Paul McKey - Synergistic Design

Redbean - One of the common themes we hear after dominant players in any industry suddenly lose the plot is that their leaders were getting just the advice they wanted to hear - but not the advice they needed. When bosses in the car industry surround themselves with BIG car people they invariably make more BIG cars regardless of what the market wants.

And so it seems with News Ltd. Richard Freudenstein, CEO of News Digtital Media, was quoted in this week’s press as saying “For a lot of the things people want to do, the broadband we have now is probably quick enough to allow that to happen… it will just be an extension of what is already happening.” (20090730 - SMH - Broadband revolution fails to excite News)

For me this rates right up there with the lack of foresight, denial and other bad predictions of the visionless. You wonder whether these people actually use the services they sell. Or maybe it is just the vested interests talking, seeing that Fraudenstein is also a director of the pay TV operator Foxtel?

Pay TV and free to air TV are both under threat from increased broadband speeds and using denial of that fact as a strategy doesn’t sound too smart to me.

Note to Mr. Murdoch. I am available to advise you at exorbitant rates of pay but there is a caveat - I may not tell you what you want to hear.

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Redbean - This is a comment from Dan Holloway, a US based author trying to shake up the book publsihing industry. I thought it deserved a blog of its own:

Dan - I’m trying to drag writers into the twenty-first century but it’s hard - they’re a pretty reactionary bunch - as a result, as a collective we look rather unradical to the outside world because we have to keep pace in our publicity with our slowest members out of respect, but I think the future is in grass-roots community building, and that means direct engagement with the fans, which is what I’m trying to do with the Free-e-day festival (www.freeeday.wordpress.com) - it’s interesting to see so far the reaction I’ve had from filmmakers and musicians has been more positive than from writers, who are a deeply suspicious bunch (convinced you’re trying to do them out of a living, rather than trying to create a larger interface between readers and writers - in the new landscape the ones who’ll be done out of a living are the publishers not the writers!).

Here’s my post:

The publishing industry’s main failing is that it refuses to be reader-centred (hence the lack of engaging experiences – what we need to do is learn to listen, to offer up models, and respond to the feedback – which is what I’m trying to do with my interactive Facebook novel The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes). It is also uniquely badly placed by being so cumbersome and keeping everything in house – the future will bring, I am sure, flatter models where editing, design, printing, logistics are directly outsourced by writers or their PRs. Social media work bottom-up, which is why traditional businesses suffer – they have to listen and not impose – which ties in with the last of your four points – great networkers would be an invaluable asset to publishers, but impossible for them to justify in the current economic climate.

All of which is great news for the likes of us, because unless the publishers stop looking down their noses at the newbies and realise sometimes we can do it better, some of us newbies will before too long be buying them up and asset-stripping them.

I wrote a long article on this in May if anyone would like to take a look:
http://streamwriting.com/blog/?p=116
Best
Dan

http://www.yearzerowriters.wordpress.com

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I love this question. Is design too important to be left only to designers? It is a question that has been posed by Bruce Nussbaum at Business Week. http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2009/06/is_design_too_i_1.html

In this post he quotes Anne Burdick who takes up, quite eloquently, that if designers don’t expand their thinking about design then others will do it for them. This is the same threat to a particular herd that has been felt before by, for instance, artists are threatened by patrons buying primitive art, ‘real’ musicians are threatened by folk music and so on. Now Designers are being threatened by sites promoting non-designers.

So if you can get around the absolutely whacko design of yellow and orange text and reverse video colour schemes then you should find the speech and supporting movies on the place of design pretty interesting.
http://www.burdickoffices.com/Design-wo-Designers/

So here is a question for you. What is the difference between a designer and a non-designer?

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New York - I am in the Big Apple to attend Book Expo America - one of the largest book fairs in the world. This trade only show brings together nearly everyone in the biz from the big six publishers to many of the independent publishers and bookstores across North America. It is quite a gathering of the literati.

My attendance was primarily as an author, hawking a new book currently titled “Smart Business Design - How to gain competitive advantage in the 21st century”.
The book deals with a fundamental concern of what Chris Anderson of Wired magazine has this month called the New new economy. That is that the majority of business people struggle to develop in all four areas critical to the success of a 21st century business - areas outside their experience which include:
* understanding and developing business models
* designing and delivering compelling experiences
* understanding how to leverage new media and social networks
* developing the skills to attract and nurture great people

Unfortunately, nowhere was the above problem more apparent than in the book publishing industry.

They are seeing their business model being eroded by online sellers and they have virtually no answer. Amazon are releasing their books for USD9.99. Far below the $25 or so the industry requires to maintain profitability.

They are seeing their well developed marketing channels being eroded by a lack of understanding about online tactics. Tactics their ebook competitors and smaller publishers are quickly mastering.

They are seeing their independent booksellers suffering in most markets. With fewer people browsing their shelves there is little they can do. Their best tactic is to develop and promote their local community of readers yet few have the skills (and as was pointed out, the personality) required to utilise social networking techniques.

While the demise of books and the book industry is slow and inevitable there appears to be no demise in reading. If anything we are all reading more these days. It’s just that it is in other forms to a physical book. Hence the online market is developing at breakneck speed driven by digital readers such as Kindle, Sony Reader and even the iPhone.

Yet the industry hangs on tight to its structured, physical distribution model. As the president of one major publisher told me “there is still a lot of money to be made behind the front line”. Yet digital is growing rapidly and starting to really eat into traditional channels. As one presenter pointed out there is some hope and he said the companies to watch are Wiley and O’Reilly.

http://www.wiley.com/

http://oreilly.com/

And the publishers look like dinosaurs caught in the spotlight. They have little to no constructive response. One panel session which included three CEOs of the big six publishers spent most of their time arguing over how to deal with Amazon and Google. They had little insight into how to deal with a shifting demographic and industry in confusion.

And it comes down to the people. Unfortunately the book industry is an older population of literate folk who don’t really get online that much. And that is out of step with their market.

What is concerning is that they are not spinning off innovative smaller companies to test and develop new channels. They are unwilling to adjust while watching their US$28B industry erode before their eyes. They are terrified of going the same way as the music industry, where all the major labels have lost market and influence due to online forces, yet seem incapable of responding.

This is an industry in crisis. The irony is it may be where I can realise the best sales of my book, which is designed to help individual organisations and even industry sectors migrate into the modern world. I know of at least six CEOs who should be reading it.

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The Australian Prime MInister Kevin Rudd this week announced an AUD43 billion plan to deliver high-speed fibre-to-the-node broadband to 90% of Australian homes within 8 years.
CNet News

I congratulate the government which has had the vision and is providing the funds, and is taking the risk. They have had to step in since the private sector was providing none of these elements and waiting for them to do so was a classic case of market forces failing to deliver.

Australia has several unique problems when it comes to delivering telecommunication services. Firstly it has one of the lowest rates of population per square kilometre in the world. And even though most cling to the coast like barnacles the expense of delivering physical services to a very spread out population is rarely cost-effective.

The second problem is that it is resource rich so it hasn’t seen the above problem as a problem till now. Australia just crushes more rocks and turns that into money.
Until of course the resources boom finally came to an end. Until of course the Global Financial Crisis left it clambering for new ways to turn a dollar. Until of course it compares itself with the rest of the world and finds it has not kept up with investment in infrastructure.
International Telecommunications Union Statistics

So here is some news Australia. The resources boom is over and the knowledge boom is just beginning.

Many struggle to see what spending all this money on some fibre cables is going to do for them. This infrastructure is long overdue.

It can be argued that the countries like those of the G20 have had little vision in the past ten years other than to make money. That’s fine but as we know, money has this capacity to disappear and we see few benefits of the ‘good times’.

The benefits of this initiative will flow to the three core areas of economic, social and environmental improvement for many years to come.

I am much happier to see the money going to fibre cable than some of the choices that face the USA right now. For instance spending the equivalent amount on bailing out General Motors. GM is an industrial age dinosaur. Its products don’t fit with the economic, social and environmental future yet they still persist in making brands for numbskulls like the Hummer. Bankruptcy is the best thing for them.

These challenges are echoing around the world and the question is when do we finally give up on the industrial age, bring it to a graceful close and start facing and investing in the knowledge age that is out inevitable future?

Embracing a knowledge rich and sustainable future is now becoming our responsibility. It also just makes plain good sense. The time has come for a new mindset.

The economy of the future will revolve around the exchange of ideas not commodities. The social fabric of the future will benefit from knowledge based services in diverse areas like finance, education and medicine (such as the ability to deliver high quality diagnosis in the home) with the use of simple and existing technology (except for those missing pipes). The environment will win in a multitude of ways as we remove the drudge from our lives and concentrate on improving the planet.

So thanks Kevin Rudd for getting the ball rolling into the future.

Phew I think I’ll go and have a soy/chai latté down at the Internet café after that rant!

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A recent article in a major newspaper the “Death of the dotcom degree” described the failure of ‘virtual’ universities (The Sunday Age 20090222). While I can’t disagree with the core of the article, that online learning as delivered by most universities around the world is unpopular, I do challenge the reasons they gave for this being so. While the article blames the product I would lay blame squarely with the providers who develop the product.

Our universities have failed dismally in the development of online learning. Yet writing off online education at this point in time is equivalent to looking at the technology of the car in 1900 and concluding that this will never evolve into anything. The problem then was exactly the same as we have now. Universities and other online providers have seen a change in the medium but failed to change the form or the message to exploit its possibilities.

At the turn of the 20th century car makers were doing the same thing. They modelled the objects of the new paradigm on the familiar of the old. They called the car a horseless carriage. It took a generation to ‘get’ the difference between a horse and a car. We are in an equivalent space with online learning now.

The paper quotes Clifford Stoll, one of my favourite sceptics, with describing online degrees as third rate. I couldn’t agree more. The lecture-essay learning management systems developed 15 years ago still dominate. They are true horseless carriages in that they were designed to deliver the existing antiquated teaching and learning model with ‘modern’ technology.

My daughter is at university this year and by all accounts the online subjects she is taking are still seen as a way for the university to avoid funding qualified and experienced staff, to avoid funding adequate technology infrastructure and to avoid the redefining of themselves as a 21st century business. In other words online is seen as a low cost means of faking modernisation. Hence third rate product.

So let’s look at some of the elements of the modern online degree product.

The business model is still predicated on the top down delivery of information and units of knowledge. It still treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled up. We also have no way to charge you other than via a price per unit of knowledge hence you have to do them all to graduate which ensures the institution’s cash flow. I have managed training organisations for twenty years. I know this model well. The bricks and mortar, single career degrees, and low volume models are quaint and expensive nostalgia. The jobs of the future are going to be online, generalist and heavily dependent on interaction with new ideas, new people and new threats and opportunities. We need to increase the quantity and the quality of our education systems. A challenge that will fail with existing business models.

Even the specialist ‘virtual’ universities such as Universitas21 aren’t performing well since they are really just a distribution network for the same tired old product.
Universitas21

The teaching and learning practices are dumbed down to support the current business model. With an ageing, technology ignorant, population of teachers they deliver the product in the only way they have known - mainly chalk and talk with some added interactive elements icing the bland cake. You can get away with this on campus but not online. It will take a generation for education to come to grips with the possibilities of today’s technology and changing learning requirements even if we stood still. Only by absorbing the technology and the changing socio-cultural trends can one consider how they might be used/needed for learning in the 21st century. They can’t just be bolted on.

Technology, as usual, is both the solution and the problem. As it has done since the invention of the wheel it presents us with the joy of possibilities and the pain of change. As part of the recent Horizon Report we looked at the possible new technologies coming into teaching and learning in the next five years. However I just don’t see the infrastructure nor the cultural change occurring to support these technologies. Institutional administrators who are ignorant of teaching practices let alone technology will not invest in either. Better to stick with what you know - bricks and mortar. http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/nmc-releases-horizon-report-focused-emerging-technologies-australia-new-zealand

And that brings me to the people. There is an old saying in business that if you can’t change the people then change the people. I said it in my masters thesis 13 years ago and I still haven’t seen it happen - the best way to build the online university is to go down the road and break new ground, with a new vision, new culture and new people and embrace new technology and new business and life realities. Existing universities have the power yet neither the knowledge nor the will to develop high quality online learning experiences and products. Hence the whole sector is held back through this subconscious collusion to maintain the status quo.

So until universities actually put their minds, hearts and budgets to really embrace online learning their product will be continually third-rate and students will be served up ill-fitting, out of date horseless carriages while being told they are really very modern, functional and safe cars.

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It is the end of January already. One twelfth (or 8.33%) of the year gone. Yet an opportunity to turn a new leaf.

Blogs are beginning to bore me, and to drink my own medicine, why should you care? Because dear reader everyone keeps telling you you should blog and/or care about blogs. And making this blog meaningful is my responsibility otherwise you, and I, should switch off. How can we keep blogs meaningful?

So far in this blog over three years I haven’t actually told you much about my personal whims except as the astute reader knows all my thoughts are between the lines, in the topic chosen and in the language used. So I can’t hide. But I promise never to do this to you. http://thecatsite.com/blog/ (Unless of course one of my sheep has to go to the vet then you will hear the whole story in up to the minute reports and blurry photos).

And then there’s Twitter. I have no problem with Twitter per se, it is just the concept of building ‘Followers’ that has me running scared though. It is getting into the heads of some Tweeters out there who are becoming ego-maniacal about how many followers they have and why some leave them. They are actually starting to believe their own bullshit. But funnily the use of the term Followers always gets me thinking of Jonestown every time I hear it. Imagine if Jim Jones had Twitter!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

But I digress. What got me started was my Follower (note the ego-free use of the singular. Just keep the contributions coming) wanted to know more about the processes I use or go through to develop original ideas for using technology in business, experience design and learning. My Follower wanted my blog to be more personal (I am already getting self conscious using the personal pronoun which has been beaten out of me by many years of academic writing).

My follower suggested that sometimes my ideas are a bit of a leap (of faith?). A little creative let’s say. And I couldn’t agree more. Yet it depends where you are standing. Many of the institutions and businesses, large and small, I work with are quite conservative. They like to use conservative practices like strategy and planning as a means for change. So yes they might find my methods ‘creative’.

I have always tended to consider most strategic planning sessions as a diversion to facing up to issues and embracing real change. A form of action to do nothing. The more conservative of our institutions, large corporations, universities and schools love this stuff. It feeds a lot of consultants so they don’t complain. But invariably after the two year strategic plan has completed you often get the feeling that everything is different but nothing has really changed.

And it appears I am not alone. In a recent article of the Australian Financial Review (AFR 24/12/2008) titled “The Strategy Fad is Dead, Long Live Thinking” it is argued that the rational approach of strategy has not served us well. The ‘fad’ started in the 80s with Michael Porter and was quickly embraced by consulting firms around the world who turned it into a ’science’. Unfortunately as we have just found out there is no recipe for success yet selling recipe books has been big business for thirty years.

No the good firms don’t follow formulas. Yes they have strategies, yet they are loose and adaptable. We are discovering more about the influence of creativity in success and how it can be encouraged and relied upon. As the article states “a real strategy is neither a document nor a forecast but rather an overall approach”. Ah now we’re talking. While the rational conservatives want plans, metrics and control I tend to get a lot more excited about developing and supporting the appropriate culture or the corporate ethos and ‘ways of doing things’ than being prescriptive about specific strategies to follow. A ‘good’ company and its employees will always know the right thing to do in most situations. Smart companies just know before everybody else!

Anyway the point is that this year I am going to tell you, dear follower, more about the way I think. It might get a bit irreverent. For example I will tell you how a background in creative arts like, music, film and painting, help me solve problems and form new solutions. How electronics engineering taught me to develop practical outcomes. And I will share why I think going to an art gallery, and reading philosophy and great novels will possibly get you further than reading anything by Jim Collins.

And I won’t bore you with my cat stories. (pssst wanna see a picture of my sheep? go on you know you want to. Click Here )

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It would be wise and pertinent to write something witty and profound here but…

After a week of sifting sand with my toes and floating slowly across the azure waters of Byron Bay my mind seems devoid of all wit and profundity. I am sure it will all come back to me but probably not tonight as we count down to the new year.

Have a great 2009.

I recently participated on the Advisory Board for the New Media Consortium Horizon.au report which charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative expression in coming years. That report was released on December 1st.

From the Report:

” In defining the six selected areas—Virtual Worlds & Other Immersive Digital Environments; Cloud-Based Applications; Geolocation; Alternative Input Devices; Deep Tagging; and Next-Generation Mobile—the project drew on an ongoing discussion among knowledgeable leaders and practitioners in Australia and New Zealand business, industry, and education, as well as published resources, current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC community itself. The Horizon Project’s Australia-New Zealand Advisory Board probed current trends and challenges in post compulsory education as they uniquely are expressed in Australia and New Zealand, explored possible topics for the Report, and over several rounds of rankings and dialog, selected the final technologies.”

The report is available here:

http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/nmc-releases-horizon-report-focused-emerging-technologies-australia-new-zealand

Larry Johnson and his team at the New Media Consortium have done a fantastic job in compiling this report. Over the next few entries this blog will delve into some of the predictions for a deeper understanding of their impact upon practice and business opportunities in the learning and performance space.

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The age of dumb capitalism is over. Dumb capitalism based upon excessive consumption fuelled by easy credit has run its course.

With quality not quantity the new buzz in financial markets this will filter all the way down the retail chain because as the easy money (or credit) disappears the consumption patterns of everyone from individual customers, through small business and large corporations will become far more cautious and selective.

So for businesses the business plan of “just sell more stuff” has also expired. This could be fatal for many small businesses since the majority I come across have no other plan. Most have not experienced a downturn and have no knowledge of how to counteract the effects of one on their business.

Sacking staff, prices and services is both a short term and ultimately defeating strategy. That’s a quantity strategy. What is required is to follow your customers into the area of quality. Yes they will make fewer purchases but that doesn’t necessarily follow that they will make cheaper and lesser quality purchases.

Many firms also start discounting in a downturn. This results in a race to the bottom. You will most likely lose existing customers on the way since when price dominates you just become one of the pack.

A smarter strategy is to consider how you can help your existing customers and how you can weather this downturn together. For instance how can you maintain quality while giving them a break on finance? Instead of discounting give them a little longer to pay which has the same effect. Instead of lowering the quality of your services or stock allow them to pay in instalments.

What you really need in a downturn is not fear and drastic measures but creativity. Being creative seems not that important when things are going well. It is critical when they are going bad though.

Like all downturns we usually get warning signs and the time to act is as soon as they are confirmed. This is the time to take stock with key staff and advisers to consider both a protective strategy and a rescue strategy. The former is proactive, and includes creative approaches such as those mentioned above, while the latter is reactive in case certain key indicators do go horribly wrong. Assessing them both now, before the ‘proverbial’ hits the fan, is wise.

The key to a protective strategy is that it must be both creative and actionable and go beyond the clichés of sacking staff and cutting prices.

To develop that strategy take your advisory team somewhere nice, away from the doom and gloom news, take a good facilitator with you and spend time getting people into a creative groove so they can develop a protective plan that actually improves your competitive advantage in the current climate.

Bold moves like this are the sign of a good business and good businesses not only survive downturns but they actually emerge from them even stronger.

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