Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Business class syndrome and travelling hard class

Much of the advice from business and political leaders is through a prism of privilege

“Why are you travelling by train?” I was asked by the expat project manager as I planned a site visit to a factory being built by our company on the outskirts of Bangkok.

For me, that two hour third class train trip was an opportunity to get out of the pampered bubble that is life as an expat in a country like Thailand and get a brief, if incomplete, picture of daily life in a rapidly changing nation.

Travelling Business Class

Business Class Syndrome — a view of the world seen through the prism privileged lifestyle that isn’t shared by most people — is a phenomenon that afflicts many of our business and political leaders who are insulated from the real world.

Over the past three days I’ve been dipping in and out of various economic forums as the B20 and the Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance conference being held in Sydney this week ahead of the G20 Heads of Government meeting being held in Cairns next October.

Both events illustrate Business Class Syndrome as global experts travel the world discussing issues like youth unemployment, third world growth and startup businesses that are beyond their experience.

None of this is to say the speakers at these events were wrong or dishonest, just their ideas — however well informed and intentioned — are developed through a selective view of the world.

Taking the privileged view

That selective view has to be kept in mind when reading the recommendations of such experts. White, middle aged, western men don’t have a monopoly on the planet’s good ideas.

In the case to the Bangkok project managers the expats didn’t really care about what was going on; their job was to build and move on, which they (and I) did.

However I hope those hard seat journeys left me a little more understanding about Thailand than those who wouldn’t leave an airconditioned site hut.

Indian Railways sleeper image by dforest via wikimedia

Google’s river of gold

Google has another spectacular financial result but weakness remain.

Google’s quarterly results are in – revenue up 22% on the previous year with a gross profit margin of 300%. Although the adwords river of gold still makes up 90% of the company’s income.

investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q2_google_earnings.html

While spectacular, such a reliance on one product line is a vulnerablity. It’s not surprising Google’s leadership is experimenting with new businesses.

It’s also notable that payments to network partners fell as a proportion to revenues, which explains some of the pain sites that rely on Google Adsense checks are feeling.

Electrocuting elephants – the cost of competing standards

We’re bad at setting standards but we have moved on from electrocuting elephants

A constant theme when new technologies appear is the inevitable war about standards that often sees bitter arguments over how the new methods should be used.

Over the centuries we’ve seen fights over railway gauges, video tape formats and even the shape of lighting conductors.

The struggle over lightning rods between the English and French camps in the eighteenth century was parodied by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels where the two tribes fought over which end of a boiled egg should be broken.

Probably the nastiest dispute in modern times was the battle over DC and AC electricity transmission between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, a fight made worse by Edison’s former employee Nikola Tesla taking his patents over to Westinghouse.

The fight became so fierce that Edison actually electrocuted an elephant to illustrate how dangerous AC electricity would be to householders.

Tesla and Westinghouse eventually won the argument, but it came at a cost to Topsy the Elephant.

While we may draw the line at electrocuting elephants in these enlightened days, we aren’t much better at settling standards. That’s why it’s fascinating watching how technologies like the smart car and the connected home will evolve.

The limits of big data

A story of lost school books illustrates the limits of big data

A story in the Atlantic – Why Poor Schools Can’t Win At Standardized testing – illustrates the limits of Big Data.

When Meredith Broussard tried to computerise the text book inventory of her son’s school district she found the project limited by poor systems, fragmented record keeping and siloed management.

Broussard found the records were manually collated, collected on Microsoft Word documents and emailed to an under resourced office that entered details into an Excel Spreadsheet.

The Philadelphia schools don’t just have a textbook problem. They have a data problem—which is actually a people problem. We tend to think of data as immutable truth. But we forget that data and data-collection systems are created by people.

The human factor is a key limitation with any technology; if people aren’t collecting or using data properly than the best computer system in the world is useless. Garbage In, Garbage Out is a long standing IT industry saying.

Management systems are more than computer networks, they go to the very core of an organisation’s culture which in itself is probably a better indicator of how well a company or institution will survive the current period of change.

Were the Philadelphia public school system a business it would be a very good example of a company on its way to being digital roadkill, that it’s an educational network should worry anybody concerned about the economy’s future. That’s a bigger issue than Big Data.

Restructuring Microsoft

Will losing 5,000 jobs make Microsoft a nimble competitor?

After last week’s long memo from CEO Satya Nadilla, it was inevitable Microsoft would have to restructure around the company’s new direction.

Bloomberg now reports Microsoft will be laying off thousands of employees – possibly more than the 5,800 laid off in the recessionary depths of 2009.

With 127, 000 employees Microsoft could almost certainly do with a cull, to make the company as nimble as it needs to be may take more than 5,000 jobs.

Respecting the user – Drummond Reed of the Respect Network

The Respect Network’s Drummond Reed sees personal clouds as the future of online privacy

Drummond Reed, CEO of the Respect Network, is the latest guest on the Decoding the New Economy channel.

The Respect Network offers ‘private clouds’ for individuals and companies where users can choose to trust others to share information.

After over twenty years of working in the IT security industry, Drummond founded the Respect Network after becoming worried at the power social networks are having over individuals’ privacy.

Drummond explains how a network designed to be private may be the future of online services.

“The internet is only 18 years old,” says Drummond. “We want to bring it into adulthood.”

Small business and big data defines the digital divide

How companies embrace big data and the internet of things illustrates the digital divide in the small business world

One of the questions about the development of Big Data has been how small businesses can use all the information pouring into their operations.

The New York Times this weekend has a feature illustrating some small business applications for big data.

In one of the case studies Brian Janezic, a 27 year old owner of two car washes in Arizona, created his own application that automates his business and monitors consumable levels.

The story further highlights how businesses like The Serbian Lion that haven’t done the simple basics like online listings are being left far behind more nimbler operations like Janezic’s.

Contrasting the two operations illustrates the digital divide between businesses. The sad thing is that many of the baby boomer owned enterprises not embracing the new technologies are further compromising the assets their proprietors are depending upon for their retirement.

Small business’ essential online ingredient

The story of Rene Bertagna and the Serbian Lion illustrates how operators in the hospitality industry need to be on top of their listings and online presence.

A Virginian restaurant, the Serbian Lion, went out of business because its Google Places listing was hacked, reports Wired.

The proprietor of the Serbian Lion, Rene Bertagna, wasn’t aware his online listing showed the restaurant as being closed on weekends and as a result customers stopped showing up, he alleges in a law suit against Google.

As a result of result of the drop in earnings, the restaurant entered a death spiral of falling service standards, declining customers and further cuts until the place closed down.

While it’s difficult to judge how true Bertagna’s claim is – it’s quite possible the listing was a mistake by Google’s data scrapers or an oversight by a customer putting the data into the services – the story does illustrate how important getting the correct information into online services like Google Places, Microsoft Bing and Yelp.

Bertagna himself appears to be a classic case of roadkill on the information superhighway with his claims not to be a computer or internet user.

Bertagna immigrated to the U.S. from northern Italy when he was young. He’s 74 now, and, he says, doesn’t own a computer—he’d heard of the Internet and Google but used neither. Suddenly, a technological revolution of which he was only dimly aware was killing his business. His accountant phoned Google and in an attempt to change the listing, but got nowhere. Bertagna eventually hired an Internet consultant who took control of the Google Places listing and fixed the bad information—a relatively simple process.

The sad tale of Rene Bertagna and the Serbian Lion illustrates just how important it is for operators in the hospitality industry to be on top of their listings and online presence. This is where the customers are.

Sadly, this story isn’t news – that customers are using the web to find local businesses and read reviews of neighbourhood establishments has been the case for a decade, the move to mobile has been obvious for over five years.

For all local businesses, it’s a core responsibility to make sure online listings are correct along with having an up to date website. If you don’t, you only have yourself to blame if the customers don’t show up.

Satya Nadella’s grand vision

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella lays out the company’s strategic future

From a PC on every desktop to a services and devices company and now “productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s long missive lays out where he’s taking the company.

It’s a radical shift from the company of the Gates and Ballmer years.

In order to deliver the experiences our customers need for the mobile-first and cloud-first world, we will modernize our engineering processes to be customer-obsessed, data-driven, speed-oriented and quality-focused. We will be more effective in predicting and understanding what our customers need and more nimble in adjusting to information we get from the market.

This describes a very different company from five years ago; it implies an end to bureaucracy and management conveniences like stack ranking; if Microsoft is really going to be more nimble, then it means a smaller, more focused management.

In 1995, Bill Gates turned Microsoft around in a few months when he realised the strategic mistake he’d made in underestimating the impact of the Internet, so the company has adapted quickly to dramatically changed times in the past.

Whether Microsoft can adapt and maintain its position in a computing world very different to the one it once dominated will be among the great business studies of our time.

Peg Fitzpatrick and social media

The latest video on Decoding the New Economy features Canva’s Social Strategist Peg Fitzpatrick explaining how businesses can use social media.

Living in the 1970s – Australia looks backwards

Australia harks back to the 1970s as the nation retreats from the 21st Century

An interesting observation about life in Australia over the last twenty years is how the nation decided to look backwards and become insular in many fields.

One of the manifestations of this insularity is the sensitivity towards outside criticism by many of the nation’s business and political leaders.

Today saw an example with two Members of Parliament on the ABC’s The World Today program responding to criticism from a former Thatcher government minister, Lord Deben, over the government’s climate change policies.

GEORGE CHRISTENSEN STATEMENT (voiceover): The last time I checked, the House of Lords, that undemocratic anachronism in a modern British democracy, and its Privy Council, had no jurisdiction over Australia, thank God.

Yet Lord Deben has waded into Australian affairs, whingeing about what we are doing regarding climate change when we contribute less than 2 per cent to total global carbon dioxide emissions.

…

If this whingeing pom thinks the carbon tax was actually doing something for the planet, can he please advise us lowly commoners how many degrees the Earth would have cooled to because of the carbon tax?

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IAN MACDONALD: I think the Australian Government and Australian policy should be run by Australians not by some retired English Lord.

MacDonald’s and Christensen’s sensitivity towards criticism from a ‘whingeing pom’ is notable – as is their contempt for the British House of Lords despite being members of a political party that supports the English Queen as Australia’s head of state.

On their own, the ramblings of a pair of insular rural apparatchiks doesn’t count for much but the same hostility towards educated outsiders was on show two days earlier when US economist Joseph Stiglitz appeared on ABC Television’s Q&A program.

An early audience question to Stiglitz set the scene;

Thank you for taking my question. My question is for Professor. Sorry, excuse me. What gives you the right, as an American, to come to Australia and criticise our budget, especially the $7 co-contribution payment, which is capped at $70 per year?

The ‘what gives you a right as an American?’ theme was gleefully picked up by Professor Judith Sloan, the token government apologist on the panel – faux news balance beings as alive and well in Australia as much as anywhere else in the world – who dismissed many of Stiglitz’s observations on the Australian economy as being the misguided views of an ill informed outsider.

Dismissing the whingeing poms and arrogant yanks harks back to an earlier time in Australia’s development. It may well be the nation has gone back to the days of Barry Mckenzie where Down Under is the working man’s paradise that the rest of the world desperately wants to be part of.

Strangely, the immigration officials in that 1972 movie could well pass for today’s Australian politicians.

As it turned out, the 1970s were a tough decade for Australia as it looked like the luck had run out. It may well turn out the Twenty-First Century is a lot tougher for the Lucky Country.

Spreading the good news – Canva’s Guy Kawasaki

The tools for building new businesses have never been more accessible says Canva’s Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki

“My job is to spread good news,” says Guy Kawasaki of his role as Canva’s Chief Evangelist.

Kawasaki was speaking to Decoding the New Economy about his role in popularising the online design tool which he sees as democratising force in the same way that Apple was to computers and Google to search.

Democratisation is a theme consistently raised by startups and businesses disrupting existing industries and Kawasaki continues this theme.

“The world is becoming a meritocracy; it’s not about your pedigree, it’s about your competence,” states Kawasaki.

Falling barriers to entry

What excites Kawasaki about the present business climate are the falling barriers to starting a venture. “Things are getting cheaper and cheaper, in technology you had to buy a room full of servers, have IT staff in multiple cities. Today you call Amazon or Rackspace and host it in the sky.”

“Before you had to buy advertising for a concert, now if you’re adept at using social media – with Google Plus, Facebook,Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram – you have a marketing platform that fast, ubiquitous and cheap.”

“What excites me is there are going to be more technologies, more products and more services because the barriers are so low.”

Creating a valued and viable product

For those businesses starting into this new environment, Kawasaki believes the most important thing a startup should focus on is getting a prototype to market; “at that point you will know you’re truly onto something.”

“If you build a prototype that works you may never have to write a business plan,” says Kawasaki. “You’d never have to make a Powerpoint, you may never have to raise money as you could probably bootstrap.”

Kawasaki view is the MVP – Minimum Viable Product – model of lean product development should have another two ‘V’s added for ‘Valuable’ and “Validated’.

“You can create a product that’s viable, ie you could make money, but is it valuable in that it changes the world?”

“Is your first product going to validate your vision? If it’s not then why are doing it?”

The story Kawasaki tells is the tools to deliver valued and viable products are more accessible than ever before; that’s good news for entrepreneurs and consumers but bad for stodgy incumbents.