Spring Break Rewind #2 - Tuesday, rain, and playing the long game

Note: It is Spring Break week here in Western New York, (for the school-age kids anyway), and while I will still be working and traveling to New York City to present at a conference, this week will be busier than most. So this week on the blog I'll be re-running some pieces from the last 12 months or so. Yes, I am being lazy. Cut me some slack. Anyway, if you are on Spring Break this week, I hope you have a great little vacation!

This piece - 'Tuesday, rain, and playing the long game', originally ran in September 2012.

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Ever since Malcolm Gladwell pitched his now famous 10,000 hours theory, it cemented into our awareness what most everyone has known for a really long time - overnight success is usually not overnight at all, and the long, slow grind of experiments, failures, refinements, learning, and disappointments is what (mostly) leads to what only seems like overnight success.Johns - Figure 4

Even the 'Gangnam Style' guy has been plying his craft in one form or another for over 10 years.

We all know this to be true, it isn't novel, we were usually taught this in school starting in about 3rd grade, or whenever it was we ran face first into that first subject or concept that we didn't just 'get' right away. Maybe it was fractions, maybe sentence structure, adverbs, or long division - once that first bit of frustration with not understanding hits, we generally realize pretty quick the only (ethical) way forward is long, boring, hard, and largely unsatisfying effort. Unsatisfying until we do finally 'get it' and say things like 'It's all been worth it', or in the case of calculus, 'I'm glad I'll never have to go through that again.'

So while the 'you have to work really hard for a long time to become great at anything' isn't news, it still is a sentiment or guide that still bears repeating from time to time, (at least for me). And rarely have I seen it expressed as well as in a recent piece on the ESPN True Hoop blog called 'The long game is the only game', by Henry Abbott, (I know you are shocked, a basketball site).  

Here's the money quote from Henry:

It may appear that NBA games are won with big moments when everybody is looking -- dunking over people, blocking shots, hitting a momentous jumper. And once in a while that does happen. But the reality is that many more careers and games turn on getting things right in the millions of small moments when nobody is looking. The big moments will always dominate the Hollywood version of events. But in real life, if you want to do the most you can to get the best possible results, it's a long game of putting together one solid day of training after another.

You want to know who's going to have the best NBA career? You could do worse than to simply figure out who puts in the most work to prepare.

Maybe in the NBA there are some exceptions to this, there are some supremely talented and physically gifted guys where the need for the day-in, day-out slog is not necessary to have successful and even legendary careers. But those guys are extremely rare, often work and practice much, much more than they let on, and often are looked back upon as not making the most of their physical gifts.

For the rest of us, who can't dunk a ball, or for whom irrational number theory never came naturally, we have to continue to grind away. 

I got up early today, it's Tuesday, it's cold and raining. The kind of day that is pretty easy to fold to, to simply go through the motions,  and come back tomorrow.

But that never gets it done.

It's Friday - you can't possibly STILL be working, can you?

Here is a really quick take for a blustery Friday as I stare out the window awaiting the arrival of Winter Storm Nemo, (Yes, we are naming winter storms now. Silly. Next thing you know people will be naming their hangovers. 'Sorry I can't make it to the office today. I got hit by Hangover Bacardi this morning.')

I thought about the storm's impending arrival across the Northeast, and the havoc that these types of weather events play on work, school, travel, etc., and then it hit me - it's Friday, most of us shouldn't even be working at all.  In the future, and if one Danish academic has anything to say about it, once you've put in about 25 solid hours for the week, you should be able to pack it in, put your feet up, and drink cocoa and watch the snow.

How so?

Take a look at the reasoning behind Professor James Vaupel's assertion from a piece on the Science Nordic blog, (you have that one in your Google Reader, right?), titled - 'We should only work 25 hours a week, argues Professor'

When you’re 20, you would rather spend more time with your friends. When you’re 35, you want time with your kids. But then when you reach 70, you have far too much time on your hands.

This scenario probably sounds familiar to many people today. But there are good arguments for changing this. We should aim for more leisure time in our youth and instead work a bit more when we get older.

“We’re getting older and older here in Denmark. Kids who are ten years old today should be able to work until the age of 80. In return, they won’t need to work more than 25 hours per week when they become adults,” says Professor James W. Vaupel.

In socio-economic terms it makes a lot of sense. The important thing is that we all put in a certain amount of work – not at what point in our lives we do it. In the 20th century we had a redistribution of wealth. I believe that in this century, the great redistribution will be in terms of working hours." 

Interesting take for sure. Kind of makes sense in a way, I think. If indeed via a combination of longer life expectancies, advances in medical care and technology that will make us capable of being productive workers into our 70s and 80s, and even economic necessity - it seems almost certain most of us, and definitely our kids, will have longer working lives than our parents and grandparents did.

Professor Vaupel thinks there should be a kind of societal trade-off - in exchange for signing up for working until you are 82 (or you keel over), you get to put in 25 hours or so a week when you are in your 20s and 30s, in theory so you can enjoy your life more, spend time with friends, go surfing, raise your kids, etc.

Sort of a crazy, only a European would think that way kind of an idea, but one that does at least force us to think about what the impact of an aging workforce might be in the future.

What's your take - do we all, especially us Americans, work too much? 

Are we going to continue to work too much way into our Golden Years?

Are you going to send your Gen Y staff home for the day after you read this, making them PROMISE to take care of you in about 30 years?

Have a Great Weekend!

Lessons from an Ad Man #2 - On Fear and Creativity

Over the holidays I finished off an old book that had been on my 'I really should read that' list for ages -Confessions of an Advertising Man by ad industry legend David Ogilvy. The 'Confessions', first issued in 1963, provide a little bit of a glimpse into the Mad Men world of advertising in the 50s and 60s.

Ogilvy's book is a little short on the dramatics and indulgence portrayed on Mad Men, but it is long on practical, insightful, and simple advice for running a business, managing people, serving customers, and more.  Since I love to share such nuggets of solid business advice, and I need to create a few more blog 'series' to help keep this little blog updated, here is dispatch #2 in a semi-regular series called 'Lessons from an Ad Man.'

Here's Ogilvy on how at times, the often adversarial nature of the client/agency relationship impacts the ability of the 'creatives', i.e. the ad people, to produce great work:

Most agencies run scared most of the time. This is partly because many of the people who gravitate to the agency business are naturally insecure., and partly because many clients make it unmistakably plain that they are always on the lookout for a new agency. Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising.

We can of course take this point with a grain of salt - Ogilvy is writing from the perspective of the ad agency owner that would very much prefer to have the security (and steady, predictable revenue), of long-term contracts and stable client relationships.  But buried past that bias is certainly some truth - that making people that you rely upon to produce interesting, innovative, creative, and even unforgettable work nervous and afraid for their positions and their livelihoods is unlikely to be a successful long-term management strategy.

It certainly makes sense - you can probably recall times in your career where the element of fear, or of intimidation, shouting etc. could produce improved short-term results, particularly for singular, repetitive, and less complex tasks.  But have you ever had success walking into a room and berating or threatening a group of artists, designers, writers, or other so-called 'creatives'? Shouting -  'We need five innovative ideas by tomorrow or you are all sacked!', seems a pretty dismal approach as Ogilvy suggests.

It leads to more 'safe' ideas, a climate of second-guessing, and an overall reluctance by people to stand up for they believe is right, and for them to stick with more of what will be accepted. And 'safe' might not be what propels your business into the future.

So that's Lesson #2 - 'Frightened people are powerless to produce great work.'

Have a great week everyone!

Jagger, Warhol, and another guy you've never heard of

Check the letter below, a fairly famous one at that, written in 1969 from the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger to the artist Andy Warhol regarding Warhol's impending collaboration with the band on the cover art for their soon to be released album:

In three short paragraphs, and with 100 words give or take, Mick schools us all on the difference between the Talent - himself, the band, and of course Warhol; and the 'support' types like the unfortunate Mr. Al Steckler, who will look 'nervous' and can essentially be ignored.

I post a lot on this blog, perhaps too much, about the challenge and threat that increased automation and robot technology pose to the workforce and workplaces of the future. But I don't think that the changes and potential disruption that more powerful automation technologies, smarter artificial intelligences, and the increasing acceptance of robots in all kinds of workplace environments can be ignored. The primary challenge for many of us, and certainly for the next generation of workers, will be to find ways to ensure we can continue to create value - unique, hard to copy, and certainly hard to automate value.

This is not really a new requirement, although the pace of technological advances are making it more pressing. Back in 1969, Mick Jagger already it pegged. People like himself and Andy Warhol, well they were the creators. They were the important parts in the machine. And they'd enjoy the spoils - did you catch the line in the letter were Mick basically tells Warhol to name his price for creating the album cover art?

In 1969, for a non-creative, non-essential type like Steckler the worst think likely to happen was he'd be ignored and maybe marginalized a little. In 2013, the risks of being someone branded as a non-creative, worrying, nervous, functionary I think are far worse.  We can get a robot to handle those jobs soon enough. 

And the robots won't get nervous or bother the talent.

Have a great week all!

Why is the robot looking at me?

This past Sunday the seemingly inevitable march towards humanity's future domination by our robot overlords took a pretty significant if old-fashioned step - with a feature story on the venerable news magazine show 60 Minutes titled 'March of the Machines'.  In the piece, (video embedded below, email and RSS subscribers will need to click through to watch), CBS' correspondent Steve Kroft provided a well-balanced overview of many of the recent advances in robot technology, and how automation plays a critical and complex role in the nature and future of many types of work. 

60 Minutes - 'March of the Machines'

The piece, and supported by interview comments from 'Race Against the Machine' authors Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson from MIT argues that some, if not most, of the jobless nature of the economic 'recovery' of the last few years has been driven by increased automation and the reduction in human workers required in those industries where this kind of automation, (manufacturing, logistics, even in health care), has become more widespread.

The piece, if you follow these developments reasonably closely, doesn't break much new ground, although simply by virtue of being covered on a well-known and widely watched show such as 60 Minutes, will bring the issue of the potential threat robotic automation into greater awareness.

In addition to the 13 or so minute piece that aired on the show, (the video you see above), the show's website also posted a shorter piece, with some additional footage and some out takes, that has the segment host, Mr. Kroft interacting more with some of the robotic technology from the story, (embedded below, same click through message as before). 

60 Minutes - The Robot Waltz

This little piece of B-roll cuts a little closer to some of what will be the inevitable issues and concerns that will arise from people working more closely with robots and robot technology. Fear, anxiety, trepidation, unease and more - all summed up in Kroft's telling question - Why is he (the robot) looking at me?'

Why is the robot looking at you indeed.

If you take a few minutes to check out the clips, please let me know what you think - are those of us that keep writing, talking, and thinking about the changes in the nature of work due to these kinds of advances in robot technology over reacting?

Or should we truly be teaching our kids how to better relate to their future robot colleagues?