Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: employment

  • Seizing the collective insanity: Secrets of the happy creative

    Seizing the collective insanity: Secrets of the happy creative

    For a moment Yiying Lu seems a bit sheepish about her title of ‘Unicorn Whisperer’ at 500 startups. “It was Dave’s idea,” she smiles referring to the tech accelerator’s founder, Dave McClure.

    Yiying – whose more conventional title at 500 Startups is Creative Director and says her name translates to ‘happy creative’ in English – doesn’t do bashful very well, particularly when discussing the importance of design.

    “If content is king, engagement is queen.” Yiving says when we interviewed her at 500 Startup’s San Francisco office in May, “if you look at the Bay Area community they look at the content rather than the design.”

    Getting magic

    “When you put them together that’s when you get magic,” says the designer who’s best known for creating Twitter’s Fail Whale and now counts companies ranging from Disney and Microsoft through to Mashable and a range of startups as clients for her design practice.

    Captivating people with good design is the key to successful business, Yiying believes. “At the end of the day, it’s the engagement,” she says. “If you remember Google Wave, it was a great concept but it failed and look today – it’s Slack! Google Wave failed because there was no engagement. They didn’t really look at what the user wants.”

    As someone who now spends most of her time in the Bay Area having shifted from her Sydney base several years ago, Yiying laughs while describing her belief that the entire region has been gripped by a mania. “98 percent of startups won’t survive, but everyone in the Bay Area wants to do it. They’re collectively insane,” she says. “Everybody is giving it their best shot.”

    Seizing the collective insanity

    When she arrived in the city, Yiying embraced that collective madness, “When I first came to San Francisco, I immediately thought I was home” and cites the city’s small size but dense community of talented, committed people as the main reason for the region’s success.

    For areas wanting to copy the Bay Area’s success the key lies in getting all of the industry’s players improving their game. “If you want an awesome ecosystem then anyone should work. It shouldn’t be just one part of the ecosystem working,” she states. “Investors should get better as well.”

    One of the many things Yiying is passionate about is not focusing on money and her advice to those intending to make the move is to look beyond the cash, “A dollar exchange is a narrow view,” she states. “We have a lot of real smart people coming here to TechCrunch Disrupt and South by South West thinking about finding investors. That’s not the way to to it.”

    Looking beyond money

    “Don’t think about finding investors, that’s a fear based model.” Is Yiying’s advice, “look at putting things into the community. You can only become really successful if you’re prepared to let other people be successful.”

    For Yiying herself her priorities are a long way from cash. “When I make people happy, that’s more important than money,” she explains. “You can only become really successful if you’re willing to let others be happy and successful.”

    Having made the jump to the Bay Area, she’s philosophical about where home is, having been born in Shanghai and spending much of her life in Sydney, Australia. “Home is where your heart is, but if your heart is big enough you can live anywhere.”

    Seize the opportunity is Yiying’s advice to those looking at making the move, “a lot of things are in your head and things are more difficult if you let them worry you so it’s best to just do it,” she says. “Make it happen. Do stuff. There is no time to hesitate.”

    For the creative worker, it seems ignoring the money and not hesitating is the way to stay happy. For tech business, getting engagement in a noisy world is everything.

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  • A need for better political leaders

    A need for better political leaders

    Brexit, the rise of Trump and the unrelenting negativity of the Australian election campaign underscore the consequences of playing a negative game in politics.

    For thirty years, the pattern in western democracies has been to belittle your opponent and demonise relatively powerless minorities such as welfare recipients, immigrants and refugees.

    The rise of Donald Trump and the Brexit are symptoms of large segments of society losing confidence in their political leaders, something that isn’t surprising after thirty years of constant negativity from the political classes.

    Exacerbating that distrust of the political establishment is the working and lower middle classes wore the brunt of the economic changes of the 1980s and 90s with their work prospects never really recovering. A reality that has not been acknowledged by political leaders.

    As we enter another period of dramatic technological change that’s going to have massive effects on the workforce, we’re going to need better leaders.

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  • Automating the world of pizza making

    Automating the world of pizza making

    First they came for the pizza makers.

    Alex Garden, a former head of production of online game developer Zynga, is the co-founder of Zume. His company is automating pizza making.

    “It’s going to be a long time before machines can do everything people can do, probably not in my lifetime,” he tells Bloomberg.

    Pizza making though isn’t already untouched by automation. A visit to the local Pizza Hut or Domino’s shows how the process is already standardised and partly automated at many fast food chains.

    Like coffee making, the machines are supplanting many skilled tasks and service industry jobs that were once thought to be beyond automation. The nature of work is changing and in turn invalidating many of the assumptions about employment held by policy makers.

    Those with a 1980s view on how service sector industries will be the drivers of employment may have to reconsider their theories.

    Zume and Gaden may have some way until they fully automate the pizza supply chain, but humans will increasingly be a smaller part of it.

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  • Employment and business in an era of ubiquitous robotics

    Employment and business in an era of ubiquitous robotics

    While robots threaten to take our jobs, they also promise to change the agricultural industry. That paradox describes how both the risks and opportunities in our increasingly automated word.

    Brian Halweil, an ag-tech writer, describes how small farmers are using specialist robots to automate their operations. He lays out how the miniaturization of farm machinery will help encourage small, diverse farms.

    The available of cheap, adaptable robots driven by almost ubiquitous and build in artificial intelligence is going to drive automation across most industries.

    Ubiquitous robotics though means we have to rethink employment and social security as the workforce adjusts to new methods of working. Inadvertently former McDonalds chief executive Ed Rensi touched upon this in his somewhat hysterical response to the campaign to increase the minimum wage across the United States.

    Rensi is right to point out that fast food restaurants will replace workers with robots where they can, indeed McDonalds led the way through the 1970s and 80s in introducing production line techniques to the food industry and the company will automate their kitchens and ordering systems regardless of minimum wage levels.

    That relentless automation of existing jobs is why there is now a world wide push to explore the concept of a guaranteed minimum wage. We seem to be at the same point we were almost a century ago where the ravages of the Great Depression meant societies had to create a social security safety net.

    As we saw with the Great Depression, the jobs eventually came back but in a very different form in a much changed economy. We’re almost certainly going to see the same process this century, hopefully without the massive dislocation and misery.

    For businesses and industry, Halwell’s point about much smaller and adaptable robots giving rise to more nimble businesses is almost certainly true. For investors, managers and business owners adapting to that world will be key to avoiding being on the minimum wage themselves.

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  • Switzerland debates giving away money

    Staid, conservative Switzerland is one of the first developed countries to seriously discuss a universal guaranteed income.

    While it appears the proposition will fail, the fact it is being debated indicates an acknowledgement of changing attitudes towards income and social security.

    In many respects governments – particularly in the English speaking world – have ignored the personal social consequences of their economic policies over the last thirty years that have seen working people’s and increasingly the middle classes’ incomes fall and become more precarious.

    Now those costs are being acknowledged in the face of increasing concentration of wealth with politicians and business leaders being forced to confront far less stable and cohesive societies.

    It may be that the discussion of a universal guaranteed income forms the foundations of a new social compact that defined the mid Twentieth Century, increasingly it looks like something is needed in increasingly divided economies.

    While a unified guaranteed income may not be the solution to addressing the economic and social needs of a substantial proportion of a workforce that is under employed and poorly paid, a discussion on what we can do needs to be had. At least the Swiss have started this.

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