Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: demographics

  • Links of the day – Mind games, wine growers and the Naples mafia

    Links of the day – Mind games, wine growers and the Naples mafia

    Mind games, wine growers and the Naples mafia are among today’s links along with last person in Britain who lived under Queen Victoria passing away and a touching series of portraits showing the end of the film photography industry.

    Cutting out the middle man

    Reka Haros is a wine maker in Italy’s Venuto region. Like many small producers her winery struggles with distribution and sales in a crowded market. Reba’s solution of going direct to the customer is one that many businesses should be considering in a noisy world.

    Life in protection

    I don’t fear death, I fear being discredited. The story of Italian journalist Roberto Saviano and his eight years in protection after writing about the Naples mafia.

    Picturing the decline of film photography

    Canadian photographer Robert Burley travelled the world with his 4×5 field camera to document the end of analogue photography. It’s a poignant portrayal of how an entire industry comes to and with one technological change.

    Last of the Victorians

    Ethel Lang, the last surviving Briton to live under the reign of Queen Victoria, died last week at the age 114.

    Manufacturing false memories

    A frightening physiological experiment shows a cunning interviewer can convince most of us  we committed crimes which we are totally innocent of. This truly is a disturbing story.

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  • Lessons from the G20 leaders meeting

    Lessons from the G20 leaders meeting

    This year’s G20 talkfest has come to an end with the usual communique of fine words.

    Apart from the discussion of climate change there’s little in the communique that wouldn’t have furrowed the brows of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Regan thirty years ago with most of the pronouncement a being around opening markets, reducing unemployment and freeing capital.

    On the latter point, the call to reduce tax avoidance given this was an obvious consequence of the 1980s reforms would be met by with a rueful laugh from those responsible for the deregulation wave of the Reagan and Thatcher years given reducing taxes on corporations was one of the reasons for the ‘reforms’

    An aspect that would trouble Maggie’s and Ronnie’s ghosts would be the commitment to ‘address deflationary pressures’, something undreamt of in the 1980s, although a clear warning to today’s commentators and investors that Quantitative Easing is not going away any time soon.

    What today’s communique shows is the world’s leaders are still very wedded to the economic models of the Twentieth Century despite the massive demographic and technological developments changing our society.

    The real message from the G20 is don’t wait for your country’s leaders if you want progress; at best they probably won’t comprehend what you’re saying.

    Although if you can put your ideas in terms of creating growth or reducing youth unemployment then you might have a willing audience with your local minister, chancellor or President.

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  • How smart hiring paid off for the PayPal mafia

    How smart hiring paid off for the PayPal mafia

    One of the challenges facing people who’ve started their own businesses is re-entering the broader workforce. Many managers are reluctant to hire previously self employed workers; the PayPal experience shows that attitude could be hurting working

    At the Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco yesterday three PayPal alumni, part of Silicon Valley’s infamous ‘PayPal Mafia’, discussed why the company was such a successful incubator of talent.

    “The company was composed of a bunch of young folks who were very driven,” said founder of LinkedIn and early PayPal employee, Reed Hoffman. “Once they sold the business to eBay they weren’t the type to retire.”

    Along with PayPal’s founders being driven, the company also tended to hire people who had run their own businesses but were finding the  going tough in the economy at the time; “Silicon Valley was collapsing under its own weight,” observed PayPal founder and fellow panellist Max Levchin.

    “There was a lot of running for safety in the Valley,” Levchin remembers. “We were looking for people who were into risk taking and were excited to take a risk and this would be the last company they worked for because the next one would be their own. As a result we biased the selection towards entrepreneurs.”

    Copying that hiring practice today is Stripe where co-founder John Collison told Decoding the New Economy last month that one of the keys to managing a fast growth business is to hire entrepreneurs and former self employed workers.

    “They are self starters; they don’t need much supervision,” said Collison in describing how hiring people who’ve run their own businesses makes running a business that has gone from ten to 150 employees in three years.

    it’s no coincidence that one of the investors in stripe is Peter Theil who along with Levchin founded PayPal and is probably the best known of the ‘PayPal mafia’.

    PayPal and Stripe’s experience show the folly of overlooking workers who’ve run their own businesses; in a world where business is becoming more competitive, having entrepreneurial employees is an asset too good to miss out on.

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  • Dealing with the demographic dividend

    Dealing with the demographic dividend

    “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.

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  • San Francisco’s stuggle with property prices

    San Francisco’s stuggle with property prices

    “You’re not wanted here” is the message from San Francisco residents protesting against tech workers and tycoon moving into the city.

    Over the last year the protests against the ‘Google Buses’ that ferry tech company workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley has steadily ratched up with protests against high profile individuals, people vomiting on the buses and Google Glass wearers getting their devices smashed.

    Around the world, from London and Berlin to Auckland and Hong Kong, cities are worrying about the diversity of their cities as the global asset bubble inflates property prices beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.

    In many respects San Francisco is probably unique in its relationship to Silicon Valley and its restricted geography, but it’s hard not to think if the current technology stock falls on the US stock markets became a Tech Wreck style bust then the city’s problems might solve themselves.

    The challenge for all major cities around the world is to manage the current boom in property prices that threaten to drive out lower paid workers essential to vibrant economies – although ultimately anything that can’t be sustained won’t be sustained and it’s hard to see how housing can run too far ahead of wages before a reversal happens.

    In the meantime though we can expect to see many cities struggle with the same issues that face San Francisco.

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