This is worth watching, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris and Australian Business Council chief Tony Shepherd spoke on Sunday with Alan Kohler on the ABC’s Inside Business.
At 5.40 Andrew Liveris says Australia is suffering a state of economic rigor mortis – “we’ve lost the ability to innovate” – with no plans and a great complacency. It’s something all Aussies should reflect upon, although don’t expect these blokes to be any help.
One thing former Obama 2012 campaign CTO Harper Reed cannot be accused of is subtlety so his statement at the Sydney CeBIT conference last week that Big Data is Bullshit wasn’t wholly surprising.
Reed has a good point – like all IT industry buzzwords there is a fair degree of hype and BS around Big Data although his referring to it as a storage problem misses the point.
Data storage is a problem largely solved; when we’re talking about Big Data today, we’re talking more about analysing the information and managing the life cycle of an organisation’s data.
Not that these issues are new, the tech industry has been dealing with the challenges of storing, managing and analysing data since computers first appeared. In fact, that’s the reason computers were invented.
An excellent NY Times Bits blog post expands on Harper’s views and rebuts many of the myths and hype around big data.
Most important is the point that big data is not the truth, we can torture those bits and bytes to tell us anything we like.
Claims that Big Data can tell us everything or that it will conquer discrimination and make cities smarter are fanciful. It all depends on how we choose to use the data.
There are downsides with Big Data too — we live in an age where it’s easier to let the algorithm do the work and if the computer says ‘no’, then we can shrug and say “sorry it’s beyond our control.”
Letting the algorithms run our lives is one of many risks, but it doesn’t change the opportunities for businesses, governments and communities Big Data presents. If we can understand our world better, we can do smarter things.
That’s the real opportunity with Big Data and we don’t need the hype to tell us that.
Sitting in on the Storytelling and Business panel of the Sydney Writers’ Festival it occurred to me how well Silicon Valley and the tech startup community have crafted an image for their times.
Author of What’s Mine Is Yours, Rachel Botsman focused on the need of businesses to articulate the organisation’s sense of purpose. While this begs the question of what’s the message if the business’ purpose is to enrich their senior management, it is an a good point.
What is a business’ purpose and how do you articulate it? More so, what is the purpose of your industry?
One group of businesses that has done very well in articulating their message is the Silicon Valley tech community who’ve portrayed themselves – regardless of the reality – as being driven by the altruistic aim of changing the world.
Steve Jobs was one of the leaders of this and, while we shouldn’t overlook his talents, he was a ruthless, driven businessman.
On the panel advertising industry elder Neil Lawrence raised Jobs’ ability to articulate Apple’s mission, telling the story of when the Apple CEO was challenged on the ‘Thing Different’ slogan not being good English, he replied “it’s Californian.”
Apple’s success in branding itself as a visionary, creative company – and Google’s image of ‘Don’t Do Evil’ – show how it’s possible to create an image for an organisation, an industry or even an entire industry.
In reality, Silicon Valley and the tech industry are as full of snake oil salesmen, mercanaries and paper clip counting corporate bureaucrats as any other sector, but legends have been built, and continue to be built, on the myth of selfless entrepreneurs sacrifice all to make the world a better place.
Contrasting Silicon Valley’s success with the Australian experience was interesting, Botsman was scathing about the ability of Aussie managers in telling the story about their businesses finding most of them have lost her by the second slide of their Powerpoint presentation.
We shouldn’t get too hung up though about the nobility of telling a business’ story, Shehan Karunatilaka, former copy writer and author made the major point about business communications “story telling in business is about shifting product.”
He went on to describe the tragic career path of the advertising copy writer who comes into the ad industry believing they are a world changing artist and ends up being burned out.
“you are not an artist – you are a mouthpiece for businesses” said Shehan.
The truth is most of us in business are not artists, some parts of our work may involve creative skills – like copy writing, design or financial engineering – in reality most of us are there to make a decent living, if not a fortune.
Silicon Valley’s mythmaking shows how you can cover the mundane truth with a noble, a constant narrative which has allowed ruthless businessmen like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to portray themselves as selfless visionaries rather than the modern equivalents of John Rockerfeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and other 19th Century robber barons.
This is possibly the greatest message of all in business communications – history is written by the victors.
When you’re winning in your industry, you get to write the story.
As we all get buried under a tsunami of data, the challenge is managing it. The MIT Technology Review this week looks at the rise of the data scientist, a job title unknown a few years ago.
The problem for industry is the skill sets required to become a data scientist are fairly esoteric.
Data scientist has become a popular job title partly because it has helped pull together a growing number of haphazardly defined and overlapping job roles, says Jake Klamka, who runs a six-week fellowship to place PhDs from fields like math, astrophysics, and even neuroscience in such jobs. “We have anyone who works with a lot of data in their research,” Klamka says. “They need to know how to program, but they also have to have strong communications skills and curiosity.”
While Big Data might be to this decade what plastics were to the 1960s, it’s not the only technology change that’s affecting business as the McKinsey Quarterly describes the ten IT trends for the decade ahead.
The thing that really stands out with McKinsey’s predictions is the degree of reskilling the workforce is going to need, today’s workers are going to need an understanding of programming, logic and statistics as much the kids currently at school.
If you’re planning on being in the workforce at the end of this decade right now may be the time to consider getting some of these skills.
Just as businesses will be separated by how they use Big Data, workers may too find those skills divide the winners from the losers.
As the amount of data flooding into our lives explodes, we’ll all need to think about how we can get the skills to manage and understand data.
Some days you wake up and it’s black.
If you are lucky – and sometimes you are really lucky – later in the day you get the opportunity to speak to folk who are really changing the world.
Those are the folk who can light up a dark world.
And sometimes you’re lucky enough to speak to them.