Media and Consumer Tech Trend #2 - The End of Complexity

Last week the analyst firm Gartner issued an interesting press release sharing their '10 consumer macro trends shaping the technology, media and service provider markets over the next 10 years', and on Monday I blogged about one of the trends Gartner called out, the importance of understanding the customer profile as you create products and services, and perhaps more importantly, as you make decisions on hiring and promotion into leadership roles.

Today I want to hit upon another of the Gartner consumer media and tech trends, the one titled 'The Death of Complexity'. For some context, here is the take from Gartner on how in the consumer media and tech space, complexity can often be seen as a negative:

The Death of Complexity

The consumer market is becoming progressively less tolerant of complexity. Although consumers tend to buy products with ever-richer features, they often prefer those that are simple and intuitive. The ability to provide appealing and intuitive user interfaces has become a critical point of differentiation among competing technology providers. As technology becomes more complex, vendors need to invest more in keeping the user interface simple and intuitive. (Providers) therefore need to focus on simplifying technology, pricing, brand messaging, and feedback and interaction, and consider offering chargeable help services for consumers challenged by installing and configuring new equipment and services in their homes.

I know what you are thinking, that is such a no-brainer kind of viewpoint that it should not even have made a list of trends or predictions. I mean, who doesn't want simpler, easier, and more accessible technology?

Well mostly everyone, I think.

We continue to want more and more capability from our technologies while simultaneously demanding that they become easier and easier to use. And that is perfectly fine, in fact, these increasing demands and requirements are what often spur fantastic innovations and solutions. But when the 'I want the product to be simpler' desire involves giving up capability that we feel like we have a right to or that we can't do without, well then often the simple becomes the complex.

So the technology solution providers, both in the consumer space and those that build technologies designed to support enterprise users, (also becoming increasingly harder to distinguish), are challenged to balance the simplicity vs. capability ledger all the time. And while achieving the correct balance is certainly tricky, the ones that manage it most effectively are likely to stay one step ahead of the competition.

But here's the thing about simplicity, it seems to me that everyone is in favor of simpler and easier to use technologies for a little while. Until something new comes along. Something that does that 'one more thing' or has the one extra bell or whistle. And then the simple solution we loved for so long start to look, well maybe a little too simple.

Right up until the point where the tools we have can't do something that the other guy's tools can.

Regretful Turnover and Saying Goodbye to the NJ Nets

Yesterday the NBA's New Jersey Nets played their final game in their soon to be former home court in Newark, New Jersey. Next season the team moves to its latest new home, this one a brand new arena in Brooklyn, NY, where they hope their fortunes will improve, the basketball hotbed of New York City will embrace them as the 'other' NYC team, (NYC will always be the Knicks town), and more highly prized free agent stars will be more likely to want to play for the team.

In the USA, professional sports franchises are usually seen as community assets, and when new franchises become available, either through league expansion or the occasional team relocation as in the Nets' case, you typically see cities trying to one-up each other for the chance to have one of these pro teams call their city 'home'. While the long-term economic benefits that accrue to a city or even a neighborhood from having local professional sports are certainly debatable, that usually has not stopped cities from making concessions, raising local taxes, funding arena construction and committing to infrastructure improvements and the like, in order to attract or in some cases retain a pro sports team for their city.

But not all locals or more specifically local government officials feel the same way about pro sports teams, at least not every sports team. In the case of the Nets' exodus from New Jersey, Garden State Governor Chris Christie offered these remarks among others (emphasis mine) :

''My message to them is, goodbye,'' Christie said at an afternoon news conference at Newark Beth Israel Hospital where he signed a bill to promote organ and tissue donation. ''You don't want to stay, we don't want you.''

''That's one of the most beautiful arenas in America they have a chance to play in, it's in one of the country's most vibrant cities, and they want to leave here and go to Brooklyn?'' he asked. ''Good riddance, see you later. I think there'll be some other NBA team who may be looking to relocate and they might look at that arena and the fan base in the New Jersey and New York area and say, 'This is an opportunity to increase our fan base and try something different.'''

Christie could be forgiven for not expressing any sadness or disappointment at the loss of the Nets, given their 35-year history playing in New Jersey has been mostly unsuccessful, uninspiring, and uninteresting. Apart from 2 appearances in the NBA finals in the early 2000's, the Nets have largely been a forgettable bunch, (this player being the exception).

But even still, Christie's ripping of the Nets and their decision to leave New Jersey offers us a chance to think about what we do and say in our own organizations when faced with a dissapointing resignation of an employee that we truly need, one that we fought hard to land, and that for we perhaps even made some concessions in our own hiring and business processes to secure.

Big giant flame-out resignation letters (or blog posts or videos), on the employee side often make the news. It is always fun to read about the dirt and dysfunction of organizations we know and sometimes admire. Usually, unlike our pal Christie, employers take the high road, refrain from commenting publicly, and go on with their business hopefully addressing any truths or lessons learned as needed.

Bashing someone on the way out, for making the best career decision for them, seems like an incredibly petty and short-sighted approach to handling regretful turnover. Unless you can honestly say you were deceived or can prove you have been played, (neither true in the Nets' case), then I think you'd be much better off wishing the departing employee well, taking actions to stay in touch, and working your angle as 'This is still a great place to work' as you walk the person out the door.

Sure sometimes that can be really tough. And sure it is much, much easier to bark 'good riddance', but aside from giving you about 30 seconds of hollow satisfaction, how does that really help your cause?

And all this spoken as a New Jersey native who never cared one bit about the Nets!

Media and Consumer Tech Trend #1 - Know your profile

Last week the analyst firm Gartner issued an interesting press release sharing their '10 consumer macro trends shaping the technology, media and service provider markets over the next 10 years'. The piece is worth taking a look through, even if you are (probably rightly), skeptical of any person or firm's ability to accurately or even semi-accurately being able to predict where consumer or even enterprise technologies are heading in the next decade. While we all know (or should know), that while the future of technology is likely to be dramatically different than today, we tend to plan for it in ways that are more like simple extension of the present.

But still, one trend that seems to be holding truer and truer with each passing day is the tendency and emphasis that consumer and public technologies will increasingly influence, shape, and create expectations for ease of use and flexibility for the next generation of enterprise technologies.  We have all heard the story by now - employees want enterprise solutions as fast, fun, nice to look at, and that can run on all their preferred devices, just like the solutions they use in their private and social lives. So if nothing else but for some awareness, designers and implementers of enterprise technologies should be aware of developments in the consumer technology space, as these drivers will have more and more impact on the solutions that are eventually deployed in the workplace.

So while certainly understanding that the Gartner predictions like any predictions, should be taken only at face value, I wanted to call a couple of them out this week on the blog, and offer a take or two of my own about how they might or should influence what happens in the workplace, either with the technologies themselves, or with the talent management processes surrounding the people that build these technologies.

Today, I call your attention to Gartner consumer tech and media trend #3: (below is from the Gartner release, and text in bold is my emphasis)):

Women Wanted: Unlocking Gender Opportunities

The consumer technology market is trending toward the production and marketing of more female-friendly technology products targeted at the market's single biggest demographic: women. Women are underrepresented in key job roles within the technology and media sectors. This is clearly a missed opportunity given that women typically control from 70 to 80 percent of household spending, including big-ticket items such as computers, cars and houses. T&SPs should conduct a gender audit and invest, if necessary, in recruiting suitable talent to redress underrepresentation of genders in key decision-making and creative roles

I thought this prediction was really interesting for two reasons. One, the more obvious observation that in certain markets, women drive the purchase and decision making processes to a significant extent. And two, and more compelling to HR and Talent professionals, that often women (and I think this angle can be extrapolated to any other demographic that dominates in a customer segment), do not have equal or even adequate representation in the companies and in the job roles meant to be making the decisions about what products and services to offer these customers, many or most of which are women.

From the talent management perspective this observation raises some important questions. How much does the talent inside the company need to look, think, and relate to its customers in order to build products that really resonate? And does an element of 'does this candidate understand our customers', (or at least is he/she likely to be able to understand them?),  need to be factored in to the more classic screening processes that focus on hard and more demonstrable skills and experiences.

I mean, upon closer inspection it seems kind of obvious - if you are building a product aimed at a particular market, (or at least one that is adopted by a specific market), how much do the people you hire to make the important decisions about that product need to be able to identify and relate?

Or is this just another example of a 10-year prediction we will all forget about in a years time? 

Guess which labor market?

Here's a quick game for a Friday, I'll give you three lines from a recent article titled, 'Workforce shortage a structural problem', that assesses macro labor market conditions and you try and guess which labor market the article is referring to.

1. "A lack of skilled technical workers coexists with the difficulty most students and recent graduates have experienced in finding full-time employment, because few of them possess the technical skills required."

2. "Graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs and many enterprises are facing problems in recruiting workers and technicians, revealing structural problems in the employment market, said (redacted to make it harder for you to guess)".

3. "Even then, it is still not easy to attract experienced, skilled workers. So, we have now signed an agreement with some technical training schools so that we get first choice of the best students to become interns in our company. We hope that cooperation such as this will help to develop a talent pool for us." 

So what's your guess?

Could be most any type of technical or skilled manufacturing type job in the USA, right? It possibly could be some areas of healthcare, as the aging population places more demands on the healthcare industry to supply trained workers at the same time many college nursing programs are straining under budget costs constraints and still have long waiting lists for student admission. Maybe it is the US auto industry, that seemingly has emerged from near-death to post robust sales and profits as this classic American industry continues to rebound and confound (hat tip to Walt Frazier).

All good guesses, and all could be correct in the right context, but the actual correct answer is the Chinese labor market, and all three of the above quotes were take from a piece titled 'Workforce shortage a structural problem', on Chinadaily.com.

You should click over and read the entire piece, but the short summary is that many of the same types of problems that we often read and hear about in the US labor markets - the skills gap, the lack of technical training that matches industry demand, the problems with shifting labor pool demographic composition, etc.,  seem to be just as important and profound in China as they are here in the USA.

I am certainly not going to offer '5 tips for solving your Chinese market labor problems', here on the blog, and in fact, if you truly are looking to a blog to try and solve those kinds of problems, well, I'd say you have bigger things to worry about.  

But I will offer this observation, that no matter where in the world you look to source labor and locate production, issues with skills training, development opportunities, and the best talent having lots of options besides yours to choose from seem to be pretty much the same no matter where you end up. I'd offer that you as a talent professional can try to run from talent shortages and skills gaps, but no matter where you run to, you'll probably find the same problems. 

Only you might need an interpreter to help you understand them.

Have a great weekend!

When people know they're being watched...

... they behave differently.

This observation, really given as an aside, was probably the most intriguing one that was offered during the presentations at the Social Media Strategies for HR seminar at The Conference Board in New York that I attended and co-presented with Trish McFarlane this week.  

The take, that installing, deploying, and making central more 'social' and open or collaborative systems to support people's day-to-day work processes and workflows certainly might make the organization more collegial and efficient, but it also might come with some risk and downside as well.

I think there is certainly something to say for the notion that for many people participation in social networks and systems is part honest, and genuine information sharing and engagement, but it also is at least (partly) a kind of performance as well. Think if you can for a minute about your Facebook feed - I will bet it is filled with perfect photos of your friends' precocious and impossibly cute children, tales of friends jetting off on some exotic location, or even long-lost relatives that you know are (largely) losers painting a way-too-flattering portrait of their lives.

When people know they're being watched, they behave differently.

They might embellish, they might obfuscate, or, certainly, they might simply act better and more diligently and responsibly. But either way, whether it is the popular social networks that have invaded our lives, or it is an internal or enterprise social workplace type system that at its core is designed to give lots more people a window into what the average worker bee is up to all day, I think perhaps we haven't thought enough about how being watched impacts people's actions and behaviors.

Anyway, I'm off the soapbox.

Let me know what you think - is more openness, transparency, and visibility into our everyday and mundane actions at work going to change how we act and how we try to present our work selves? Do we run the risk of becoming the same kind of annoying broadcasters we have become on Facebook? 

As always, The Conference Board put on a great event, and I want to thank them for inviting me to attend and participate this week.