The future of advertising

Hal Varian, Google's chief economist sees the future of advertising as:

1. Performance measurement of advertising as the biggest need in advertising.
   
2. TV advertising as the biggest opportunity.
   
3. Marketing is the new finance.
   
4. Agencies that embrace quantitative tools and ad platform will prosper.
   

Source:

Google economist sees a more measurable future

Brian Morrissey

AdWeek 2 Jun 2008

Amplified Individuals

Amplified individuals are the super heroes of organizations in the future. They embraced new tools, applications, practices and social media.

They have 9 super powers.

1. Mobbability

The ability to work in large groups.

A talent for organizing and collaborating with many people simultaneously.

2. Influency The ability to be persuasive in multiple social contexts and media spaces.

An understanding that each context and space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique.

3. Ping Quotient

Measures your responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement.

Your propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network.

4. Protovation

Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles.

5. Open Authorship

Creating content for public consumption and modification.

6. Multi-Capitalism

Fluency in working with different capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social and financial.

7. Longbroading

Thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the big picture.

8. Signal / Noise Management

Filtering meaningful information, patterns, and commonalities from massively-multiple streams of data.

9. Cooperation Radar

The ability to sense almost intuitively who would make the best collaborators on a particular task.

Source:

Amplified individuals, amplified organizations

Andrea Saveri of Institute for the Future

NLab social networks conference 2008

According to Jane McGonigal, there should be 10 super powers instead of 9. The 10th is emergensight, the ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity.

Intuitive Future Wisdom

I like to introduce my idea of intuitive future wisdom.

Intuitive future wisdom is a kind of feeling that a person that one don’t understand now will give one wisdom if one makes efforts to learn from him or her.

The funny part is how can one feels that one can learn from him or her when one don’t even understand them. I don’t have an answer yet. Let’s make this an enquiry and find it out together. My current guess is the greatness of their work.

I had this feeling about 8 years ago when I was introduce to the works of Buckminster Fuller by a friend of mine - Joo Hock. Thanks Joo Hock. I still don’t understand almost all his works except his personal efforts in learning. I am still trying to learn from him.

One person that is alive that makes me feel the intuitive future wisdom feeling is Kevin Kelly. I feel I can learn a lot from him but I don’t seem to understand his ideas now.

The usefulness of this idea for me is that I use it to understand why I am willing to keep learning from someone that I might not understand after 8 years. When I come across a person to learn from, I ask myself, do I have the intuitive future wisdom feeling? If yes, I will invest the efforts to learn from him or her.

Who have made you feel the intuitive future wisdom feeling?

Michael Gelb and meditation

Found Michael Gelb mentioning meditation in his book – how to think like Leonardo da Vinci.

Listen for silence

Practice listening for the spaces between sounds – the pauses in a friend’s conversation or your favourite music and the silences between the notes in the song of a bluebird. Make silence a theme for a day and record your observations in your notebook. Do you have access to a place of complete silence, away from the humming of machines? Try to find such a place. How does it feel to be in a place of complete quiet?

Practice Silence

Experience with a day of silence. For a whole day, don’t talk, just listen. It is best to spend your silent day out in nature, walking in the woods, hiking in the mountains or strolling by the sea. Immerse yourself in nature’s sounds. This “verbal fasting” strengthens your ability to listen deeply and is wonderfully refreshing for your spirit.

Source:

How to think like Leonardo da Vinci

Michael Gelb

Page 113 & 114

Delacorte Press

ISBN: 0385323816

T Talents

I like to introduce my idea of T Talents.

They are curious people who have deep expertise in one subject matter ( the vertical leg of the T ) and board interest in one or many other subject matters ( the horizontal part of the T ). For example, a friend of mine - Joo Hock is an expert in hairdressing, he also have interests in training, community management, events management, singing…

The T Talents idea is a shorten version of Ideo's T-shaped people idea. It is like using TinyURL.com to shorten a long web address to a short one. T-shaped people are people who are so inquisitive about the World that they are willing to try to do what you do. They have a principle skill that describes the vertical leg of the T – they might be mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into others skills, such as anthropology and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behaviour that point to a universal human need.

I share the same view that we need T Talents in the future with Steve Mills of IBM.

The following paragraphs are taken from his thought leadership paper.

In the past and to a great degree, the present - the workforce is dominated by two kinds of people:

1. Business generalists with broad horizontal understanding of the business issues affecting their area.
   
2. Hands-on implementation specialists or people with narrow but deep expertise in a specific, often technical, area.
   

The future of business demands a new breed of knowledge worker: the T-shaped person who combines broad understanding of business processes ( the top, horizontal part of the T ) with deep practical execution in a specific functional area ( the bottom, vertical part of the T ). People who share the same understanding of the business process ( top of the T ) can team with colleagues with different I-shaped specialties ( bottom of the T ) to cover the waterfront of a business need without losing that common vocabulary and understanding of their shared business objective.

9 characteristics of innovative people

What are the characteristics of innovative people?

Sense from:
You and Creativity
Don Fabun
Kaiser Aluminum News 25

Sensitivity
A propensity for greater awareness which makes a person more readily attuned to the subtleties of various sensations and impressions. Eric Fromm writes, "Creativity is the ability to see ( or be aware ) and to respond".

Questioning Attitude
An inquisitiveness, probably imprinted in early home training that encourages seeking new and original answers.

Broad Education
An approach to learning instilled from a liberal education that puts a premium on questions rather than answers and rewards curiosity rather than rote learning and conformity.

Asymmetrical Thinking
The ability to find an original kind of order in disorder as opposed to symmetrical thinking that balances everything out in some logical way. "The creative personality is unique in that during the initial stages he prefers the chaotic and disorderly and tends to reject what has already been systematized". Ralph J. Hallman

Personal Courage
A disregard for failure derived from a concern, not for what others think, but what one thinks of oneself. "They seemed to be less afraid of what other people would say or demand or laugh at ... Perhaps more important, however, was their lack of fear of their own insides, of their own impulses, emotions, thoughts". Abraham Maslow

Sustained Curiosity
A capacity for childlike wonder carried into adult life that generates a style of endless questioning, even of the most personally cherished ideas. Eric Fromm: "Children still have the capacity to be puzzled... But once they are through the process of education, most people lose the capacity of wondering, of being surprised. They feel that they ought to know everything, and hence that it is a sign of ignorance to be surprised or puzzled by anything".

Time Control
Instead of being bound by time, deadlines and schedules, creative individuals use time as a resource - morning, noon and night - years, decades - whatever it takes, unbound by the clock.

Dedication
The unswerving desire to do something, whatever it may be and whatever the obstacles to doing it.

Willingness to work
The willingness to continue to pursue a project endlessly, in working hours and so - called free hours, over whatever time might be required. Roger Sessions said, "Inspiration, then, is the impulse which sets creation in movement; it is also the energy which keeps it going".

Corporate open learning resource

What did I observe?

Customers don’t just buy products and services from corporations. They also learn from them. They don’t just learn things that will benefit the corporations’ sales. For example, if they learn how to protect their love ones by buying life insurance, they might buy life insurance from AIA who offers them a free seminar on financial planning.

They also learn things which will not help coporations’ sales. For example, when they watch a video on personal development at Talks@Google, they don’t use Google more.

It will be interesting to see:

Will more corporations release their in house learning resources to the public?
Will customers prefer to buy from corpoations that they have learned from versus those that they did not?

What do I called this observation?

Corporate open learning resource