TEDxToronto

I was fortunate to attend this last week, and I've been thinking about what the people there said since it took place.  It struck me that this is the aspect I'd want to repeat about it, to engage other's desire to visit the talk replays to listen, think and imagine.

TED talks are a little like fine wine.  While you can slurp it, and drain the bottle in pursuit of a quick high, the objective is to savour it.  I'm referring specifically to the act of drinking the wine, not the whole evening that the drinking takes place.  When you sip a nice glass, you keep it in the your mouth, run it around a little and only then swallow it.  The desire is to link the smells and textures to explore the wine - which fruits, flowers or musks do you sense, is there too much or not enough oak-cask in the wine, and how does it sit after you drink it. Does it flow and hum and make the corners of your mouth rise as the mirth inherent in the wine continues to play out ?

I hope you have a wine experience like that.  I know I had a TED experience like that.  The temptation was to explode with an "awesome, great or fantastic" throughout the day. Lots of that popped up in the twitterverse throughout the event.   And it was certainly good in that sense.  But the litmus test of a self-proclaimed inspiring conference like this is the after-glow for me.  Does it still make you think days later ?  Do you still want to link every story you tell to something you heard..?  Are you still humming the music you heard?

TEDxToronto did all that and more for me and I'll encourage you to go find it online and watch the talk replays.  Have a glass of nice wine at the same time, and think of it as an investment in your perspective.

Our Strength becomes our Weakness & The Pending Fall of Apple

Predicting the fall of Apple while they are the most valuable company in the world could be viewed a few ways..

*  there is nowhere to go but down

*  it's blatantly trying to abuse of their popularity to get facetiously noticed

*  it's accurate

*  it's inaccurate

Time will tell on the latter two options, and I won't make comments on the first two, other than to highlight them to demonstrate awareness.

The argument I'd put forth centres on innovation.  Not in a product sense, as clearly they have thousands on staff who do that. Rather in an expectation sense.   The Apple that people have come to love (and in the process make the most valuable company in the history of ever) is one that historically came with regular surprises, entering new markets (phones), developing whole new platforms we didn't know we needed - pods and pads and the like.   It competed ferociously with the likes of the PC folks and the big software folks, and wanted to offer alternate choices.  Obviously Steve Job's was the champion of this approach.

The challenge today (even leaving Mr. Job's absence out of this), is that the Apple of the last 2 years has become iterative.  Indeed, the foundation for this was already in place for this behavior while Steve was at the helm.  There doesn't seem to be company-risking, turn the world upside-down new directions in the pipeline.  I say that with some certainty as the drapery of secrecy that they were so good at in the past has been torn down in recent times.  Even if they failed in some new venture, they re-kindle (no pun) the spirit that put the company on the map, and I might humbly suggest would deliver the biggest bump to their stock price imaginable from exciting their core believers.

Sun Tzu taught us that strategically, our strength becomes our weakness, and Apple's challenge I'll predict is that they have to look away from today's successful product ranges into an unknown future and try to keep blowing away our expectations.  If they don't - their strength becomes their Achilles heel as they'll just continue to leverage their existing lines, diminishing over time the concept their stuff is worth a premium. 

That future is hard to avoid - look at IBM and Microsoft in the 80's and 90's who for shareholder's sake had to keep pushing what worked.  Apple is in a trap now- a success trap, and to prosper needs to move in another direction.  Otherwise they'll be a footnote in technology convergence and quite likely the RIM of 2021.  It may seem unfathomable, but history shows us over and over that every empire ends.

Unless your Passion is there - Don't do it

I came across this from Charles Bukowski.  It spoke to me, and I share it here.

so you want to be a writer

if it doesn't come bursting out of you

in spite of everything,

don't do it.

unless it comes unasked out of your

heart and your mind and your mouth

and your gut,

don't do it.

if you have to sit for hours

staring at your computer screen

or hunched over your

typewriter

searching for words,

don't do it.

if you're doing it for money or

fame,

don't do it.

if you're doing it because you want

women in your bed,

don't do it.

if you have to sit there and

rewrite it again and again,

don't do it.

if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,

don't do it.

if you're trying to write like somebody else,

forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of you,

then wait patiently.

if it never does roar out of you,

do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife

or your girlfriend or your boyfriend

or your parents or to anybody at all,

you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,

don't be like so many thousands of

people who call themselves writers,

don't be dull and boring and

pretentious, don't be consumed with self-love.

the libraries of the world have

yawned themselves to sleep

over your kind.

don't add to that.

don't do it.

unless it comes out of

your soul like a rocket,

unless being still would

drive you to madness or

suicide or murder,

don't do it.

unless the sun inside you is

burning your gut,

don't do it.

when it is truly time,

and if you have been chosen,

it will do it by

itself and it will keep on doing it

until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Hockey Strike: The False Economics of Ego

The hockey world (at least in North America) is on strike right now.  Big news if you're a fan, and less so if you're not.  They're arguing about money, revenue splits and the like. All interesting if you're involved, but again - not in the least interesting if you're not involved.

All of it though is premised on the assumption of some growth - i.e. the revenue sharing future driven from the growing popularity of their sport.  That was a fine argument to have at the outset before they actually went on strike.  But, like any threat, the power was in the fear intrinsic in the threat itself, and not in the execution of the threat.  What I mean by that is that by actually going on strike and cancelling their games, they have placed the popularity of the sport itself into doubt.  That means any discussion about how to divide up the pennies because they're growing more popular is now based on an assumption that is no longer real.

Look at what happened to baseball from their strike in the mid 1990's.  The sport as a whole sunk and it's taken years to bounce back. By some accounts it hasn't completely recovered yet, as the NFL became the most popular and most followed professional sport in the US.

Hockey which already had seasonality going against it (the Florida or California teams contradiction of being on ice in the heat) as a whole sport will also be set-back significantly. 

The false economics of ego - the players and owners blindness to the fact that they will not maintain a potential fan's wallet-share of attention will result in a long term set-back to an otherwise interesting winter past-time.  It's a shame they don't see that, but I suspect they'll get what they deserve as the outcome.

"Everybody has a plan until....

...you start to get hit" - Mike Tyson.

I don't think I've ever quoted Mr. Tyson before, but I have to say I really like this quote and the idea it speaks to.

Many of us have plans or strategies to do something.  It's not rocket science, it's the way most of us think.  The challenge arises though when the wheels come off our plan, when things start to go astray and we encounter significant difficulties.  When we 'start to get hit'.

Then, most of us abandon the plan we made, and scramble.  And we don't end up rescuing ourselves from the newly uncomfortable (bad) situation, instead we flail.  We didn't foresee difficulty and hence didn't make a contingency plan to deal with it.   As a result we fail at whatever we had planned to do.

As you know by now, I don't think failure is a bad outcome - we learn that way.  But I do think that whatever plan you have should include that fact that you might get hit.  Because sometimes we all do.

Samsung

Let me start by admitting two things:  I think their products are above average and most of the mobile computing / telephony I own is Apple.  I want to own up to assumptions and bias at the outset.

OK, here goes..

I want to like this company - brand upstarts, taking on the incumbent mindshare owner, competing hard to bring out great products and stimulating a customer-value oriented technology bonanza.  But I have a tremendously hard time looking past what I'm going to call some of THE WORST MARKETING AND ADVERTISING IN THE WORLD.

These guys (That's not sexist, they're Korean and that's the way it is there), don't have a clue.  If they did have a clue, they've lost it in a legal fight, as they probably stole it from someone else.  (Too catty ?)
I'm not talking about their intent by the way - the intent is spot on.  Gain enough mindshare from doing big things like Olympic coverage and sitting all over their big competitor's product launches.  Great intent.  Execution wise, it's hugely lacking though.

You may have seen the current TV ad featuring a young man that 'fits' into the line up outside what looks like an Apple store.  He plays with a Galaxy S3, and it ends up he is saving the space for his parents. Ha ha goes the commercial's intended punchline iPhone's are no longer cool - old people want them too. It's cute, and exactly the wrong message.

Why's that you say?  You recalled Samsung and that was the point.

If Samsung had a clue, they'd realize that the percentage of purchases that line up is sub 2% of your opening sales (case in point, Apple sold a 'disappointing' 5M units that first weekend, and I guarantee nowhere close to that number lined up).  The people that do line up are traditionally the "innovators" (This is Everett Roger's definition, adapted by Geoffrey Moore) and relative to others they have no budgets; and everyone in society looks askew at them as if they have technology ADD.

What Samsung showed us was Mom and Dad buying the phone...that's us - the majority of society, those not cutting edge. In other words, it's still good enough for some geeks that still line up, and it's usable enough for Mom and Dad, you know - regular people.  Everytime I see that ad from Samsung, I want to get into a line at an Apple store, as Samsung just validated Apple were the choice for normal people.  The poor guy whose parents wanted the new iPhone5 can't even talk his own family into using the Galaxy he has.  Ug.

This ad, like much of the positioning Samsung has done with their tablet product range highlights that they don't seem to understand how to market themselves versus the competition.  Which is a shame, as Apple needs to be kept sharp by competitors.  Otherwise they'll get complacent and we all lose.

Pivoting

It's getting close. Very close.

Pivot time I mean.  I don't know if you experience this phenomena, but I have a few times.  It's a feeling that starts in your soul and reaches into your daily life, into your gut, that things need to change.  And you do change, and you feel better.  For me, it's comparable to the feeling you get when you know you're going to throw up, and intellectually you understand that's what's needed. While the act is distasteful you do welcome it.  You feel better when it finally happens, relieved even though the experience is less than enjoyable at the time.

When I reach the conclusion that things could be better if change occurred and I fight it -  no change happens.  In me, if I suppress that for a while, it'll eventually emerge as the need to pivot.  Pivot to me means an entire life experience based conclusion that I've waffled long enough over a choice, and it's really time to act.

I notice anecdotally that pivots develop in my own life during extended down time.  Perhaps like fine wine maturing, these determinations must develop their own bouquet   Or perhaps I'm dressing up procrastination as something fancy. Whatever.

But it's close now, and I feel it.