Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • Deep design

    Blue deep sea squid

    The key underlying belief to deep design is that modern life systems and processes aren’t designed for humans. From industrial design, to administrative processes and algorithms – all could be categorised as ‘inhumane’. If you’ve ever dealt with work visa forms in a foreign country you’ll know what I mean.

    Human-centred design was supposed to address this. But it fails to scale or handle complexity. Deep design adds a layer of EQ to human-centred design in its approach. Even basic things like ergonomic datapoints didn’t include female data until relatively recently. There weren’t crash test dummies designed to emulate the effect on female bodies.

    Secondly agile processes in software and experience design with attitude of move fast and break things seem to fail as well. Test and learn as an iterative process works well at manipulating people, but is less good at building systems designed for humans.

    In the early 1990s, business process reengineering (BPR) sought to do a similar thing in organisations. It focused on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organisation. BPR aimed to help them fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors. However customer service and offerings became inflexible and not really customer centred, let alone employee focused.

    The reality was a desire to rollout processes that technology could manage. The field was pioneered by thinking from Michael Hammer formerly of MIT. It didn’t work and its popularity started to wane in the US in the mid-to-late 1990s as the process was abused. SAP consultants looked to reform client companies into one of their industry templates. Building the people round the system rather than deep design.

    Similar posts to deep design here.

    More information
    Deep design to the rescue: Solving wicked problems of the future | Campaign Asia

  • Citizen M Hotel & other things this week

    Citizen M Hotel

    I had some meetings and discovered what a good meeting space the lobby of the Citizen M Hotel in Bankside is. The downside I managed to lose my favourite pen, that was my fault; not the hotel. Of course, that didn’t take the sting out of it.

    The Citizen M Hotel lobby area is part lobby, part co-working space that feels airy, but with some privacy, which makes it ideal for the kind of discussions that I was having at the time. It’s comfortable, but not opulent or luxurious by any stretch of the imagination.

    Eames lounger

    My dream chair is an Eames lounger and I am fascinated by production processes. This video from fulfils both admirably; showing how the Eames chair is made. A few things struck me abut the manufacturing process:

    • The dynamic nature of curved plywood, that is used in ways that plastics might be used now for structural strength, for instance in the Aeron chair that I am currently sat in.
    • The user serviceability of the product item, making it relatively easy to repair for a user or a professional with the right tools and parts.
    • In the same way that we’ve been divorced from how our food is grown, globalisation has divorced us from how things are made. This is particularly true in a de-industrialised country like the UK

    Jeremy Healy

    This week, I went back, way back, back into time and ended up listening to this mix of Jeremy Healy at Hot To Trot. What gets me about this is diversity of the set. The slight crunchiness in the beat mixing early on adds to its charm. Now of course, these sets would be laid out in Digidesign allowing for a seamless flow. More culture related content here.

    Chinese privacy

    This Chinese made video on privacy has more than an element of truth beneath the humour. It would give Black Mirror a good run for its money.

    Global digital snapshot

    Last thought… 2018 Q2 Global Digital Statshot by wearesocial

  • RSS renaissance + more news

    Now Is The Perfect Time For An RSS Renaissance | Neflabs – great read and a much needed request for a lean web. There has been a post-Google Reader RSS renaissance in terms of readers out there. My favourite reader of the RSS renaissance is Newsblur

    Here’s What Facebook Won’t Let You Post | WIRED – pretty grim read

    CIA agents in ‘about 30 countries’ tracked by technology, top official says – CNNPolitics – “Singapore’s been doing it for years,” she told CNN following her keynote speech on Sunday morning at the 2018 GEOINT Symposium, hosted by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. Meyerriecks did not elaborate with further examples. – It makes total sense that the CIA is building a ‘Google Maps’-style dead ground map of areas that they operate in using machine learning. More related content here.

    Chinese cult writer Chen Qiufan on pushing the boundaries of sci-fi | FT – good read with the obligatory name check of Liu Cixin (paywall)

    g2g, brb, and what the loss of early MSN language means | Dazed – interesting change in consumer behaviour as time spent online creeps upwards with the move towards ubiquitous connectivity

    P&G returns to YouTube but with a more selective mindset | Marketing Interactive – ultimately brands are powerless in the face of Google, Facebook and Amazon advertising if they insist on not running with a media neutral approach

    China opposes all forms of protectionism, commerce minister says – says market with high levels of implicit and explicit protection

    No, a keyboard app can’t ‘prevent tragedy from depression’ | Advertising | Campaign Asia – quite shocking claims

    Google’s new video ad format doesn’t need YouTube | Digital | Campaign Asia – interesting move

    AI in the UK white paper | House of Lords – (PDF)

    Microsoft gives up artificial intelligence sales over ethical concerns – interesting positioning, it would be good to get an understanding on on what the board would define as a bad actor

    After Sir Martin Sorrell: The Reckoning | LinkedIn – interesting analysis of the marketing sector, I disagree with the way that some of it hangs together

    Gchat could have saved Google the trouble of launching yet another messaging service. | Slate – what this forgets is that GChat ended up having a lot of bots and spam accounts. For me it was worse than Skype or Yahoo! Messenger at the time. I could see business historians highlighting this as a lost opportunity in the story of Alphabet

  • Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert M Cialdini

    Cialdini’s Influence is now over ten years old and still stands up. It is a good guide on the psychology of why people say “yes”. The accessible style of Influence reminded of Douglas Rushcoff, or Malcolm Gladwell. Ok Malcolm Gladwell is a poor analogy, Cialdini’s work isn’t candy floss for the mind. This is deceptive as there is usually an inverse relationship between value and accessibility. Exceptions to this heuristic would be the likes of Sun Tzu – The Art of War.

    Influence by Cialdini

    Cialdini hasn’t been researched within an inch of its life in the same way Byron Sharp’s books have been.

    Cialdini provides planners and strategists with starting points for customer experiences. The book isn’t a how to guide for digital journeys but provides first principles. Psychology is not channel-specific.

    The Journal of Marketing Research described it as

    …among the most important books written in the last 10 years.

    The book’s style allowed me to pick it up and put it down, to fit in with my holiday schedule of train travel and family time.

    Why should you have Cialdini’s Influence?

    • If your work includes marketing planning or strategy, your bookshelf should have this book. If you are thinking about customer interactions, this book outlines the first principles that you need
    • If you’re a consumer and want to know how you’re being sold to; read this book
    • If you want to get on better with people ( your kids or co-workers); buy this book

    My copy is well-thumbed and stuffed with post-it notes around the edges as I go back and forth into it on a regular basis. More marketing related content here.

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  • Reid Hoffman on tech sector issues

    This Reid Hoffman video stands in sharp comparison to the Ayn Rand-loving frat-bro culture that seems to infect technology  sector companies based in Silicon Valley. However Hoffman in his past has reflected at least some of their libertarian views.

    However Reid Hoffman is cut from different cloth and represents a slightly older generation in the technology sector who pioneered the dot.com era.

    He grew up in Berkeley, back when the technology sector was more hardware focused and Silicon Valley actually made micro-chips. Back then HP (now Agilent) and Techtronix made measurement equipment in the Valley and it was the centre of the cold war missile technology. The east coast from IBM in New York State to the Boston corridor represented a worthy adversary of Silicon Valley. The technology sector only opted to have Silicon Valley as its home during the move to personal computing.

    eWorld

    Hoffman worked at Apple on eWorld – an early way of connecting Macs to the nascent public internet. There was interesting ideas that came out of that at the time including work on object orientated programming. Apple later abandoned eWorld when they saw the ‘net taking off and instead collaborated with selected ISPs like ClaraNet and Demon in the UK.

    Reid Hoffman later founded a prototype-social network and was part of the PayPal mafia before founding LinkedIn. The irony is that the PayPal mafia were ground zero for the current generation of technology company CEOs.

    Reid Hoffman offers a more thoughtful considered viewpoint on the future of the technology sector.

    How Technology is Shaping the Future of Human Society was filmed by the Aspen Institute.