Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: future

  • A soonologist’s view of the future

    A soonologist’s view of the future

    “I think my job title is a little bit misleading,” says Nicola Millard of her role as BT’s Customer Service Futurologist. “Most people would imagine futurologists have a crystal ball that works and maybe talking about twenty to twenty five years out about a future where intelligent robots have taken over the world.”

    “My horizon tends to be a bit shorter,” Nicola explains. “My time tends to start in about three weeks time and tends to extend to five years, so I’m more of an industrial futurologist and CEOs tend not think beyond the next three weeks.” “I guess more of a ‘soonologist’ than a futurologist.”

    Nicola was talking to the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel at BT’s London Demonstration centre where the time frame is somewhat more than the next three weeks as the company shows off the technology and product lines it believes are going to change the communication industry.

    For BT and Nicola, much of the near future is focused in how consumer and workplace behaviour is being changed by IT and communications technology.

    Nicola sees an interesting relationship between technology and people – technology can radically change peoples’ behaviour but it also can amplify existing behaviours. “It can certainly influence the way we work, rest and play, in the ways we approach the office and how we consume,” says Nicola.

    “Behaviour changes are really fascinating when we give people people access to technologies that give them more choice and more information than ever before. It untethers us. All of these thing present opportunities to change that way we do stuff.”

    The untethered office

    Technology has also untethered the office, says Nicola. “In the old days we had to go to the office at nine o’clock in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon. We didn’t have any other options – we had a desk, we had big technology and we had masses of paper.”

    “That’s all changed.” Workplaces have always struggled with collaboration and Nicola sees the open plan office as being a 1970s attempt to get workers to talk and work with each other rather than hiding behind closed doors. “By forcing people into open plan we hoped that by breathing the same air they would start to collaborate.”

    “Now we collaborate with people that aren’t necessarily in the same place as us. The office itself has become a collaboration tool,” Nicola says. “We’re seeing the evolution of the office.”

    Today’s technology tools and remote working have changed the role of the workplace with the office becoming a place for workers to collaborate and work together, however that nature of work has changed.

    Working beyond the office

    With improved connectivity the home office and mobile workers have come into their own with BT having around ten percent of their workforce operating from their residences and the company finds they achieve around a twenty percent improvement in productivity from those staff.

    However home working isn’t for everyone. “I’m a terrible home worker,” Nicola says. “I tend to go mad so if I want to collaborate I go to the office but I want to work quietly I go to the coffice’, which is generally a third place outside the office or home.”

    “There’s only four things I need to work; good coffee, good cake – these first two are non-negotiable –  good connectivity and then I need company. Not necessary office type company but just a buzz.“

    The change to retailing

    Today’s buzz extends to shopping, the shops are fuller on a Saturday afternoon than they have ever been before. The showrooming phenomenon – where customers use their smartphones to check prices and proudcts while in the shop – allows retailers to enhance their sales strategy as the same available to shoppers can also be used by sales assistants.

    “Shopping is sometimes a contact sport,” Nicola observes. “the fact we are comparing and contrasting, the fact we are challenging the physical shop. Waving our mobile phone on the shopfloor.” “Retailers for a long time resisted showrooming, they split their online and physical spaces. We’re now seeing those physical lines blurring.”

    Emerging trends

    Nicola sees the biggest challenge facing business in the near future being agility – as cloud services expand, it’s easier for companies to scale which places pressure on many incumbent businesses.

    Big Data also presents opportunities, “there’s always been big data, we’ve always had too much data, the analytics tools have changed.” For great challenge though for business is change and this is what will focus executive attention in the near future. “Businesses tend to be built to last rather than for change.”

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  • Globalisation with Chinese Characteristics

    Globalisation with Chinese Characteristics

    “eBay is a shark in ocean, Alibaba is a crocodile in the Yangtze” film maker Porter Erisman quotes the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, in comparing the two online trading sites.

    In promoting his film Crocodile in the Yangtze, Porter spoke to Decoding the New Economy about the rise of the global Chinese internet giant.

    A key part in Alibaba’s success is taking on eBay on it’s own turf, “if you’re David fighting Goliath you can’t play by the big guy’s rules,” Porter says.

    This is exactly what the Chinese company did when eBay entered their market and today Alibaba and it’s subsidiary Taobao have sales exceeding eBay’s and Amazon’s.

    “Back in about 2003 Jack Ma came to me and told me about a secret project to overtake eBay,” Porter says. “When we looked at them they looked like a Goliath, they’d never really been beaten in a market they’d entered first and they had a huge war chest with a $150 million committed to the China market.”

    It turned out that eBay weren’t as powerful as they appeared, something other entrepreneurs have discovered when giants like Google have entered their markets.

    The Chinese Leapfrog

    Like many rapidly developing countries, China is leapfrogging various stages of development that Western economies went through with the retail industry and e-commerce being two examples.

    “Some people say cellphones will leapfrog landlines, actually the same is due with entire systems,” says Porter. “In China coming from so many years of a command economy there wasn’t a very developed retail culture or even a consumer culture.”

    “Taobao came along at a time when all of that was still in the early phases of development and the company basically leapfrogged that whole phase of building out shopfronts and building logistics.”

    “E-commerce in China is revolutionary while in the US, or Australia, it is evolutionary.” Porter says.

    Porter quotes Jack Ma as saying “e-commerce in the US would be a dessert, in China it is the main course.”

    China’s Global Challenge

    As companies like Lenovo computers, Hauwei telecommunications or Haier whitegoods have discovered, Chinese businesses face challenges when expanding overseas. Porter sees this as a matter of time and scale.

    “Like Japan in the 1970s and 80s there’s a whole wave of companies that have started going global. China’s such a big market that there’s a lot of companies that get big and develop scale before going international.”

    “I’d say the biggest challenge in the beginning is cultural,” states Porter. “China’s at a disadvantage because information and the media are so controlled that’s sometimes a rude awaking when a company goes global like a Hauwei and then faces a bunch of political issues it doesn’t understand.”

    “One of the reasons I made the film,” Porter says. “I wanted entrepreneurs in China to see it and understand these are the issues Alibaba faced when they went global and hopefully you can learn from some of those successes and mistakes.”

    Going to China

    Porter’s advice to westerners going into China is to shut up, listen and learn, “don’t assume that just because things are done a certain way in the US or Australia that it’s superior.” The country’s culture and ways of doing business are different to those of North America, Europe or Australia.

    “If you look at the way traffic moves in Shanghai it looks crazy. If you drove like that in Sydney it would be a disaster but there’s just different ways of through traffic, getting point A to B.”

    “It’s better not to judge, but just step back.”

    Regardless of our judgements, China’s move up the value chain means we will see more PRC founded companies going global.

    Over the next decade we’re going to see the globalised economy start to take on some recognisably Chinese characteristics.

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  • Rebuilding American Manufacturing

    Rebuilding American Manufacturing

    US manufacturing is undergoing a resurgence, just without the jobs reports the New York Times in its story on the textile mills of South Carolina.

    The decline and recovery of US manufacturing is a story of our times – the industrialisation of Asia, trade treaties such as NAFTA and China’s joining the World Trade Organisation all saw Western producers move their operations overseas.

    A weakness with that business model are the extended global supply chains as goods spend months on ships following long manufacturing and design lead times, the exact opposite of what modern consumers are looking for.

    Coupled with domestic manufacturers’ increased investment in automated systems which makes labour costs a smaller factor and the sums start adding up for making things in the United States.

    Unfortunately for the workforce, those automated plants don’t require anywhere near the staff older factories employed and the skills required in today’s mills are substantially different from those needed in those of earlier times.

    Most industries are encountering the same change and new technologies make the modern factory very different to that of a few decades ago.

    The jobs aren’t going to come back in the numbers that were once employed, as the New York Times story illustrates with the decline in the working population.

    US-employment-changes-by-industry

    Despite the recovery in US manufacturing, today’s industry is very different to what it was last century, something that’s missed by those advocating a return 1950s style government policies to protect jobs in sectors like car manufacturing.

    Even if they are successful in rejuvenating local car factories, cotton mills or coal mines, the days of these plants employing tens of thousands of grateful cloth capped workers are over.

    Those politicians whose ideology is based on the old model, or businesspeople who want to work in the old ways, are going to find the modern economy very difficult and challenging.

    Image of cotton threads on a weaving machine through jbeeby on sxc.hu

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  • Evolving cities and Silicon Valley’s private buses

    Evolving cities and Silicon Valley’s private buses

    One of the phenomenon of Silicon Valley’s development has been the rise of the ‘Google Buses’ – the private services run by the big tech companies to shuttle their workers between home and their workplaces.

    The Bay Area’s private bus shuttles are a real time illustration of how regions evolve around industries and economies and how cities and communities are in many ways dynamic, living creatures themselves.

    An effect of the Google Buses is that San Fransisco is experiencing a ‘reverse sprawl’ notes Eric Rodenbeck in his Wired Magazine story Mapping Silicon Valley’s Gentrification Problem Through Corporate Shuttle Routes

    It’s about more than gentrification as we’ve experienced it thus far: It’s about an entirely reconfigured relationship between density and sprawl, and it’s going to need new maps to help us navigate this landscape.

    Driving those buses is instructive as well and Buzzfeed has an interview with an anonymous driver employed by one of the bus companies.  The driver’s tale shows the scale of the phenomenon.

    This bus holds 52 people and that is 52 cars that are not on the road in one trip, and we have 70 routes in our system. That’s thousands of cars everyday.

    Driving cars is fundamental to the American – and Australian – lifestyle. The modern American city developed around the motor car and that mobility is the defining feature of the Twentieth Century.

    So maybe the Google Buses are an early part of the redefinition of our cities to meet the the needs of the 21st Century and cars are not the driving factor.

    In this vein, Jarrett’s Walker’s Human Transit blog teases out some of the issues behind these developments.

    Finally, this joke is on the lords of Silicon Valley itself.  The industry that liberated millions from the tyranny of distance remains mired in its own desperately car-dependent world of corporate campuses, where being too-far-to-walk from a Caltrain station — and from anything else of interest — is almost a point of pride.  But meanwhile, top employees are rejecting the lifestyle that that location implies.

    While I don’t agree with Jarrett’s proposition that the geeks riding these buses want to mingle with strangers given the locations they live – I’d argue they’re attracted to those locations because their peers live there and downtown amenity to good restaurants and bars – he raises a very good point about the mismatch between where the workers and the jobs are.

    Jarrett’s point touches on land use zoning and its effects on the evolution of cities. An excellent piece by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic tracked Silicon Valley’s iconic techonolgy sites, most of which have been demolished due to the pollution partly caused by zoning requirements for underground tanks.

    The issue of zoning is also raised by Rodenbeck who points out that zoning issues with carparks are what has made employee buses more attractive to the giant tech employees.

    Zoning different land uses makes sense on one level as no-one wants to live next door to a tannery, heavy metal waste dump or quarry, but there’s a risk with fixed ideas that our cities will become less responsive to economic developments, particularly in an era when people don’t want to, or can’t, dive across town to get to their jobs.

    What Silicon Valley’s corporate buses really show is that our cities are evolving around the needs of today, not yesterday. It’s something governments, businesses, investors and communities should keep in mind.

    Image of Google shuttle bus stop from David Orban through Flickr

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  • Making way for Gen Y in the executive suite

    Making way for Gen Y in the executive suite

    One of the great challenges in today’s workplace is how organisations will manage Generation Y entering the boardroom.

    Lazy, unfocused and high maintenance are some of the descriptions used by boomers when talking about younger workers, but how much truth is there really in that and how do organisations plan for this generation to take leadership positions?

    As part of the recent Sydney EMC Forum, I had a chance to discuss the challenges of managing Gen Ys with social researcher Micheal McQueen and EMC Australia Managing Director Alister Dias.

    Like many tech companies, EMC has a younger workforce with around 25% of staff being GenY and Diaz sees global thinking and a fresh, bright approach as some of the advantages younger people bring to the workplace.

    “We want to see this grow,” says Diaz. “There’s two reasons for this; one is that energy level, quick learning and adaption to the new world but the other is the shortage of general talent in the market.”

    That shortage is an early part of the global race for talent, with Diaz seeing the priority for EMC and other tech companies to develop home grown skills rather than importing skilled workers.

    Offering a career

    For Diaz’s, one of the great challenges in this race for talent is retaining skilled and motivated Gen Y and Gen X through offering more diverse career options.

    Career progression is one of the big problems facing both GenY and X workers as, in McQueen’s view, the baby boomers have no intention of going anywhere as many define themselves by their work so they don’t plan to retire.

    “For Baby Boomers their work ethic is their identity,” says McQueen. “Stepping back from a leadership position, or any position in general is a big deal.”

    Not working huge hours which is a key difference between baby boomers and their GenY kids and grandkids who don’t wear long hours as a badge of honour.

    Language barriers

    An area that concerns McQueen is a lack of vocabulary as text and social media messaging has eroded the teenagers vocabulary with average 14 year old today only knowing 10,000 words as opposed to 25,000 in 1950.

    “It started off as text speak and it’s gone beyond that now,” says McQueen. “If you have a Gen Y person operating with older workers there’s often a disconnect there.”

    The effects of electronic gaming and communications also has created a climate where today’s teenagers have less empathy than those of twenty years ago — McQueen cites a University of Michigan study — this has consequences in fields as disparate as sales, technical support and nursing.

    Organisations are going to have to learn to deal with these differences.  “In our own organisation we talk about the need to adapt to Gen Y,” says EMC’s Diaz. “Personally I think we have to meet them half-way.”

    “We’ve found it difficult to get talent. You really have to do your homework on it.”

    Part of EMC’s problem in finding skilled Gen Y workers has been the collapse in university IT course enrolments along with the broader turning away from STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmetics — related degrees.

    Diaz is quite positive on this and sees the pendulum swinging back towards more technical degrees and diplomas with more younger people taking on STEM subjects. At present though enrolment statistics aren’t bearing this out.

    Finding those skilled workers is going to be one of the great challenges for business in planning for the rise of GenY workers, one of the greater tasks though might be getting the baby boomers out of the corner office.

    Image of a younger worker courtesy of ZoofyTheJi through sxc.hu

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