that’s what the reseller demands.
Clearly constraints like this prove that the core task is not at all about innovation and much more about business management within a set set of structured parameters. In simple terms it’s an asset utilisation program. There’s nothing wrong with asset utilisation. It’s a valid, profit centric, strategic imperative. It’s what companies must and should do to reach their financial potential. What’s foolish though, is confusing it with innovation. Such confusion can only lead to a long term displacement of brand relevance.
There’s a lot of things I’m not good at, getting free media coverage for my startups is not one of them. Every project I’ve ever worked on I’ve managed to get major mainstream media coverage for it.
I recently wrote a post for the crew at Pollenizer on the Sammartino methods in getting how to get media coverage. I call it:
How to media hack your startup to awareness.
Like most things in business there is a recipe, and once you know it you can cook up that dish just about any time you have the right ingredients. A couple of my favourite recipes are right here.
School taught me three really important things. It taught me to read, to write and to count. Pretty much that is where it ends. At University the process of being inside it taught me how to learn. While I’m being somewhat flippant, if I actually break it down and look hard at the subjects taken and the lessons learned, there wasn’t much outside of these things. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that everything important I know: Including how to make a living, and how to interact with other humans and my family, I taught myself. I owe all of what I learned to my family, my friends, observation and my self curated library.
Have you ever noticed that economics lessons in school, and University for that matter (I should know I majored in it) teach you about the economy as it pertains to the national and global version? Have you ever noticed that accounting and finance lessons in school, and in University for that matter, are focused on how the numbers work in running large corporations, not the corporation that is you and your personal finances.The system was set up by and for them. Not us. That’s why the majority of the happy people I know have taken personal vocations of learning to fill the void that schooling created. That’s why self help books sell so well.
In fact, most people know who to earn money – but very few actually know how to manage it. Most people know how to manage communication in a company setting – but few of us know who to manage our own personal lives so well. It’s not an accident, our education system was designed as part of the industrial revolution. In itself its primary purpose was to educate kids so that they could work well in the emerging industrial economy as employees. An interesting chart below is from Googles book scanning program – this ngram as they are known measure the frequency of any word appearing in books in percentage terms. I inserted the word ‘job’ and you’ll see that the word job, basically did not even exist until we were well inside the industrial period of living.
We’ve been indoctrinated for the first 21 years of our lives. At a time when our mind is so malleable, to be employees, more than humans. We got taught how to operate in the system, but they forgot to teach us about the human operating system. The good news is that this is changing. We now know that the human mind is far more malleable as we grow older than previously thought. We are also lucky enough to have a sub culture of innovators doing something about it.
Step Forward the School of Life.
The School of life is a new space in Melbourne which is a cafe, bookshop, classroom and community enterprise which endeavours to fill the gaps formal education inevitably creates. It’s a startup I can really appreciate. The brain child of global thought leader Alain de Botton. The moment you walk in you can feel what they are trying to do. You can sense the empathy and the humanity. The books they sell and the courses they teach provide lessons for humanity, as opposed to lessons for the economy. Maybe if our governments focused on the former, there’d be less problems with the latter.
I took a few pictures when I stopped in for a morning coffee.
The photos are telling. You can see everything from a list of courses which matter so much to us as people, to the little nudges and messages which request we challenge our own doctrine. I’m hoping this type of thing is the start of our community redefining what learning is for , but also redefining the type of learning that matters in the post industrial age of abundance.
If you happen to be in Melbourne, or any of these cities globally, then I think it’s worth the effort to pop in and say hello.