I will open my last post of 2008 with a beautiful photo of SAS's chartered airplane currently operaing the Stockholm - Örnsköldsvik route. The whole Dash debacle has called for unexpeted solutions. Wonder what it does to the SAS brand.
What an amazingly adventurous year 2007 turned out to be. Whilst newspapers have fretted about collapse of climates and credit markets alike, I have truly had the time of my life. The good things is that Vox has helped me share it with you. And my future self who will one day want to revisit the past.
I am at home in Stockholm now and resting for the first time in what seems like a very long time. I don't think there's been a single weekend without some kind of work. But there have been other years when I worked hard - this is the year it finally paid off, in more ways than one.
I wan to thank every single client of mine who have brought me in to speak at their events and engagements. I have crossed lands and oceans to rise before dawn, rehearse for a few hours and then without any other breakfast than a Red Bull strive to deliver my vision of the present and the future. Sometimes to a room of hundreds. Sometimes to a handful of souls. I have loved every minute of it! I am quite mediocre at most things. I was never good at sports. I am far too sloppy to be a scientist and I don't understand maths well enough to work with abstract figures in any shape or form. I have been blessed with a voice, though. For a while, I used it to front a rockband (whose oeuvres you can savor in the audio section of this blog) but it was when I turned to motivational speaking about trends and futurology that I really found my stride. To everyone I've spoken for and with in 2007, thank you for letting me do this.
2008 lies ahead and with it some new chapters. The book is coming along nicely. The first draft of it, that is, so with some luck and plenty of hard work something might come of it in 2008. Magazines and newspapers have been filled with predictions in the past few weeks and a recurring theme is that "we will move from words to action concering the climate". Alas, I think they're mistaken and I will use the wise words of Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert to prove why we won't do a whole lot about the climate in 2008 either.
We will, however, work hard, consume, explore, debate, indulge and partake in all other activities that make us human. And you can bet that I'll be there to observe it and tell you about it on a stage near you.
I wish you a prosperous new year and hope that we'll meet on- or offline again very soon!
Here are some terrific photos taken by Daniela Krautsack of my performance in Istanbul. Thank you, Daniela!
After having spent a couple of great days at the European Marketing Summit in Istanbul, I have a yearning to write
Day 2 was my big day. The auditorium was huge but I had the luxury of being the closing speaker so I coukd cherrypick insights and techniques that I thought would patch up the empty spaces that other speakers had left behind. I focued my speech, Fast Futures, on what we ought to be telling our children about the future. I also got a chance to play the piano. I sang and played Robbie Williams's Angels. I thought it sounded great but that wasn't everybody's impression. My point, however, was that it's OK to be an amateur and I hope I got that point across.
The man behind all this is Peter Fisk. A great British marketeer and author of Marketing Genius. He's been chairing the conference for the past few years and he's the reason I was able to go to Istanbul. Thanks, Peter! So....In conclusion, a terrific few days in a vibrant city with some new-found friends. What a great way to wrap up the autumn speaking season!
Christmas is almost here with all that it entails (not much in our household, actually) and my final engagements are nearly upon me. Final before Christmas. Final before I take some time off on parental leave (twins, I've heard, are a handful). I'm still pondering whether to host my annual open trend seminar in january in Stockholm (I've hosted it since 2001 so to skip it completely would feel...strange). I could do with some encouragement. If you read this and want me to host an open seminar this january - let me know!
I'm a bit of a sucker for motivational speakers. I remember being a lost, confused 21-year old. Most adolescents start getting into things like Albert Camus or Ayn Rand at that point. I bought Wake-up Calls by Eric Allenbaugh at that point. Reading it was therapeutic and I even made an effort to write to Mr...sorry, Doctor Allenbaugh and thank him for his efforts. His reply? A colorful postcard informing me that the book was also available in Swedish (?!).
Messrs Oom and Barth inspired me to do some stellar work. Last Thursday, I presented to
I followed this up the same afternoon by speaking for a conpany hosting a two-day seminar about employer branding.
So I keep counting down. Tomorrow I'm off to Istanbul to speak at the European Marketing Summit (sly title - I've only seen it hosted in Istanbul but the title makes it look bigger) and then I have a few things to finish off before a new chapter begins. Not least on this blog.
Cross-published at Pazarlama Zirvesi
I love eating fast. Everyone, especially my wife, complains that I’m eating too fast. If people are polite, say, in a business luncheon, they’ll just shrug and say things like “wow, you’re quick” but the politeness doesn’t conceal the fact that they also think I’m far too quick in my dietary habits.
My mom always complained about this and my other table manners as I was growing up. “You’re so much like your grandfather”, she’d say. When you’re a kid, the last person you want to resemble is one of your grandparents.
I started to feel a little bit ashamed of my table manners in general and my consumption velocity in particular.
Growing up is about opening your eyes and seeing things anew so at age thirty I studied my dad once during a meal.
I realized then where I had inherited my speed-eating skills.
In a moment of Freudian inferiority complex, I realized that I was actually quite a slow eater compared with my dad.
He’d gulp up a glass of beer like it was a small shot and he’d be all done with his meal when I was only halfway through mine. For the first time in my life, I realized what it’s like being a slow eater. I realized what all people accompanying my lunches and dinners throughout the years must have felt like.
The strange thing is that it felt pretty good.
I didn’t feel like some freak of nature that had been singled out by his grandfather’s genes. I felt less alone.
Since then, my father and me have eaten together several times (not just because he’s does all my accounting). We enjoy lunching together. It’s quick, it’s efficient and it allows us to focus on what’s important – conversation.
It’s only when we eat with other people, like family members or business acquaintances, that it can get kind of awkward.
My point in telling this anecdote is that speed is relative and that watching my father eat was my Newton-watching-the-apple-moment.
We only notice velocity in relationship to other things.
Writing this sentence, I am sitting aboard an Airbus A330 traveling at 578 Mph according to the in-flight travel monitors. But I don’t feel that. To me, the feeling is no different from sitting in my office in Stockholm on any average Tuesday. I felt the acceleration at take off but had I been sedated during take-off (or - even better – been allowed to sleep in this morning and been picked up by the airline who, without waking me, would have put me in my seat and made sure I didn’t wake up until airborne – what a terrific business concept for long-haul premium travelers!), I wouldn’t have realized that there was a 600 Mph difference of speed between seat 16A on SK945 and my office chair.
Only in moments of relativity do we realize what speed is and how it affects us.
Do you remember surfing the Internet in the mid-1990’s. The modem was a little box that beeped and made funny noises when it dialled up the ISP servers. Each webpage took about a minute or more to load – if they were text-only, that is. “Surfing” is quite a bad word to describe this. "Hobbling along" or "poking" would have been a better description. The Net was like a collection of written papers – filled with funny stories, porn or news.
Today, quicker modems and microprocessors have enabled the Internet to transform itself. It’s more like a series of interactive TV-channels today. Did we realize this in the early 1990’s? If you’re a visionary entrepreneur in Silicon Valley your answer is undoubtedly yes but most of us aren’t is your shoes. We were rejoicing in 1994 when we could (slowly) download the transcript to all Monty Python-films and couldn’t dream of a world where their entire back-catalogue could be downloaded. For Free. In less than 24 hours.
Today’s internet will transform itself many times over in the coming decades and we’ll laugh at the primitive, grainy images and slow downloading times that we live with today.
Speed transforms but is only noticeable in relationship to other things. In other circumstances, it is blinding.
My flight between Stockholm and Chicago today would have taken about six months a century ago. I would have boarded a ship in Gothenburg and sailed across the Atlantic. Had I survived the storms and the hazard of scurvy, I would have arrived in Nova Scotia in a couple of months. Then I would have gone by horse carriage or, had I been lucky and/or wealthy, by train.
Today, it takes me less than nine hours.
Am I happy about that? Do I stop to reflect and rejoice in the fact that scurvy is most unlikely and that we fly so high above the storms that we only feel them as mild turbulence? (The answer is actually "yes" but that’s only because writing this forces me to ponder this fact)
I’m more likely to complain about turbulence or worry about the queues at immigration when I land. In Chicago, the traffic will most likely be horrid and I’ll do anything to shave an hour off my itinerary. "Ungrateful!" would be the word used by the 1907 version of myself to describe this. "Quite ordinary" would be the description thrust upon me by my fellow travelers today.
People have adapted to a new, faster world and adapt their plans and thoughts to a faster climate. Flying across the Atlantic can become a routine as dull as taking the bus. In fact, my good friend Fredrik commuted between Chicago and Malmö in southern Sweden for about a year (He ended up hating it). Imagine if you were sitting next to me on the airplane right now and I would be going on and on about the marvels of fast travel. How many minutes would it take before you tried to find another seat or merely pretended not to hear me? Think about the distance traveled in those minutes.
If I was to tell you that the world will keep on speeding up, my guess is you would react in one of three ways. You would either go “Uh-huh” since the concept of “faster” means virtually nothing unless I make tangible examples describing more situations of relativity like the ones described earlier. Or you’d go “Wow!” and think about all the things in life that are currently taking too long (like our dishwasher at home – two hours! What’s with that?) and how they’d take no time at all in the future (a prototype series of Electrolux that will ask you how much time you want the dishes to take is currently in development). The third, and increasingly more common, reaction would be one of bewilderment even sadness or frustration. “Do we really need to do things faster?” is a question that many people have asked me when I’ve talked about Speed as a trend in the past few years. Italian Slow Food and Slow Cities, Carl Honoré’s excellent book “
I attended Future Work Day today. Terrific initiative. Terrific execution (thanks to the good people of State of the Arts) but appalling speakers! I don’t really want to get into great detail about what speaker were worse and what message was the least engaging. Let’s just leave it at these two insights:
- China is a big country. Any numbers related to China are bound to be big. We get it! That doesn’t mean everything becomesChina-centric.
- If you’re the “grand ol’ dame” of trendspotting, you really need to shine a bit brighter than Promostyl’s rep did today.
Let’s look ahead instead. I’m speaking in Istanbul in a few weeks at the European Marketing Summit (check out the program here). In preparation for the conference, I wrote an article called "Why we (will) need speed". Here it is, in its entirety.
Yet, “fast” is what ultimately describes development of civilizations, particularly in the past century. Nothing has affected our lives and societies more than our collective (or is it individualistic) yearning to travel, learn, accomplish – well – do everything with ever greater velocity. From the most obvious gains in transport and information transfer to less apparent speed-gains in healthcare and culture, speed permeates our lives and work. “Fast” is a relative term and will therefore be reserved for things that stand out from the crowd (when was the last time you described car travel as “fast” in this age of eternal traffic jams?) but high velocity is one of the many invisible gains that differentiates the 20th and 21st century from earlier times. This article will argue that speed is not some frivolous luxury that does more harm than good (as slow-fooders and eco-activists would have it) but a vital ingredient in a society where everyone – rich and poor – can live healthier, longer and richer lives.
I remember studying finance at business school and the professor teaching us the concept of insider trading. The underlying principle is that all information should reach the market at the same time making it a fair trading opportunity for everyone – a beautiful idea in theory but increasingly hard to accomplish in practice. The reason is that stock market fluctuations don’t just occur on a monthly or even a daily basis anymore but within milliseconds – that’s how fast the stock market is moving these days. Earlier this year, a stock brokerage moved their head quarters from Baltimore to New York City in order to be closer to the servers on Wall Street. Even though the “playing field is leveled” (as Thomas Friedman would have it) through broadband connections, this hundred-mile move by the stock brokerage enabled them to shave a couple of milliseconds (a thousandth of a second) off each transaction. The time saved was projected to render millions in increased revenue at years end. We are, in other words, living in a millisecond world. This isn’t just limited to stock market gambling but also to another kind of gaming; MMORPG’s, or Massive Multiple Online Role Playing Games, such as World of Warcraft or Counter Strike. Players of these kinds of games and there are many, know that having a fast broadband connection, a swift computer processor and rapid skills with the mouse and keyboard is the difference between winning or losing, between killing and being killed. Media is also developing into a millisecond market. In July 2007, a ruptured water main caused a gigantic explosion in a Manhattan street. The carnage looked brutal but fortunately left only a few injured and no casualties. Google News, a news aggregating website that produces no content on its own, noticed that the first reports appeared as quick as fifteen minutes after the event. However, as Google News also has a search function, they saw that people were googling the terms “explosion, Manhattan” five seconds after the event! People wanted information after five seconds (possibly quicker but typing slows you down) whilst media providers could only present the first fragmented dispatches after fifteen minutes. Talk about potential gains in a millisecond world.
The philosophical questions that often gets asked when the millisecond world is presented is: “Is this good?” as in “Does this lead to a better world?” Let’s disregard the MMORPG-example for the time being as it represents a sub cultural hobby rather than a broad societal development. Faster news providers and faster stock markets are somewhat interlinked (new information reaches the market quicker and affects the stock prices more often). Many economists argue that society as a whole would benefit from a slower stock market (the famous “everyone would be better off if..:” line of argument) but only if everyone agreed to slow down. As long as there are some speed-traders out there, everyone needs to be fast in order to profit. Markets strive for efficiency amongst other things and speed provides efficiency. When “rotten eggs” are permitted to hide amongst healthy stocks, the suffering becomes a lot higher once they’re found out and may even affect healthy companies. Several small adjustments in stock prices over the course of a day are a lot healthier financially than a few major adjustments annually or less frequently. Speed does indeed seem to improve stock market trading.
However, stock market trading, online gaming and news are viewed as somewhat artificial by some and don’t represent the real world. What about speed in daily life? On a personal and professional basis?
A “fast car” moves at great speed whereas a “fast book” doesn’t move at all, it’s merely a quick read. What about a fast company? What features does it have that we should learn from?
Once upon a time, a development cycle in a company looked something like this:
Information gathering ⇒ Analysis ⇒ Decision ⇒ Implementation.
Depending on the size of the company and/or the scope of the project, this could take anywhere from a few months to a few years.
These days, most companies have moved on from this slow and cumbersome model to something that looks like this:
Information gathering ⇒ Analysis ⇒ Decision ⇒ Implementation.
Yes, it’s identical on the surface but these days the process takes somewhere between a few hours and a few days at maximum. Google is an excellent example of this. They are quick to beta-test new applications and adapt or scrap them if the performance is disappointing. It’s a fail-fast model, which means that failures cost less money and can be divested or discontinued quicker.
Speedy internal and external processes are one of two features that companies can never go wrong by investing in (the other being cost-cutting) since it’s unlikely that tomorrow’s customers will ask you to deliver your goods and services more slowly (or more expensively).
The role models to study here are the fashion companies since they’ve lived in a world of fast changing preference and global supply chains for longer than most other industry segments. Speed was what made Benetton a global powerhouse in the 1970’s. By dyeing fabric in the last step before they reached consumers, they were able to adapt quicker to changing fashion styles. Today’s champion of speed is Inditex, the Spanish owner of Zara amongst other brands, whose whole value chain is aimed towards speed. Some examples include suppliers not getting paid until the garments are sold in the stores, a tightly knit IT-system where factories can follow up on cash register sales on a daily basis, and so on.
More and more industries are using the F-word to describe what they’re doing. Miles Flint, the ex-CEO of SonyEricsson talked about cell phones as being fashion statements. The car industry has noticed that the three-year advantages once offered by a new platform has shrunk to about six months. Food and beverage, pharmaceuticals and management thinking are other industries that increasingly follow fashion cycles and need to adapt to a quicker pace of change in consumer preferences.
The problem for many of these companies is that they remain tied up in long-term, expensive R&D processes that are designed for a slower world. Procter & Gamble is an example of a company that broke the mould when they manufactured their Pringles Prints (Potato chips with printed patterns on the surface). Developing a line extension for them used to take years and cost millions. Pringles Prints where developed in a matter of months and cost significantly less. What they did was to send out an e-mail to every P&G office around the world asking them for help with contacts to develop what was then only on the idea-stage. The response was swift. The Italian P&G had a relationship with a printing shop that were able to print on foodstuffs. With some quick adjustments, the products were ready to launch quickly and P&G were able to test the product before it had cost millions to develop. They call this process not Research & Develop but Connnect & Develop.
R&D is the only name change taking place. What about “strategy”? The word denotes a lengthy planning process wherein a company chooses what to focus on in the long-term. This used to be contrasted with “operations”, day to day decisions that were supposedly of lesser long-term significance. These days, companies need to take crucial decisions on a daily basis and thus engage in a kind of “real-time strategy”. Many companies refer to it by these words and invest large sums in developing “dash-boards” where they can get a better overview of daily operations (think of a car where you don’t just have speedometer and fuel tank but also oil meter, trip information, a GPS map, climate control and so on). A new, faster age of business calls for new tools. Imagine two guys sitting down in 1988 and thinking about helping people with searching for information. The solution would have been to pay a hundred students and set up a telephone-hotline where people could ask anything and get an answer. Fast forward ten years and this need wouldn’t be solved by people at all but by this:
This is the algorithm for Google’s PageRank model, the underlying principle governing all their search functions. The solution is not a hundred students but a formula and the result is a business model which is scalable, global and a lot more profitable than the telephone helpline. Companies need to investigate algorithms and other automated processes today if they want to deliver the speed that consumers demand and, increasingly, expect.
In the early hours of December 26th, 2004, an earthquake in the Indian Ocean triggered tsunami waves in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa whose reverberations can still be felt to this day. Thousands of people lost their lives. In Sweden, the debate was heavily centered on why the government had been so slow to respond whereas the Nordic travel agencies were superb in responding quickly. Finger-pointing and conspiracy theories were abundant. Yet the answer is surprisingly simple. When something goes wrong for a travel agency, they have “solve the problem” encoded in their corporate DNA whether it be lost hotel keys or tsunami waves. “Solve the problem” is what we call the dominant response of a travel agency. The dominant response of a government is completely different – they analyze and negotiate, not exactly a recipe for getting things done in an emergency situation. Most companies, unfortunately, resemble governments when their dominant response is scrutinized. Their top priority isn’t “to respond to changes in the surrounding world quickly” but rather “stick to the knitting and wait things out”. Companies will need to re-program themselves to have speedy action as a dominant response in the coming decades.
In Sweden, September 11th symbolizes not just one but two tragic events. The first was the terrorist attacks of 2001. The second is the assassination of Anna Lindh, the foreign minister, in 2003. “Assassination” is probably the wrong word. She was stabbed to death whilst shopping in Stockholm by a lone psychopath. Multiple stab wounds are notoriously difficult to treat and she died within twelve hours of the event. The murderer was arrested a couple of days later (Swedish police, having learned their lesson after the debacle following the murder of prime minister Olof Palme in 1986, were swift to respond). Swedish hospitals have a trouble treating victims of gunshot wounds and stabbings and similar violent attacks since Sweden has quite low violence statistics. The irony is that if people are violently attacked in Sweden, they run a greater risk of dying from their wounds than if they would have been stabbed or shot in, say, Chicago. The conclusion one can draw is that Anna Lindh would have lived had she been stabbed in Chicago. The doctors in Sweden, by a lack of stab wound experience, didn’t act fast enough. Speed would have saved a life.
This isn’t the only example of speed saving lives.
My wife is a refugee from Bosnia. When the war broke out in Sarajevo, she fled via Belgrade to Stockholm. Quick transportation ensured that she was able to escape from a collapsing society fairly quickly. Speed saved a life.
Larry Brilliant is an epidemiologist and successfully led the World Health Organization smallpox eradication program. His prescription for dealing with epidemics (and there will be many coming our way in our global, vulnerable society) is a) early detection and b) early response. He could have just said: Speed. Speed is the difference between containing H5N1/ Avian Flu in a certain area and a global plague that erases millions of lives in a matter of weeks.
Speed will save lives.
On February 8, 1993, someone pulled the emergency brake on the new speed-train X2000 in Sweden. There was no emergency, however. The man responsible, Ladislaus Horatius, had conducted something he called “OperationTurtle”. He simply felt that transportation was moving too fast and that we need to slow down in society.
Speed permeates markets, lives and saves lives, so why is it so controversial to people?
There are a number of possible answers.
The first is that speed often becomes a symbol for other things. When people are angry about “fast food”, it isn’t necessarily the speed with which the food is served that so upsets them but rather a general anti-American sentiment that they feel is invading some sort of sacred cultural space. People in older nations tend to focus heavily on “authenticity” or “fakes” and prefer the former to the latter. Hence, newish American brands serving new food in new ways are inferior to older restaurants serving more traditional cuisine. It is, however, quite striking how short the time horizons are in these examples. People in Sweden, for example, tend to think that “potatoes” are truly Swedish whilst “French Fries” are foreign. Both were actually new in Swedish society between the 1890’s and the 1960’s – a stunningly short period of time in world history. But age, actual or perceived, has a tendency of generating nostalgic value whilst new, again actual or perceived, has a tendency of being frowned upon.
One reason for this is memory. Neuroscientists have shown that childhood memories are stored and thus recalled as a lot more dramatic than adult memories. This means that people will always remember their childhoods as a lot more vivid than their adulthoods; the food will be remembered as tasting better than it actually did and the winters, at least in Sweden, will have had more snow 30 years ago than they do today.
Another reason is that we perceive time to equal skill. If you want to be good at something, it needs to take time. There may be something to this. Take movie stars, for instance. A movie star is a construction built upon the skills and the qualities of the actor/actress and how therse are received by the audience. If someone tries to become a star too quickly, the audience may reject this as being fake or of lesser value than the movie stars of yesteryear. Take the examples of Tom Cruise and Orlando Bloom, separated in their debuts by about twenty years. Tom Cruise was allowed to ripen slowly and tested his wings in several small movies before hitting the big time with Top Gun in 1986. Orlando Bloom, however, was almost thrown upon the silver screen in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and then asked to headline his own movie with the mega budget Kingdom of Heaven in 2005. The movie flopped and Orlando Bloom was widely held responsible for the movie flop. He just “wasn’t a big enough movie-star”. We can only speculate but surely Mr Bloom would be perceived as having a different panache and more credibility as a movie star had he been allowed/ chosen to ripen for a decade before trying to carry a mega budget movie.
In general, though, ”speedophobia” is a hodge-podge of reactionary politics, xenophobia and simplification bordering misunderstanding.
We may feel whatever we like for the food that McDonald’s serves (and we are free to avoid it). The fast-food chain isn’t first and foremost a food provider however. They sell a process - a process that can be learned quickly and replicated infinitely across continents. Slow food may be seductive but it hardly generates new jobs or new wealth. It’s more of an elitist, arcane philosophy than a sound competitor to fast food.
I conducted my own experiment in Stockholm a couple of weeks back. I measured the average time spent by people in a McDonald’s branch and a sushi bar. Both are located in the center of Stockholm and both surveys were conducted over the course of five days around lunchtime (11 a.m. to 1 p.m.). The results were interesting. People, on average, spent around 24 minutes in the McDonald’s restaurant if the ate there (about 75% of all customers ate on the premises). In the sushi bar, fewer people (surprisingly) ate on the premises and those who did so spent an average of 18 minutes in the sushi bar. People spend more time in a fast-food restaurant than they do in a sushi bar, at least in this experiment. So calling McDonald’s “Fast food” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with speed.
Many activities that are considered slow have everything to do with speed. Take books, for instance. They’re viewed as a slow, reflecting activity yet reading a book is probably the fastest way you can put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, situation and life. Reading a book reflects our urge to travel quickly.
Speed is a reflection of the human condition and of civilization’s development. What is it?
This not being a scientific paper on velocity, I will stay on a superficial level. Top Gear, a British TV series about motor sport, made a reportage analyzing the driving style of Michael Schumacher – possibly the fastest man ever in Formula 1. Why was he so fast? The reportage showed that the secret of his winning races by seconds, even minutes, was a precise and wholly different driving style that shaved a couple of milliseconds off each corned on the course. The result was that each lap was a second or two quicker and he ended up winning by several seconds. The secret of traveling faster is to do several small things quicker.
The White Stripes is another example of this. They wanted to play a concert in every province in Canada in the summer of 2007. Canada is big and playing a proper, 90-minute concert in every province would have been a long, costly endeavor. What they did instead is that they played a one-note conference in several provinces. That’s right! They went up on stage in full gear and played one note! This enabled them to play in all provinces in Canada in a shorter time span than anyone else. If we want to be quick, we need to do things in new and different ways. Thing about the page rank algorithm that was presented in the first part of this article. Quick search was only enabled when we had machines that could search for us.
If we do things differently, we will not feel stress. Stress is what occurs when our expectations are out of sync with reality. If we adapt to new conditions, we will feel less stress.
It is rumored that ancient Japanese wisdom urges people “not to travel faster than the soul”: This is used as a, somewhat fluffy, argument by people who want us to slow down. Another common misconception is that people suffer because of speed. This is a myth. Average longevity has increased in the past century on an unprecedented level. We have been able to travel faster and people live longer lives than ever. Everywhere.
So people are living longer, healthier lives and we have unprecedented speed levels in society.
Besides, if the soul is made of energy and energy travels at 299,792,458 metres per second, we are actually traveling pretty slowly in relation to our souls.
So here’s to speed, a force that saves and enriches lives. Today and tomorrow.
"You're bound to bump into a celebrity or two", the driver said as he drove me from Heathrow airport to Pennyhill Park Hotel last night. I haven't yet but I need only to look at the cars parked in the driveway to feel somewhat poor.
Two interesting articles got my interest in the past week. One was about a new mutual fund called Thrasherfunds - a mutual fund where you invest in Generation X. That made me think about a TED-talk by Sasa Vucinic where he talks about the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF), a not-for-profit mutual fund targeted towards investing in press freedom. That made me think about meeting my good friend Anders Östlund at Start Up Day. He has founded a ticket exchage called Ticket2. Ticket exchanges are a sign that the market for tickets is inefficient in its present form. A concept organizer has a fixed prize and a fixed amount of ticket offered at the same time. An online ticket exchane enables you to pay whatever you want, whenenever you want to. There will always be tickets, you just have to pay a certain price. People keep saying we'll "run out of oil" which is ludicrous since we will always have oil - it may just be prices so highly that it's inaccessible to most people. Bringing Ticket2, Thrasherfunds and MDLF together, you realize that there's a market for everything and everything can become a market.
That brings me onto another issue - that of gaming. Mankind are a gaming species. From grannies playing bingo to teenagers playing counterstrike to toddlers playing CD-ROMS. And anything can be turned into a game. Facebook has turned friendships and networks into a game where you can collect a certain amount of "friends", compare yourself or your movietaste with them, bite them, and so on. Anything is a game. David Byrne wrote an amusing entry in his journal recently about his epiphany that shopping at IKEA is a game.
It's Monday morning here in Sweden and I'm just off the rush of having moderated Start Up Day 2007. What a terrrific event! I've suffered from TED-withdrawal syndrome since March and this was a well-needed booster of the intellect. My favorite moment was interviewing Pirate Bay-founder Peter Sunde. Young, at 29, he was intelligent, pleasant to be around and had some truly interesting convictions as to the movement he's a part of. Having talked to him, I started doing some reading. I'm embarrassed to admit that I've treated Pirate Bay as a site that deals with downloading and haven't really taken a stand for or against them. I've been sloppy in my conclusions, in other words. Intellectual property laws, and the ways that certain governments fight to uphold them isn't a black-white question the way some people have laid it out to be. Why does the argument "how will musicians get paid?" have any more clout than "how will people who carry wood from the forest get paid now that we have tractors?". When Bruce Sterling spoke at SXSW in 2006, he urged people to "make no decision out of fear". There's a war going on right now between progressive globalists and fear-driven careerists with little understanding of what technology is and what it's capable of. What side are you on? I'm ashamed to say that I was undecided before talking to Mr Sunde but now I know. (Start Up Day has been blogged about extensively and there are some clips on YouTube as well)
Last Friday, the good people at MiH Future had invited me to provoke the adults at MiH into better future-thinking. I normally say no to Marketing Associations ("we have very little resources" is what they tell me whilst charging their members 20 bucks to listen to my presentation). MiH Future is different. It's run by young people and they reached out to me when I spoke in Gothenburg earlier this year. Their sympathetic plea and the fact that they let me stay in the superior suite (with and ocean view) made me want to go. The morning was just like a high school revue. It started with a teenage swing band and ended with some student comedians. I wish every morning was like that (including waking up in a suite).
When I was in Orlando a couple of weeks ago, I went to Disney World. Call it a combined nostalgia trip and recon for the unborn twins. At 3 p.m. they have the daily parade and although it's wholesome and for kids, I hung around to see it. I started listening to what they were singing. The message was interesting - it was about the importance of dreaming because "dreams may come true". I thought to myself, that's quite a positive message. I'd like to take my kids to see and hear that some day. Then I started thinking about what I had grown up with in Sweden. Bamse, the bear. There were no songs about dreaming in Bamse. In fact, as opposed to Disney where the rodent is a visionary, the rodent in Bamse was a millionaire and he's evil. Bamse's friend Skalman, a turtle, is an inventor and portrayed as very lazy (he seems to be suffering from narcolepsy). So, the millionaire is evil and the inventor is lazy. Bamse is righteous because he takes performance-enhancing honey whenever he needs to push someone around. He claims to be kind - "the world's kindest bear" - yet the only one he stands up for is his cowardly friend "Lille Skutt", a rabbit. Why didn't Bamse try to persuade the millionaire rodent, "Krösus", to make investments that would shelter all rabbits in the forest? Why didn't Bamse give some of his performance-enhancing (and possibly illegal) honey to Skalman, the inventor, to prevent him from falling asleep and get him to work on some world-changing innovations instead?
Because Sweden isn't a dreaming country. We invented some sort of stale societal model a century ago and we keep coasting along as if nothing has happpened since. My children will never be allowed to read Bamse. Bamse should be outlawed. Media messages for kids should persuade them to dream big in a big world! It should make them into dreamers, daredevils and doers!
I belive that being a trendspotter is the best job in the world. When I was in college, I thought a lot about what I wanted to do with my life. Being young and insecure, I was over-dependent on the thoughts and ideas of others and not nearly confident enough to pick out my own direction in life. I remember a mentor of mine who had gone into advertising because when he'd first visited an advertising agency he got a "Eureka moment" and thought "Wow, you can do this and get paid!". I was waiting for that Eureka moment for a long time. The problem was that I was searching in the "what to work with"-category and not the "how to work"-category. My insight after a fifteen year career is that anything can be dull with the wrong boss whereas working for yourself is almost always fun. My "Eureka moment" came when I realized that you can work internationally, across boundaries, and get paid for it. My past few weeks exemplify this.
I was down in Gothenburg speaking for the good people at XDIN, a techical consultancy.
Last weekend was travelling time again. First I talked in front of the VK Press Foundation, who own VK, the largest
I only had time to return home briefly and then it was off to Orlando, Florida to speak at the DiveFuel08 conference, hosted by PADI. The event was big - with about 400 people in attendance - and the line-up was great. I was keynote speaker and followed by Andy Wirth of Intrawest who own and operate a number of ski resorts worldwide. Then there was an on-stage interview with Holly Beck who gave an echo boomer perspective on diving. The day continued with Rob Campbell of Transworld Business who drew some parallells to boardsports. The grand finale was a panel Q&A. The challenge for the diving industry is that it's followed an S-curve which basically means that growth is sluggish and that you have to work a lot harder for revenue that you did 15-20 years ago.
You can kind of tell when someone hasn't blogged for a while since the subject line increases in scope drastically. The beauty of blogging (short, succinct tidbits) is thrown out the window and replaced by a massive lump of angst-ridden textmass. How’s that for an inspiring start to this blog entry?
Jokes aside. The past few weeks have been exciting – if slightly hectic.
I visited a chocolate factory and was a bit disappointed by the lack of oompa loompas and chocolate rivers. But I have to say that factory visits in general are pretty damn fun. In this age when people romantisize about the “non-industrial” and the “unrefined, raw”, I find great stimulation by seeing a manufacturing plant in action.
London was my hometown between 1986 and 1993 and part of me still lives there. However, I was quite disappointed when I saw the state of this magnificent metropolis a few weeks ago. Retailers had closed down and left empty, dirt-ridden premises in their wake. The Trocadero – one of the most exciting indoor-theme parks in the world – looks like something out of a dystopic (and cheap) sci-fi movie from the early 80’s and Leiceister Square, once the Times Square on this side of the Atlantic, is just a big hole in the ground. What’s going on? Are prices too high for anyone to still be in business in the center of London? Who’s in charge? How low will it go before somebody does something? (I know I sound like Tyler Brule saying this).
I managed to take an upright movie of the fabulous, time-saving paternoster elevator.
If you haven’t already, take the time to listen to Lawrence Lessig’s brilliant lecture about corruption.
