Franz Kafka once wrote, “Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” I’ve used that line before in a post about the audacity of youth, because I feel that fresh perspective is enormously important.
Our young people bring enormous value because they apply new contexts to old problems. It’s no accident that Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and James Watson made their major discoveries before the age of thirty.
However, this new generation has a problem. They are coming of age at a time in history when great technological forces are converging to democratize the use of complex and powerful machines, which is giving a false sense of validation to their youthful exuberance and making it easy for them to ignore hard truths. Here are some of them, unvarnished.
Marketing, at it’s best, is about the future. Unfortunately, we spend most of our time stuck in the past. We research what already happened and extrapolate forward to produce a plan. It’s not that we’re lazy, we simply know a whole lot more about the past than the present or the future.
We already know that marketing is becoming more social, local and mobile, just as we know that big data and new interfaces such as touch, voice and gesture are becoming increasingly more important. What comes next?
One key to answering that question is to define the problem. We live in a digital age, but continue to manage in analog terms. There is a strong need to integrate those two realities and so we can expect that the next wave of innovation will close the distance between the virtual and the physical world. Here are 3 things that are coming in a few years.
In the last few days leading up to the recent presidential election, long time political observers such as Peggy Noonan, Steve Forbes and Dick Morris were predicting that Mitt Romney would win in a landslide.
They were wrong, of course. Horribly, drastically, overwhelmingly wrong about everything from the shape of the electorate, voter turnout and, of course, the direction of the result in the face of massive, publicly available evidence that showed Barack Obama as the clear favorite.
InTrade markets gave 7 to 3 odds that the President would prevail. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog (which analyzes polling data) calculated a 91% chance of an Obama win. How could they get it so wrong? It turns out that the answer lies not so much in partisan politics, but in the inherent flaws of our basic human decision making machinery.
For years now, everybody has been talking about disruptive innovation. It’s not enough just to play the game anymore, the aim is alter it completely.
That’s a lot easier said than done. If you are a thriving business, you will have to change a lot of what made you that way. There will be no guarantee of success and the road forward will be uncertain, with no previous model to emulate. It’s not just products of process that will have to change, but the entire business model.
Where do you start? In a brilliant HBR post Whitney Johnson, who runs a fund dedicated to disruptive investment, makes the salient point that we must first disrupt ourselves. To create a disruptive future, we must often walk away from a comfortable present. I agree and have some ideas about how firms can go about it.
We like to think that the value of an idea is unlimited. From Watt’s steam engine to Darwin’s natural selection to Einstein’s relativity, ideas have changed the world.
But that’s not the whole story. Watt, Darwin and even, to a certain extent, Einstein came from a privileged class and that matters. Most ideas go unnoticed because they require investment capital and distribution to make their way into the physical world. That’s beginning to change.
While your ability to start a successful business still depends greatly on the place and situation of your birth (if you live in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, you’re probably out of luck), many of the barriers to getting ideas to market are disappearing. We’re in the midst of a new industrial revolution, which is cleaner, more efficient and more inclusive.
Last February, when I wrote that Windows 8 will put Microsoft back on top, a lot of people thought I was nuts. Nobody could touch Apple and Google’s Android had too big of a head start. Microsoft was toast and anybody who denied it was just ignoring the obvious.
Well, Microsoft launched Windows 8 last week to mixed reviews. None were glowing, a few were negative and almost all expressed some kind of reservation. So how do I feel now? I’m doubling down.
Given that Windows 8 is an almost completely reimagined product, from the interface to the basic technology, the reviews are surprisingly positive. Combined with the rest of Microsoft’s assets, is strategically brilliant (and amazingly interoperable). From a business perspective this is one of the most important products in history. Here’s why:
Our data driven society requires hard numbers. We take those numbers, plug them into models to create solid plans and execute those plans with ruthless efficiency. If we do it right, things are supposed to go well.
The problem is that our numbers are fantasies, our models are broken and our budgets are farces. We all know it, try to make allowances for it and the game goes on because, quite frankly, it is the only one we know how to play.
Somewhere along the way we became enamoured by certainty and obsessed with precision in the hopes that, if we only built better tools, we could conquer complexity. That effort has failed miserably. There is, however, another way that was abandoned long ago. It has a rich history of solving the thorniest, most uncertain problems. It’s time we returned to it.
Every manager would like to be Steve Jobs, but very few ever even come close. Many seek out advice, read case studies and go to workshops to help guide them. Yet still, very few companies are able to innovate effectively. Why is that?
Surely there is no lack of desire. Ask any top executive and he will tell you that innovation is a top priority. It’s not a lack of commitment either. Businesses invest billions in R&D every year, yet all to little avail.
One big reason is a the lack of innovative culture, especially at successful operational firms. Competing for the future is different than competing for the present. If you try to innovate the same way you operate, you probably won’t get very far. To break the cycle, you’ll need to build a culture that promotes innovation as well as operational excellence.
The mathematician G.H. Hardy once wrote that “for any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift.” As someone who intimately knew some of the greatest minds in history, he would know.
What he meant was there many things other than intelligence that are required to succeed at an intellectual task. Persistence and luck surely play a role and, as Einstein famously noted, imagination is supremely important.
Nevertheless, intelligence is something we admire, both in ourselves and in others. It has been considered for most of history, to be a uniquely human virtue. So it is unnerving, even terrifying, when we encounter other types of intelligence. From crowdsourcing to computers performing human tasks, we’re going to have to learn to make our peace.
Shakespeare once wrote that life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Digital marketing sometimes seems a lot like that.
It certainly has its share of idiots, no lack of sound and fury and, while not exactly signifying nothing, does have an unhealthy tendency toward hyperbole. Technology changes much more quickly than people’s habits do.
In reality, consumers largely buy the same products they always did and use them in the same way. We still eat food off of plates, put socks on our feet and get behind the wheels of cars. Just because technology is evolving is no reason to abandon common sense and, perhaps not surprisingly, the clearest path to good strategy is still asking good questions.
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