The Long View

Your brain in your pocket: why an Apple Tablet could bring about media convergence

With a rather large library at home and the prospect of moving house has become quite daunting.

As has the chance of finding stuff.

Famous last question: Where did I read that again?, followed by an hour's search across dusty shelves.

This has, of course, its own inimitable charm. Invariably I come across thoughts, ideas, stories that either I had forgotten about or that I had just simply not connected with.

However, as soon as I leave the house (a very regular occurrence), that entire library becomes useless.

So what if?

So what if there were a technological frogleap that would allow me to have that library with me all the time, allowing me to roam through at leisure on the train or the plane?

What if I could access all sources of information and all media, perform instant searches and combine text, music and video into one knowledge mega-library?

A laptop, you say?

Nah, not a laptop. Laptops are still far too appliation-centric (as opposed to content focused) Nah, not a Kindle, either. Too static.

Something that combines the flexibility and the colour of a magazine, the reading comfort of a book (or 1000 books -- without the weight), the charms of a Kindle (or so I am told, not owning one, but I have my doubts) the advantages of a laptop (film, music, searchability) as well as the potential of the new forms of converging media (did you recently visit the New York Times site?).

Well, according to Gizmodo, Apple (yes, I know, them again…) may be about to launch such a device. Much has been written about the Apple Tablet, but what got me animated here, is not so much the prospect of a possible near launch (February 2010), but more the prospect of media convergence in one device with a touch screen.

One thing in particular struck me in the article: the idea of putting school textbooks onto iTunes.

That would be a total game changer - for kids (think about those heavy satchels), for teachers (up-to-date materials), for bookshops (whoops…sorry, no good news here) and also for publishers (a new definition of the marginal cost of text book publishing).

Publishers would also be encouraged to release the long tail, their huge catalogue of books that have been out of print for years.

But most of all, once multimedia content becomes standard fare, tablet content will be to books what television has been for many years to travelogues: wildly more vivid and engaging. Just imagine your standard economics book with interactive, automatically updated graphics.

Whether it is going to be Apple or someone else, is beside the point. We are fast approaching the convergence of media.

If you add the recent evolution of e-paper (flexible screen technology) into the mix… we might just be at the beginning of an(other) information revolution.

Remember the live newspapers in the Harry Potter movies? Well, I have come to think that they are but a frog's leap away.

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.

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.

Listening

Found at http://killianmclaughlin.com/

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)

Fragmentation, convergence, contribution

The world is becoming more and more abstract. Certainties of the past are dwindling; we are moving in an ever escalating spiral of innovation, change and, more recently, turbulence.

There are essentially two ways to deal with this: cautious withdrawal and open embrace. 

Whichever you "chose" (and a lot could be said about that conscious or unconscious choice) will have an impact on our individual and collective outcomes and futures (yes, with a plural s). 

Yet there is more to it: the fragmentation of the traditional monoliths (state, company, society, family) is not just a breakup of cherished habits. It is also a powerful invitation to connect with people"other" side with the "other" context, with the people we do not usually do business (or buddiness) with. 

The opening of new intellectual and social portals produces and generates vast opportunities to talk to people of varying backgrounds, knowledge levels and semantic fields and linguistic jargons. Organisations, well established, like Ted, or more recent ones like Mindshare, highlight the growing desire to converge and exchange field notes with people from different scientific backgrounds.

In this interactive mash-up between social sciences, cognitive discoveries, business priorities and fractal movement, each of us can make a contribution. 

What we sometimes forget today, in the fearful chatter of recession an depression, is the basic fact that we still live in an economy of abundance, as measured in terms of available information, accelerated creativity and opportunities to shape and create the new paradigms for the century, while helping those around us that may be struggling today.

I am fundsmentally convinced that the sucess stories of the future will be written not by those who ask "What do I have to lose?" but by those who act on the question "How can I help you succeed?" 

The Internet of the future

The Internet as we know it, with endless sources of information, seemingly limitless resources and its tidal wave of downloaded documents is just the beginning.

We have seen nothing yet. Current search engines give us millions of references to places where to find information (a Google search on "leadership" gives me this morning about 183,000,000 entries in 0.14 seconds), but nothing in terms of how these pages relate to each other, and, more specifically, how they can be useful to me. In many ways, this way of finding information is already starting to look antiquated.

Enter the Semantic Web.

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) under the "founder of the Internet" Sir Tim berners-Lee is working on the next generation internet. In the site's own words:

The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.
…
The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and it is not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?
Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.
The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

Suddenly, the Web becomes my oyster.

The impact on business will be swift, and huge. Even top notch state-of-the-art websites of today will look outdated  as we move into the next era of mass information management. The Harvard Business Review in its February issue warns CEOs that they have a problem if they ask their CTOs about the semantic web and get a blank stare.

And you just thought you had it figured out?

The How of the What, in the context of the Why

This week I had a lot of conversations around leadership. There is lots of great literature available on the subject, and I will create a list of the most important one of these days.

One comment I got this week was along the lines that "sometimes these books cloud the issue instead of clarifying it for me. The author's thinking process looks great on paper, makes lots of sense, but then when I have to apply it to real life situations, it turns into quite a different animal." 

Readers get lost in models, definitions, principles and graphics. Managers don't know if they should use a different theory at the beginning of the week and then end, in the morning and the evening.

What the entire leadership discussion might just come down to is three things: the What, the How and the Why.

The What: management roles - objectives, responsibilities, targets, directions, tasks,  deadlines, deliverables… This is what managers get hired for in the first place. It is their job.

The How: leadership roles (and styles) - personal credibility, accountability, inspiration, motivation, communication, handling of (own and others') emotions… This is how each person builds up the work culture in and around him, how she relates to her staff and what environment they chose to work in (Yes there is a choice element in that as well…).

The Why: What do we want to achieve in the end, why are we making all these efforts - vision, mission, values… The Why provides the context, background and the ultimate reason for our actions. Without it a vital piece is missing and this makes the manager's job virtually impossible.

The consistency and overall effectiveness of the manager (in managing others or/and themselves) lies in the careful reflexion on and mutual balancing of the What, the How and the Why.

And if you look closely, that works for pretty much everything in life.

Listening to you(,)(r) customers

Those of you who have been to my seminars know that I have some views about what a strong relationships with customers could/should/would like.

Seth Godin on his blog this morning talks about listening to customers:

Here are three common listening mistakes:

1. Believing that your customers are monolithic, that they all want the same thing.
2. Believing that loud customers speak for all customers.
3. Worrying that if you don't satisfy short-term, loudly articulated needs, you will fail.

There's an art here, it's not a science. I'd focus on a few tactics:

• When someone is in pain, recognize it and address it if you can.
• You decide, not your customers, where you want to go. Lead, don't follow.
• Amplify the voices of the people you care about, those with the most value to you in the long run. Give them a platform and make it easier for them to speak to you and the rest of the market.

It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of the listening part of the customer relationship. The listening is not enough, of course. 

Matching the listening with the right action for that particular is what will make the difference. 

Customer satisfaction statistics are great (when you can get them, and may many companies do not have a formal process for collecting these data). In any events, stats are only one foundation stone on which to build a listening culture. The hard part is keeping an open ear.

Take the lead in listening. It pays off in the long run.