Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: rants

  • Changes

    Changes

    Last month everything changed.

    Instead of waking up at 5am, lying in bed and checking the overnight news and media releases on my phone, I was able to lie in, consider going to the gym and wandering into work at a sensible hour.

    My two years as Mumbrella’s news editor had come to end.

    Modern digital journalism is not for the lazy or the faint hearted. The tyranny of a daily newsletter means the editors are always hungry for stories and stressing about scooping the opposition.

    The hours up to sending the daily newsletter – around 10.30am for Mumbrella – go in a blur.

    After the newsletter is sent, the duty editor’s challenge is to keep the website up to date while keeping a beady eye out for breaking news, story ideas for coming days, complaints about earlier stories and moderating the often defamatory comment stream.

    Lucky editors have great reporters in their teams. In my case, I had Zoe Samios and Abigail Dawson who both awed and scared me with their work ethic and ferocious competitiveness.

    I was very lucky.

    That luck held in working alongside Josie Tutty, Mumbrella’s deputy editor, whose editorial sense and attention to detail saved me from countless shocking howlers.

    With that team, Mumbrella managed to score its highest ever traffic in 2018.

    Those opportunities, privileges and challenges came at a cost, though with stress an every-present problem for everyone in editorial teams.

    One former editor of an industry website told me they had PTSD after four years of running one site.

    Despite the stresses, those two years had been interesting. I’d learned a lot and I’m eternally grateful to Tim Burrowes for the opportunity to have a deep, if short, dive into an industry which I didn’t really understand along with the privilege of working with some of the smartest and hardest working young journalists in Australia.

    It was also the opportunity to be on the editor’s side of journalism, a challenge I genuinely thought I would never get.

    However when Zoe, Abby and Josie decided to move on for their own individual reasons, it was time for me to move on as well.

    Again, I was lucky. A role at the Australian Computer Society opened up which allows me to get back into tech in a position that gives me the opportunity to help raise the IT industry’s importance to the nation’s and political leaders.

    This has been my passion and was too good an opportunity to pass up.

    Added to the attractions were a much shorter commute, nicer offices, more civilised working hours and far less stress.

    I’ll miss the hipster vibe of Chippendale, even though I was probably the oldest person in the suburb, let alone the office, along with the opportunity of dressing like an extra from Mr Robot.

    Now I’m at Barangaroo (the towers in the featured image) I have to dress like a sensible, middle aged adult.

    The last two years were at times fun, at times dispiriting and at times infuriating. On the latter point, it’s remarkable how sensitive those outwardly hard-nosed agency bosses, journalists and publishers can be when relatively trivial stories upset their fragile egos.

    I won’t miss those panicked phone calls from hysterical publishers, journos and agency bosses who, quite frankly, were old enough to know better. You know who you are.

    But on balance, my time at Mumbrella was a challenging and fun adventure. I wish the new team, as well as Tim and his co-founder Martin Lane, all best in navigating a business reporting on an industry that doesn’t understand its own challenges.

    So I’m thankful for the opportunity, and I’m grateful for the change.

    I hope to see many of you around in the new role.

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  • Malcolm Turnbull and the task of turning around Australia

    Malcolm Turnbull and the task of turning around Australia

    Watching from afar, the reaction to Malcolm Turnbull becoming Australia’s 29th Prime Minister has been remarkable as suddenly the nation seems to have collectively woken up to the fact they are fifteen years into a new century.

    In a few short weeks Australian public servants have started engaging in hackathons and business leaders whose idea of an investment was a property plan disguised as a casino have started raising VC funds.

    The question though for Australia is this too little and too late after three decades of concentrating on property speculation and betting on a never ending Chinese economic miracle?

    New leadership

    In Malcolm Turnbull – who only rejoined the Liberal Party in the early 2000s after careers as a journalist, barrister and banker – Australia for the first time in forty years doesn’t have a party apparatchik as Prime Minister.

    While this wasn’t a problem during the 1970s and 80s under Fraser and Hawke, by the 1990s the shrinking membership base of Australian political parties meant increasingly the ‘talent’ coming up the ranks was lacking perspective outside the narrow factional groupings most of them were beholden to.

    This became brutally apparent with the last three Prime Ministers who were fully hostage to their party factions. In Gillard and Abbott Australia had two party operatives who were no doubt talented in internal party manouvering but hopelessly out of their depths as government leaders – Abbott often seemed to be more interested in settling the battles of 1980s Sydney University student politics than governing the country.

    Describing Prime Minister Rudd would take a thesis in political psychology which is way beyond the scope, or interest, of this writer.

    The consequences of this were an Australian political leadership that was disinterested in the real economy beyond guaranteeing the social compact that property prices would double every decade and ensure their support in the key swing electorates of suburban Australia.

    An insular business community

    For the business community the insular focus of Australian society and its politicians worked well too. As the economy turned inwards in the 1990s under the Keating and Howard governments, so too did Australia’s conglomerates who realised clipping the ticket of a consumer economy was far easier than competing on global markets.

    The best example of this were Australia’s banks which essentially gave up on lending to business unless it was guaranteed by property. This graph from Macrobusiness illustrates just how the nation’s banks focused on property speculation.

    Australian bank lending, courtesy of Macrobusiness.
    Australian bank lending, courtesy of Macrobusiness.

    That focus on housing and consumer spending underpinned on rising property prices distorted the entire business sector and ingrained in the Australian psyche that the key to riches and prosperity was to get a relatively low skilled ‘safe job’ and borrow as much money as possible.

    A good example of this are the regular stories of sweet twenty something wunderkinds who have built multi million dollar property portfolios while working in pizza shops or as administrative assistants.

    Possibly the greatest damage Australia’s property obsession has been on the nation’s youth where the message has been ‘don’t gain a globally competitive skill set or education, just get an entry level job at the real estate agents and buy as much property as the bank will allow you.’

    Turnbull’s challenge

    Like Gough Whitlam, the last Prime Minister not a creature of their party factions, the reform challenge facing Turnbull is immense as 25 years of complacency have left Australia with an uncompetitive economy – as it had for the incoming Labor government of 1972 – with added complexity of having to maintain property prices to keep its economic miracle and social compact ticking over.

    The similarities to Whitlam are also striking in the support Turnbull has from the population. One of the striking things on returning to Australia after spending most of the last three months in the United States has been the sense of relief that the inept horror movie of the Abbott government (Attack of the Clueless Zombies) is over and a realisation that Australia has actually entered the 21st Century and not regressing back into the 19th.

    Agendas for reform

    Entering the 21st Century won’t be easy though for Australia. Completing the reforms of the education sector, started half heartedly by Gillard and then trashed by Abbott in settling the scores of his student politics days, is one major challenge along with reforming tax and social security systems that focuses on asset hoarding and speculation over productive investment.

    Possibly a greater challenge is to wean the Australia business sector off its ticket clipping mentality and rediscover its desire to compete globally. It may well be that encouraging the startup sector makes more sense in rebuilding the economy’s competitiveness as many of the nation’s insular conglomerates and their well fed executives are too used to milking the domestic consumer rather than taking on the world.

    The end of kitchen renovations

    The biggest challenge of all though will be to wean Australians off their property addiction, particularly those under 50 who have neglected their global skills as they focused on renovating their kitchens.

    Given the scope of these reforms, such an agenda will require a clear mandate from an electorate that has been complacently accepting guaranteed good times as long as refugees are turned back, the terrorists among us imprisoned and gay couples prevented from marrying for the last 25 years. Making the argument for change is probably going to be Malcolm Turnbull’s greatest task.

    For Australia the stakes are high. It’s not likely the 21st Century will be as kind to The Lucky Country as the Twentieth was.

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  • Renaming places

    Renaming places

    Madrid have renamed a subway station to Vodafone Sol and plan to rename an entire metro line as part of a corporate sponsorship deal.

    Personally I think renaming places changes the culture of place; something well understood by dictators but possibly not so well by corporate marketing people.

    Do you think this is a good idea?

    Picture of Madrid Sol station courtesy of Zaqarbal through Wikimedia

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  • Technology’s Ayn Rand fallacy

    Technology’s Ayn Rand fallacy

    Adam Curtis in his wonderful BBC series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace discusses how Ayn Rand influenced many in the tech industry.

    Having been accused of being a ‘techno-utopist’ Curtis’ story is a good reminder of the limits of technology and how the future doesn’t usually turn out how we imagine.

    The Ayn Rand influence is worth reflecting on as Rand’s libertarian outloook is shared by many in the technology industry – from the lowest PC technician to the highest flying software mogul.

    Rand’s beliefs are best portrayed in her own words, in a 1958 interview with Mike Wallace she tells of how she believes in “challenging the moral code of altruism.”

    In Rand’s world view it was the duty of each man to achieve their own happiness, self sacrifice and caring for other is weakness.

    That technologists should have those views is curious in that the entire computer industry, the internet and Silicon Valley itself is the result of massive US government spending during World War II and the Cold War.

    An more delicious irony is the centre of Silicon Valley, Stanford University, is itself the result of a bequest by railroad tycoon and former Californian governor Leland Stanford.

    So self-sacrifice, altruism and government spending forms the basis of the entire modern tech industry – something that computer industry’s libertarians ignore, if they are conscious of history at all.

    An even bigger contradiction is the belief that the internet dismantles government and corporate power – one of the lessons of Edward Snowden’s revelations is how comprehensively intelligence agencies monitor online communications.

    When the history of Silicon Valley and the 21st Century tech boom is written, one of the compelling themes will be the contrast between the industry’s beliefs and reality.

    The final chapters of that history will describe how that contrast between reality and beliefs is resolved.

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  • Little Boxes, big data and modern management

    Little Boxes, big data and modern management

    Yesterday’s passing of folk singer Pete Seeger at age 94 is a chance to think about old age, the Twentieth Century and how we use technology might be restricting us from seeing the opportunities around us.

    One of Seeger’s best known hits of the 1960s was Malvina Reynold’s song ‘Little Boxes’ that described middle class conformity in the middle of the Twentieth Century, which had a renaissance in recent years as different contemporary singers did a take of the song for the TV series ‘Weeds’ .

    As the ‘Weeds’ opening credits imply, we are probably more conformist today than our grandparents were in the 1960s.

    In business, that conformity is born out of modern management practices that insist employees be put into their own ‘little boxes’ – if you don’t tick the right boxes then the HR department can’t put you in the right box.

    With big data and social media expanding, increasing computer algorithms are used to decide which box you will fit into. One of the boxes that managers and HR people love ticking is the age box.

    Little Boxes’ writer Malvina Reynolds would never have fitted into one of the modern HR practioners’ little boxes as she only entered the folk music community in her late forties.

    Despite being a late bloomers, Malvina wrote dozens of folk and protest songs through the 1960s and 70s – The Seekers’ Morningtown Ride was another of hits – before passing away at age 77 in 1977.

    Were Malvina Reynolds born 60 years later, she would expect to live to at least Pete Seeger’s age and expect to switch careers several time during her working life.

    Modern age expectancy means the modern workplace’s age discrimination and the box ticking of HR managers is unsustainable; there’s too much talent being wasted while individuals, business and governments can’t afford to fund a society where the average person spends the last thirty years of their life in retirement.

    With technology there’s no reason why a forty year old air pilot can’t retrain to be an accountant or a sixty year old farmer get the skills to become a nurse, the very tools that are being used to keep workers in boxes are the ones that enable them to break out of those boxes.

    Similarly modern technology allows an accountant, farmer or young kid in an obscure developing nation to create a new business or industry that puts the box ticking HR managers in downtown high rises out of work.

    Just as today’s box ticking manager might be confronted by a threats they barely know exist, so too is the business that spends all its time looking at data that confirms its owners’ and executives’ prejudices.
    Life, and data, doesn’t always neatly fit into little boxes.

    Filing box image courtesy of ralev_com through sxc.hu

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