Tag: economy

A consumerist utopia – where does Australia go in the 21st Century?

A raft of reports and media stories highlight the threats to Australia’s continued prosperity but the nation’s business leaders aren’t listening.

Today has been a big day for Australian navel-gazing with a range of reports released on the country’s prospects on in the Twenty-First Century.

One of the reports was the Joined Up Innovation survey commissioned by Microsoft and written by PwC, I wrote a story for Business Spectator on the results.

While the Microsoft report focused on the small business sector, Startup Aus released their Crossroads report that warns Australia is falling behind the rest of the world. Smart Company’s Rose Powell has a more detailed summary of the report.

Alan Noble, head of Google’s Australian Engineering operations warns, “we still lag behind many other nations, with one of the lowest rates of startup formation in the world, and one of the lowest rates of venture capital investment.”

“If we fail to address this, we risk forfeiting over $100 billion in economic benefits from emerging tech companies, and an irreversible decline in Australia’s competitiveness.”

Looking in from the outside

Particularly notable from the two surveys is that the discussion about Australia’s tech competitiveness is the debate is being led by two local employees of US Multinationals.

For a local perspective, the Macrobusiness blog joins the day’s chorus with a long examination of the risks to Australia’s living standards by being too far down the global value chain.

In the Business Spectator piece, I compared some of PwC’s recommendations with the efforts of the UK and Singapore to rebuild their manufacturing industries.

Australia’s collective decision

For Australia, it’s probably way too late to worry about most of the manufacturing industry as in the 1980s the country made a collective – and almost unanimous – decision to shift the economy to being resources and high value added services.

The high value added services haven’t eventuated; mainly because the internet has shifted the global dynamics towards lower cost centres and partly because Australian business leaders decided it was easier to exploit their domestic market power rather than compete globally.

Mining proved to be a better bet, more by the accident of China’s turn of the century boom rather than any deliberate policy, however the industry employs less than ten percent of the workforce and the vast majority of Australians living in the South East corner of the country have little contact with the resources industry.

A consumerist utopia

For most Australians, employment and prosperity relies upon a growing population driving city GDP growth with domestic wealth supported by buoyant property prices. Australia truly is the consumerist utopia.

As a result of a booming, seemingly unstoppable, housing market and an expending resources sector, Australia’s exchange rate has soared while the nation’s productivity has slumped.

Making matters worse is that outside of mining and a few agricultural markets most of Australia’s industry is grossly expensive by global standards and suffering from chronic under-investment.

An unsustainable economic model

That model is not sustainable, it will take one shock to Australia’s housing market to see the good burghers of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne impoverished so the nation’s continued prosperity requires something to drive the economy beyond low interest rates and Chinese commodity purchases.

Whether Australia’s business and political leadership are capable of hearing and reacting to these reports remains to be seen, but they will have no excuse to say they weren’t warned.

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Burying capitalism with the Internet of Things

Burying capitalism with the Internet of Things

A strange piece by author Jeremy Rivkin in The Guardian argues the internet of things will facilitate an economic shift from markets to collaborative commons which threatens capitalism as marginal costs fall to zero.

Rivkin argues that the rise of the ‘prosumer’, who contributes content and adds economic value for free, is undermining the basic tenants of capitalism.

A telling blow to capitalism in Rivkin’s eyes is the abundant data generated by the Internet of Things;

Siemens, IBM, Cisco and General Electric are among the firms erecting an internet-of-things infrastructure, connecting the world in a global neural network.

There are now 11 billion sensors connecting devices to the internet of things. By 2030, 100 trillion sensors will be attached to natural resources, production lines, warehouses, transportation networks, the electricity grid and recycling flows, and be implanted in homes, offices, stores, and vehicles – continually sending big data to the communications, energy and logistics internets.

Anyone will be able to access the internet of things and use big data and analytics to develop predictive algorithms that can speed efficiency, dramatically increase productivity and lower the marginal cost of producing and distributing physical things, including energy, products and services, to near zero, just as we now do with information goods.

That Rivkin mentions large corporations like Cisco, Siemens, IBM and General Electric illustrates the flaw in his idea — these companies are profiting from the Internet of Things and the data it’s generating.

Rather than being killed, capitalism is evolving to the new marketplaces.

Nowhere is this truer than in the sharing economy where the new lords of the digital manor are  profiting from the work and free content generated by unpaid ‘prosumers’.

How long the free business models can survive is open to question, in many respects the age of the digital sharecropper is a transition phase that isn’t sustainable and it’s more likely we’re seeing a move to an economy where information is far more abundant than it was previously.

Such a change is not unprecedented, far more basic human needs are food and energy. In Western economies, we have been living in a time of unimagined abundance of both for the last century.

In subsistence economies, food and the energy to grow or hunt it is scarce and its why living standards are low and life expectancies are short. Agricultural society start to solve the food scarcity problem and industrial societies automate farming and increase living standards through abundant energy.

During the pre-industrial era, the basic unit of energy was the horse – hence the term horsepower – and it was rare to have more than four horses driving a coach or piece of machinery.

Today, we have locomotive engines that provide 6,000 horsepower, a basic farm tractor delivers around 100 HP  and a typical family car around 200. We live in an age of abundant energy and our living standards reflect it.

We’re moving into an era of abundant information that will change our societies in a similar way to the age of abundant power has changed economies over the past 300 years.

Open source, the sharing economy and the internet of things will all change aspects of our economies and society but people will still be making a living one way or another so they can buy a meal and pay their rent.

The age of abundant information means massive change to the way we work, but it no more means the end of capitalism than the steam engine did.

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Sense-T and the Tasmanian economy

Tasmania’s Sense-T is a brave project to reinvigorate the state’s economy through the internet of things

On Networked Globe I have an interview with Sense-T’s director, Ros Harvey.

Sense-T is a project to connect the entire state to the internet of things using a sensor network monitoring soil, water and other environmental conditions to help the state’s agriculture and business communities.

Harvey’s ambitions for the project are high where she sees Sense-T even having the potential of rekindling the interest of the state’s students in science and technology courses.

It’s a brave project that means a lot to a state that’s doing it tough.

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Contemplating a jobless future

Few industries are going to be untouched by the disruptions of the next decade and that’s going to present challenges for all of us.

Last October, ahead of the company’s Orlando Symposium, Gartner Research Director Kenneth Brant released a paper looking at the effects of technology on the workplace.

“Most business and thought leaders underestimate the potential of smart machines to take over millions of middle-class jobs in the coming decades,” Brant wrote. “Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market’s ability to create valuable new ones.”

Brant’s view about middle class jobs is a sobering thought, many of the corporate ‘knowledge worker’ positions can be easily replaced by computers to make the decisions now being made by armies of mid level managers, bean counters and clerks.

Indeed the whole concept of ‘knowledge worker’ that was fashionable in the 1980s and early 90s in describing the post-industrial workforce of nations like the US, Britain and Australia is undermined by the rise of powerful computers and well crafted algorithms to do the jobs unemployed steel workers and seamstresses were going to do.

Twenty years later and the ‘knowledge workers’ had morphed into the ‘creative class’ and it appears the computers are coming for them, too.

Personally, I subscribe to the view in the medium to long term new jobs in new industries will evolve – a view shared by economists like GE’s chief economist, Marco Annunziata.

Over the next decade however there’s no doubt we’ll be seeing great disruption to established industries and the hostility to Google buses in San Francisco may be just an early taste of a greater antagonism to the technology community in general.

For managers, the problems are more complex; while their own departments, corporate power bases and even their own jobs are at risk, they are going to have to find ways to incorporate these changes into their own business. Gartner warns CIOs in its briefing paper;

The impact will be such that firms that have not begun to develop programs and policies for a “digital workforce” by 2015 will not perform in the top quartile for productivity and operating profit margin improvement in their industry by 2020. As a direct result, the careers of CIOs who do not begin to champion digital workforce initiatives with their peers in the C-suite by 2015 will be cut short by 2023.

Few industries are going to be untouched by the disruptions of the next decade and the resultant job losses are going to present challenges for all of us.

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The taxing business of options

The Australian attempt to reform the tax system is an interesting exercise in international comparisons.

I’m burning the midnight oil tonight pulling together a story for Business Spectator on reforming Australia’s tax treatment of employee option schemes.

This is a fraught subject as Australia bucked the global trend in 2009 after it became obvious the corporate sector was abusing the existing tax rules that were largely in line with most OECD nations.

In a clumsy, poorly thought out reaction – which is sadly the mark of modern Australian governments of all shades –  the then Rudd Labor government radically changed the rules governing employee schemes that made it difficult for any business to offer stock to their staff.

Last week I spoke to Sydney business intelligence company Encompass and after the video the founders told me about the importance of their share scheme, it illustrated exactly the problem facing Australian startups.

Five years on and it’s apparent the strict rules are working against Australian business and various industry associations, accounting groups and startups are lobbying for reform.

One of the lobbying initiatives is Deloitte’s Retaining Talent project that has some fairly modest proposals in bringing fairer rules back for smaller and younger startups.

The story’s particularly interesting for me in that I’m bringing together a number of previous posts citing how other countries and cities like San Francisco and the United Kingdom have changed their rules on option schemes.

For Australia, the closure of the country’s car manufacturing industry and the struggles of the agricultural sector are bringing home to voters and the government just how seriously the country squandered the massive mining boom of the last decade.

While reforming startup option schemes is a useful start, it’s hard not to think it’s way too little and way too late for the country to begin planning for the post mining boom economy.

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Revisiting the Lipstick effect

How real is the lipstick effect? The Irish experience says it’s complex.

During the recession much was made about the ‘lipstick effect’ – the idea some businesses and products would survive because they’re little luxuries that cash strapped consumers will spend on while scrimping and saving in other areas.

Some of those areas are ladies’ cosmetics (lipstick), chocolate, movies and coffee shops. All of them offering small pleasures for a few dollars.

It’s a theory I’ve always been sceptical of and an episode of the BBC’s World Of Business where Peter Day travels to Cork to see how Ireland’s second city is recovering from the great recession illustrates the reality is a lot more complex than the theory suggests.

“We really struggled to keep alive,” Claire Nash of Nash 19 restaurant says in her interview with Day on her business experience during the recession.

“My turnover just absolutely took a spiralling tumble and it wasn’t that the customer weren’t coming in – those that had lost their jobs weren’t coming in – but those that hadn’t lost their jobs were really hurting and they were very careful with their spend.

“So they started using us as a treat, which was a model I never wanted to enter into but we weathered the storm.”

It can be argued that Claire survived because of the lipstick effect – she kept enough customers to survive – but it was tough and had she taken out the loans offered to her during the boom it’s unlikely her restaurant would have survived.

The key point though is the lipstick effect turned out to be a very different, and much less lucrative business, for Claire and other businesses in Cork.

So assuming a business will remained unscathed because of the assumption the lipstick effect is a big risk, if that’s the plan then Sequoia Capital’s infamous Powerpoint of Doom comes to mind.

While the presentation was aimed at tech companies and investors, it’s a good overview of how the Global Financial Crisis happened and Slide 49 – Survival of the Quickest – is probably the best lesson for any business: Act fast to adapt.

The lipstick theory is a nice way to justify unsustainable business models, particularly those that rely on consumer spending, in the face of a recession but the assumption spending will remain the same as customers will seek little luxuries is deeply flawed.

A business that doesn’t respond quickly to changed circumstances and reduced spending is one that might not survive a downturn.

Peter Day’s Cork story is a good listen on how Ireland and Cork have weathered the global financial crisis, the main question from the piece is how much have the Irish and the rest of the world learned from the mistakes of the boom years at the start of the 21st Century.

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Digital vagrancy

The term digital vagrant might be appropriate for the businesses and people left behind in a connected world.

One of the joys of writing on and analysing trends IT industry trends is the never ending source of buzzwords and phrases that vendors invent.

Today is a good day with a release from security software vendor AVG coining the term ‘Digital Vagrant’.

Underlying the idea of digital vagrancy is an abandoned underclass who, overwhelmed by technology, are ignored and neglected in a connected society. As the AVG media release describes;

Users who are left behind to wander around in an online world that largely ignores them are nothing more than the digital equivalent of vagrants – people who are left to cope in a world that has become too overwhelming.

‘Digital Vagrant’ joins other wonderful ‘digital’ labels; digital immigrant, digital native and digital sharecropper come to mind.

It’s tempting to think that digital vagrancy is what eventually happens to poor exploited digital sharecroppers – those who’ve donated their free labour to help the likes of Mia Freedman, Chris Anderson and Ariana Huffington to build their media empires.

Should that be the case, there’s going to be many digital vagrants.

On more serious note, AVG does have a point in that both individuals and businesses that scorn technology risk being left behind in society that’s becoming increasingly connected.

Society and business are going through a change similar to that of a century ago where the motor car, trucks and tractors radically changed industries and the economy.

Those farmers and businesspeople who stuck with horse drawn equipment slowly became irrelevant and went broke.

A similar process is happening now as a new wave of technology is changing business and society.

The question for all of us is do we want to be left behind in a connected society?

Beggar image courtesy of apujol through sxc.hu

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