Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: economy

  • Acknowledging the human costs of disruption

    Acknowledging the human costs of disruption

    As we talk of the dramatic changes facing business and society today it’s worthwhile noting a  much greater displacement happened in the Twentieth Century as electricity, the motor car and communications drove the greatest increase in standards of living that humans have ever seen.

    Our great-great grandparents lived through a period of change far greater than that we will see as their lives and communities were radically transformed.

    Many common jobs in the early 1900s had ceased to exist by the middle of the century as cars replaced horses, mains electricity replaced town gas and refrigeration changed shopping habits. In the second half of the century affordable motor vehicles and television saw our cities reshaped around suburban life, a process now being reversed.

    The structural change to economies saw a shift in population and jobs; a hundred years ago thirty percent of the US labor force was employed in agriculture, today it’s around two percent. Despite the shift, jobs were eventually found for those displaced from farms.

    Shifting from an agricultural economy to an industrial society didn’t come without costs however,  the price paid by the affected communities and individuals was huge as documented by Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange’s photos.

    While it’s unlikely we’ll see the deprivation of The Great Depression repeated in a modern welfare state, it’s important to recognise the real human costs of technological change. For politicians and community leaders it could define how history judges them.

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  • Where will the digital leaders come from?

    Where will the digital leaders come from?

    Last Thursday in Sydney a group of industry groups, telcos and local councils launched their 2030 Communications Visions initiative; a project “to shape a digital vision and set of goals for Australia to achieve global digital age leadership”.

    The project is a worthy one, particularly given the failure of Australia’s National Broadband Network, which I’m writing about early next week in Technology Spectator however one thing that bugs me is what exactly is ‘digital age leadership’.

    If we look at the rollout of technologies like the motor car, electricity or telephone through the Twentieth Century it was a mix of private companies, community groups and governments that championed the development of roads, mains power and phone systems. People either demanded their towns became connected or raised the capital to do it themselves.

    So on one level, the champions need to be us. We have to lead our communities and industries by using the technologies and showing what can be done, that also makes our businesses more likely to succeed in the future.

    On another level, we need to consider the genuine leaders of the ‘electrical age’ or ‘motor car age’; people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built businesses that led the world and still exist today.

    For countries, it’s no coincidence that the United States is the richest nation on the planet after having most of the leading business in their industries over the last hundred years.

    That latter point is really what the Digital Visions project is about; do Australians want to remain a wealthy nation in the Twenty First Century?

    Governments have a role in this, as the UK is showing, and political leaders need to be encouraged to take the digital economy however governments can only do so much and successes like Silicon Valley are more a fortunate by product of spending rather than the consequence of strategic policy.

    Ultimately, leadership starts with us — we can’t afford to wait for governments, big business or someone else to take the reigns.

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  • The Economist’s World in 2015

    The Economist’s World in 2015

    One of the annual features in The Economist is it’s World In… edition where the magazine makes predictions on the year ahead.

    For 2015 the magazine has its usual wide range predictions; some safe, some risky and some out of left field, like Papua New Guinea topping the world growth lists for next year on the back on a new LNG plant comping online.

    Economy: The fastest-growing economy in the world in 2015 will be Papua New Guinea, where GDP will expand by nearly 15%. China will drop its growth target to 7% (from 7.5%). Overall, global growth will be higher in 2015 (3.8%) than in 2014 (3.2%).

    Business: Singapore tops the Economist Intelligence Unit’s global business environment rankings for 2015. Watch out for Xiaomi, a Chinese mobile-phone maker, as it continues its meteoric rise and goes global. And expect a welcome return, at least in some places, to the nine-to-five culture in the

    Interest rates: In the United States and Britain, where growth is relatively robust and unemployment is coming down, interests rates will start to rise in 2015, ending a long period of ultra-low rates. In the euro zone and Japan, by contrast, central banks will continue to ease monetary policy, to battle against deflation. The diverging paths of the main central banks will lead to more volatility in equity,

    Statistical landmarks: It will be a year of striking “crossovers”, as America overtakes Saudi Arabia to become the world’s biggest oil producer, China overtakes America to become the world’s biggest economy (measured at purchasing-power parity) and Facebook overtakes China in terms of its

    Elections: Britain will have another hung parliament after its general election in May, with David
    Cameron probably remaining prime minister. But Canada’s leadership is likely to change hands in an October election, with the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau taking the helm.

    The environment: A deal of sorts will emerge from the Paris summit in December 2015. Hydrogen- powered cars will hit the road, as Toyota and Honda launch the first mass-market fuel-cell models. And Australia will be in the global spotlight as the UN decides whether the Great Barrier Reef should be put on the endangered list.

    Technology: “Wearable” technology will be all the rage, thanks to the launch of the Apple Watch and other devices. Virtual-reality firms will overcome the cost and technology problems that have prevented their products from becoming mass-market hits. And mobile phones will become mind-readers, thanks to “anticipatory computing”, which enables them to trawl their users’ data to predict events

    Sport: Australia will win the cricket World Cup, New Zealand will win the rugby World Cup and the United States will win the women’s football World Cup.

    Space: America’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Pluto, after a journey of nearly nine years – maybe igniting a campaign to reinstate Pluto as a fully-fledged planet from its current “dwarf” status.

    Some of the predictions are obvious while others may be a bit longer term than 2015. Overall it’s an interesting range of predictions and in the next few days I’ll post an interview with two of The Economist’s editors, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran and Daniel Franklin, justifying their forecasts for the year ahead.

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  • Creating a healthy society and economy in a time of disruption

    Creating a healthy society and economy in a time of disruption

    At the Australian Gartner Symposium conference today MIT researcher and futurist Andrew McAfee gave the day’s closing keynote on his book The Second Machine Age, a book written with co-author Erik Brynjolfsson “because we got confused” about technological change.

    McAfee’s message is that the rate of technological change is about to accelerate dramatically, that change is not going to be gradual but abrupt and businesses have to prepared for a very different world.

    Another of McAfee’s points is a decoupling between incomes and growth has happened around the world, particularly in the US, which has changed the assumptions underlying economic growth.

    US-productivity-GDP-employment-income-1953-to-2011

    Interestingly, McAfee’s chart shows US household incomes diverged from growth in the mid 1970s during the post oil shock stagflation predating the personal computer and internet booms.

    The breaking of the linkage between economic growth and incomes underpins the rise of the precariat — those with uncertain jobs and career prospects — which gave rise to Douglas Coupland’s Generation X.

    While the bulk of the pain in the last forty year’s disruption was felt by lower income and younger workers, the pain is now extending to the middle classes as described by Stephen Rattner in the New York Times.

    US-inequality-gets-worseThose changes are certainly not wholly attributable to technological change but as more jobs are lost to robots and algorithms, that process will accelerate.

    For McAfee, the challenge for business leaders and policy makers is to ensure growth and opportunities are evenly spread; “our job is to make smart choices to create a healthy society and economy.”

    How well we as a society manage this will define our times.

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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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