3 posts tagged “trends”

Before I begin, Seth Godin posted a terrific talk he gave to the music industry today. Read and enjoy it here.
OK, now on to the presentation I've been preparing with some of my readers' help. Thanks to Filip Truedsson, Charlie Trygg, Daniela Krautsack and Ruben Nieuwenhuis especially.

Children's right to culture
To be presented at Kulturtinget, Västerås, March 5, 2008

Clifford Stoll once said that "if you want to know about the future, ask a kindergarten teacher - they know". This talk is about two sides; children, who in a literal way represent the future and culture,  a word often used to describe a society's past achievements. Since I was asked to present here today, I have been preoccupied with two parts of the topic. First, what do we mean by a "right" to culture? Do we mean a "right to choose" or are we using a gentler way to say "Children needs to learn about culture"? Secondly, what do we mean by the word "culture"? And when I say "we", I should probably say "you" or "I" since the perception of that word is highly subjective as it turns out.
Let me resolve the first of my qualms quickly so that I can spend the greater part of this speech on culture. The "right" to culture is actually stated in the UN Human Rights Declaration and in the Declaration of the rights of the Child:

• “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”
• “The child shall be given an education which will promote his general culture and enable him, on a basis of equal opportunity, to develop his abilities, his individual judgement, and his sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society”
  

These don't necessarily answer my rhetorical questions at the outset by they at least state outright that "culture", whatever we mean by it, is a fundamental human right.
That brings me on to the second, and more interesting part, of the topic: What is "culture"? And what isn't "culture"? Is it a means or an end? Are we striving for monoculture, driven by national heritage, or polyculture, embracing the rich tapestry o the world's many civilizations? Is "culture" by nature rigid and static and something we use to describe artefacts or is it dynamic, changing with every genereation? These are just some of the questions that have blown through my mind. Let's see what you think? I'll start with a small quiz. Which of the following do you consider "culture"?

• Rap, R&B and Hip Hop?
• Graffitti
• Computer Games
• Industrial design
• Fast Food
• Advertising

If your answer was an emphatic and sincere "yes" or "no" to any of these, I believe you may be partially blind to what culture actually is and how it's created.
Let me begin by talking about  my Grandmother's apartment in a suburb of Stockholm. Looking at how she, and many other elderly people, furnish her rooms, it's easy to believe that there's some sort of "old people's taste in furniture" that sets it once you hit seventy. The aged furniture, the color schemes, the curtain and linen styles, and so on. However, this completely misses the point that my Grandmother's style reflects what was once high fashion in interior design. She made most of the investments in the home when she and my deceased Grandfather built a home together in the 1950's. In a number of decades, people will look at the minimalist, Phillipe Starck inspired interiors of today and call it "old people's taste" whilst many of us still regard ourselves as living in a stylish home. Culture often functions like this - defined as something in one era only to be redefined in a later one. Think about the following quotes taken from Swedish 20th century newspapers:

• "A fad without substance and value. The musicians lack proper schooling and can't read sheet music", Dagens Nyheter about jazz in 1949
• "A poor role model for the young...Music lures kids into drug abuse", Dagens Nyheter on (wholesome Swedish icon) Alice Babs, 1954
• "Over-commercialiced garbagemusic", Tabloid Expressen on ABBA, 1975

All three examples here have since been re-evaluated and appreciated as fine cultural examples.What we learn from this is that what we call "culture" might have been a rock n' roll revolution when it first occured. The accordion was once the electric guitar or DJ Turntable and represented youth culture at its most revolutionary. Today we have things that people may not understand or define as "culture" but that may in fact be considered ubiquitous when describing 21st century culture in the future. One example is the Reactable music table in the clip to the right.  Youth culture is often signified by its tendency to alienate the establishment and/or older generations. Take the favorite "whipping girl" at the moment, Britney Spears who's often frowned upon for her very public meltdown. This completely disregards the fact that so many of our cultural giants were myogynistic, sucidial, manic-depressive, drug-addicted, alcoholics from Hemingway and Strindberg to Gauguin and Sylvia Plath. If you then claim that Ms Spears's work isn't on par with the works of these giants, then consider this: Platinum Blue Music Intelligence, a Barcelona-based company who have developed a software able to analyze the hit potential of songs by cross-referencing with earlier Top40 songs and classical masterpieces have found many of Britney Spear's hits to be near perfect in their hit potential, echoing not just earlier 20th century chart hits but also certain classical compositions. Songs like "Oops, I did it again" may in fact be timeless classics veiled in modern composiiton. Another interesting aspect is the view of many that culture needs to be somewhat uncommercial or not-for-profit in order to truly qualify as "culture", possibly a self-serving meme of the many poorly managed museums, opera houses and theatres around the world. Looking back however, many works considered "haute culture" today were highly commercial and accessible when they first appeared. Shakespare, as opposed to many of his peers, was a a great class unifier symbolized best by the many different classes - from royalty to groundlings - watching his plays at the Globe Theatre. Mozart wrote many of his best works as commissions by the Austrian emperor, similar to how many of today's top artists do corporate gigs or write jingles. The artist Paul Gauguin used an advertising agency to stir debate and thereby sell art. And so on. Yesterday's commercialism is often today's culture. But neither this statement, neither the one before about yesteday's rock n' roll revolutions, are bound to have many people in the so-called "cultural establishment" agreeing. They utilize a system whereby a work needs to be in a kind of "cultural quarantine" for a number of years before it can be considered culture. For them, only aged works can be considered worthy of the C-word. To quote a Swedish report that I found in preparation for today:
"In the state-sanctioned cultural sector, the biggest obstacle is the condescending attitude that many display. You should tech people what good culture is and the only offer them the best (something that only they know). This authoritarian way of thinking is out of sync with today's society. For most young people, this approach is a certain way of creating aversion to "culture". But instead of protesting and demand their right to choose, many simply ignore the public cultural sector alltogether and devote themselves to whatever they like".
This is reflected by a survey I read wherein young people are asked what they think about when hearing the word "culture". A typical answer is: "Boring - created for old farts".
The problem is that people draw mental boundaries - in time and space - for what culture is and what it isn't. Mozart but not Mos Def; Renoir but not Roxette; Byron but not Banksy and so on. Culture. instead of being a living, thriving life force, becomes a stale public institution left to feel sorry for itself. Take some of the headlines in Swedish media in the past year (reflected in other countries around the world):
"Libraries are dying"; "Quality cinemas are closing down"; "Museums stand empty and underappreciated" and so on.
The truth is that cultural offerings are thriving like never before. Book sales have been rising by near double digits in Sweden since the VAT leveraged on books was lowered a few years ago (and distribution radically expanded to include newsagents and supermarkets - Thanks Niclas Lilja for that comment!). People don't read less, they just want to own a cheap paperback version of a book instead of leafing through an old hardback edition (and pay fines for late returns). The market for niche movies have never been better with an abundant online market for DVD's, where you can find almost anything, and (illegal) file-sharing sites where these movies are available for free. iTunes is full of classical music as well as chart music, and so on. In fact, the Internet may be the best thing that has ever happened to the cultural sector. With computer power and bandwidth almost free and still getting cheaper every day, it makes everything accessible to everyone not just those fortunate to live close to a good library or cinema. This brings me on to my first trend: Culture has moved from the confinements of museums, libraries, opera houses, cinemas and theatres into a digital realm that is

• Always open
• Free (or at least very cheap)
• Unlimited in its supply
• Immediate
• With a global reach

The net is almost too good to dream up. If I told you of a new type of theater or museum that had these qualities, the cultural establishment would weep tears of joy but since the Internet is a bottom-up movement, often understood better by the young, the cultural establishment often frowns upon it and retreat to their dusty catacombs.

My second trend begins in new technologies as well. Over a hundred years ago, when the first grammophone players entered the market, composer John Philip Sousa lamented that:
"These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country”
Far from being a funny technology-hostile statement in hindsight, this statement might actually have some substance. The grammophone took music from something that every community engaged in - from church to campfires - to something that became a packaged, standardized product. Music became an industry, even an oligopoly, favoring the most elite talents. What we're seeing in today's digital marketplace is a shift back to the time before when everyone was a potential singer or musician. This isn't just an artistic development. The entire wealth in society has shifted in the past fifty years, from being predominantly inherited to self-made. A society based on inherited wealth (where credits market are regulated and interest rates high or, at least, volatile) is bound to be a conservative one favoring preservation and frowing on excessive risk-taking. Today's society is quite the opposite. Credit is easily accessible (try SMS-credit, for example) and the low (if currently volatile) interest rates makes capital cheap. The driving force today is change and challenging the status quo. The modus operandi of an entrepreneur is to challenge the establishment by supplying something that isn't already there be it more comfortable shoes, more efficient energy sources or a better bank.
We can call this development "Punk Capitalism". Punk was chracterized by two things predominantly; a push to challenge the establishment and a sense that anyone, regardless of skill, can play a musical instrument. In today's marketplace, we're giving the tools of production to just about anyone with a laptop and a brain (from the sourcing

factories of China to GarageBand software, blogs and digital cameras). We move from "Media" to "Wedia" - from few authorities in an industry characerized by high barriers to entry to an industry characterized by virtually no entry barriers where everyone can participate if they want - on a blog, by print-on-demand books, by movies made on Nokia N90's and broadcast over YouTube and so on. To quote anthropoligist Wade Davis: "Culture is the product of imagination". Albert Einstein elaborates on this by claiming that: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand". To understand just how accessible high-level filmmaking has become, check out the clip to the left made by Richard Hammond showing a recreation of the D-Day landings using a cast and crew of only three people.
Something that often gets shunned in this development is the idea of copyright. Many beieve that society has evolved beyond copyrights and patents and thereby forget that intelllectual property is also a human right established by the UN:
"“Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.”
To accomodate copyright in a copy-paste world is challenging but also something that the Creative Commons license has sought to do.

My third trend has to do with children themselves. In the past few weeks, UK charts have

been dominated by Swedish artist Basshunter's catchy-borderline-irritating song Now You're Gone. Using different lyrics, this song was a big hit in the summer of 2006 in Sweden. I thought the song then was called "Anna The Boat" and that Basshunter sang about maritime life set to a techno-y rhythm. The song was in fact called "Anna The Bot" and was about a sophistcated piece of software that trawls the internet and IRC-channels keepting them clean from spammers. Talk about a complicated subject, You hardly needed that kind of technological expertise to understand "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah" by the Beatles, right? This isn't the only example I have of complexity in popular culture. Kate Bush's song Pi (whoch recites that mysterious figure to at least a hundred decimals), Katie Melua changing the lyrics of Nine Million Bicyles to be more scientifically accurate, Tool's song Lateralus using the Fibonacci sequence (see video on the right) and many of Steven Berlin Johnson's examples in Everything Bad is Good for You showing how popular culture offerings have grown increasingly complex and sophisticated in the past few decades. All this tends to favor sociologist James Flynn's finding that IQ has risen over the past century, the so-called Flynn Effect. We are smarter than our parents and our children, in turn, are smarted than us. And we keep getting smarter (by "Me", I mean "them"). Looking at some of the developments in society today, it's easy to see how the next generation will be one of unsurpassed intelligence, from mother's chewing Omega 3 during pregnancy to Baby Einstein videos for toddlers.Will Wright's next game Spore, due any day now, is an interactive and addictive excercise in evolution that Wright (of The Sim's fame) has called "an experiment in foresight". We are, in other words, teaching children to be better at future-thinking.

My fourth and final trend is about something we all feel the effects of on a daily basis - the scarcity of time. When

money has become easily accessible (as I described above), it's time that becomes the scarcest resource. This has spawned new industries and offerings, from Dutch technology giant Philips promising "Sense and Simplicity" to reductionistic design of the iPod. Wired wrote about Snack Culture in 2007, outlining how media and culture is being consumed in one-minute snack bites, rather than full servings. One of the most amusing examples of this trend is White Stripes' legendary one-note show in Canada in July last year.

These four trends - the shift to culture offered in open forums, the move to creative consumers, the rise of intelligence and the scarcity of time - are fundamental if we are to understand how culture will be shaped in the coming decades. But what about the challenges? I began this presentation with the rhetorical question of culture as a means or an end in itself?
Let me begin that pointing out what many of you feel - that the abundance of the internet isn't just a force for good. Super-abundance has merely made the bell curve fatter and longer, not necessarily raised the general level of quality. We can, in other words, spend months watching porn and trashy videos where we could only spend hours before. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert brought this up in a recent BBC debate drawing the parallell to our insatiable appetite for sugar. It is common knowledge today that a diet based entirely on sugar is a bad idea. The same might be said for an "information diet" based only on trash news, porn and illegally downloaded Hollywood blockbusters. I know that this may sound like a contradiction to my laissez-faire attitude in the earlier parts of the speech but I will get to that in a second. Outlining this "information diet" is our first challenge.
The second challenge has to do with cultural diversity. Bob Geldof remarked in his closing statement at the recent TED conference how over 50% of the world's 6,000 languages no longer are taught to kids, slowly erasing entire cultures. This, to use a quote from The Big Lebowski, will not stand. Flying around the world has never been cheaper and the Internet makes other cultures (arguably not all) accessible at the touch of a button. We need more cultural exchanges and more offerings that embrace polyculture - where ancient traditions merge with modern expression. Pangea Cinema Day is an example of this. As is current Swedish TV show featuring a gobetrotting Papa Dee who visits everything from Cambodian rappers to Jamaican rockers.
The third challenge has to do with education. On an average day, people today read abour 10Mb of text, hear roughly 400 Mb of sound and see 1Mb och information flash before their eyes every minute. This means that in less than a decade, all that a person reads, hears or sees in an entire lifetime can be stored in a cellphone. Schools have mainly been about memory - learning capitals and chemical formulas and the regurgitating them in a closed-book quiz. We need to change this model.
Culture is a means and an end. It's an enjoyable, thought-provoking, enlightening way to spend your time but it may also have a great impact on those who use it. I believe that the one goal we need to set out, when educating out young and creating the cultural offerings of tomorrow, is to prevent evil. Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford-prison-experiment fame, recently pointed to seven steps towards evil that we can and should avoid, ingeniously entitled "Seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil":

• mindlessly taking the first small step
• dehumanization of others
• de-individualization of self (anonymity)
• diffusion of personal responsibility
• blind obedience to authority
• uncritical conformity to group norms
• passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference
• and that particularly in new or unfamiliar situations

The antidote, according to Zimbardo, is a "culture of heroism" that "celebrates heroic imagination".
So, how can we combine open-mindedness to new cultural offerings with an urge to provide an "information diet", expand cultural horizons and prevent evil from prevailing?
The answer already lies before us. In the past few years, there has been a movement that unifies "important" with "sexy". We see it in the rise of hybrid cars - fusing high performance with smaller environmental impact. We see it in the rise of organic food - celebrating culinary achievent and sound environmental cultivation. We see it in movies like Murderball, An Incovenient Truth and Good Night and Good Luck by Participant Productions who want to "change the world, one story at a time". These are commercial movies intended to compete on the same arena as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter but they also carry a message of change, hope or social criticism. We can combine important message and "nutritious" information with the sexy, contemporay packaging needed to reach all people - not just children and teenagers. To quote Walt Disney:
"Entertain and hope to educate - not educate and hope to entertain"
Thank you!

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 “ ” and four-week meditation retreats are all symptoms of what I call "speed anxiety". Speed anxiety has nothing to do with actual velocity since speed is nothing we can experience objectively. It is more connected with a general fear of the future. People tend to enjoy change but they are afraid of being changed. Many virtues are connected with slowness. Being wise,  a good lover, a good cook or just meticulous in general are all examples of things that have been connected to slowness rather than speed in the past decade. Actually fast lovers and fast cooks are connected to undesirable things in many cultures. Making love quickly is almost always portrayed as a “fast fuck” with a stranger, often with an element of infidelity involved, and let’s not repeat all the anti-fast food propaganda that have filled bestseller lists and movie screens in the past few years. There’s something truly provocative about the concept of speed in the eyes of some people. I will spend my session on December 7th in Istanbul investigating what it is, then outline the drivers of speed and what a quicker society will do for us in the coming decades.

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.
People dislike speed. Or rather, people dislike fast people. They accuse them of causing harm to themselves (Physicians warning against the many harmful effects of being a Type A personality) and others (“Don’t run in the corridors!”) respectively. They even make up instructional anecdotes wherein speed as a means for winning is ultimately useless - this happens even in events designed with the sole purpose of determining who’s the fastest - as in “The Hare and the Tortoise”. Indeed, adding “fast” as an epithet can affect the perception of the entire category negatively (think “fast food”) or lower any emotional expectations (How does a “fast” dinner sound as opposed to a “slow” dinner? How romantic is  a “fast” lover?)
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.