“Charts are our version of cat videos” says Kevin Delaney, co-founder of the Quartz news website, in an interview with Richard Edelman, president and CEO of the Edelman PR Agency.
Keep stories short and snappy or long and in-depth with Delany seeing 500 to 800 words as being a ‘dead zone’ for online stories. Interestingly, Edelman’s piece comes in at 760 words.
In future, I’ll be keeping blog posts either very short or extremely long on this site.
“In the 20th century the planet’s population doubled twice. It will not double even once in the current century,” states The Economist in a lengthy article on how the world’s aging population is going to affect economic growth.
One of the most overlooked aspects of modern day economics is the changing demographics of the developed world, the aging army of baby boomers has been effectively ignored by policy makers and voters alike and now we’re about the see the consequences.
Japan is the case study as the country is well ahead of the pack with an rapidly aging population and the indicators aren’t good.
Amlan Roy, an economist at Credit Suisse, has calculated that the shrinking working-age population dragged down Japan’s GDP growth by an average of just over 0.6 percentage points a year between 2000 and 2013, and that over the next four years that will increase to 1 percentage point a year.
Despite that drag on growth, the Japanese are still living quite well and could be showing that an economy can grow old gracefully and productively.
The key to doing that is to have a well educated, skilled and productive workforce. An efficient health system that ensures older workers stay fit enough to work doesn’t hurt either.
What The Economist illustrates in its story is that some countries are going to perform better than others as their workforces age. Those who’ve neglected their education systems and workforce skill bases are not going to do well.
One can’t help but think the ideologies that gripped the Anglo-Saxon countries in the 1980s that saw skills being discarded, investment neglected and education cut are going to have a high cost on those nations over the next twenty years.
The announcement that Vic Gundotra, the executive responsible for Google+ at the search engine giant, is leaving the company has lead to the widespread assumption that the troubled social media platform is dead.
It’s not an unreasonable assumption that Google Plus is dead; the company’s trait of corporate attention deficit disorder means the project is likely to die of neglect without a top level executive supporting it.
Should Google Plus be dying, this won’t be bad news for some of the company’s other products, the enforced integration with the social media service irritated users, –particularly on YouTube — while reducing functionality for platforms like Google Places.
Google Places, or Google Plus for Business as it was clumsily renamed as part of the integration, could be the great beneficiary of removing the distraction of the social media service with renewed focus on local search.
Losing focus on local and mobile search has been the most damaging effect from the Google Plus experience and renewed efforts in those fields will take on Facebook while filling a gap in the market.
It’s also unlikely that the entire ‘identity service’ will live on with those features permeating through the company’s products.
Of course, it could be that Google Plus isn’t dead at all; we’ll have a better idea of where it’s going to go when we see the level of commitment from senior management towards the product, although the appointment of a relatively junior executive doesn’t seem to be good news for the platform.
Moving on from Google Plus is an opportunity for the company to refocus on neglected niches, it could be a good result for the company’s shareholders.
What will be the next five technologies that will change busines? CITE Magazine has an interview with Tom Soderstrom, the chief technology officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on what he sees as the next big game changers for business.
The list features many of the topics we’ve discussed on this blog; data visualization, the Internet of Things, robots, 3D printing and new user interfaces.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a good place to start when looking at what technologies will become commonplace in business as the organisation is testing the limits of modern engineering.
Earlier this month, Sydney video streaming company Viocorp changed leadership with founder Ian Gardiner stepping down as CEO.
For Gardiner, the decision was tough and in a blog post he described how the company was founded and grew and why it was time to step away. That decision though was not without some pain.
I have nurtured and loved this little startup as it has grown up like one of my children.
And like my children it can occasionally be frustrating, difficult and highly erratic and unpredictable. But most of the time it is fantastic and hugely rewarding. And I love it with a passion that is hard to describe.”
However children one day grow up and leave home. Viocorp is not a start-up any more. It is a serious business with massive potential. And I feel that my skills as a product innovator and fire-starter are not the ones that Viocorp needs for this next stage of our journey.
I spoke to Ian Gardiner in a noisy Sydney Cafe in February for the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel shortly after he’d made the decision to step down as CEO where he elaborated on the reasons for the change.
“I ended up getting further and further away from the stuff I’m actually good at,” he said. “You end up as the founder and entrepreneur in a place that is not good for anyone.”
“As a result of that the business doesn’t go in the direction you want.”
Gardiner’s decision illustrates an important truth about business; different management skills are needed at different stages of development.
A good example of this was with the corporate slashers of the 1980s – CEOs like GE’s Jack Welsh and ‘Chainsaw Jack’ Dunlap here in Australia were the right men to shake moribund organisations. A decade later both were out of favour as the needs of the business world and their companies had moved on.
Similarly the skills that are needed to found and grow a startup are very different to those required to steer a more mature business. This is why Facebook’s experiment with retaining founder Mark Zuckerberg as CEO of a hundred billion dollar company is so fascinating.
With Viocorp, Ian Gardiner and his investors have made a very mature decision about where they see the future of the business, as the now retired CEO told me earlier this week: “The punchline is that I’m happy about it, and very excited about the future of Viocorp.