Last night, 700 children gathered at the Sydney Opera House for The Festival of Choral Music. Over the four days the event is run, over 2,000 kids will have performed in the choirs, bands and ensembles.
Why aren’t we telling these stories of talent, potential, happiness and beauty? Why are we bogged down in the negative, backward looking view of the world we see in much of our commentary of the world?
Maybe it’s time for a rethink about the stories we tell.
What is cloud computing and why does it matter to most homes and businesses?
Join Tony Delroy and Paul Wallbank to discuss cloud computing and what it means to the ordinary business and household on ABC Local Radio across Australia from 10pm on August 19.
Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.
If you’d like to join the conversation with your questions or comments phone 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.
You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702 or twitter @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag
A key philosophy underlying much of Silicon Valley’s successful companies is the “fail fast” concept where a business releases a rough version of a new idea and asks the world what it thinks. Should people like the idea, it gets developed and if they don’t, it gets dropped and everybody moves on to the next brainwave.
The “fail fast” philosophy was behind Google Wave’s dropping last week, as CEO Eric Schmidt said at the Techonomy Conference on the day it was announced; “….we release it and see what happens. It works, you announce product, you ship it…”
Until recently, “failing fast” was restricted to hot shot Internet businesses but as the cost of product development falls due to better collaboration tools, testing methods and global outsourcing, it’s become easier for all businesses to experiment without risking an organisation’s future.
This is very different from the old style of doing business, a good example of how things used to work was Boeing’s development of the 747 Jumbo Jet which was a $2 billion dollar bet, $14bn in 2010 dollars, on a big lumbering subsonic jet in the mid 1960s when the future of aviation seemed to be with sleek supersonic aircraft like the Concorde.
While Boeing’s bet paid off, it took 15 years and nearly sent the company broke.
Most of today’s businesses aren’t locked into 14 billion dollar and 15 year investment cycles as we can test products with simulation tools, computer aided design programs, fast prototyping and oursourcing services like o-desk for labour and alibaba.com for manufacturing without risking the farm.
For most businesses, it’s not even a matter of spending time and money actually developing ideas, usually it’s something as simple as testing a new idea by buying a domain name and setting up a low cost website on a cheap hosting service for under $200. If the idea flies then you start looking at spending real money on making the product ready for the broader market.
Failing fast presents a great challenge to the traditional organisation where the slightest failure is a stigma. In the new economy, a risk adverse culture is going to be punished by competitors who accept that not every idea is right for its time and learn lessons rather than punish those associated with the unsuccessful project.
While this is bad news for large organisations run by risk adverse managers it is one of the great opportunities for nimble and smart companies. If your business is prepared to take small risks, learn from the misses and celebrate the wins then your business could well be on the way to being the next Google.
“I don’t see why the Internet is important to me” said Maggie, the first caller to our “is the Internet the ultimate consumer’s revenge “ radio program.
Maggie’s question is a very good one at a time when governments, businesses and households are investing heavily in Internet technology. Just a few hours before the radio show I’d been invited by television program A Current Affair, to discuss if Australia’s 43 billion dollar investment in a National Broadband Network is worthwhile.
For Maggie and ACA’s viewers, the answer is “yes, it is very important” — the Internet today is what the motor car was to the early 20th Century and railways were to the 19th Century. Communities that aren’t connected will miss the benefits of the 21st Century economy.
To illustrate how important it will be, let’s have a look at Maggie’s life. We’ll assume she’s an older person living in a regional Australian town or one of the fast growing fringe suburbs of a big city.
Probably the most immediate change the Internet delivers for Maggie is how it is giving her a stronger voice as a consumer and citizen. This is what we discussed on the ABC program, how Internet tools like social media are giving customers and voters their voices back.
With reliable broadband Maggie can be researching products and voicing her dissatisfaction with government and private organisations to the world in a way that would have been impossible a few years ago.
Those Internet tools also growing communities around her as like minded people across the world and in her own district are connecting online then meeting in real life at events like Coffee Mornings.
Not only does the Internet connect communities, it connects families — one lady recently described to me how she speaks more to her daughter living in Brazil through Skype than she did when they lived nearby. The net brings friends and families back together and helps overcome social isolation.
Exclusion in education has always been a pressing issue, once upon a time you had to be in Cambridge or Oxford to access the world’s great minds. With a fast reliable Internet connection, the kids in Maggie’s neighbourhood can listen to a Harvard or MIT professor’s lecture without leaving their hometown.
Bringing knowledge to local communities will also help Maggie should she have to have to go to the local hospital, the local doctors will be able to consult specialists without Maggie having to travel long distances to get specialist advice.
Importantly for Maggie and her local hospital, the access to online training resources mean the local staff will be up to date with their professional development and across new trends, ensuring Maggie’s standard of care will be equal to the big city teaching hospitals.
Solving staff training issues also delivers benefits for the local business community. It means the Maggie’s son Tim, the owner of a local plumbing business, doesn’t have to pay for expensive training courses or to travel into town to attend business conferences.
The net also means Tim can access the world’s best business minds without leaving his office. Which gives him benefit of running his business more efficiently and profitably.
For Tim’s kids, it also means they aren’t excluded from the entertainment world. They can stream and download the latest things happening and share equally on social networking sites. They may be in a small town, but they can play in the big world.
Having these education, business, training and entertainment resources strengthens communities. It means kids and entrepreneurs can live in their home towns and still participate in the global economy. It means Maggie is a valued and important citizen of her country and the world.
Fast accessible Internet is more than important, it’s vital just in the ways roads, railways, canals and the telegraph were in their eras. The investment in these freeways of the future is necessary to grow strong and dynamic communities.
In 1999, the then Clinton administration Education Secretary, Richard Riley, said “We are currently preparing children for jobs that don’t yet exist…”
Last week’s COSBOA conference in Brisbane showed another aspect to that statement; in the next decade most businesses will be operating in industries that don’t yet exist and all organisations will using technologies yet to be thought of.
The day’s conference sessions reflected this with the topics consistentently coming back to technology; for instance, discussions on taxation coming around to e-tax and marketing covering e-commerce and social media.
In many ways, the emphasis on social media is a bit unfortunate because these tools are really yesterday’s news; Twitter has been available for three years, Facebook for six and blogs since the establishment of the World Wide Web in 1993.
The mobile Internet, location based services and augmented reality are the current frontier as described by Ben White, Optus’ Director of Strategy and Corporate Development in his keynote to the conference.
Darren Alexander of Launceston based company Autech emphasised this change later in a later forum by describing how his business has evolved over ten years and where technology was taking regional businesses. If you doubt the value of the National Broadband Network, have a chat to Darren sometime.
Also on that technology panel Mike O’hagan of mini movers described how outsourcing and crowdsourcing has changed his, and others, businesses. This is something we’ve covered previously and discussed how this presents challenges to many established businesses.
While this means we’re in a great era of great opportunity, it’s also a time where the slow movers will fall by the wayside. When nearly 50% of businesses don’t have a website and where retailers are ignoring their customers moving online, you can’t help but think many of these enterprises are heralding their own doom.
On a national level this is clear as well. While I’ll leave the commentary on the politicians’ promises to small business at COSBOA to others, it should be pointed out that accelerated depreciation and small business ministers in cabinet are nice, but without an overhaul of the tax system that puts investment in Australian businesses and innovation on the same footing as passive investments like housing and shares then Australia’s investment structure is going to remain unbalanced and much of our business and intellectual potential is going to go untapped.
Australia’s national obsession with property and our dependence on raw commodity exports to finance a private debt habit put us in the same position as the business without a website. We need to be thinking properly about the future and equipping ourselves with the skills to deal with tomorrow’s technologies and the 21st Century world economy.
While in our own lives and businesses we can’t change national policy, we can prepare for the changes by being aware of the trends, experimenting with them and making the financial and management investment in today’s tools that are creating tomorrow’s industries.
Are you prepared to be part of the future?