Keep up (don’t give up): How to take a tech trend-based work-ation

Last week, we talked turkey; this week, we get ready for the reindeer games.

'tis the season for reindeer games and...tech trends

But, there is still time to sneak in a couple of work-ations before the year is over—extracurricular explorations that can set us up for success in 2011. Work-ations are creative excursions (either actual trips or virtual dives) designed to inspire us, and help our companies get a jump on some of the trends that could kick-start revenue growth.

Today’s work-ation list focuses on one of the most important (and, sometimes overwhelming) trends that everyone in business absolutely must pay attention to: technology innovations. How do you dig into what’s new and match the tools to your business concerns?

WARNING: TECH TRENDS CAN BE OVERWHELMING AND POSSIBLY LEAD TO PARALYSIS

A friend recently visited a whiz-bang tech shop in Los Angeles and came away saying, “I don’t know if I should keep up or give up.”

We can't afford to give up

The truth is that we can’t afford to give up. We can all jot down a problem that’s keeping our company from moving forward, and design a work-ation refresher course to study someone who’s tackled that issue using technology.

A WORK-ATION IDEA INSPIRED BY TECH INNOVATIONS AN IDEA TO GET YOU STARTED: GEOFENCING

Trend-related work-ation task: Learn about geofencing.

It’s the next wave beyond zip codes and Groupons and Foursquare and SMS text messaging and Google maps.  Geofencing is the power to know where your customers are (physically) and their permission to customize offers to their (almost) every move.

With geofencing, a company like North Face or REI can ask a customer for permission to send out customized SMS text messages with offers that match the customer’s location. If I live in California and fly to Denver, REI or North Face can greet me with a text message that says: “snowboard rental discount available at these Denver locations.”

OK, it sounds 95% creepy (Big Brother is watching) and only 5% cool (Wow, someone knows where I am and is meeting my immediate customer need).

Geofencing is less Big Brother and more "We're Here for You."

But the ability to take customer intimacy and responsiveness to a new level definitely offers any business leader inspiration for amp-ing up his/her definition of “customer responsiveness.”

If we’re still stuck with an old-fashioned approach to coupons based on a static location-based offer (like for a free dessert at a restaurant in zip code X based on the fact that the customer lives in zip code X), we’re missing one of the biggest lessons we can learn from companies like Placecast and others taking advantage of the geofencing trend: our customers move around so our businesses needs to customize our relationships with them so that we’re where our customers are. All the time.

TECHNOLOGY HAS ALLOWED US TO SHIFT BUSINESS FOCUS FROM WHERE OUR CUSTOMERS LIVE TO WHERE THEY ARE (RIGHT NOW)

The shift from direct mail coupons to Groupons to geofencing is sort of like the shift from calling people’s houses (land lines) to calling people’s ears (mobile phones). Our places are no longer static, and zip codes are no longer the sole definition of where our customers need us.

Get a move on tech trends for your business.

Which technology trend will be on the back of your envelope this week and which work-ation will you schedule to catch up on the tech trends and contemplate your next moves in 2011?

Josh Kelley: Follow You

MUSICAL CODA

Follow You
by Josh Kelley

Everybody tells me I am wrong

When I know I’m not

Something in me moves me to be strong

Cuz its all I got

But I don’t know what to say

When you ask me everyday

My mind won’t let me play

The thought of you

The thought of you

So tell me what you need

I’m getting stronger

If you will help me see

It won’t be long now

Its time for you to leave and I will

Follow you follow you

If you’re stuck, mix it up: How (and why) to have an “interesting” conversation

At TEDxSanDiego, everyone took part in a novel experiment designed to track conversations throughout the day, partly to encourage the speakers, audience, performers and sponsors to mix and mingle in new ways, and partly to look at how the interactions at a TEDx event might be different from traditional networking. What kinds of questions would lead to the most “interesting” conversations? And, what can business leaders learn from an informal social experiment dedicated to tracing the intersections of people at a conference?

Jack Abbott (TEDxSanDiego) and Marty Cooper (speaker) engage in an interesting conversation

Business leaders who are stuck can solve problems by not focusing directly on their problems and instead focusing on discovering new insights from experts in other fields.

Here’s the in-a-nutshell version:

Lesson #1: Creating a breeding ground for “interesting” conversations involves some engineering of diversity—gather people together with the specific purpose of cross-disciplinary expertise.

Lesson #2: Putting yourself into a discovery mode, where you’re learning about a new field, creates a different spark than a networking mode or a day-to-day, problem solving mode.

Lesson #3: Business leaders can benefit from this spark of discovery—by opening themselves up to new insights about trends, shifts in customer preferences, and new technologies and products on the horizon. [For example, if you’re working on software solutions for schools, talk to a 10 year old about what games they’re playing.]

Interesting conversations can become the catalyst for corporate insight.

How to Engineer Interesting Conversations

How do you have an “interesting” conversation these days? How do you put yourself into a situation where you’re learning not telling? How can business leaders apply the results of the TEDxSanDiego informal experiment?

For corporate teams that are stuck and looking for new direction, the TEDxSanDiego experiment offers an interesting insight into a powerful skill that any business leader can use to expand his / her perspective. Here’s how it worked:

1. Everyone at the TEDxSanDiego conference was asked to list the topic they were most passionate about: Technology, Entertainment, Design, Entrepreneurism, Innovation, Community, Sustainability, Philanthropy. The audience and speakers were selected to represent a good cross-section, to make sure there was representation in the room from every field of interest.
2. Throughout the day of programming (22 speakers, performers, videos) everyone was asked to interact with people they didn’t know already and to name 3-5 people they didn’t know prior to the event with whom they engaged in an “interesting conversation” throughout the day.
3. James Fowler, Robert Bond, and Chris Fariss (the team of researchers from UC San Diego) mapped the interconnections.

The assumption had been that some patterns would emerge, with the most likely outcome being that people would group according to the birds of a feather rules—people with similar interests would gravitate toward each other–the way that jocks, debate team members, and drama club thespians would interact at a high school reunion.

And the answer is…no interaction pattern is a significant finding.

At TEDx San Diego, something very interesting happened. At the end of the day, no pattern emerged (see the map below.)

James Fowler's Map of "Interesting" Conversations

Technology folks mixed with Philanthropy folks. Ecologists linked up with Entertainers. Innovators connected with community organizers. The data looked absolutely nothing like the high school reunion of stereotypical cliques.

Instead, the array of conversation mapping looked like 52-card pickup.

And, people found those cross-expertise conversations extremely interesting.

The data array looked like 52-card pickup

Let’s remember that the Conversation Mapping experiment was designed to encourage cool discussions during breaks. And let’s remember that the TED conferences are specifically created to encourage cross-disciplinary thinking. So, the deck was stacked a bit.

But, it got me thinking.

Are there some times when we, as business leaders, need to shake things up a bit?

Are there times when we’re out of touch with trends and need to get together with some new people and enter “discovery mode”? Are there ways to orchestrate a setting where we interact with a diverse collection of people with very different perspectives from ours, and ask great questions, listen with tremendous interest, and learn about fields that are totally outside of our day to day knowledge base?

What was the best way to engage in these “interesting” conversations?

Follow these steps to broaden your horizons:

1. Think about your hunches about where you’re currently challenged in moving your business forward. (For example, how to build healthcare facilities smarter and better in the future.)
2. Envision a group of people whose perspective could add insight (For example, bringing in an expert from Qualcomm to talk with your healthcare architects.)
3. Engage in “interesting” conversations, where you discover what’s keeping them up at night, what’s exciting them, what they see on the horizon in their world.
4. Take it all in. Sleep on it. Don’t focus on the problem at hand.
5. Eureka…you’ll have an insight in a few weeks based on seeds that were planted during these interesting conversations. (For example, wireless innovations could lead to remote diagnostics and a redesign of your laboratories.)

If you’re stuck, mix it up.

Eminem: Mix 'Em Up

MIX ‘EM UP

Eminem

Big and some Pac and you mix them up in a pot

mix them up in a pot, mix them up in a pot

Take some Big and some Pac and mix them up in a pot

mix them up in a pot, what the f- do you got?

(Fifty!)

It’s Big and some Pac n u mix em up and you got, juggernauts of this rap sh–, like it or not

Live is not dead: How to move ideas further, faster, better—flesh-to-flesh

We used to gather in caves and around fires, to exchange ideas and get together.  We made a move:  from an individual existence to a shared existence. And we kept going forward.  From primitive ideas to civilized ideas. Towards evolution. Towards progress.

Fast forward thousands of  years and enter the age of technology, when the promise of sharing ideas faster, more efficiently, and more powerfully led many of us to believe that live was, well, dead. Why interact live when electronic images could communicate the same ideas over the Internet? Why have flesh-to-flesh meetings when Skype and video conferencing (and still face-to-face) could substitute for the real thing?

I’ve been co-organizing the first TEDxSanDiego conference (the viral Technology Entertainment Design colloquium live in San Diego), to take place next week, and wondering why so many people want to come together—live—to interact and engage and experience being in one room for one day to hear speakers and see performers whose presentations can just as easily be viewed in the comfort of a home or office with a live stream. So, why be there live?

Luckily, the book (actually an e-book on Kindle) on my bed stand provides some clues. Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist and his related TED talk, When Ideas Have Sex traces hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. And his compelling conclusion is that our ideas evolve fastest when they “have sex”— it’s the exchange of ideas that accelerates the speed of progress. But, does that exchange have to be live, or could live interaction be replaced with remote connections?  We can, after all, have sex over the Internet, telephone, and cell phone (think sexting).

In the 1970s, two classic media images were born that planted the seeds of doubt regarding the power of live. Memorex introduced an ad campaign in 1971, “Is It Live, Or is it Memorex?,” that forced us to wonder if the live singing voice of Ella Fitzgerald was superior to that same voice captured on tape. In 1973 Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper introduced the “Orgasmatron,” a machine that offered the safest sex possible, an elevator-sized capsule equipped with pleasure-inducing devices. It set us up to consider a question, albeit with an appreciation for the ridiculous: Could a futuristic device replace live touch?

I, for one, believe that the live will never be dead.

With rallies like Jon Stewart’s Restore Sanity to informal gatherings like PechaKuchas with short presentations that move ideas forward to business conferences like TED to live concerts and festivals like Austin City Limits to unconventional gatherings in the desert like Burning Man to everything in-between, live is on the rise. And according to a government study on Audience 2.0, “people who participate in the arts through electronic media are three times as likely to attend live events.” (See http://www.nea.gov/research/new-media-report/index.html.)

What can business leaders learn from the live phenomenon? You might think live is dead, but it isn’t.  Don’t make bets too quickly on the extinction of live. Remember the people who bet against the paper industry when personal computers entered the scene? And, how many more sheets of paper are people using—to redraft and rework documents? I’d place my bet on the personal connection surviving as a vital part of the way we all do business. Telecommuting won’t, and can’t, replace the power of the live tribe. Airlines won’t be replaced by Skype. But, we hold the power in our live, warm hands, we can tap into what’s truly special about why we gather, and make those moments, moments.

 

MUSICAL CODA
Text Me Pictures by Lady Gaga

Because…Baby you text me you send me pictures

You send me things cause your still in love with me

Ohhhhh you don’t wanna hear from me if you do only cause your friend told you so.

Baby you text me you send me pictures

Ohhhhh hhhh ooohhhhh cause your callin’ me saying

Oh baby I love you

My heart belongs to you

Tough love for bad business ideas: How to advance the extinction of innovative, but unevolved, business ideas

There’s been a lot of sadness communicated over a list of 25 ideas about to become extinct with examples ranging from the US Post Office to milkmen. Luckily, apple pie missed the list. Commentators on the fates of these dying species mourn the loss and wonder how business leaders could have seen the hand just before the plug got pulled. Business Genome views the extinction differently–as a wake up call for business leaders who are avoiding the sometimes unpleasant task of constructing a gallows for their current corporate initiatives that are leading nowhere.

Business Genome offers a 7-step checklist to guide corporate leaders through the task: How to Pull the Plug on Bad Business Ideas. The key to avoiding extinction is not to mourn when it’s too late, but to stick to a discipline of facing facts before the fate is sealed.

Toughen up, stop the bleeding, and move on.

And, do it with a smile. Because after shedding dead ideas, the Phoenix rises, bringing better business ideas.

Umami, the fifth sense for business leaders: How to build a business based on what customers want but can’t tell you

Umami represents the fifth sense in the science of the physiology of taste. Although long-recognized in the East as a flavor sensation that augments the taste dimension that westerners have defined as salty, sweet, bitter, and sour, umami has only recently gained traction in the rest of the world.

Translate the concept of a formerly unnamed “sense” finding a name to the world of business and you have one of the Business Genome’s core lessons on how companies can uncover formerly unnamed consumer preferences. These preferences, sometimes called “latent customer needs”, are elusive to many, yet open a world of opportunity for business leaders charged with developing new products or services with legs in the marketplace. The Business Genome offers the how-to’s of uncovering “customer umami”–the fifth sense for sensing what the market is ready for, but cannot name.