We Need a New Mailroom

Why would we need a mailroom, I hear you say. The reason is simple: the mailroom wasn’t really about the mail. Sure, it was the place where the mail was sorted, sent and delivered, but ironically, it delivered much more than that.

The mailroom was really a place that served lots of important, and since lost, functions for many big organisations. Firstly, the mailroom was an entry point. It was a place where people could enter a large and respected organisation with few formal qualifications. It was a classic back door entry into what we might call a restricted building. It was a way in, especially for those who didn’t fit the mould or thrive in a traditional schooling environment. They could find a way in, forge relationships, learn about the business from the ground up, pay attention, hear the whispers in the hallway and learn about the business actually in the metaphorical trenches. It was a quasi-business apprenticeship model.

Now, you might be thinking, “Oh well, it doesn’t make that much difference, because there are still plenty of youngsters to choose from in pretty much every industry.” Let’s add that all too often, today’s youngsters are over-qualified for the first jobs of their careers. But here’s where this entry point differs. It attracts a different type of a person. A person who comes from a different path and who might have a way of learning that’s different to traditional graduates. A different way of seeing the world. Perhaps less academically inclined but with a different kind of smarts. They may have learned kinesthetically, been better at observing interpersonal dynamics and understanding how politics plays out at work. You might have even met a great leader who came via the non-traditional path. I have, more than once.

One person I know who entered this way is the best leader I’ve ever worked with. Smart, strategic, considerate, empathic – this person has it all and he started in the mailroom of an advertising agency. I’m not even sure if he finished secondary school. Today, he runs a multi-billion dollar business in Australia. He’s different to most other leaders I’ve met, who have taken a more traditional path via formal education. I put it down to the mailroom being very different to the textbook. While we are, importantly, increasing the diversity of people in organisations, we are ironically decreasing the diversity of their arrival journey.

Over the past 20 years, slowly but surely, entry level administrative jobs have evaporated. First it was the typing pool, then the mailroom, and today, only the most senior executives are afforded any kind of administrative assistance. Yep, we send our own mail – mostly electronically and the occasional FedEx. While that’s not necessarily bad – it has left a significant non-mail related gap in organisations. Maybe it’s time we imagined a new kind of ‘mailroom’.

Never grow your vegetables in someone else’s garden

In an attention economy it is a compelling offer for a website to offer access to an audience of 2.4 billion people (Facebook) or promise that 90% of all internet searches start with you (Google). It would seem as though the only rational choice would be to do business on their platform.

It’s here that the most important business lesson my father taught me comes to mind:

Never grow your vegetables in someones else’s garden.

The advice is exactly as it sounds. Make sure your own and control where you build your assets and revenue streams. If you don’t there is always the risk that the landlord will change the rules without notice and pull up your roots.

In the digital platform economy most people and companies are growing their veggies in other peoples gardens. While it is very clear there’s an upside to this strategy; speed, simplicity, scale. But the downside is obvious and almost always comes to bear. Eventually the platform landlords increase the rent, or kick you out – but only after you’ve tended their garden, or renovated their house.

The weird thing about this, is that it keeps on happening and people and businesses keep on falling for same trick. Let’s go through a little bit of internet platform history to remind ourselves of the downside and even help us with our Future Proof Platform Strategy Development.

The Likes Deceit:

Marky Zuck said; “Yo, brands out there, generate ‘Likes‘ for your brand on our platform, and you’ll be able to have constant contact with the consumers and fans of your brand. Whenever you post an update, they’ll see it, and you’ll have a direct connection.” Then after brands spent many millions of dollars building a brand following on Facebook young Marky changed his mind. He said “Yeah, about that – well, I’ve changed my mind, and now to reach those same people you invested in my ‘Platform’ to connect with – you need to pay me again – to advertise to them. They are no longer going to see your updates in their news feed.”

Boom – just like that – he pulled up their roots.

The Google Page Rank:

Sergey & Larry said; ‘Yo, businesses out there, we are different to Yahoo and other searches engines (there used to be many). We’re all about helping people find exactly what they are after and sending them immediately to you – We are not a portal like Yahoo. Get on board. Then every website in the world optimised for Google. Then Google became so good at everything and so big, they changed their mind. Google is rapidly becoming a portal where they scrape their suppliers information and keep customers in the Google ecosystem – increasingly they don’t send people who search anywhere. They satisfy their needs right on the Google homepage. Just check out the first listing for my searches today for the Snow reports, Weather reports, The AFL ladder and even Flights.

Sorry about that Snow & Weather Channels…

Thanks for the stats AFL…

Introducing the Google travel agency…

Instagram influencers lose their ‘influence‘:

The latest change to remove the likes count on Instagram has hurt so called influences who get paid on this metric. While facebook have claimed that this shift is to improve users well being and remove the stress of expressing themselves, I can’t help but think they don’t want the leakage of advertising revenue going directly to their users instead of the mothership. I wouldn’t be surprised if they launch an Instagram Influencers dashboard with metrics in the back end to control the money flows in the Influencer economy.

So, it seems the only thing we learn from business history, is that few people learn from business history. Just this week Australian TV news channels joined up with the Facebook platform to get their news to a wider audience. This too won’t end well for those providing the content. Contrary to what many people believe, content is not king. Distribution is more powerful than content – always has been, always will be.

How to manage the Platform Predicament?

So, do I practice what I preach? Yes. The most important piece in the Steve Sammartino portfolio is my own webpage and this blog. I own and control it. Around 5000 people read it each week – not a huge amount, but it’s enough to serve my personal business model.

Of course I use other peoples channels; Linkedin, Youtube, Twitter and Instagram – but my primary goal in using them isn’t to grow a business inside it, but rather to grow some seedlings which I’ll transfer into my own garden.

My advice here is simple. Always spread your platform and digital risk. Ensure you take a portfolio approach and invest in your own channels that you control. Always remember that incentives shape commercial behaviour and we should ensure we remember this for our own purposes too.

– – –

Be sure to check out the Latest Ep. of Future Sandwich Now-Soon-Later – we talk about how in the future you won’t own anything – 4 mins of goodness & insight click here. I’d love if you made a comment on Youtube as well.

Cheers, Steve. 

Your World in 2030

Ten years is not a very long time, but in a world of exponential technology, a lot can happen. So I thought I’d provide some predictions for the world by 2030. Thirty of them, to be precise. Let’s call it 30 for 2030.

Sure, some of the ideas below might seem like science fiction or fantasy, but so was much of the technology we take for granted today. It makes sense to think about these now, so that we can consider longer-term career, financial and corporate strategy decisions today. So buckle your seat belt, open your mind and enjoy!

1. All-Electric Economy: The vast majority of the energy we consume in the future will be electric. Fossil fuels will be replaced almost entirely by electricity, generated by renewables. Electricity will win not through a political battle, but purely through economics. Fossil fuels won’t be able to compete on cost. The energy will be generated by the the sun, wind and water. We’ll find a storage solution 10o times more efficient than the lithium ion batteries we use today.

2. The Energy Internet Emerges: We will be trading energy with each other through a new type of distributed energy grid. It will be akin to the way we trade information with each other on the internet now – except it will be energy – and we will generate excess energy on our buildings. Sometimes we’ll get paid for it and sometimes we’ll simply give it away. Centralised energy production will go the way of centralised news and media – and mostly be replaced by user generated content (but this time it’ll be energy).

3. Data Becomes a Liability: Data is currently seen as a commercial asset that companies try to acquire from us. By 2030 this will be reversed. Data will become a well-regulated liability. If companies hold our data it will be like a bank deposit that we own and they look after, and they’ll even have to pay us interest or fees. If they lose it, or it gets stolen, they will have to pay heavily for the mistake.

4. Globalisation Will Go into Reverse: The current trend to re-nationalise, and de-globalise will continue. Countries will become more closed and trade less. Fear of technology, job losses and immigrants will continue its current pattern. This will be further enabled by automation and manufacturing where the low-cost labour market trading advantage evaporates.

5. Climate Issues Will Re-Globalise: We will only become a truly global community when climate catastrophe demands it. While the technology to de-carbonise our economy is already here, we’ll be stifled by politics and the worst will hit in the early 2030s creating a necessary global alliance across countries for species survival.

6. Mobile Work > Office Work: More people will work away from office and formal work locations than those who work in them. Large companies will realise modern offices are a poor allocation of resources and de-centralise their workforces. Most people will be mobile in their work and cross-fertilise ideas with people outside their company and industry.

7. Freelancers Overtake Employees: There will be more freelance workers selling their time and skills on projects for companies than people who are full-time employees. As technology removes the friction of employment, we’ll all become modern day digital craftspeople.

8. Gigs with Benefits: The gig economy will evolve from its current exploitative business model. New startups will emerge to perform the roles of what unions and HR departments used to do to represent and organise gig economy workers. These quasi-union organisations will facilitate work benefits once only available to full-time employees. Think sick leave, annual leave, superannuation, training, wage negotiation. This will become a huge industry and may work in conjunction with the superannuation industry as employee numbers decline.

9. Regional Renaissance: Administrators and residents from regional areas will realise the internet can change their fortunes. Global e-commerce, lower living costs and higher living standards will create a renaissance for non-city places of great beauty. They’ll leverage their geographic monopolies and localised products, sell to global market places and compete effectively with cities.

10. Public and Private Transport Morph: The two forms of transport will continue its trajectory to differentiate from each other. Autonomous vehicles will be owned by private people who rent them to public systems. The shape of public and private transport will replicate each other and become mobile forms of commerce, relaxation and entertainment zones.

11. National Parks 2.0: National parks are generally enclaves reinventing the way the ‘world used to be’. A new form of National Park will emerge in cities. Places where there is no internet connectivity at all. These ‘zones’ will replicate pre-internet industrialisation where humans need to connect directly and nothing can be copied, documented or shared.

12. Cities Redesigned for Living: During industrialisation cities were designed around factories and offices. But cities will be reinvented to be built almost entirely around human living spaces. They will be more green than grey and grow most of the produce for their inhabitants in buildings. They will be pedestrian-centric with clean air.

13. Nationalisation of Technology Platforms: Big tech in America won’t just be split up – they may be acquired by the government and be redefined as national infrastructure – as we saw with railways. Some big tech companies will be repatriated. Many countries will build their own digital platforms such as search and social, taking them out of private hands. Algorithms will be regulated, and listed like food ingredients on digital platforms.

14. Government Will Love Small Again: Governments around the world will finally realise big powerful companies are reducing their tax revenue. They’re doing this in two major ways: through tax avoidance and reducing their number of employees paying PAYE tax due to production automation. New policies will be set in place the world over favouring local and small businesses. The current rhetoric of ‘corporate tax reduction creates employment’ will be rebuffed and the trend of lower corporate tax will be reversed.

15. Highly Paid Because Human: The highest paid jobs in the economy will be paid as such ‘because a human is actually doing it’ even if it could be automated or done by a machine. Think of the cost of a concert versus a digital download, think barista coffee versus coffee machine . We’ll start paying more for the real thing. Highest economic value will be placed on humans doing tasks for other humans, even if a robot ‘can’ do it.

16. Personal Operating Systems Will Arrive: Software systems will organise our personal lives. We’ll train them like dogs and they’ll be our personal life assistant. They will owned by the individuals (rather than a company), powered by open source software and backed up by machine learning.

17. Humans Start Merging with Machines: Information technology and biotechnology will increasingly overlap. We’ll have the first versions of ‘upgraded cognitive ability’ for humans inserted into our bodies. This will start an inevitable split in our species: neo-humans and organic-humans.

18. Humans Become a Hackable Species: As we merge with the machines, we will for the first time become hackable from the inside. The hacking process will mean that we could be programmed to behave in ways we didn’t intend. The hacking will mostly occur without our knowledge that we’ve even actually been hacked.

19. Posthumous Existence: Our memories and intelligence will become uploadable into the cloud. In doing so, many of us will have a posthumous existence and continue relationships with loved ones after we’ve passed.

20. The Higher Education Bubble Will Burst: People will wake up to the fact that all but a few (eg medical) university qualifications can be obtained online, for free, from the world’s best practitioners on those topics. Alternative education methods will emerge and gain more credibility. Knowledge will also start to become a commodity we can buy and download directly into our brains.

21. Crypto Currency Replaces Fiat: Governments around the world will launch crypto currencies to replace their fiat currency. A global crypto currency will emerge and replace the USD as the quasi-official global trading currency.

22. 3D Printing Will Have a Smart Phone Moment: A revolution in 3D printing will occur, probably associated with new materials science. Materials like graphene will become ubiquitous, like ‘plastics’ did in the 1950s.  We’ll finally end up with desktop manufacturing in most homes and offices, the way PCs became household items in the 1990s.

23. The Toilet Will Become a Laboratory: The toilet will become a digital health parter as a mini lab in your home. It will be the most high tech device in every home.

24. Everything with Electricity Will Be Smart: If it has electricity, it will be smart and connected to the cloud. There will be near zero dumb devices that require electricity to operate.

25. Augmented Reality Metastructure: A new type of virtual infrastructure will emerge in cities and homes. We’ll put some technology into our eyes (eg glasses or contact lenses) that enables enhanced digital vision of everything around us to augment the physical world and provide bespoke, on-demand information for cognitive shortcuts.

26. Universal Basic Income Will Fade Away: The robot and automation job apocalypse will never eventuate as technology will create more jobs than it destroys. With this, the fashionable concept of UBI will fade away.

27. Clean Meat Movement: Clean meat (nature identical meat grown in a lab) will be lower cost financially and environmentally, than meat grown through traditional agriculture. This will create a massive consumer shift starting with the humble burger, ending in disruption to agricultural industries.

28. Semantic Language Coding: New software will be developed granting coding powers to anyone who can speak. Software that builds software based on voice commands will democratise the code development process, mostly through AI and machine learning.

29. AI Cold War: A cold war around winning the AI race (which has already commenced) will continue, resulting in a handful of AI superpower nation states.

30. Blockchain Digital Commons: Many platform businesses like Uber and Airbnb will be replaced by a new form of Digital Commons. Software will be owned and operated by the providers of the services,  instead of a giant internet company like Uber taking 30 percent for every ride organised.

 

Some of these ideas will happen within a couple of years and some will be closer to the end of the decade – but I’m confident most of them will eventuate. The exciting bit? It’s our turn to go and build all the good stuff and help circumvent the bad bits.

 

There’s only one real world

It’s very hard to understand the consequences of something when you can’t touch it, feel it and experience it in the physical form. Many of our virtual experiences seem displaced from a physical reality. It’s as if it didn’t really happen, that it’s only information and information isn’t real. Digital privacy fits neatly inside this parable.

I’m sure you’ve heard the following statement when it comes to online privacy:

“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

The next time you hear that, ask the person who said it to hand over their phone. Ask them to tell you the password, unlock every app inside it and to let you browse through at your leisure. I’d be surprised if any adult in the free world would feel comfortable with this. I know I wouldn’t. It’s not because I have anything to hide, it’s because privacy and secrets are not the same thing. And some things in my life, like everyone, are private. The phone is not a phone – it’s a digital manifestation of the physical self. It’s the most personal device humans have ever owned in history.

To gain access to it, our governments and tech companies have conspired to conflate privacy and secrets to be the same. It suits both of these actors. Governments get access to all that we do – just in case a terrorist is hiding inside their gigantic digital dragnet, or someone tries to use crypto currency to dodge tax. Simultaneously the tech giants get to continue their business of Surveillance Capitalism. And the externality of both these things, is that basic human decency, respect and freedom is compromised for all.

If there’s one thing we need to get better at as a society, it is understanding the physical consequences of informational actions. If you’d keep something private in the physical world, then we should have the ability to do that in digital realm too. If you wouldn’t say something to someone’s face, we shouldn’t say it on-line. And if you think that your online life is different to your physical life – then it’s time to start remembering that all these things interact in the one physical world we live in.

The shape of the future

Reviewing visuals from the first ever television programme is interesting. You’ll notice that they were basically radio shows, which happened to be filmed. A couple of people. In a room. With a camera. A few years earlier, they would have been in the exact same setting, doing audio recordings. Early TV was essentially still an audio programme with pictures. It took them (the television producers) many years to realise that things didn’t have to be the same shape.

Even when they started to create on-screen interactions, such as the Late Night talk show format, it was essentially live theatre for the TV – props and segments being interacted with on a small stage. It seems that we so often have an incremental mindset of how new technology can substitute whatever came before it. It’s not isolated to TV either. Our cars are still horse carriages with a motor. Our houses are caves with electricity. Laptops are typewriters with screens where the paper used to be.

It seems that only once we realise the new technology can be a different shape that really innovative things can happen. The smart phone changed so much because it removed buttons and built in a screen on a very flat device. Videos, app stores, mapping…. sure, the technological had to catch up, but the new shape had a massive impact.

Right now there’s lots of opportunities to change the shape of things:

  • How could supermarkets look now that we have self-checkout, and will soon have no checkout? How should the selves and aisles be arranged?
  • What will department stores look like when we try on clothing virtually and fit out our homes with furniture we buy from home using augmented reality?
  • How should car parks look given that many won’t even have drivers? Will they need pick up & drop off bays for goods and people, as well as charging stations in every bay?
  • Will commercial car parks be empty during the day and full during the night? How can we utilise that space? What about car-stopping spaces in cities?
  • Do cars need to have front facing seats or can they look more like rolling lounge rooms or rolling offices now we can take our eyes off the road?
  • Will houses need drone delivery pads for ecommerce and drone landing pads for our personal flying machines?
  • What will kitchens look like when automated vertical gardens in offices and houses are common?

This is a micro-sample of some of the changes we know are coming. They’ll be more we can’t even imagine yet. It just might be that the biggest opportunity of the future isn’t inventing the technology itself, but reshaping our physical spaces to accommodate it.

The Technology Wildfire

Fire – one of the first technologies we mastered around 230,000 years ago – isn’t much different from our modern day torch light, the smart phone. They both became vital work tools. We hunt with them, they give us access to new types of food, they provide signals and direction, and they facilitate all manner of night time activity which was previously impossible.

It isn’t a stretch to imagine our ancestors walked around with a lit torch in their hands for most of their waking hours. There seems to be an eerie similarity with fire and our lithium ion-powered, handheld digital torches. They both have life-changing power and utility, but unless we learn quickly of their dangers, I fear we’re going to get burnt.

The problem, as I see it, is that we are allowing the technology to control us, instead of us being in charge. We haven’t learned when to put it down, or out, and to let it serve us. It seems at this point we are serving it – and it is the technology companies who power the fire. I was speaking at a conference just last week when a question from the audience was, “Do you think there will be a new technology which will help us put down the technology and get on with a little bit of humanity?’ And this was my answer:

‘We already have that technology – it’s called self-discipline. We can choose to switch off and ‘go dark’ and if it is that our boss, industry or family expects us to be connected at all times, then it might just be a matter of communicating when we won’t be available. Sure, there might be an emergency – but we all know there probably won’t be. Besides we still catch those long flights when emergencies could happen… It’s really just a choice.’

But in all honesty, I do think we need more regulation around digital technology and its use. At the moment technology is spreading like a wildfire which we do not have under control, and the few organizations with the power to bring it under control (our Governments and the big tech companies) are happy to let it burn – even thought it might hollow out important parts of our homes and maybe our civilisations.

Humans have sadly proven again and again that we’ll misuse technology unless guardrails are put in place to protect us, by those who know and care enough about the dangers. It’s easy to forget that workplace health and safety didn’t exist for most of the industrial revolution. We forget that road rules and safety features on cars didn’t just magically appear and that air travel was reserved for crazy risk takers early last century.

We may even be able to convince ourselves that the examples above are vastly different – that this time the technology is just information and can’t possibly harm people the way cars and dangerous machines can. I like to think of it this way: everything physical is informational first. We must first conceive, design and communicate all physical things informationally we make before they come into being. We must also remember that anything technology companies do, happens at scale. They don’t just effect a cohort of buyers or an isolated market.

But it’s not just the technology itself – the size and power of these firms is worth pondering. Consider the fact that the top 5 tech companies (Alphabet / Amazon / Apple / Facebook / Microsoft) now have a collective market capitalisation of $3.7 trillion. That’s more than $1,000 for every person single connected to the internet. It’s also more than 15% of the entire US stock market value which tracks over 3,000 corporations. Every now and again capitalism is put at risk by winner takes all technology. This is why Standard Oil and AT&T were split up into a bunch of smaller firms.

It’s time to tame big tech and regulate – they need to be responsible for anything bad that happens as a result of their products. And if you think regulation is bad for the economy – just remember that next time you board a plane, strap on your seatbelt or have more than one choice of product at a shelf.

The Startup Bubble

There are few things any established industrial economy needs more of than new businesses, but I’m here to say that ‘startups’ might not be the answer. Firstly, there are a lot of businesses calling themselves a startups, when in reality, they’re really just new, small businesses. So, what is a startup?

Startup = A new type of business trying to uncover a business model which doesn’t exist yet. Often, they want to leverage a new technology and be a better solution to an existing problem. A startup isn’t just a small business trying to grow with an established method, like say, a café. It’s a new way of doing business in a certain arena.

This definition is why they can attract large sums of speculative investment – the prize of winning can be big.

– – –

The amount of technological innovation is providing scope for many great startups. But business, like anything, isn’t immune to getting caught up in fashion. Yep, business is massively influenced by what is fashionable. If you run a startup – here are a few things that are highly unfashionable at the moment.

  • To be profitable
  • To self-fund
  • To want to remain small or medium-sized
  • To enter an established industry and just do it better
  • To not try and change the world

The Silicon Valley ethic now runs deep – despite the current tech-lash. There’ll be a lot of startups that realise not everyone (in fact, nearly no one) ends up with a unicorn or gets bought out by big tech. And this is where the problem lies. No one wants to simply run a business, make profit and employ people. Everyone wants to change the world instead of their suburb.

Yes, every technology revolution creates new behemoths which redefine commerce, but the probability of being one of these is extremely low. In fact, it’s a really bad bet to even try.  I’m not trying to steal anyone’s dream. I’m trying to do the opposite and actually help you achieve it. Here’s why.

There has simply never been a better time in history to start a small business, be a freelancer and earn a well above average income by staying small and not aiming for all-or-nothing. Never before have we all had such an equal playing field to start anything. Access to knowledge, finance, manufacturing, promotional tools, distribution, logistics, publishing, you name it. It’s all possible for anyone with internet access, imagination and tenacity. We can literally invent money through organising the factors of production in a new manner, and we don’t need a venture capitalist to help us do it.

What every entrepreneur should remember is that when a startup raises capital, they end up with a boss, which is exactly the thing that most entrepreneurs want to leave behind.  If I see another so-called success story of some startup founders standing in front of a brick wall at a co-working space smiling because they just raised $x million in capital I might even scream… it seems to me so many people have forgotten what should be the biggest motivation of all – independence. Isn’t that why people chase money? For the independence it buys?

So here’s the kicker with all this: more entrepreneurs should aim to run business instead of a startup, to actually make a profit and grow organically. A successful business has options, the owner can stay in control, gain financial power and some wisdom along the way. If entrepreneurs do that, then they might have a better chance to scale and actually change more than their suburb.

Thanks for reading, Steve.