Ged Carroll

Category: innovation | 革新 | 독창성 | 改変

Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.

Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.

  • Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
  • Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation

Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.

It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.

The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.

  • AgXeed + more news

    AgXeed

    Claas acquires share in Dutch robot manufacturer | Irish Farmers Journal – Claas has acquired a minority shareholding in Dutch start-up AgXeed B.V, with the aim of co-operating on the development and commercialisation of autonomous agricultural machines. AgXeed makes robot tracked tractors that look suspiciously like vehicles from the first Terminator movie. Automation like AgXeed is going to become more important in agriculture at labour moves to the cities and farming consolidates. You can see how unskilled factory work is also having to look at automation in the below piece from the South China Morning Post. AgXeed is the flip side of the coin to industrial robotics.

    As China’s working population falls, factories turn to machines to pick up the slack | South China Morning Post – makes a lot of sense for a brand like Midea who needs less precision than say a smartphone assembly line

    Beauty

    What’s driving the Chinese boom in cosmetics for children? | Vogue Business – In China, it’s more socially acceptable these days to show individual identity in looks. Parents born in the 1980s or 1990s are less likely to curb their daughters’ interest in beauty products and may even encourage it. The current boom is certainly one to watch: according to data from Kaola, in May 2020, sales in China of children’s cosmetics were up by more than 1,200 per cent year-on-year. Disney’s sales alone were up by 100 per cent over the same period. 

    In China, children’s cosmetics are defined as those for children aged 12 and under. On e-commerce platforms, a quick search for children’s cosmetics brings up dozens of brands and thousands of products, with prices ranging widely. Products are typically sold in sets, including colourful eye shadows, blush, lip gloss, nail polish, compact powder and makeup brushes

    Consumer behaviour

    What Gen Z Really Think And Why You Should Care – GWI – at least the author was thinking about life stages when they wrote this copy

    Energy

    Hydrogen plant planned for Cork but viable market yet to emerge 26 May 2021 | The Irish Farmers Journal – but if there isn’t hydrogen production, there won’t be hydrogen infrastructure and marketplace.

    Hong Kong

    EXCLUSIVE Hong Kong threatens Lai’s bankers with jail if they deal in his accounts | Reuters – “We can now see that any banking relationship you have centred on Hong Kong makes you vulnerable under the national security law – that is going to be a big wake-up call for the wealth management industry here, and their rich clients,“

    China’s Communist Party chips away at Hong Kong business houses | The Economist – Expropriations may violate local law. But laws can be changed, as the imposition of new security and electoral rules show. Such an outcome looks “all too believable”, says Mr Blennerhassett. The tycoons thought “they didn’t have to do anything as long as they didn’t question Beijing”, says Joseph Fan of Chinese University of Hong Kong. Now the Communist Party will not even settle for overt expressions of fealty. It appears intent on extracting value, too. – not terribly surprising. The hubris of Hong Kong business people is surprising, even to someone like me

    Legal

    British Business in China: Position Paper – British Chamber of Commerce in China | Beijing – Chinese data protection rules a key issue

    Luxury

    Can Gucci Sell High-End Watches To China? | Jing Daily – “Gucci’s high-priced watches are lacking legitimacy. Real watch collectors will not buy,” Müller concludes. In fact, the expansion into high-end watches may not help Gucci attract new clientele but will undoubtedly enhance the Italian maison’s prestige. As the luxury entry barrier lowers, the brand is required to expand in the high-end sphere to retain its exclusivity and appeal to local high net worth buyers

    Marketing

    The Test Screening That Almost Killed Fast Times at Ridgemont High | Slate – such a great interview, but would you have a cultural moment like that now; or would it be over like yesterday’s news or a TikTok meme?

    Media

    China’s Hottest Livestream Trend: Fraud – The episode was a disaster for Li. Her company had paid 200,000 yuan ($31,000) upfront just to secure a spot on the influencer’s show. It had also stocked over 4,000 boxes of shakes, anticipating a sales bonanza. But in the end, they hadn’t earned a single yuan. “Apart from the financial losses, we felt humiliated,” says Li. “All the other employees at the company were whispering that our team was totally fooled.” – ad fraud is universal but this one seems to be particularly shocking

    Technology

    iFixit tells the sad story of how Samsung “ruined” its upcycling program | Ars Technica – “Samsung, like every manufacturer, should set their old phones free. Open up their bootloaders. Let people use their cameras, sensors, antennas, and screens for all kinds of purposes, using whatever software people can dream up. The world needs fun, exciting, and money-saving ways to reuse older phones, not a second-rate tie-in to yet another branded internet-of-things ecosystem.“

    Web of no web

    Europe looks to the end of the mobile phone | EE News Europe – The aim is AR glasses that are wearable all day and weigh less than 60g with a 500mW power consumption. “We can achieve that this year with 1000nits for outdoor brightness, compared to 500nits that needs darkened lenses, and a 30 to 50 degree field of view (FoV) is enough,” he said. 

    “In the end there is a tradeoff in power consumption. The way you build the relay optics is where you lose the field of view. Increasing the field of view means the energy is relayed into the comb of the lenses so the limitation is on the capabilty of the waveguide to have a good colour uniformity across the field of view, and we are working with waveguide makers to get to 60 to 70deg. Today Hololens has 55 degree field of view for example but the military were asking for 85 degrees.” – more related content here.

    US-China tech war: China’s GPS rival BeiDou poised to support industry worth US$156 billion by 2025 | South China Morning Post 

  • Get Tough by William E Fairbairn

    What is Get Tough?

    Get Tough is a book on hand-to-hand fighting originally published in 1942. It is important for what it represents as much as it is with regards its content.

    Fairbairn as an author

    By the time Get Tough was written in 1942; Fairbairn was an experienced published author. In 1926, Fairbairn wrote the book Defendu. This was a step-by-step guide to Fairbairn’s fighting system that distilled his experience in street fights, alongside the jujuitsu he learned from early Japanese teachers that went abroad. In this respect Fairbairn, was similar to the Gracie family in Brazil, Imi Lichtenfeld’s Krav Maga and the Soviet founders of SAMBO. Globalisation drove hybrid fighting styles. Something we’d later see with mixed martial arts in general.

    Defendu as a title didn’t catch on that well as a title so it was republished as Scientific Self-Defence in 1931.

    The second world war resulted in Fairbairn’s most prolific period as an author. He wrote Shooting to Live with a colleague and firearms expert Eric Sykes. All-In Fighting was written by Fairbairn as a manual in close quarters combat. Though a section on using firearms in a close up situation was contributed by P.N. Walbridge.

    Get Tough was an American and Australian edition of All-in Fighting, but without the section by P.N. Walbridge. Where All-in Fighting was aimed at the soldiers Fairbairn and his colleagues taught, Get Tough looked to appeal to a wider audience.

    Fairbairn provided an edited version of his work called Self Defence For Women and Girls, which is about a quarter of the pages of Get Tough. There was also an American edition retitled Hands-Off!

    Fairbairn managed to write the book whilst training British commandos. Fairbairn and Sykes had a falling out sometime in 1942 and were never reconciled. Fairbairn took his expertise to to the US and Canada. Sykes carried on teaching in the UK.

    Get Tough and colonialism

    Get Tough was a distillation of experience that Fairbairn had in Korea and then later in Shanghai. As a member of the Shanghai Municipal Police he had been involved in hundreds of fights with local and international residents of the port city.

    The experience led to Fairbairn to play a role in developing:

    • Anti-riot techniques
    • Police sniping techniques with Eric Sykes
    • The Defendu fighting style
    • Two types of knives. The Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. A slender but sharp double sided stiletto blade designed the weapon to strike at the vulnerable parts of an opponent’s body, especially the vital organs. The original version was known as the Shanghai knife and had a 6 inch blade. It was likely part of the cache of illegal weapons that Fairbairn and Sykes brought back to the UK from Shanghai during the war. The military versions were 1.5 inches longer, to get through winter clothing. The Smachet, a large broad knife almost like a machete or a Roman sword

    Fairbairn’s work was based on the health and lives of colonial subjects. Fairbairn often enjoys exclusive credit for this work, but the reality was that it was a collaborative effort from several officers in the Shanghai Municipal Police including Eric Sykes and Dermot O’Neill. The Shanghai Municipal Police was what modern organisational theorists would have termed a ‘learning organisation’.

    Part of this learning culture was forced upon them by events. The Shanghai Municipal Police killed four members of a protest in May 1925 because they didn’t have enough police on duty to manage a demonstration. This felt rather similar to the Amritsar shootings of 1919, which shattered support for British rule in India by both Indians and people in the UK.

    This led to the Shanghai Municipal Police founding the first modern SWAT team called the reserve unit; this unit was also responsible for modern methods of policing riots.

    The Get Tough legacy

    Defendu had been taught to hundreds of policemen who rotated through Shanghai before the second world war. They then went on to work in other outposts of the British Empire in a policing or military capacity.

    When Sykes and Fairbairn brought their particular set of skills back to the UK in 1940. They were put to work training commandos and and secret agents in their skills. These skills were taught to military age men and women, the women were predominantly going to be dropped by parachute into occupied Europe.

    Again hundreds, if not thousands of people passed through the schools that they ran in Scotland and the south coast of England. Some of the people who went through those schools were from overseas. When they eventually went home, the ideas and training that they learned went with them and were put to use. At first trying to retain colonial rule. Then later, building up nascent special forces units including units from the US, Belgium, Holland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

    Over time these countries evolved their techniques to match modern war, but the principles where still there.

    After the second world war, the colonial policemen of the Shanghai Municipal Police who survived scattered across the British empire. Fairbairn went to Cyprus to train police in his techniques. He then ran two sessions in Singapore for the newly formed riot squad unit.

    The contents of Get Tough

    Fairbairn wrote Get Tough for a wide range of readers, not just the military as Fairbairn himself said:

    It is not the armed forces of the United Nations alone who can profit by learning about how to win in hand-to-hand fighting. Every civilian, man or woman, who ever walks a deserted road at mid-night, or goes in fear of his life in the dark places of a city, should acquaint himself with these methods.

    Get Tough by William E. Fairbairn

    The book covers:

    • Blows
    • Releases – how to get out of holds by an assailant
    • Holds
    • Throws
    • Miscellaneous advice – mostly covering improvised weapons from things at hands
    • Use of the knife – Fairbairn talks about using the Sykes-Fairbairn fighting knife
    • The Smatchet – use of a short machete type weapon designed by Fairbairn
    • Disarming an opponent of his pistol

    If you’ve trained in a martial art, you’ll have done drills of some sort like katas in karate. Fairbairn’s work doesn’t have drills per se. The idea is that if you do the hold or the blow, you are unlikely to need follow up.

    More book reviews here.

  • Military civil fusion response + more

    Military civil fusion

    How Should the U.S. Respond to China’s Military Civil Fusion Strategy? | ChinaFile – Over the past four years, the U.S. government has invoked military civil fusion (MCF) to justify a range of policies. For instance, MCF was among the rationales for the reform and expansion of export controls to include certain “emerging” and “foundational” technologies, as well as for the addition of companies and universities to the “Entity List” and “Unverified List” that the Department of Commerce maintains. The Trump administration partially justified attempts to ban WeChat and TikTok from the United States through initial claims about the companies’ alleged linkage to MCF. Moreover, a presidential proclamation on Chinese students and researchers studying in the United States cited students’ proximity to entities engaged in MCF as grounds for denying or revoking visas – military civil fusion is probably one of the biggest things that will affect innovation over the next couple of decades. It will shape the prioritisation of innovation topics in the west as a reaction to what happens in China.

    Luxury

    The Limits of Luxury Livestreaming | Jing Daily 

    Marketing

    Bitcoin declined substantially in value this week. The inciting incident seems to be Elon Musk waking up to the environmental impact of cryptomining. Papa Johns Pizza put out an offer in the UK which seems to bet a rise in the value of bitcoin.

    Promotional offer from Papa Johns Pizza UK

    This offer could democratise ownership of bitcoin, but it’s unlikely. Instead it feels like a PR driven story that could turn into the Hoover’s free flight debacle of 1992. It is apparently to celebrate Bitcoin pizza day.

    Media

    What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks – Columbia Journalism Review – really interesting findings, though I am surprised that the percentage link rot is only 25% – I was expecting it to be much higher given the range of years covered. When you have 72% link rot from 1998, it gives a counterpoint to ‘on the web is forever’. My friend Ian often talks about how he can’t find a video demonstration of Orange’ home of the future from the dot com era. This data supports his empirical experience. The work that the Internet Archive do is immensely important. But it misses the interconnectivity between content; which is an important part of the medium and the context of online.

    These Ex-Journalists Are Using AI to Catch Online Defamation | WIRED – so you’ve spotted it, what next?

    Security

    The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told | WIRED – interesting story that foreshadowed the SolarWinds breach a decade later

    Technology

    New 2021 Ford Focus RS hot hatch axed | CAR Magazine – interesting story. It implies that motor companies won’t be able to do niches and halo cars. This will have a knock on for suppliers, forcing consolidation. It also has implications in terms of the need for design houses and design teams, motorsport participation and brand differentiation. And the software aspects of car experience looks even worse for the consumer – ‘The uncomfortable future of in-car upgrades has begun’ | CAR Magazine

    Ford’s Ever-Smarter Robots Are Speeding Up the Assembly Line | WIRED – up to now manufacturing robots have been programmed to do a series of movements, not that dissimilar to a CNC machine. This means that they are intolerant of inconsistency. Ford, Nissan and Toyota are looking to use machine learning to handle inconsistency. The man on the line is fine if his screwdriver, is placed in roughly the same place as it was when he put it down. He or she doesn’t mind what part of a bolt they pick up in the parts bin. Yet that kind of thing requires a lot of machine learning work for robots. It will be incremental gains on tasks like this that moves automation forwards

  • Measure What Matters by John Doerr

    I was recommended Measure What Matters by my friend and fellow ex-Yahoo Cathy Ma. Cathy found the book useful in her way through managing teams. In Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains the idea of objectives and key results or OKRs.

    Measure What Matters

    About John Doerr

    If you’ve worked in or around the Silicon Valley technology space from the PC age through to the 2010s Doerr’s name will have a passing familiarity to you. Doerr was a salesman at Intel in the 1970s, realised that there were too many good people ahead of him and took an over in venture capital instead. Doerr was involved in funding:

    • Compaq – Compaq kicked off the market for ‘IBM compatible’ PCs and made the first portable ‘IBM compatible’ PC. Soon after IBM was no longer the dominant player in personal computing leading to the Wintel duopoly. Compaq eventually offered a full range of large servers, workstations and PC when it acquired Digital Equipment Corporation and Tandem Computing. Compaq was in turn bought by H-P
    • Netscape – Netscape Communications mainstreamed the internet browser, email client, web servers and email servers. The server software lives on in Oracle’s product line via the Netscape – Sun Microsystems alliance. The browser indirectly carried on through an open source project Mozilla
    • Symantec – Symantec started off as a natural language processing company in the early 1980s, it became famous for its Mac antivirus software and then went into the DOS and Windows market after merging with Peter Norton Computing. It now has a consumer facing business called NortonLifeLock and the business focused software part of the business was sold to Broadcom
    • Sun Microsystems – Sun Microsystems started off as a UNIX workstation manufacturer. Over time they built up a healthy server and software business that supported much of the infrastructure of the web. They were instrumental in the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix – which influenced parts of the macOS that I am typing this post on, RISC processors in your smartphone, thin client computing like Google Docs, and virtualised computing that is instrumental for cloud computing. Sun Microsystems workstations were popular with investment banks, telecoms companies and internet startups bought their servers. The company’s decline can be marked by the dot com crash. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and their technology lives on
    • drugstore.com – was a first generation e-tailer in health and beauty products. Walgreens bought the business in 2011, and shut down the website five years later.
    • Amazon.com – needs no introduction
    • Intuit – Intuit sells financial software in the US. TurboTax helps Americans do their tax returns, Mint provides a personal finance dashboard for consumers and QuickBooks is accounting software for small and medium sized businesses
    • Macromedia – Macromedia was a software company that developed tools for creatives and programmers. It was eventually acquired by Adobe. Macromedia products live on in the Adobe product range
    • Google – the search engine.

    About OKRs

    For all of the companies that Doerr has funded he has advocated OKRs. The idea of OKRs came from Doerr’s colleague at Intel Andy Grove. OKRs are a collaborative process. The idea is that it is used with teams and the individuals who make up the teams. Management seeks to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. The key results in OKRs are how you track progress towards the objective, create alignment within the team, and encourage engagement around measurable goals. They are also supposed to flex with circumstance, which is one of the key points of separation from Peter Drucker’s management by objectives (MBO).

    The first part of the book Measure What Matters explains the origin and process behind OKRs.

    You can get everything that you need in the first two chapters covering 35 pages.

    The Cult of OKR

    The rest of the book is a series of self aggrandising endorsements of OK from senior executives who are OKR advocates:

    • Larry Page of Alphabet
    • Bill Davidow of Intel
    • Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook
    • Bill Gates on The Gates Foundation

    It crosses the line for me and almost reads like a high water mark for Silicon Valley hubris; Doerr’s book was published in 2018. Three years later and:

    • Bill Gates is in the most trouble he has been in since the Judge Jackson ruling
    • Alphabet and Facebook are being assailed by regulators around the world
    • Intel looks like a shadow of its former self. Its fabrication process are three years behind competitors. Customers are designing their own chips and AMD is eating their lunch in high performance processors

    Secondly, Doerr’s book, whilst acknowledging Andy Groves role of OKR creator; fails to acknowledge that Andy gave a good descriptor of OKRs in his 1983 book High Output Management.

    I think one of the reasons that I am not that keen on Measure What Matters, is that the book doesn’t work for culturally as a non-American. Instead I would recommend Andy Grove’s own book High Output Management. More books that might be of interest here.

  • The Exponential Era by Espindola & Wright

    The Exponential Era is a business strategy book published by the IEEE Press as part of its series on technology, innovation and leadership. David Espindola and Michael Wright work at Intercepting Horizons and advise at the University of Minnesota.

    The book is a concise 182 pages including its index. It has a satisfying hard cover about the height and width of a paperback book. The book proportions reminded of many of the books that we used to have my secondary school’s library. It felt right in my hand. Its a small thing, but it matters.

    The exponential era

    The secondary school analogy goes further; the book summarises knowledge and makes it relatively easily digestible.

    The Exponential Era includes:

    • The threat of platforms and their ability to disrupt market sectors
    • Why people find it hard to grasp the change brought about by the future
    • Megatrends with the kind of utopian tone that reminded me of Alvin Toffler, George Gilder and John Naisbitt
    • Horizon monitoring
    • Agile approach to development
    • Test and learn
    • Feedback based strategic decisions which relies extensively on the technology sector’s fetishisation of John Boyd’s OODA model
    • The Innovator’s Dilemma
    • Future business ethics

    The book consolidates the kind of reading that people in technology and marketing would likely have read anyway. Chances are if you’ve already read books like Saving Big Blue, Measure What Matters, The Lean Startup and Zero to One, then The Exponential Era isn’t written for you.

    Who should read this book?

    Instead this book seems to be an increasingly diminished audience. A company too small for it’s management to have been lectured on disruption by McKinsey, Bain, BCG or Accenture. But still large enough to be concerned. Like McKinsey et al Espindola and Wright are looking to create disruption fear and sell their SPX methodology to re-engineer their business. I would have thought the c suite in most businesses would have at least done enough reading to have a high level understanding of the content in the book.

    The book’s relentless utopian optimism reminded me a lot of business works from the 1970s to the dot com era. I think that The Exponential Era will be of most use to junior people at the start of their career looking for a primer rather than its intended audience.