Just back from Crete, a great week of sun, relaxation and table tennis, and a week out from information overload. I did sneak a peek at IBM’s Smarter City however; impressed both with the website itself and the information on it, particularly on education. Take a look at thesmartercity.com.
The 2010 Breakaway conference is almost at an end. What a great event. More than 1,000 participants, very good speakers, great entertainment (especially Tuesday-night rodeo) and a high-quality industry awards dinner. The theme of course was technology – trends, products, an emphasis on IT healthcare - but it was that old chestnut that won the day for me, people. When you get people face-to-face to talk, network and do business, the dynamic is incomparable.
Twitter is adding a new dimension to television. Watching TV whilst tweeting is like listening to live commentary. It also turns a solitary pastime like watching TV into a communcal one, and you get to have your say. It is time Twitter was incorporated into plasma TVs for same-screen action and TV audiences for political debates include the Twitter brigade.
As somebody who commutes to London often, and travels overseas occasionally, I am surprised to read about Brain Shot by Random House publishers. This is a product that distills regular books into a 10,000-word, 60-page e-book for people in a rush, on the go and no time to read. For example, John Barrow’s “100 essential things” has been reduced from a 340-page book by 80%. Part of the beauty of books is to learn, get-away-from-it-all and lose yourself in the pages. Is that excused because it has been given the ‘technology effect?’
I wonder how long it will take before email is passé. Our youngsters today are less inclined to send email because it is too long a process, and instant messaging is fast and with-it! I hear some unversities have stopped distributing email accounts to their students, and instead are giving out eReaders, iPads and Tablet computers – that’s the kind of place I would like to study.
With technology so powerful, how can we use it to create what Tom Peters calls the “Two-Cent Candy Phenomenon?” Small differentiators, such as a store with a box of two-cent candies at the checkout, or a jar of sweets at the immigration desks at Singapore airport. Small touches that are so memorable. So many ways to add a touch of ‘wow’, how can technology help us by adding ’small gestures’ to our business?
The students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in 1 school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a one-and-a-half year’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, many countries could climb the ladder simply by replacing the bottom 6-10% of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality (Jack Welch tells us to do this in our companies every year). After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with potential to be great teachers. Summarised from Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent new book ‘What the Dog Saw.’
Co-hosted three TechKnowledge evening seminars in Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi this week. Whirlwhind tour but well worth it. Hosted more than 180 delegates, where we discussed creating a competitive difference through skills and talent. A common thread is emerging, and when you look at changing demographics, the median ages of key global markets and India’s investment in education, it is poised to become the world’s largest supplier of
well-educated workers. People are our number one asset, and India recognises that.
Attended a few good events recently; presented at the British Telecom apprentice managers event in Gatwick, Brokerbin’s UK partner meeting in Manchester and the ElementK Learning Practitioners seminar in St Paul’s. Some excellent new contacts through those, and enjoyed them all. By far, this was the best thing I heard: “The best things in life aren’t things.”
Even if a social network has millions of followers, it is very unlikely to translate into millions of buzz-spreaders. Only a tiny percentage spread the word – the One Percenters. The One Percenters are the root of all word of mouth, and our job is to find and attract them.
