It was better the old way

Chances are pretty good that we've all accepted some version of one of following maxims in the last few years:

Business is moving faster than ever before.

The pace of change (technical, societal, economic) is rapidly accelerating.

Advances in technology continue to outstrip our capacity to adapt.

Even the personal technology that many of us have adopted - smartphones and tablets primarily, drive home this point almost every day. Once you have even a average number of Apps loaded on your iPhone, say about 20 or so, almost every day at least one or two of them has a new version for you to download.

And if you ignore that little visual cue on the App Store icon for a week or two, you'll likely be faced with perhaps a dozen or more updates queued up and waiting.  It's quite likely that the Apps you rely on every single day, (News reading apps like Pulse or Zite, social networks like Facebook or Twitter, image Apps like Instagram or Camera+), push a brand new version out every month if not sooner.

Even if any individual new App version by itself is not all that comprehensive or significant, when taken in the aggregate, and considering how many times per day/week you engage with these apps, that is a lot of technological change being foisted on end users. 

But wait a second, we are supposed to loathe change, right? Particularly technology changes that are forced upon us against what we believe are our best interests and preferences.

Push out a new Windows or MS Office upgrade in your organization and stand back to wait for the shouts of outrage.

Dare to migrate to a new ERP or HRIS system, even a 'better' one than what is currently in place, and prepare for 12 months of 'In the old system, I knew exactly how to get that information. Now - who knows?'

Try to migrate collaboration and interaction out from Email and into some new, 'Facebook for the Enterprise' tool and prepare for a long, slow, path to adoption, (if you ever get there).

Our collective and individual experience and affinity with the world of Apps - with their rapid iteration, incremental changes, and persistence in nudging us along to accept those changes I believe is making us less and less 'change averse', at least when the change feels small.

Push out a dozen small changes each year - to a technology, a process, a policy - and people get used to it, they worry less about the implications of each change, and they are more inclined to see you the creator as someone 'continually focused on making it right'.

Drop a big, hairy, massive change on people all at once - well good luck with that and let us know how it goes.

We hate change because too much of our experience with change has been the old way - like getting dropped into a foreign country with no understanding of the language or landscape. But chopped up and served in more incremental pieces - that is the kind of change we all are coming to expect and, maybe even embrace.

I think that's why your Mom tried to trick you into eating your broccoli by cutting it up into the tiniest pieces possible, or mixing it into something tastier.

NO ONE wants a plate of giant broccoli.

Have a Great Week everyone!

VIDEO - Disdain the Mundane and other lessons from Clyde

When I saw that the ESPN 30 for 30 video short series latest creation was a feature on New York Knicks legend Walt 'Clyde' Frazier there was no way that I was not going to post about it on the blog.

Some background - ESPN a couple years ago, in conjunction with the network's 30th Anniversary year, commissioned a series of original documentaries called simply 30 for 30, which covered a wide range of sports-themed stories, from the perspective of 30 different, and many well-known directors. If you care about sports at all, you should really spend some time catching the original 30 for 30 run, (my favorite, which I blogged about here, is 'Once Brothers', a moving look back at the Yugoslavian national basketball team of the 80s).

More recently, the 30 for 30 series has expanded into shorter pieces, like the above mentioned piece on Clyde Frazier titled 'Disdain the Mundane', (embedded below, RSS and email subscribers please click through). Check the video below, and then I'll hit you with 5 life and career lessons from Clyde taken straight from 'Disdain the Mundane'

1. 0:56 - On finding a work/life balance

Clyde speaks: 'As a rookie, I wasn't playing up to expectations, so in order to pacify myself, I went shopping. I might not be playing good, but I look good'.

Lesson: Work matters, but it can't be the only thing in your life. Stepping away, finding some solace, especially when in a tough patch at work is the way to keep your sanity.

2. 1:14 - On standing-out

'I see this borsalino hat, brown velour, but it had a wide brim. And those days, like now, they were wearing the narrow brim. I never like the narrow brim. The first time I wore the hat, everyone laughed at me - my teammates, the opposition. But I said, 'Hey man, I look good in this hat, so I'm keeping it on.' Two weeks later the movie Bonnie and Clyde comes out, and everyone says 'Look, there goes Clyde'

Lesson: Go along with everyone else, wear the narrow brim hat, and you are just another guy with the same hat everyone else has. Go a different way, stand out a little - and now you are not just some dude, you are 'Clyde'.

3. 1:48 - On learning your trade 

'When I was Clyde, I was still learning. I used to go on 5th Ave. and just walk. In the 70s, 5th Ave. was the most fashionable street in the world. I used to see different colors people had on, and I'd go to my tailor and I'd make them up, because I actually saw them right there.'

Lesson: Understand you don't know everything, and the only way to really get smarter is to find people that know what you want to know, or at least can help you better articulate where you want to go. And the best way to do that is right on the street as it were, live and in-person.

4. 3:10 - On working with innovative people

'They (the tailors) know I'm looking for something different. I don't want just your basic, generic thing. Usually when I go to a new guy I tell him - 'Hey man, show me something you think nobody would wear.'

Lesson: You want to continue to do great work? It helps to find like-minded people that are up to that challenge, who can think differently, and who won't get in caught up in devising reasons to say 'No.'

5. 4:07  - On lateral thinking

'(when he embarked on his post-NBA broadcasting career) 'I said, 'Man, I've got to improve my vocabulary.' So I used to get the Sunday Times, the Arts & Leisure section, when they critique the plays - riveting, mesmerizing, provocative, profound - all this stuff, dazzling. So I have books and books of words and phrases, and once I learned the words I could start relating them to the players.'

Lesson: You don't get better at something JUST by studying that one thing. Clyde realized that basketball was 'performance', not unlike movies, books, plays, etc.  So by studying the language that the New York Times critics and reviewers used, Clyfe was able to bring a fresh, distinctive element to his basketball broadcasts, further cementing his status as an innovator.

Awesome.

Clyde is a legend. Cool, canny, cunning, creating.

Rockin' Steady.

Disdain the Mundane.

Go Knicks.

Have a Great Weekend!

'And we're going to track one of our employees'

There you go, happily wandering around the internet and the social networks. A Twitter conversation here. A Foursquare check-in there. Maybe a quick cruise up and down your Facebook feed dropping a few 'likes', and uploading a cool snap from your weekend trip to winery or petting zoo or ballpark. It's fun, it's social, and in 2013 for many of us, updating, connecting, and participating in social networking and contributing to the colossal Big Data set that is the social graph is an essential part of our lives.

Sure, every so often we get a little tired of it all, maybe we take a Facebook vacation, or go on a little Twitter hiatus. We forget to update our LinkedIn profile for a while, (at least until we decide we need a new job), or decide 'checking-in' every time you get a coffee on the way to work is kind of silly. But eventually we come back. Too much of our lives, personal for sure, and increasingly professional, are wound up in the social web. 

That essential nature of social networking that not only compels us to Instagram our pancakes before digging in or fighting over meaningless 'Mayorships' at your kid's preschool also leads to a kind of softening in our views of privacy and security. Through a combination of often confusing and shifting privacy policies, and a pessimistic, (probably realistic), rationalization that no matter what 'privacy' settings or controls one chooses, that their data, once submitted to the great big social graph in the cloud, will eventually become if not public, at least privy to people and programs for which it was never intended.

We sort of get it, we get the tradeoff, we (mostly) accept it as a 'cost of doing business' where the value we derive, (fun, connections, business opportunities), is greater than or at least equal to the darker side of social - loss of privacy, more and more ads, the occasional backlash in the form of 'If your not the customer, you're the product' bitterness. Ok, that last one is mostly my pet peeve.

But despite all that, and our real understanding that nothing on the internet is ever truly private, it is enlightening to catch a glimpse, a snippet, of just what is happening with all that social exhaust we leave as we traverse the social networks and live our lives online.

The UK's Guardian site managed to get a hold of a pretty amazing video created in 2010 by the defense and security firm Raytheon, that features a short product demonstration of a tool called RIOT (Rapid Information Overlay Technology). The Raytheon system was designed to exhibit just how simple and powerful social network data can be for the purposes of identification, tracking, and predicting one's movements. Take a look at the video below, (RSS and email subscribers please click through)

Pretty incredible, right? And remember this video of RIOT is from 2010. No doubt development has continued on RIOT, and no doubt that Raytheon was or is not the only company interested in this sort of thing.

But a great reminder nonetheless. 

We KNOW the data that we publish, push, and post on social media is never private.

But we don't usually get to SEE a reminder of what that actually means.

What's your take? Creeped out by RIOT? Or simply do you chalk it up as the way the world works today?

Happy Thursday.

Aside - Did you notice the Raytheon demo guy from the video looks just like comedian Louis C.K.? Weird.

In a slump? Maybe you need a celebrity Global Creative Director

I was close to dropping this post into the 'Job Titles of the Future' bucket, but then I realized that the idea of a 'creative director' isn't really all that new or novel. Ad agencies, publishers, marketing companies and the like have had and will continue to have a 'Creative Director' role for some time now. But what is new, and who knows if it will eventually move past stunt hiring and into the mainstream, are organizations of all kinds tapping celebrities known for their ideas and personalities as more than just spokespersons, but as 'Global Creative Directors'.Gaga-inspired camera glasses

I'll give you three recent examples of this trend, (please, if you know of more, share them in the comments), and then offer a take on why these seem to be happening more and more, and if there is indeed anything that our 'normal' organizations can take from these hires.

1. Polaroid (surprisingly still around), hires singer Lady Gaga as Creative Director for a new line of products, and later unveils the results of their first collaboration, some new Polaroid gadgets at CES in 2011.

2. BlackBerry, (I really want to be able to come back to you BlackBerry), hires singer Alicia Keys as Global Creative Director. Keys will collaborate with BlackBerry to work "with app developers, content creators, retailers, carriers and the entertainment community to further shape and enhance the BlackBerry 10 platform, and inspire creative use through its remarkable capabilities and functionality."

3. Anheuser-Busch names actor/singer/producer Justin Timberlake as the Creative Director for their Bud Light Platinum brand, seeing JT as a talent that "is one of the greatest creative minds in the entertainment industry, and his insights will help us further define Bud Light Platinum’s identity in the lifestyle space". 

The cynical (and probably fair) reaction to all three of the above examples would be to simply assume that these 'creative director' arrangements are really just the hundreds of years old celebrity pitchman or woman gimmick just spun a little differently to make the arrangement seem a little deeper than the the typically surface-level celebrity relationships with brands.  After all, what does Alicia Keys know about modern smartphone technology, or Gaga about the technical and competitive challenges in the consumer photography market?

So why the push to re-brand or re-frame these celebrities as 'creative directors' and not just as spokespeople? 

Perhaps, (admittedly giving the companies a huge benefit of the doubt here), that these organizations have realized that talent, great ideas, inspiration, and innovation can come from all kinds of sources, and in these examples, from non-traditional ones. Perhaps, these organizations have embraced the idea that incredibly talented people from alternate, adjacent, or even unrelated fields might have something to offer, some new perspective, or fresh eyes, that can actually be of value to their businesses.

Perhaps, that being really, really, successful at something, might just be a sign of a person that could be really successful at lots of things, even if their background and resume would be one that would never 'pass' the initial assessment for any of the organization's open jobs.

These companies are all looking for something, some kind of a lift, some new energy. They are taking a chance certainly, but at least they are doing more than holding yet another staff meeting with the same assembled cast of characters and asking, 'So, anyone have any ideas?'

Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising #1

Launching a new series on the blog this week - well not exactly new, since I have been writing about robots, the impact of increased robot automation on workplaces and jobs, and how if we don't watch out, pretty soon all our base will belong to them for quite some time now. But then I figured that the combination of the robot uprising, and my need for a steady source of reasonably interesting content for the blog warranted a more structured approach to collecting, classifying, and most importantly - providing an easy way for our future robot overlords to see that I am, actually, on their side, the future 'robot' content on the site. So then, this is the first 'official' piece in the new series, 'Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising'.

From the 'Jobs that the robots are not really doing, but could easily take over if given the chance' category, I submit for your consideration the 'job' of Entertainment Rreporter.  Take a look at the video below, (yes, it is from The Onion, but don't let that unduly influence your opinion), and then ask yourself honestly if robots could indeed replace all manner of entertainment industry 'journalists': (RSS and email subscribers will need to click through)

iInterviewer: Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola Talk Their New Movie, Inevitable Deaths 

Not that bad, right? And if you leave out the Onion's need to make the interview more of a gag than a true reflection of the typically horrible and banal celebrity interview  - 'How did it feel to work with such a great cast?', then I think you can pretty easily see that a robot, (and not even that powerful a robot), could step in for what passes for the in-depth and biting reporting that most entertainment shows pay high-priced human talent to produce.

I know what you're thinking - this is a goof, it's the Onion after all, and I'll never get back the approximate three minutes I've spent reading this post.

All of those reactions are fair and valid. At least the 'lost three minutes of your life part.'

But if you're still hanging in there with me on this, here's the payoff.

It does not matter what industry, job title, function, or process you are involved in. If what you do is easily repeatable, if the people that do the job are pretty much indistinguishable, and if it doesn't really matter who does the job, only that it gets done - then you or your job is a candidate for the impending robot uprising.

We laugh at the robot interviewing the actors. Until we realize a human reporter would have asked the very same questions.

And not been as funny.