Only Dead Fish

Do Not Stay in a Job you Dislike

What's the most important life lesson that older people feel you must know? Do not stay in a job you dislike. Eric Barker has summarised the work of Karl Pillemer from Cornell University, who interviewed almost 1500 people aged over 70 for his book 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans. Pillemer found that the interviewees were more adamant about this single piece of advice than anything else.

Alongside this defining life lesson, they also talked of the importance of not choosing a career solely for the financial rewards, being persistent about looking for a job that makes you happy, and how critical autonomy is to career satisfaction. All rather redolent of Dan Pink's maxim about how motivation is powered by autonomy, mastery and purpose, which rather exposes the mismatch between what science already knows and what business actually does. It's something I refer to a lot. 

Google Firestarters 10: Planning For Good

We’ve never been afraid to tackle the big questions with Google Firestarters and for our tenth (crikey, tenth!) event we shall be addressing perhaps our most challenging yet: How can planning and marketing be more of a force for good? Is it realistic to believe that purpose beyond profit and social change can be embedded into the practice and process of what planners and marketers do everyday? Or is that just a complete pipedream? We have two excellent speakers to provoke and inspire, and it's at Google HQ in London on October 15th at 6.00pm. 

John Grant, who is something of a planning legend, was the Co-founder and Head of Strategy at St Luke's and has authored such seminal marketing texts as The Brand Innovation Manifesto, The Green Marketing Manifesto, and Co-Opportunity. John’s current focus is on the convergence of sustainability, digital technology and globalisation and he has advised clients as diverse as the BBC, IKEA, HSBC, IBM and The Guardian.

Sam Conniff is a passionate advocate of marketing for good and is the Chairman of youth marketing agency Livity, a ‘more than profit’ youth engagement agency that works with teenagers and young adults every day to co-create socially innovative campaigns, communications, content and communities that improve the lives of young people. Described as a “marketing agency with a youth club in the middle of it”, Livity works with young people in South London, unlocking untapped talent, enabling them to realise their full potential and often helping to lift themselves out of a life of gangs and crime. Livity’s clients include Nike, Barclays and Channel 4.

So, should be a truly thought provoking evening. The event is invite only but as always, I have some guest passes to give away to readers of this blog. If you'd like one, please let me know in the comments or drop me a note.

The Value In Implicit Data

It was interesting to read about the new 8-strong Artificial Intelligence team at Facebook applying so-called 'deep-learning' techniques which apparently use simulated networks of brain cells, or the equivalent of 'neural nets', to process data. The application of these kinds of techniques can take machine learning beyond simpler explicit forms of data (like metadata or keywords) and into a deeper understanding of the connections and implicit meaning in data. This can then be used to provide a better comprehension of things like context and emotion when analysing data such as newsfeed content.

There's some interesting people in the Facebook AI group including the founder of facial recognition startup Face.com which Facebook acquired last year, and some intriguing potential applications of this kind of work. Facebook has already invested quite a lot in facial recognition through it's 'tag-suggest' feature that identifies faces in newly uploaded photos by comparing them with pictures in which the users have previously been tagged. And it was notable that Facebook recently updated its data use policy to enable them to use profile pictures to suggest tags. They also recently acquired Mobile Technologies, a company that has developed speech recognition and machine translation technology.

Similarly Google have patented new facial recognition technology that could be used to unlock mobile phones, and they have of-course done lots of work in speech and visual recognition to enhance search. Their rapidly improving capability to interpret implicit meaning in data is starting to become really interesting. Take a look at this search result:

There is no mention of the word 'Gigli' in that search, but Google is able to interpret that using the words 'Ben Affleck', 'Film' and 'Terrible' should lead to that result, indicating the shift away from a reliance on keywords and toward results powered by more contextual forms of data (some considerable debate about what this means for SEO practice). The development of their knowledge graph enables them to use more semantic search information gathered from a wide variety of sources to enhance results like this.

As the richness of data accessible to companies like Facebook and Google exponentially increases, so does the potential capability to deliver enhanced services capitalising on these more contextual connections between data. Including, of-course, advertising. 

It makes me wonder whether this kind of work will actually provide the answer to the great unanswered question around search - how to make in-video content searchable. If video content could be turned into data, and the implicit meanings and connections in that data could then be interpreted, the possibilities are amazing.

HT Ben Davis for the Ben Affleck visual

Digital and the Magpie Syndrome

There's a salutary lesson from this research released by MIT Sloan and Cap Gemini late last year that I've referred back to a few times in work with clients. The lengthy (two years) study of around 400 companies was designed to assess the impact of digital technologes on large, traditional companies, and how they are responding to those challenges. The study found that whilst most companies were active with digital initiatives, only a few had positioned themselves to capture real business benefit. They identified four broad organisational classifications:

1. Beginners:- do very little with advanced digital capabilities, low awareness of opportunities
2. Conservatives:- favour prudence over innovation, have a unified vision but are skeptical of the value of digital trends
3. Fashionistas:- follow digital trends and implement shiny new digital apps, but don't have a unified vision for the digital transformation of their business
4. Digirati:- those that truly understand how to drive value through the digital transformation of their business. In other words combining transformative vision and governance with investment, innovation, and continuous improvement in people, process and technology.

These more digitally mature companies (or  'digirati') were able to combine a focus on change through new technology, with a concurrent focus on change management, people, process, and culture. The study found that this latter group of companies were, on average,  26% more profitable, had a 12% higher market capitalization, and derived 9% more revenue from existing assets.

This was an advantage that persisted across different industries. But what was also notable was how companies that pursued shiny new technologies without the underlying strategies, processes, team structures and cultures to exploit it (the 'fashionistas') effectively damaged their business performance and were 11% less profitable than the average. The lesson? Digital drives real advantage but the magpie syndrome really isn't good for business.

Great Ormond Street and a Formula One Team

Thanks to Ian for pointing me at this innovation story - one of the best examples of the benefit of assessing old problems with a fresh pair of eyes I think I've come across.

In the surgical and intensive care units of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, doctors knew that improving the 30 minute process to unplug and untangle (in a crowded space) all the wires and tubes from patients in order to transfer them from surgery to the ICU could directly improve patient care. Dr Allan Goldman, the head ICU doctor and Prof Martin Elliot, heart surgeon, were watching a Formula One race in the hospital's staff common room following a 12-hour emergency transplant operation and noticed how a 20-member Formula One pit crew worked seamlessly to change the car's tyres, fill it with petrol, clear the air intakes, and send it away in less than seven seconds.

So they invited the McLaren and Ferrari racing teams to work with them to identify how their own handover discipline could be more efficient. The racing technician's recommendations focused initially on equipment but then broadened out into training and process and resulted in a restructuring of the patient handover proceedure, new protocols that detailed who should be the leader in the process (the anaesthetist) and the exact task of everyone involved, diagrams that showed exactly where everyone needed to be positioned around the patient, and rehearsals to make the new processes as seamless as possible. An industrial psychologist monitored 27 operations following the adoption of the protocol and found that the number of technical errors and mistakes in information handover had almost halved. Brilliant.