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Monthly Archives: September 2016

Driven to Distraction by the Driverless Car

09 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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Apple TV, autonobabble, BATNA, Blu Ray, CAPEX, Casio, Concorde, Digital watch, Dr Hugh Bradlow, driverless car, driverless cars, Maryanne Wolf, Max Bazerman, Moore's Law, Netflix;, OPEX, psycho motor skills, Richard Denniss, Telstra, Texas Instruments, The Australia Institute, Tufts University, Video Ezy

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I went to a politics in the pub session with Richard Denniss last night. He’s the Chief Economist with The Australia Institute. He has coined a phrase called ‘econobabble’ to explain how the use of economic terminology and jargon by non-economists is designed to stifle the debate and belittle the audience. I am going to coin my own phrase ‘Autonobabble’. I define this as the use of putative assertion and poorly conceived rhetoric to predict the bleak future of the world through the relentless advance of automation.

The recent hype behind the driverless car has me perplexed. Recently Dr Hugh Bradlow, Chief Scientist for Telstra, was on the radio making the prediction that by 2030 the road will be almost entirely occupied by driverless vehicles. Ironic I thought in the very same month that Telstra’s system crashed due to IT failures requiring a pretty significant mea culpa and compensation payment to customers. I also thought what greater insight into driverless cars does a telecoms company have over the usual Joe or Joeanne in the street? When we hear future predictions with no counter-balance I begin to smell vested interest. Let’s look at driverless cars then in greater detail.

There are a number of rationales being used by the short-term futurists predicting the rapid uptake of driverless vehicles. These include:

  • Moore’s Law. If we think of the driverless vehicle less as a car and more as a computer the computational advancements will be rapid over the next ten years. Can’t argue with that;
  • Insurers will drive this change as we will be so much safer in driverless vehicles given human error is the largest contributor to motor vehicle accidents by a long chalk. True;
  • People don’t want to have such big CAPEX sitting idle for the largest portion of its life at home or at work. Kinda but does everyone have that old CAPEX v OPEX conundrum whistling around in their head all the time? and
  • Everything’s going digital right? Keep reading….

I’m not so convinced that driverless cars are going to catch on at the speed that is being predicted or if they do that it will necessarily be a good thing. The trajectory for driverless vehicles and the predicted uptake is based on a number of myths which need to be called out.

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Myth One. Everything is going digital. I recall many years ago going to a training session where the trainer got us all to work on a Harvard Business School Case Study on the demise or near demise of the Swiss watch industry. It was being disrupted by the digital watch with the advent of the quartz mechanism which was actually invented by the Swiss watch people and given away to Casio  and Texas Instruments because they couldn’t see any use for it. As they say the rest is history. Sounds like Kodak – yes? Well no actually. A watch is way more than a means by which to tell the time. It is jewellery on your wrist – an emotional purchase and guess what happened? Swiss watches fought back and now you are hard pressed to find a digital watch. New generation Apple and Samsung watches are really just backlit analogue timepieces.

This drive to digital isn’t always a good thing. Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University believes that there are intrinsic dangers in giving ipads to children. This belief that we are creating digital natives is just that – a myth. What it is in fact doing is stunting children’s memory, ability to read, concentration and overall cognition. And we are led to believe it’s a good thing because a one year old can swipe an ipdad screen. Wolf believes ipads should be banned outright for children. But we’re not talking about kids we are talking about adults in cars right?

Think again. Psycho-motor skills are important. Driving remains one of the last great psycho-motor challenges left to humans. Remember learning to drive a manual vehicle and doing all those things simultaneously? We had to master a multi-faceted task. With the other psycho-motor skills dulled over the years e.g. we no longer need such dexterity to hunt, cook, or build, we need to retain some tasks that engage us fully. Driving involves many of the senses at once and cognitively engages us from situational awareness, memory, hand-eye co-ordination, thinking ahead, planning, judgement, risk assessment, emotion control etc. There is also the issue of ophthalmic health. Driving a car requires us to exercise eye muscles and look into the distance then quickly change our focal point. It’s highly likely the driverless car experience will involve looking at a screen loaded with some form of entertainment or news once again adding to the visual stimuli at a focal range that human’s were not evolved for. Did you know that our mental wellbeing partly requires us to look to the horizon from time to time to build comfort? Did you know that optometrists are finding ocular health in rapid decline in children equivalent to the decline seen in previous generations of elderly people? Driving a car keeps cognitive and ocular health in good shape. Very little in the way of cognition or psycho-motor skills will be enagegd when Elon Musk’s car pulls up at your door for your commute to work.

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Myth Two – the technology is ready. My Video Ezy closed about a year ago. Shame really as I supported it to the end. Sure Apple TV gave me online access to rentable movies plus I could get rubbish movies for free on Netflix. I stuck with my local Video Ezy partly out of loyalty but also because of the social interaction I had with the owner. I got to know her really well over the years and knowing of my penchant for foreign movies she used to stock world cinema almost just for me with little prospect of making much a return from those titles. That builds loyalty. Try getting foreign movies on Apple TV. I haven’t watched a decent foreign film in ages. Even if I did want to watch the trash that Apple TV offers I have to wait anything from 1-5 hours for the movie to download at a cost of about double the face to face hire cost. The technology just can’t match a good Blu Ray pick up from a local video store. Just like internet 1.0 the hype of its possibility outstripped its ability to deliver.

Myth Three – It’s Cheaper. No-one wants to have their CAPEX sitting idle for most of its useful life do they? Better to have it working for you – that’s the basis of collaborative consumption. Let’s think this through. What will be the cost of the OPEX to get the driverless vehicle to your place every day so you can have the equivalent access as having a car at your fingertips (your own)? No-one really knows. Think about this for a moment. Governments need to tax us to pay for the roads hospitals, schools etc. Governments need to repay national debt currently at levels that would make your eyes water. Governments don’t want to raise your personal taxes because it gets them voted out. Politics 101 when in government says always put someone between you and the shit. Imagine the sucker punch of being able to raise costs/taxes/levies that have to be absorbed by a middle entity who then passes them on to the consumer (the person who orders the driverless car). No direct attribution back to the government…sweet!

The calculation that people will have to make is will they pay more ultimately. The CAPEX route to car availability at least gives the consumer certainty over the largest component of the expenditure. To lose an alternative (i.e. to have no BATNA as Bazerman might describe it) is to place you in a very weak position in any negotiation around service. Try ordering a driverless vehicle at peak hour – you might find the cost out of your comfort zone. We see electricity costs rising every year when one is promised that competition will do the opposite. Driverless cars might find us beholden to service providers in ways we would prefer not to be.

turntable

Myth Four – Everyone Will Want To Use One. The largest sales in music today are albums. Why? Because the digitisation and compression of music has taken the soul out of it. It just sounds better in analogue. Dust off your old albums put them on a turntable and turn up the sound. You know I’m right. But does this example hold true for motor vehicles? Well yes and no. Would I prefer to drive myself or be in a driverless car to and from work each day? The latter if myth three is within reasonable bounds. But in the weekend the thought of using my iphone to request a driverless vehicle to take a nice drive up the Coast leaves me cold. There is a romance to driving that will never be delivered without someone in the driver’s seat actually driving. If we go driverless then all motorsport will go by the wayside shortly after. Motorsport is popular because it is the ultimate fantasy of driving at the very extreme of person and machine. If the psychomotor experience of cars is taken away then we won’t be able to contextualise the racing driver experience. Out go the weekend car and bike warriors and anyone who has a classic or vintage car will find their hobby quickly curtailed. Out go the petrol heads in come the propeller heads. For many there is an emotional component to driving (like a watch in many ways). Just because an idea seems like a good one to the marketing department doesn’t mean it is so.

Look how far we have come. Watson is now doing cognition computing, social media is revolutionising communication, there is the internet of things, automation and robotics are already changing our workplaces, wi fi is ubiquitous, cloud computing allows big data to know everything about us, mobile phone ownership internationally is of staggering proportions even in countries once considered ravaged by chronic long-term poverty. Strong arguments indeed upon which to base a 2030 driverless vehicle prediction. Pause though and reflect. We landed a man on the moon in 1969, and have barely left the earth’s orbit since. We had the first supersonic aircraft (Concorde) in 1976 retiring in 2003. We haven’t done supersonic flight since. Driverless cars are coming but not as fast as we are being led to believe. So pause next time you are cut off on the road and think is it worth giving the finger to a driverless vehicle? Not much satisfaction in that. So all this talk about the demise of the driver operated vehicle…not so much hot air as autonobabble!

Sporting Leadership When the Future Looks All Black

02 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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#forceofblack, All Blacks;, Asene Wenger, Bayern Munich, Bill Shankly, Bledisloe Cup, Force of Black, Gerard Houllier, Jose Mourinho, Kieran Reid, Leadership, Leading, Liverpool, Liverpool FC, Manchester United, Michael Cheika, Ole Gunner Solskjaer, patience, Peter Blake, Qantas Wallabies, Red Devils, Ritchie McCaw, Robert De Niro, Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Peter Blake, sports leadership, Teddy Sherringham, The Intern, Wallabies;

IMG_6894

I had the privilege to live a good part of my life in Manchester (well Trafford really) so my local team was Manchester United and I was there for the glory years of Sir Alex Ferguson. In fact I still have a clock whose alarm is a recording of the commentary of Teddy Sherringham’s and Ole Gunner Solskjaer’s goals in the 1999 UEFA Champions League final against Bayern Munich. We were 1-0 down with 3 minutes of extra time on the clock and came away 2-1 victors. Imagine waking up to that every morning! I noticed the other day that Sir Alec, the most successful manager in the history of football, wrote a book last year about leadership simply called Leading.

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I’m pretty ambivalent about getting leadership advice for business from the sporting world, be it from successful captains or coaches of the past. There’s a world of difference between sport and business, despite the fact that sport is big business. In sport:

  • You dump/bench your players when their form drops;
  • You have many people competing for one position to encourage best efforts;
  • There is a much greater clarity about what the goals are of which there are fewer;
  • There are a limited number of tactics;
  • All players are pretty much motivated and have really only one or two reasons for being there (to win and make money);
  • It’s easy to replace someone when they can’t turn up to work;
  • There’s no issue with equity or equality;
  • You don’t spend most of your life at work;
  • Most of what you do is practice and the bit that really matters lasts about 90 or so minutes a week for 6 months of the year;
  • If you are really good the pay is astounding;
  • A whole group of people outside your employer want to pay you money as well and shower you with gifts;
  • You exist in a pretty hermetically sealed single gender world;
  • You can be loved and loathed in equal measure;
  • You get into nightclubs without queuing and can always get a drink at the bar;
  • If you are shit the whole world knows about it;
  • If you transgress the whole world plus your partner knows about it; and
  • Your chances of being on the front or back page are a quantum higher.

That said there is no shortage of ex-coaching soothsayers selling their wares in how to motivate your ‘team’ and make your business better. John Buchannan ex-coach of the Australian Cricket Team is a good example but there are many others. We’re often told it’s about good ‘man management’. CEO’s have to be good people managers so getting a pep talk from our sporting counterparts is maybe not so enlightening for us.

The weekend saw the failure of our beloved Wallabies (Australian national rugby team) to once again lift the Bledisloe Cup, one of the most coveted prizes in World rugby behind the Webb Ellis Cup (World Cup) and the Six Nations. Given some coaches penchant for giving us CEO’s advice I thought I would throw my hat and not inconsiderable experience as a CEO (20+ years) into the ring to provide advice in the opposite direction. In this case to the Wallabies Management on how they might build to achieve success. Here are my ten habits of a successful team:

Lesson one. Respect begets loyalty and loyalty begets respect. I’m thinking way deeper than the players respecting their coach and vice versa. I’m talking about respect for tradition and team values, respect for your paying customer and respect for all those associated with the game especially those officiating it.

Lesson two. Humility eats arrogance for breakfast. Legendary All Black Ritchie McCaw and his fellow senior players stayed behind after every rugby test and cleaned the dressing room. Sir Peter Blake, legendary America’s Cup captain and round the world racing yachtsman, would have his entire team on a roster to clean up the sheds, regardless of rank. I stack and empty the dishwasher at work. When no job is too small for a manager then no-one can complain about a menial task they might be assigned. When in the thick of it and your captain makes that clarion call for effort of ‘one in, all in’ you are more likely to go shoulder to shoulder with them if you have been shoulder to shoulder with them in a more mundane situation. Arrogance breed entitlement and there is no quicker depleter of confidence and energy than entitlement.

Lesson three. Aggression without purpose is wasted energy. ‘Punching above your weight’ does not actually involve punching. Putting ‘niggle’ in to draw penalties from your opponents is actually a zero sum game. Strive to win through fair play because to win otherwise lacks authenticity and players, sponsors  and spectators can smell that a mile away. Discipline eats aggression for breakfast.

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Lesson four. Accept your own failures and don’t blame others. I looked on Amazon for books about referees who reversed their on-field decisions when a penalised player complained. Guess what? I couldn’t find any. Captains who constantly whinge to the referee are amplifying their frustration to their players and the lack of confidence this builds becomes a contagion. So what you were unfairly penalised? The rub of the green invariably goes to the positive side. Taking referring knocks on the chin and not getting knocked sideways by them is the mark of a confident team.

Lesson five. Patience. You can’t re-build if you don’t have a trajectory just a ‘jam now’ mentality. To be constantly at the top is a pipedream in any sport, be it the Chicago Bulls, Manchester United or the All Blacks. When you are re-building do just that. There is no need to lose shape, form and experimentation in the pursuit of every game being a must-win. Look to building a positive trajectory and forward momentum. If your end point is your start point you have a flat line.

Lesson six. Be savvy and learn from others. If you see something working in another team break it down and look at how you can learn from it. Do it from post-match analysis and not pre-game bugging though. If you can only win by stealth when those crunch moments come the lack of physical fibre will be obvious because moral fibre will be missing.

Wallabies-v-England-Suncorp-31

Lesson seven. Consider your brand. How do you look on-field? Perhaps more importantly how do you conduct yourself off-field? The Wallabies are one of the most slovenly teams I have seen in a long time. Wear a blazer, comb your hair, have a shave. Did you learn nothing from De Niro in The Intern? Also when you are the coach be mindful that lots of kids watching the game can see your reactions and they can lip-read. So too can your players on the field. When you as leader lose it what are they to think? Behaviours are mirrored and good and bad habits get reinforced. We choose which ones we want to be an exemplar for. That is leadership!

Lesson eight. A winning culture does not mean you have to always win. To be winners there are a number of KPIs to achieve and the final score is just one of them. Creating a positive culture is one that appeals to sponsors and spectators alike. A siege mentality might, for a short time, draw a team together but having a constant enemy (i.e. everyone else) saps energy and cannot be sustained for the long haul. Think about a broad range of parameters that define success not just the scoreboard.

Lesson nine. ‘Us versus them’ only exists when on the field. Think about a life after the game. Camaraderie will become important especially when the all too short sporting career comes to an end. Even though teams might be rivals, relationships are enduring.  Competitors in business will still meet at functions over lunch and get on; the same must go for sportspeople. Forge relationships that will empower you after your career. This is a lesson for players and coaches. Even the volatile Sir Alex forged friendships with coaching rivals such as Gerard Houllier, Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger.

Michael-Hooper-dives-in-to-score

Lesson ten. Learning how to win humbly and lose with grace is a lesson for sport and a lesson for life. I’ve always been wary of the over-the-top post-try celebration; the swan-dive being a prime example. What say you do that but lose the game? You look a tool that’s what. Humility when scoring a la McCaw or Reid becomes a standard that other players emulate. There is a good rationale for keeping your emotions in check (or in Cheika!) because the opposition are coming right back at you and you need to stay focused. After the game the degree to which you are magnanimous in defeat or victory shows character and more often than not character wins games when it gets tight. To immediately blame the referee or cheating opposition in the aftermath of the game for your loss speaks volumes, not about the referee or opposition,but yourself.

Bill Shankly, famous Liverpool football manager, once commented. ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’ That was very tongue in cheek from a sporting club that has had its fair share of tragedy over the years, but keeps a winning way about it despite not always being at the top. Perhaps Kipling’s lines from his poem ‘If’ are the best manifesto for sporting success? To me you are a real winner;

‘If you can dream – and not make your dreams your master;

If you can think – and not make your thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same.’

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