3 posts tagged “istanbul”
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!
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.
