One of the first things I learned at university was around customers and retail. My lecturer asked who was more valuable to a restaurant? The family that came in once each month for dinner, or the guy who came in every day for one cup of coffee? The answer was the coffee guy. The mark up on coffee was good and the value of 30 coffees is more than a family dinner.
This is what came to mind today as I was asked by the manager of Mugg ‘n Bean (South African coffee chain) in Sandton City if we wouldn’t mind leaving as they had a long queue. (it was Saturday morning) I guess they calculated that 2 people drinking coffee over an extended period of time wasn’t as profitable as the many people standing in line for breakfast.
And maybe they were correct today? There probably was someone in the line that would have spent more money. But maybe tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, they’ll miss my coffee order. It’s not like there aren’t enough coffee shops on our planet.
This morning Barrie and I had a coffee meeting. As Director of Resources at TomorrowToday I had to admit to him that I had never ordered a book on line…… Yet I am an avid book buyer from the stores in my area. 
He challenged me to come home and place an order with Amazon. Ok Barrie - Two hours later the deed is done. Why had I not done this before??? Especially in my role as Head of Resources. I had to admit that the Baby Boomer in me was in the way. If this is so for me, how do we teach all those Baby Boomer book buyers out there to convert to on line trading?
A second incident around this happened last week with my ten year old niece who calmly told myself and her Gran that she had ordered ten books from Amazon that day and was negotiating with her Dad as to who was going to carry this investment. Why am I scared, she is confident and my mother does not even contemplate this channel? This is a great marketing challenge for the On Line trader.
Follow this link to download a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation on the Millenial generation and the media Generation M & The Media The data is US focused but provides insight into all 8-18 year olds. The page has other useful downloads like an executive summary, powerpoint presentations, and videos of the presentations of the findings.
Read the media release for the report below:
“Media Multi-tasking” Changing the Amount and Nature of Young People’s Media Use
Bedrooms Have Become Multi-Media Centers
Kids Say Parents Don’t Set or Enforce Rules on Media Use
Washington, D.C. – Children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using “new media” like computers, the Internet and video games, without cutting back on the time they spend with “old” media like TV, print and music, according to a new study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), they’re managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day. The study, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds, examined media use among a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 3rd through 12th graders who completed detailed questionnaires, including nearly 700 self-selected participants who also maintained seven-day media diaries.
The study - which measured recreational (non-school) use of TV and videos, music, video games, computers, movies, and print – found that the total amount of media content young people are exposed to each day has increased by more than an hour over the past five years (from 7:29 to 8:33), with most of the increase coming from video games (up from 0:26 to 0:49) and computers (up from 0:27 to 1:02, excluding school-work). However,
Continue reading ‘Report on Millenials and the media’
To download a free e-book from MIT on Innovation goto this link Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel Chapters are as follows
1 Introduction and Overview
2 Development of Products by Lead Users
3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products
4 Users Innovate-or-Buy Decisions
5 Users Low-Cost Innovation Niches
6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations
7 Innovation Communities
8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation
9 Democratizing Innovation
10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations
11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design
12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields
Please come back and post comments on this page.
I am reading a really challenging book: “The Individualized Corporation” by Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher Bartlett. (Buy it at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net)
They have a radical view on the role of management (well, not so much radical, as just bold and clear). Take this great quote for example:
“It has, by now, become a cliché to claim that people are the key source of a company’s competitive advantage. But, in a literal sense, this cannot be true in the long-term — at least not since slavery was abolished. The only way people can directly serve as the source of a company’s competitive advantage is if they are exploited — in prison factories or sweatshops. In companies that pay a fair wage commensurate with the individual competencies of their employees, the real source of competitive advantage lies in the context — in the Intel environment that allows people to individually and collectively create far more value than they could if they were employed elsewhere. If, as is often asserted, the key function of management is to help ordinary people produced extraordinary results and if [the] behaviours of people in the company can be so radically changed by changing the internal behavioural context, then shaping that context is undeniably the principal task of managers and the best measure of the firm’s quality of management.” (pg 176f)
As you probably know, there are blogs and there are blogs. Some blogs are nothing more than gossip, while others simply chronicle the life and times of the blogger (which may or may not be interesting). Our blog is a tool we use to capture the intellectual capital floating around in the talented brains of the people in our network. It is therefore critical to make sure that you know what a blog’s goal is before bookmarking it for regular reading.
?ic@TmTd = “What I see at TomorrowToday.biz”.
At TomorrowToday.biz our passion is to help people realise that we don’t have to work in the way we’ve always been working. A new era is emerging, and this provides us with wonderful opportunities to be extraordinarily successful in new ways, using new methods, and creating a better life for all. TomorrowToday.biz is a futurist strategy consultancy with a particular focus on helping companies and individuals understand the “humanâ€? side of business. We believe competitive advantage is found less and less in what you sell, and more and more in who you are and how you sell. Therefore, we focus on helping companies maximize the potential and effectiveness of their people, and enhance their connections with their customers. We do this by watching future trends and understanding the human impact of tomorrow’s realities before anyone else does. We help companies apply those insights today, with a specific emphasis on helping our clients to attract, retain, nurture and lead the “bright young thingsâ€? – inside and outside the organization.
This blog is our play space, where we record what we’re seeing as we scan global mega trends to look for the new realities. To do this, we watch other blogs, scan websites, read magazines (between the main contributors, we read virtually every decent business and news magazine available (from The Economist and Business Week to TIME and Newsweek, from New Scientist to Inc and from Fast Company to Intelligence) and read vociferously. We also spend a lot of time with our network of gurus and our clients - listening more than anything else. What you see on this blogsite is a synthesis of all of that information into something useable for you.
You will probably find its too tough to read through everything we put down - don’t worry about it. Maybe select a category down the side menu, and just read those. Or dip and and out as you have the time.
This is really just our internal website that we’re allowing you to look into. Enjoy it.
(If you want to know WHY we blog, click here).
As I walked in it felt as though I had come home!
The CEO’s office could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as ostentatious but the large desk was well ordered and adorned with some impressive looking gadgetry. As it was a Boomer boss I was dealing with here I couldn’t help but wonder just how much of the gadgetry was really used, but of course discretion dictated that I keep such thoughts to myself! Central to the office was a round table with comfortable leather chairs, a combination that invited conversation. Running the length of two of the office walls was a waist high built-in mahogany wood cupboard on which were displayed a variety of artifacts. It was the artifacts that caught my attention as I walked in and it was the odd assortment of collectables that struck a cord within me, inviting the question as to the story associated with each of them.
And that is where it began‌but let me backtrack a few weeks to where it all really started.
Continue reading ‘Learning from a Savvy CEO’
The Devastating Effect of not Taking ‘Bright Young Things’ Seriously.
Continue reading ‘Would You Work for Halliburton?’
If the world is changing faster than ever before, and if we are rapidly moving towards a world where your competitive advantage increasingly depends on your ability to attract, retain and get the most out of the talented individuals in your industry, leaders cannot ignore the need to be able to adequately develop and prepare their people for the future. But how should we train people for a world that doesn’t yet exist? Which knowledge and skills should we focus on if current skills and knowledge might be obsolete tomorrow? Or should we rather focus on attitudes? How do you train someone that has all the information in the world at her fingertips already?
In the first article I outlined seven attributes that are widely regarded as essential for success in the future workplace. The second article highlighted the way in which you should view the learner if you hoped to have any significant impact on her development. In this article I will take a closer look at the role of the facilitator of the learning process. As I mentioned in the previous article, I will use the terminology ‚learner‛ and ‚facilitator‛ although these terms also refer to leaders/followers; managers/staff, trainers/trainees etc.
Facilitator vs teacher
The role of the facilitator is aptly described by the name: facilitator. Someone who facilitates learning. Someone who makes learning easy. Please note that I did not use the term ‚teacher‛. Where a teacher gives a didactic lecture which covers the subject matter, a facilitator helps the learner to get to his or her own understanding of the content. In the former scenario the learner plays a passive role and in the latter scenario the learner plays an active role in the learning process. The emphasis thus turns away from the instructor and the content, and towards the learner and her context. This dramatic change of role implies that a facilitator needs to display a total different set of skills than a teacher. A teacher tells, a facilitator asks; a teacher lectures from the front, a facilitator supports from the back; a teacher gives answers according to a set curriculum, a facilitator provides guidelines and creates the environment for the learner to arrive at his or her own conclusions; a teacher mostly gives a monologue, a facilitator is in continuous dialogue with the learners. A facilitator should also be able to adapt the learning experience ‘in mid-air’ by using his or her own initiative in order to steer the learning experience to where the learners want to create value.
Why this change of role?
- Because you don’t have all the answers anymore. We live in a world where there are various answers to the same questions. Why should your answer be superior to mine?
- Because I learn better when I discover things for myself. Of course it’s easier if you just give me the content � but that’s boring! And I don’t need you to give me the content, just give me my internet-connection and I’ll dig up the content myself.
- Because the content alone is not what it’s about. Things change. The content you give me now is old by lunch-time tomorrow. Rather excite me about the topic and help me to master the foundational concepts � as well the skills to continuously master new ones.
- Because my questions are more important than your answers. Respect my questions, don’t smother them with quick answers. I’d rather live with the ambiguity.
What does this mean in practice?
- Rather think of creative ways to help the learner explore and discover the topic than spending hours and hours on developing slides and slides of content.
- Develop your facilitation skills. Don’t tell them the answers � ask them the questions that will lead them to the answers. Usually when we get nervous, we tend to convert to teaching mode. Resist this temptation.
- If you are a leader, these principles should be applied in your everyday interactions with your people. Facilitate their development: do not try to teach them in YOUR ways � help each person to discover her/his own way.
Jean Cooper
Jean Cooper is an Organisational Alchemist at TomorrowToday.biz, a dynamic organisation that is assisting both large and small companies navigate the rich steams of the new economy. Jean completed two Masters degrees in 2004, both cum laude (an MPhil and MComm). He is an Industrial Psychologist and team dynamics expert, with a passion for helping companies get the best out of their bright young things.
The Rainbow Nation
Most of us who are resident in South Africa are proud of the fact that we live in the Rainbow Nation. To the world we are a ‚miracle nation‛ because we went through simultaneous social, political and economic change, and surprisingly came out the better for it on the other side! But how many South Africans have actually embraced the idea of the Rainbow Nation, and to what extent do they believe in the concept? I believe that the Rainbow Nation is a surface concept for most South Africans who, when faced with a challenge, revert to the old paradigms that formed the basis of the pre-Mandela South Africa. The challenge our nation is facing is for each person to reflect a deep understanding and love for all people. How can the leaders of our nation instil this change?
Triple Bottom Line reporting has been introduced with Corporate Governance for all public companies in South Africa. The business world now needs to report on its financial health as well as the contribution it is making towards social change in an effort to uplift the disadvantaged and protect the environment. The JSE has also introduced the CSI index as a measure of how we are performing in this regard. But how are individuals faring when it comes to social change?
Continue reading ‘Triple Bottom Line in the Rainbow Nation’
The book by this name, by Jessica Williams, (Buy it at Amazon.com) was published in 2004 (Sep) - you should not be able to read these facts and stay the same. How you choose to respond is up to you - but you can bet that there are people responding.
Continue reading ‘50 Facts That Should Change the World’
I spent 8 hours driving yesterday, to have a 90 minute meeting. Well an interview actually. I met with Thomas Schmuck. He manages a building supply store that is part of the Build It franchise (Click here for their web site). The store can be found in Vryheid. Somewhere in Kwa Zulu Natal. Actually a beautiful drive from Durban. Still a long way to go for 90 minutes. Or not?
I went to talk to Thomas because in 2 weeks I’m speaking at the Build It National Conference, and Thomas manages the ’store of the year’. I don’t know his exact age, but he can’t be more than 35, he’s from Austria, and has been in South Africa for no more than 18 months. So how does an Austrian in his mid-30’s take a building supply store in Vryheid, and transform it into ’store of the year’ within a National Franchise like Build It?
I wasn’t disappointed with what he had to say. I say that because what Thomas is doing in Vryheid looks very much like what we’ve been suggesting companies need to be exploring if they’re going to be successful in the future. There are many large companies that have large resources at their disposal that show little sign of making the necessary changes to capitalise in an emerging Connection Economy. In fact I have a feeling that the ‘new pioneers’ are not going to be found in your traditional blue chips. It’s going to be the Thomas Schmucks of the world who are going to be the leading lights into the future.
Continue reading ‘Lessons from where you least expect them’
Contrary to most airline announcements, it is not unsafe to use a mobile phone on an aeroplane. On most flights, a few cellphones are left on by mistake, and the avionics systems on modern aircraft are hardened against radio interference anywhere. The real reason that mobile phones a band is because they disrupt the networks on the ground — imagine a few hundred cellphone users flying at great speed across the city and needing to be transferred en mass every few seconds from one base station to another. The networks just couldn’t keep up. But it’s just a case of technology. What will be happening in the next few years is mobile base stations installed in aeroplanes with the hulls of the aeroplane shielded to stop the phones connecting to ground base stations. This is currently being tested by WirelessCabin. Its about time!
I found this manifesto recently and thought it was worth sharing.
The current trend toward seeking out graduates in the arts and creative faculties for corporate roles will probably end up in the offering of degrees similar to this one. As Innovation moves up the corporate agenda we will need more and more application of business relevance to the exercising of our imagination. People who get ‘a handle’ on this skill first will be highly marketable, and sought after.
For more info on what it is like to be this type of person within a business environment contact Barrie our Chief Imagination Officer barrie@tomorrowtoday.biz.
For those who don’t have the time to read the complete article below, or if you are deciding whether to make the time to do so, let me help you out. The qualities of a Masters in Business Imagination [MBI] are:
* They see things differently,
* They spur creativity in other people,
* They focus on opportunities, not on threats,
* They have the ability to bring ideas to life,
* They have the skill to learn and unlearn knowledge, and
* They accept challenges with passion and enthusiasm.
Continue reading ‘The Masters of Business Imagination Manifesto’
The Futurist in February reviewed the book, “Predictable Surprises” (2004) by Max H. Bazerman and Michael D. Watkins (buy it at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net). It is designed to help us see when we should be able to expect unpleasant surprises, and how to be organised to minimise them.
Here are some of the points:
Continue reading ‘Predictable Surprises’
We live in the 21st century. By now, we feel, we should have solved life’s mysteries, understood the functioning of the universe and made sure that the only surprises we face are those created for us by other human beings. But that is not so.
The promise of modernism (initiated by the Enlightenment Project) was that we would eventually come to understand this big machine we call the world. Everything should be able to be reduced to its small component parts, each part categorised and investigated and understood, and by so understanding the parts we then understand the whole. Through our understanding we are able to exercise control, and by exercising control we are able to make a better world. That modernist thinking not only applied to Newtonian physics but to almost every human endeavour and especially to business. It was this approach that guided, for instance, Henry Ford in his design of the production line.
But Einstein and quantum physics is changing all of that.
Continue reading ‘So, we think we know everything’
How do you get noticed as a company attempting to hire this year’s crop of bright young graduates? L’Oreal has gone for an interesting strategy. Following the extraordinary success of business based reality TV game shows (we’re not fans of the business advice these shows give - read an article I wrote about that here - but they’re certainly good entertainment and have captured the public’s attention), L’Oreal has run their own international strategy simulation business competition, attracting competing teams of MBAs and final year undergraduate students from around the world.
Its run completely online, looks like a lot of fun, and is very likely to attract attention amongst type of graduates that L’Oreal would want to employ as interns. Check out details of the game here.
Attracting and retaining the Bright Young Things is now more than ever a strategic capability of a successful 21st-century company. To be successful, companies need to think in new ways and do new things.
OK, so make sure you don’t read what I didn’t say. You still need to be worried about India and China — the matter what country or industry you’re in, if you’re not thinking about the effects that these two countries will have on you, you’re already in trouble. But we need to keep the threat in perspective. India and China are both exceptionally populous countries, between them accounting for over one third of the world’s population. In terms of the potential talent pool, we are often tempted to think of them as limitless. But they’re not. Like my own home country, South Africa, a large percentage of the population are unskilled. Only a very small group of people in these countries would be regarded as talented enough to contribute to the industries that benefit from the offshoring and outsourcing of service industry work from developed countries.
Because of this, there is a growing war for talent in these countries. The immediate ramifications of this is that salaries and remuneration packages are starting to climb — in some cases quite dramatically — and that will put the squeeze on the price these companies charge, thus starting to remove one of their greatest competitive advantages. Once this happens, the pace of outsourcing will dramatically decrease. And it is happening.
Continue reading ‘Why you shouldn’t be too worried about India and China’
Blogs are the new big thing in communication - and now companies are getting on board, too.
What is a blog? Very simply, its a “web log”. Do you remember Captain Kirk’s “Captain’s log, stardate xyz”? Well, that’s kind of what blogs are. They’re websites that record (usually) short snippets of someone’s thoughts and musings. There are blogs on every issue you can think of, as people around the world simply dump their thoughts onto the web. It is (and has already become) a bit messy, so most readers of blogs find blogs on topics that interest them, written by people they feel they can trust, and then they stick with that blog site. Most blog sites provide links to other web pages and other sources of info.
The value is that a blog gets to a trusted way of filtering the mass of information that flows through our world every day. Blogs even made the cover story of Business Week (read it here), and I agree with their analysis - blogs are going to change your business - inside and out!
OK, so that’s what they are, and why they’re important. So, how do you use them?
Continue reading ‘Blogging 101 (or Blogging for Boomers)’
Is this a world first? Stonyfield Farm has a Chief Blogger - mainly charged with connecting with clients. Read the BusinessWeek story on her, here.
Blogs are coming - no doubt. BusinessWeek’s current edition has blogs as the front cover. “As big as the printing press…” is their view. Get on board, before you lose out.
Also read BusinessWeek’s blog site (blogspotting) about Who should blog at a company.
And, PS - thanks for reading our corporate blog. Link to us, and come back soon.
If you have been frustrated at the pricing and service of any of South Africa’s telecomms providers, you might enjoy Clive Simkins’ rant about Vodacom’s recent hassles with 3G (and the warning not to use their option-only Vodafone 3G card): get it here.
I had a wonderful phrase the other day. A14-year-old was complaining that he had been “cyber grounded”. I believe this meant that he had no access to his digital TV, which meant no access to the Internet either. I wasn’t able to ask him about the implications for a cellphone usage, but maybe the parents would have thought that was a health and safety issue. Who knows? It’s wonderful to be living in the 21st century isn’t it?
In most developed nations around the world, one of the biggest looming issues is that of retirement and payment of pensions. Futurists and commentators have been talking about it for a while (see, for example, Newsweek, Macrh 8, 2004). There is no doubt in my mind that this issue above all others has the potential to cause massive generational wars around the world. I do not think that I’m overstating the danger. Most developed nations have an unsustainable system that in essence takes it from the young and gives to the old. For the past hundred years this is not really been a problem, because the young have outnumbered and out earned the old. But that has not changed. As the baby boomers begin to retire these systems are no longer adequate.
Many possibile solutions have been put forward: raising the retirement age (it was set by Bismark in the 1800s when only about 10% of the population even lived to 65 years old), scrapping all income taxes for those over 65 (with a possible ceiling for mega rich CEOs), mandatory retirement saving, moving to a personal savings only retirement policy (i.e. no - or reduced - social security).
Read a short summary of the situation, in TIME magazine, written before George Bush began his task of reforming the American pension system (see text below).
Continue reading ‘Pensions - one of the scariest generational issues of all’
In the past decade, a number of chains of private schools have sprung up around South Africa. They provide a quality education, of course, but one of their primary focuses and certainly one of their primary marketing tools is to churn out matriculants with a fist full of distinctions. It’s not unusual for these schools to have matriculants who do 8, 9 or even 10 subjects (the requirement is 6), achieving most with distinction. Most of these students have expected to have universities clamouring for them, but that is starting to change.
Both the University of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand University medical schools last year rejected many applicants with top academic qualifications, favouring applicants with life skills and the emotional intelligence required to be a doctor. Although this was partly due to South Africa’s need to redress past imbalances, it was not simply about affirmative action and limited places. It was about these medical school saying that it takes more than just academic intelligence to be a good doctor. The same is true for most of the other professions.
It’s exciting to see universities, those social institutions supposedly geared towards the future skills requirements of society, starting to understand some of the implications of the movement to a connection/emotion economy.
