Global terrorism. Financial Crises. Digital technology. We are truly at the fulcrum of history. Comfortable old notions are no longer warm blankets, but shackles in an era that demands agile maneuvers.
It seems as if we have unleashed powers that are beyond us, that we have opened the genie’s bottle and maybe we shouldn’t have.
There’s some truth to that. However, what is often missed is that the forces that are driving our volatile world were let loose long ago. In fact, they were always there, but we were led to think they weren’t by notions of great men who, for all their brilliance, turned out to have been mistaken in some important ways. In the end, we’re better off for it.
Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about content strategy in marketing circles. I must confess, I don’t really know what that is.
Possibly, that’s because I’ve spent a large portion of my career in publishing, shared a lot of time with other publishers, gone to conferences, the Stanford Publishing Course and never, in all that time, heard of such an animal.
Nevertheless, marketers seem to be quite excited by the idea. Content is becoming a hot area and so would seem to require a strategy. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I don’t know what a content strategy is. However, after being involved in dozens of successful media launches over my career I do know how to publish. Here’s how it’s done.
Innovation seems magical. Like Steve Jobs in a black turtleneck showing off his new wonder or the simple fact that we carry devices in our pockets more powerful than the computers that put a man on the moon.
So it’s not surprising that the path to innovation is shrouded in mystery, something only to be undertaken by those dazzling intelligence, incredible daring and a certain flair.
However, in truth, there is an astonishing amount of agreement among experts on how to go about it. From scientists, to economists to entrepreneurs, the same themes repeat themselves with almost metronomic regularity. So while the endpoint of any innovative process is impossible to determine, the path to innovation is well paved.
What country has more people on the Internet than the United States has citizens? Ding ding ding! China.
China has over 450 million Internet users and we’re now witnessing Chinese digital culture turn into a precursor of things to come.
If Japanese mobile culture set the future vision for mobile in the ‘00s, Chinese digital culture looks set to become a similar bellwether in global digital culture for the next decade. In simple terms, with so many people participating online, we can look for emerging behaviors that may bubble up in the West as well.
“Prediction is difficult, especially about the future,” is a quote attributed to people as diverse as the physicist Niels Bohr and baseball legend Yogi Berra.
It is, of course, a mangling of the English language, but resonates because it’s true. Prognostication is a tricky business, usually best left to carnival hucksters and high priced Wall Street analysts.
However, despite the pitfalls, we can make some reasonable assumptions. Some important digital trends have highly foreseeable outcomes. We have a good idea about what limits will be hit, problems that will follow and some concrete notions about how they will be solved. The future exists, it just hasn’t arrived yet.
Okay, it’s your big day. Everything is on the line. All of your blood and sweat has led up to this point and now it really matters. What happens next is up to you.
And, if you’re like most people, you will choke. Relatively few can perform under pressure. Even highly skilled people, when under stress, will see their performance suffer.
Why is that and what can we do about it? Paul Sullivan, in his book Clutch, offers some guidance. As a former competitive athlete as well as from a career in business, I found it extremely insightful and that it rang true. Therefore, I won’t even try to masquerade the ideas as my own, but will simply pass them on. read more…
While a generation ago the focus among economists was shareholder value, it’s become clear that’s not enough. Businesses have a variety of stakeholders, including employees, customers and society at large. While it may be expedient to overlook such things in the short-term, companies that do will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
Pissed off at the system? Most people are, as they should be. Systems suck. Anybody who says he likes the system is either a liar, a fool or the guy who created it in the first place.
The system favors some over others, overlooks important, sometimes crucial information and has so many rules that they end up contradicting each other. What a mess!
All of those things are true, but we run into even bigger trouble when we confuse problems with the particular system we are mad at with ones general to systems themselves. We end up tearing down the old system in favor of a new one which is often just as bad and sometimes worse. We lose time and incur costs along the way.
Lately, the world has felt out of kilter. Things don’t conform to the rules we’re used to, but spin out of control, seemingly at random.
We’ve witnessed the Arab Spring, where entire cultures turned on a dime, rose up and overthrew regimes that had ruled for generations. Financial crises start with obscure acronyms and reverberate throughout our society. We appear to be in uncharted territory.
But is that really so or are we just becoming aware of realities that until now we’ve been blissfully ignoring? Before the digital age, we were able to sequester our organizations behind legal and organizational barriers, staving off the tides of evolutionary change. That’s becoming less and less tenable. Our challenge now is to face those forces head on.
There is no doubt. We are entering the age of mobile and that represents a vastly different technological experience than anything we’ve ever encountered.
However, in one respect the mobile age will be exactly the same as everything that preceded it: The trend has barely started and already marketer’s mouths are watering. We can’t wait to dive into the “third screen.”
However, a requisite amount of caution is warranted. Mobile computing is a fundamentally different kind of animal. The true value of mobile computing goes far beyond the device itself. It’s embedded in the interactions between devices and objects in the real world. As we shall see, that will make all the difference in the world.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
