Office Culture – Coffee vs Education

The of two important cultural phenomenons got me thinking about office culture again. The love of coffee and the love of the internet. Both have a massive stake in western world office culture. Most people engaged in anything from small to large companies have omnipresent access to both. But the perception of each is vastly different.

But as far as I can tell the following is true:

Coffee: If you are at the coffee machine, making a coffee or buying one at the local espresso house in the morning no one looks twice. In fact it is respected and expected, part of the culture. A simple coffee fix is fair play in an office environment. Regardless of the fact that it is during work hours.

Internet: If you are surfing the web (excluding facebook) and potentially reading an article within your industry scope it looks bad. People see it as avoiding work or wasting time. It’s evident that this belief exists by the number of ‘click outs’ people do as others walk by. When in reality, this is a vital part of being effective and up to date.

What they both point to is the importance of culture. Both the macro societal one and the internal one. I’m starting to believe that culture is at the apex of company output. And the culture we foster determine the people we attract and the output we create. One thing I know for sure, is that in a rapidly changing business landscape I’d rather have an informed set of staff working for me, than a set of robots who are operating on the punch clock paradigm.

Do it when nobody is looking

If we get up early when nobody is looking.

If we go to the gym when nobody is looking.

If we read the books when nobody is looking.

If we attend the night classes and seminars when nobody is looking.

If we tend the garden when nobody is looking.

If we save our income when nobody is looking.

If we build our prototype when nobody is looking.

If we knock on doors when nobody is looking

If we work hard when nobody is looking…

So long as ‘we’ are looking, is all that matters.  If we do it for long enough, eventually the yield from silent and lonely work appears for others to see, and most often, they wonder ‘when’ we did it.

Definitive Advice

Advice is an interesting thing to give because by it is opinionated in nature. It is influenced more by the previous experience of the giver, more than it is by the taker. Because advice we give is usually one of many possible courses of action, there will always be doubt in the recommendation. The only way of really knowing what advice to take, only becomes evident after it has been taken.

Where doubt is an omnipresent reality, the best advice we can give is definitive advice. Advice which is acted upon quickly and fervently. When advice increases self belief in the receiver, it is often more valuable than the advice itself.

Smart Marketing on Pinterest

I love it when I see an emerging social channel used in a way that redefines what can be done. I’ve just seen Pinterest used in such a way by Australian Road Safety consort the TAC. While it’s easy to see the link between brands selling home wares, properties, holiday destinations and other ‘things’ on Pinterest, the link with road safety takes a little more human insight to find. The angle the TAC took was ‘How to plan a funeral’. In doing so they used various boards to share the ‘emotional cost’ of road trauma. I particularly like the fact that this social channel is strongly skewed to woman, who can strongly influence the men in their lives who are statistically most at risk on the roads.

Like most social channels, they can promote just about anything if we free our mind from usage in the past, and start thinking about usage in context of what we do.

I’d be interested to see if any startups have used pinterest to create a branding campaign or build a community through.

2 types of work

The large majority of work we do falls into one of two categories:

1. We make things.
2. We organise things.

As entrepreneurs we will do well to answer these two questions in response:

1. Which one of these types work do we prefer?
2. How can we help the parties doing the other part we don’t focus on?

Smart startup founders know that both matter, and both need each other.

K-Rebz

Earlier this week I posted about how cheap cool stuff is becoming. So I thought I’d share something cool we made in our office using Fiverr.

It’s about our IT guy Tome Krebs. He’s a funny cat and all you need to know about Tom to enjoy this video are the following facts:

• We have a very old percolated coffee machine in our office. Tom drinks it – we think it’s only him.
• He’s partial to grey clothing
• He enjoys a good Christmas party dress up
• The dog is Hanz – our office mascot

Laura organised a rapper in the USA to make up this rap. It cost $5 and I dig it big time.

…
Makes a nice birthday gift idea.

The 3rd phase of the web

The graphical web as we know it is about to have its 20th anniversary. The first free downloadable graphical web browser ‘Mosaic‘ was launched in January 1993. In the past 20 years, the world has been reshaped no less dramatically than it was during the halcyon days of the industrial revolution which started in the 1750′s. And while it is clear that we are living through something like a 200 year shift, the shift can be segmented into easily definable parts when we pay attention to what has been happening.

The web, so far has had two distinct phases – from a commercial and a human perspective. The first was the connection of the infrastructure and the second was the connection of people. But now, we are about to enter a third and most interesting phase – The web of things. The web of things can be defined as a world where the web becomes so omnipresent that it becomes…invisible. It will be a world where everything and everyone is augmented via the web. You may be asking why anyone would want this and how it could relate to marketing and advertising, but before we do that, it is worth considering how we got here and why the web of things is inevitable.

The first phase of the web was the connection of the machines. This takes us all the way back to the 1960s when experiments in data transfer arose. Machines and code were being built so that previously separate forms of technology (largely mainframe computers) could talk to each other. The second phase was the one that confirmed this internet thing was not just a passing fad. In fact it was this part that caught the advertising industry napping and resulted in the largest disruption to human existence since we left the farms en masse. It was the connection of the people, the web 2.0 phenomenon, as it became known later, when we realised there was value in humans being connected to each other’s expertise, thoughts and creativity. The previously top down marketing models big brands lived by became yesteryear – turned upside down forever. Coined in the early 2000s, this phase was defined by the power of the people on the web, rather than the infrastructure providers themselves. This shift was made possible by ubiquitous cheap technology and a rethinking of platforms from a bottom up standpoint. Now that we have our invariably permanent connection to the web, we want more. We want everything we touch and experience to be augmented, bettered and digitally enhanced. Step forward phase three – the web of things.

The web of things is a vision where everyday devices, i.e. objects that contain an embedded device or computer, are connected by fully integrating them to the internet. This has been made possible by the dramatic deflation in both size and cost of the sophisticated technology, which enables the web. This includes microchips, cameras, GPS, sensors, RFID et al. The constant need for better and cheaper technology in smart phones has provided a classic scenario where the web of things can ride on the coat tails of innovation of what already lives in our pockets.

In order to provide some context of how cheap augmentation technology has become, the following price changes are enlightening: In 10 years, one gigabyte of memory has dropped from over US$12 to less than five cents and a single RFID chip is now a little over 10 cents. What this means is that technology that connects ‘things’ to the web is as disposable as the packaging it comes in. If we add to this consumers’ desire for all things to be connected to the web, then there is no stopping it from becoming a consumer and communications phenomenon that will dwarf the impact of the social web. After all, a web of things has direct financial implications and monetization potential.

What we have seen with web connected running shoes and refrigerators is just the tip of the proverbial ice berg. Imagine how we might be able to integrate communications with a fridge that knows exactly what is in it – everything we buy at the local supermarket is connected to the web. A world where, we can remotely control everything in our homes, where almost everything we buy can interact with us, other products, our smart phones, our friends and our media habits.

Let’s take the humble toothbrush – imagine it is web-enabled. All of a sudden we can directly reward usage and brand loyalty. The toothbrush will know how often and how long it is used for each day. So there would be nothing stopping the toothbrush manufacturer from coalescing with a dental health provider. The toothbrush brand could provide discounted insurance based on regularly tracked brushing and brand re-purchase, while insurance provider could benefit through reduced risk of poor dental health. A triangular loyalty and incentive programme which lives outside of in-store discounting. It is this kind of product/ service mash-up that entrepreneurs need to be thinking of. There’s plenty of evidence already that humans really like tracking their own behaviour – runkeeper for example.

As entrepreneurs, we have now got a chance to invent the commercial implications of the inevitable ‘web of things’. The social web has now connected us and introduced a new era for startups, so we should now take the lead and create consumer goods mash-ups and value equations which couldn’t exist in a world without connectivity. And just like the social web, we will only ever know what people want to track, share and do when we put our web of things startup in front of them.

Starting from

A regular marketing tool is to let potential customers know what the entry price point of a product or service is. I was driving into car park in the city when I was exposed to this method of marketing.

Park from $5

I was there for 3 hours and it cost me $38. Which is quite a distance from the initial promise. It turns out that pretty much every retail offer in market use the prices start from premise. Cars, insurance, concert tickets, airline flights, they all do it. And because they all do it, we all know we need to be suspicious that it does not represent the truth. In fact, we know it’s a bare bones offer, a best case scenario for pricing, in which the probability of that serving our needs is very low. In short it’s a trick to gain attention, it’s inauthentic and often misleading. But now that the trick has been used for such a long period of time, people with a level of intelligence simply ignore the message. We know better than to believe it, let alone act on it.

Every now and again we need to flip the way we go to market. Often because the people that came before us ruined it for everyone. Maybe it is time to flip the ‘starting from‘, to become ‘ending at‘?

What if we told consumers what the most expensive version of the product or service was, the one with all the bells and whistles? Yes, the thing we actually want. While this might sound crazy, it would have an important impact on the perceptions of what we are selling. The experience could only get better than the promise, not worse. And instead of generating negative word of mouth or brand associations, it would probably generate some positive ones. Not just from the authenticity and respect we are providing our customers, but also due to the positive sentiment that comes when we realize something is better value than we expected.

It comes down to a simple principal, do we want to create disappointment, or inspire unexpected delight?

20 things in 20 years

Since I left school around 20 years ago and in that time I’ve learned some things, that might just be a short cut for you. I’m not going to explain them – just state them. This list is non exhaustive and here they are:

1. Taking longer to make decisions rarely improves the final result of said decision.
2. Large companies primarily make decisions to protect income, startup companies primarily make decisions to grow income.
3. Hard work from an average person invariably has better results than average work from a smart person.
4. We remember and revere events much more than we do so for things. We should know which one to accumulate.
5. People who have money problems while on low incomes have them on high incomes as well. It’s the habits that matter.
6. Spare time is a poor choice to allocate anything important to (read here family, exercise, reading).
7. Large companies most often reward people on cultural alignment more than actual results of tasks.
8. Passion projects often take a lifetime to bare fruit. The short term favours sacrifice of belief systems.
9. Great technocrats always get paid well. Great leaders and influencers always get paid more.
10. Being aligned to your partners values is more important than alignment of interests. True for business and love.
11. Financial independence is always a function of spending less than your income. Regardless of income size.
12. Technology is recalcitrant towards the status quo and history. It forges ahead regardless.
13. Informal and self education is of greater value than the formal version. It should also never end.
14. Over time, prices for most everything relative to income drop. The only exclusion I know of is land.
15. The most valuable things in life cannot be bought or sold, they must be earned. Respect, love, health…
16. Secrets kill the soul.
17. Ideas should be shared.
18. Generosity is rewarded on the long run but may be invisible.
19. We all have valuable skills, and these skills can leveraged in many ways once we stretch our imagination.
20. The people we spend our days with has a greater impact on happiness than the work we do.

What are some of the philosophical things you’ve learned?

Aziz Ansari – another digital direct disciple

After the blog post from yesterday I happened upon a Cool Hunting interview with young comedy powerhouse Aziz Ansari. His approach has also been one of going direct to fans and paying attention to the changes in the digital landscape. His interview below has some cool insights, and a few laughs to boot. Oh, by the way, the Youtube channel from Cool Hunting is worth following as well.

What other entrepreneurial examples of web first & direct are you guys seeing?