The Long View

Short term gain, long term pain

A new blog post on Busionomist ponders the seemingly sensible decision by Hyatt in Boston to outsource around 100 housekeepers, and the totally unintended consequences of that short-sighted action.

Welcome to the age of instant media.

A Better Place: electric cars for everyone

Following yesterday's article, here is Shai Agassi explaining the Better Place concept himself:

The motor industry gets a wake up call

Every once in a while a company comes along that utterly changes a market or invents a completely new one.

Edison and the light bulb.

Jobs and Apple is on track for being one such company. With the original Mac, it introduced the graphical user interface (GUY, with the iMac, it brought design and colour into the PC market; with the iPod, it reshaped the music industry, and with the iPhone its apps it is redefining the smartphone business.

Shai Agassi and Better Place have the potential to do for the car market and transport what Edison did for light in our lives and Apple did for computing.

Just on a massively grander scale.

Like Apple, Better Place put itself in the shoes of the customer. Agassi asked one simple question: What would it take for the electric car to be adopted by the public on a large scale?

Answer:

• Range
• Price
• Design
• Reliability
• Future proofness.

None of which the (pure) electric car can provide today. Battery technology is the biggest inhibitor for mass adoption of the electric car.

And so Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place had what may well become the Newton apple moment of the 21st century:

What if we decoupled the battery from the car?

A new business model is born. Battery as a service; electricity by the mile. It goes somewhat like this:

• Separate the battery and the car. The pack becomes an easily replaceable element of the car, like in any mobile phone (except the iPhone… hmm).
• Sell the car, NOT the battery. Better Place holds on to the batteries. Now the car costs as much as a normal car. New technology batteries can easily be rolled out. Old batteries can be recycled.
• Remove range anxiety. Better Place, in partnership with hosting countries or cities, builds a network of charging points on parking lots and battery swapping stations. The driver choses to charge the battery or swap it. Swapping takes exactly 1 minute, less time than to pay for your petrol at the station.
• Design real cars. Cars that people want. Carlos Ghosn of Renault bought into the concept without hesitation and is building a fleet of 7 separate models to match market needs. Agassi is also talking to other manufacturers.
• Find a country, an island or a city. Oh look: Israel, Denmark, Australia, Hawaii, San Francisco, Tokyo are lining up.
• Build the infrastructure. 200,000 charging points and 100 swapping stations in Israel.
• Buy energy from renewable sources. Wind, sun, hydro ensure the remote pollution objection does not stick.

The “yes, but” crowd will no doubt have a field day and find all sorts of reasons why this cannot work in their country or anywhere else..

But this is happening right now.

Better Place goes live in Israel in 2011 (piloting starts in 2010). 20,000 cars had been pre-ordered by early 2009.

And, in ten or twenty years’ time, with the luxury of hindsight, it will just look so obvious. 

Like the light bulb. 

Bring in the creatives!

We humans have funny thought patterns.

Just when we thought we had it all figured out with our superiour rational brains, just when we thought we had understood the world, evolution, and the galaxies, just when we thought we had reached the end of history (sort of after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the early nineties), it got all muddled up again.

What seemed simple, clear and, possibly somewhat boring, broke apart and fragmented into millions and millions of inscrutable nano-parts, uncountable amounts of gigabytes and seemingly endless strands of sequenced genomes.

We thought that we were on top of the world, and the horizons receded into the farthest distance. We thought we were pulling the strings of history and are now beginning to realise that there are far too many of them.

To make sense of it all, we need to, and have always needed to, tell ourselves stories. In that sense, in spite of the dialectic waltz we have been dancing, nothing has changed since the dawn of time:

1. The ancient peoples told stories of gods and how they created the world, our destinies and the weather.

2. Then, collectively, we decided to take destiny into our own hands and demystify the universe. Renaissance man and his descendants told the story of the superiority of rational man. It created the modern world with its industries, its technologies and its pollution. 

3. More and more signs point into the direction that we have now entered (or are at the brink of) a new era, or should I say of an infinite number of new eras, where the collective story telling takes on a completely different life - one of tis own: it will be non-linear, pattern based, non hierarchical, multi-cultural, and not least, utterly unpredictable.

This will go against the grain of the our recent left-brain mechanistic generations. But after the reductionist (and, lets face it, highly effective in construction and destruction alike) last five centuries, the realities, complexities and challenges of our world(s) demand a thoroughly improved set of tools.

In comes the right brain. In comes the web paradigm. In comes creativity as an asset and not something reserved to a bunch of quirky eccentrics.

Artistry takes on an entirely new meaning: it's the multidimensional expansion of multiple intelligences, spurned on by rapid technological advances and possibilities. 

Welcome to the business man as artist.

The eternal quest for motivation

When I work with my coachees, we often have long conversations around what motivates them at work. When I work with managers, we have the same conversations, in particular around how they can motivate their staff. 

My general view is that one cannot motivate people; you can only bring people to motivate themselves.

Motivation is a strong emotion inside that makes us do stuff because we want to do it: so the only effective way of motivation is self-motivation. Hence the limited effectiveness of rewards in the work environment: they will work well for some tasks and contexts (repetitive, left brain environments, but much less for others (right brain, creative contexts).

Sam Glucksberg did some extensive research around intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The following video with Daniel Pink explains the differences beautifully, and, crucially, with a good sense of humour.

BN Quote of the week

"Only those who constantly retool themselves stand a chance of staying employed in the years ahead."

Tom Peters

->: What are you doing to stay ahead?

And then, Peter Drucker said:

• Do first things first, and second things not at all.
• The average executive hires incorrectly 2/3 of the time.
• What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it , is another matter.
• Wherever you see a successful business, someone made a courageous decision.
• Every success creates new opportunities, and so does every failure.
• Communication is what the listener does.

They speak for themselves, really. 

A few Peter Drucker quotes

Here a few quotes that may seem familiar - all by Peter Drucker (and we might not know it):

About strategy:

• The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different..
• The best way to predict the future is to create it.
• The entrepreneur always searches for change,responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. 

• Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes, but no plan. 
• Plans are only good intentions unless they degenerate into hard work.

About customers: 

• Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.

• The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits and sells itself.

About process:

• Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.

About leadership:

• Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
• The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right. 

• For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets examples and is imitated.

• The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said.
• We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

The Socrates of modern management thinking

Peter F. Drucker spent his 70-odd year career teaching, consulting, writing and asking questions. Fundamental questions to guide managers in the awareness of their responsibilities and the execution of their tasks. Having had virtually no hands-on management experience himself, he prided himself that he was helping people to find out people what to do, yet not how to do it.

When Peter Drucker began his work in the thirties, management as a discipline was virtually unknown. 

Many of the business concepts we talk about today (and so often take for granted) can be traced back to Peter Drucker. Management was not a worthy subject of study in the first half of the century. At the start of his career, he found it extremely difficult to find books on management... so he wrote a few himself (about 40 of them).

Common modern business concepts and practices, like management by objectives, management by walking around, empowerment, people as an asset not a cost, doing the right things, leadership by example and countless others are all described, generally for the first time, in Drucker's writings.

In 1981, when Jack Welch (CEO and Chairman of GE, Forbes CEO of the Century) began his mission at the helm of GE, he went to see Peter Drucker for advice on running the conglomerate. He came away with only two questions. Yet those two questions were going to define everything he did in the following 20 years until his retirement in 2001:

1. If you were not already in the business you are in, would you enter it today?
2. What are you going to do about it? 

Whereupon Welch set off to sell hundreds of businesses of the GE Empire, restructuring, redefining and strengthening the organisation to 25 times its value.

And this is how Drucker described himself:

"My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions."

To me, that sounds eerily like what a certain Socrates said two and a half thousand years ago.

The long road to Twitter paradise (1)

I thought that after about two months of tweeting (my first tweet was on 14 February to be precise), it would be good to give a brief update on how this social networking beginner is doing.

Now my first remark is that already I seem to be in a very different place from two months ago: once you have spent some time in the twittersphere it seems uncanny that still not everyone knows what Twitter is exactly. (it even seems there are some people who have never heard of it all).

So for the untwittered among you: Twitter is a social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time with what is happening in any of the areas you want to be connected to. Twitter aims to help you kill two birds with one stone: building a social network and keeping you informed about the topics you are interested in. It is instant information 24 hours a day. (Unless you turn it off, a bit like email, really just at multiple times the volume). 

Unlike Facebook, you can only send and receive short messages of up to 140 characters (including any URL links you want to include.

Some even say that Tweeting can be bad for you, but so can many other things…

So, how has it been going for me? In a nutshell: well, but slow. 

I have not been the most assiduous of tweeters (about 100 updates since the beginning), and after two months have now reached the 200-followers mark - some assiduous twitters count in the hundreds of thousands, just ot give you an idea. (Experienced twitterers will by now have detected my beginner’s language and naive mindset - but hey, we are all learning, not?)

Here are some of the things I really like bout Twitter as well as some that I intensely dislike.

Likes:

1. Ease of set up and use and the instant communication it provides to people and areas on the net
2. Discovery of entirely new industries, interests and mindsets
3. Ability to connect to a wide range of people, without prejudice or discrimination; to relate directly to people you did not know that existed 3 minutes ago
4. The general respect and politeness of the exchanges
5. Real-time updates on what is happening out there. While it may not always be the truth necessarily, it can come quite close to it on occasions
6. Creation of my own personal newsfeed in realtime
7. Ease of following and unfollowing - unlike facebook, there is no sense of ego loss. Easy come, easy go
8. The sense of expansion that comes with the growing network - it has already had an impact on my blog traffic, as well
9. Some good iPhone interface applications help keep up when on the move Twteety, Twitterphone (both on the Apple iTunes store) to keep you abreast
10. A new toy to play with. This should never be underestimated.

Dislikes

1. Cumbersome interface despite the apparent simplicity
2. Site can be quite slow and unreactive
3. To become really powerful, you need to master additional tools (more time, energy, learning - surely all for a good cause)
4. The amount of self-proclaimed social media gurus and twitter specialists that in reality are not much into sharing - except for their share of your wallet
5. Time required. Don’t get me wrong  - i enjoy spending time, and even think it is worthwhile - but on a busy day, I find it difficult to switch to Twitter and tend to turn it off
6. A vague sense of frustration about all that great stuff that you miss out on when you are not watching
7. Not sure today that the time invested is really beneficial - although this hesitation alone seems to tell me otherwise.  

So these are some first impressions. Overall, a good start. I am now celebrating my 200th follower (@N3W_Media), so the mass twitterers may still deride my early efforts. However, Twittergrader puts me at 92/100 this morning, up from 24 a few weeks ago.

Twitter paradise cannot be that far  away. Thank you to all those that follow me: @jeanmarcrommes.

(To be continued)