Think Different

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify and vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Inspiring commercial and ad campaign from Apple. A great success in 1997, it took the public by storm and won critics over. It heralded the return of Steve Jobs, and it ushered in a revolutionary first decade of the 21st century for Apple. Think: iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad. Jobs’ name or image is nowhere in this commercial. Yet, like him or not, he unquestionably belongs among the luminaries captured here.

It isn’t easy perhaps for many of us to think differently. It requires us to break conventional wisdom when looking at things and drawing conclusions about events. Nassim Taleb, author of the book The Black Swan, spoke at length about the foibles of human thinking. For example, psychologists or consultants are wont to identify the traits that make a particular leader successful, say, strategic in thinking, engaging of others, and driven toward results. We believe, then, that if we acquire these traits, we can and should be successful, too. What these experts sometimes forget is what Taleb calls “silent evidence.” What about those leaders who had these very traits, but who failed? They may be far from the limelight, if their failures weren’t at all colossal, relegated into the dusty annals of those who couldn’t ‘cut the mustard,’ and therefore deserve not to be acknowledged or studied. So, to think differently means, among a number of things, weighing things that stand out and also things that don’t. Doing this makes us appreciate, I believe, how extraordinarily difficult it can be to achieve the levels of success portrayed in this Apple ad campaign.

Let’s unpack that inspiring quote above, shall we, and let me add to its short list of luminaries.

“They have no respect for the status quo.”

Sigmund Freud.  Indeed he dared to cut against the grain of 19th century Victorian Europe, by delving into the sexual and aggressive drives within us. Yes, some dismiss or otherwise vilify his views, but there’s no denying his impact on culture and insight into people. For example, these drives percolate in our unconscious, and can prompt us to act irrationally or impulsively. Indeed he argued, provocatively, that we as people weren’t even masters of our own ‘house’ (mind and body). Rather, it was the id and these unconscious drives.

“They push the human race forward.”

Charles Darwin. Through astute observation and painstaking study, he gathered the pieces of a colossal framework to explain the evolution of life. Adaptations over generations vis-a-vis the environment resulted in remarkable changes in the shape, function, and appearance of life. Moreover, he had the gall to suggest that the human was cousin to the chimp and that, with modern scientific discoveries, both human and chimp had a common ancestry in the fish! Evolution was what brought about and pushed the human race forward, not creationism, he argued.

“To think that they can change the world.”

Nicolaus Copernicus. The Ptolemaic view of the universe survived for centuries. It was a geocentric one, with the earth as the cosmic center. Copernicus had a radically different notion. He was greatly reluctant to publish his findings, for fear of criticism, censure, perhaps even death, from government and church authorities. Still, as Galileo succeeded him, there was ultimately no denying that Copernicus was right. That our universe was in fact a heliocentric one and that the earth was simply one of numerous celestial bodies revolving around the sun. What a blow to the ego of humankind, its world having changed before its very eyes!

These three, plus the Albert Einstein, the Amelia Earhart, the Pablo Picasso et al. captured in this Think Different commercial, are exceptional individuals indeed. Rare visionaries and talent, with whom, like it or not, we are gifted. The vast majority of us belong to an average lot, in contrast. Still, I believe that in our small ways, in our daily lives, we can think differently and consequently solve problems, make changes, and fashion things for the better for others.

In what ways have you thought differently about things, and what were the effects of doing so?

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD

Lessons on Innovation from the Poor

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What companies or products come to mind first, when we speak of innovation?  For me, it’s Apple and Google.  It’s the iPod as a platform for iTunes, and iPhone followed by the iPad, all of which have put music, communications and computing on-the-go.  It’s about the sophisticated search algorithms that millions of us use everyday to get hordes of information we look for, at literally fractions of a second.

This TED Talk by Anil Gupta tells a different kind of tale, one that to me is no less compelling (albeit far more unheralded) than what Steve Jobs presents in a big-stage product launch or what the Google boys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, cook up for the web.

“People may be economically poor, but they’re not poor in the mind.”  

So goes Prof. Gupta, and in a short stretch of time he offers numerous practical illustrations of his point.

I’ve heard this said many times:  ‘Nothing is impossible’ … ‘Anything is possible, if you put your mind to it’ … ‘Impossible is actually I’m possible.’  Many people may believe this, and find it quite motivational.  I don’t.  When we stop to think about it, there are so many things that we as human beings simply cannot do.  For example, even if I had the best of basketball coaches training me, for years and years, I will never have the legs to jump like superstar Michael Jordan.  Scores of people cannot, either.  Have me tutored by the best scientists in the world, around the clock, and still I can assure you that I will never have the intelligence of Albert Einstein.  Vast swaths of us have just average-functioning brains.

But within the nebulous boundaries of our talents, there are indeed very clever, useful, even artistic things that we can come up with.   Things that make our lives more livable, and others’ lives a bit easier and more productive.  The “we” I refer to are among the poor in India, and not just in India but in other countries where impoverished villages exist.  For us who live in industrialized, corporate or wealthy sectors of the world, herein lie lessons for innovating.

How does this innovation happen?

First, it comes from within those very villages, where hardships are a defining way of life.  Where income may hover over the bottom ranges of a country’s currency (e.g., rupees).  Where everyday devices at their disposal are no where like a computer, handheld or desk bound, but more a matter of low-tech (e.g., a bicycle, powered by muscle and bone alone) or even no-tech (e.g., your head, on which you carry water)!

Second, it comes from people living in those villages.  Who think, who reflect.  Who solve common, day-to-day problems, such as grinding small amounts of grain or washing clothes at costs that villagers can afford.  They say, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention.’  True, very true.  Moreover, it requires a ‘mother,’ symbolic of someone who knows her culture (home) and people (family) intimately.  Can someone like me, who grew up in suburban Chicago in a middle-class family, do what these local innovators have done?  Maybe, or maybe not.  I’m smart, but I’m wholly foreign to their way of life.  My mind is entrenched on Google, and how to get quick answers to my queries.  Not on grinding or washing anything.

Third, it comes from an organization like the Honey Bee Network, which facilitates such innovation, encourages the villagers, and finds a way for them to get some income.  Now I’m not familiar with HBN, but my sense is that they grasp the culture of these people and they know how to help them in ways that recognize, not undermine, their way of life.

Finally, it comes from what I feel is the warm, encouraging spirit of a man like Prof. Gupta, who believes in the very things he says, “Creativity counts … knowledge matters … innovations transform … incentives inspire.”

Solving poverty is complicated, even overwhelming, but I believe it’s a responsibility of us more privileged people to help in this effort.  I believe this TED Talk offers a key algorithm in such a solution:  that is, encourage and-or recognize useful innovations within these impoverished villages.

What do you think, in what ways do you innovate?  What are the common problems you face everyday, and how have you solved them?

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD

BlackBerry and its Discontent

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Not hopeful about RIM

Let’s be clear about this. I love my BlackBerry for the reasons that many others love it. Its QWERTY keyboard is perfect for me, as it’s familiar to my laptop-fashioned mental schema. Also the surface of its keys fit my thumbs very well, so I can tap a message quickly and accurately. I like the range of messaging options available to me, from BB Messenger (BBM), to WhatsApp and Google Talk, and of course to the commonplace SMS and e-mail. Oh, yeah, I really like the LED, and I check my BB often for its blinking red light, as if it were some kind of fix for an addict (lol)!

Still, I’m not hopeful about the BB, and as Roger Cheng advises in his article, my next mobile device will be an iPad2 and either an iPhone or an Android-operated smartphone. Why? Well, for reasons that have to do more with Research in Motion (RIM), the BB maker, rather than the BB per se.

You see, I bought my (first and only) BB in July 2010. Friends had been asking for my BB PIN, and I was embarrassed not to have one. But in less than a month, there was an uproar about the United Arab Emirates, where I live, threatening to block BBM services. Saudi Arabia and India made similar threats to RIM, unless it allowed these countries access to its BBM data. They cited security concerns. This issue was intriguing in and of itself, but that’s another story. What I learned about RIM, with just a bit of research, was how UN-innovative it was and how late-to-the-party it was. The Torch was coming out about that time, and RIM was touting its touch screen and sliding keyboard. Whoop-de-doo (haha) ;P Been there, done that. It was so first-decade-of-the-21st-century.

Reports were that about 500,000 BBM users were in the UAE at that time. So I expressly reassured my friends that the UAE was unlikely to actually block BBM. But I also posted on Facebook that BB was on the royal road to extinction. What Apple does, what Google does … well, that excites me, both as a consumer and as a businessman.

I love my BB, as I said, but my love for it has waned steadily over the past year. I gathered that RIM was in a panic mode about how to regain its market share. Well, that’s understandable, but panic in the high stakes business of mobile devices is not exactly a confidence-booster in the marketplace, is it.

Unfortunate negative association

Rioting must be as old as humankind itself, and it’s no less tragic when it happens now.  It inflames emotion, to say the least.  One friend on Facebook, for example, described the rioters in the UK as a “bunch of pathetic wastes of space.”  Another friend is sick and tired of hearing all the feeble excuses for their rioting.

A Bloomberg article noted that many of the rioters organized themselves on the BlackBerry Messenger.  As one marketing director suggested, the association between this unrest and BB was another negative hit for an already panicked Research in Motion, the maker of BB.  You see, RIM is rapidly losing market share to Apple and other mobile makers using the Android operating system.

Well, it’s a bit of irony for RIM, isn’t it, that so many of these young people in the UK seem to have taken up the BB.  Good for its market share, no?

The most unfortunate irony for me, however, is this negative association.  For a UK Parlaiment member to call for a ban on BBM services is as illogical, indeed, as to blame the long-trusted (stationary) phone or the venerable handwritten letter as the cause of negative events communicated through its medium.  If BBM could speak, it would harken back to that old saw, “Don’t kill me!  I’m only the messenger.”  It’s frankly nutty.

So it is.  Such association is clearly part of human nature.  It’s irresponsible, too, that Bloomberg would (initially) title this article so provocatively that it reinforces this sort of blaming:  “BlackBerry Falls from Executive Suite to UK Mobs.”  Alas, the editors of Bloomberg are part of that human nature.

I have noted before that under heightened emotion, in high stress situations, people can lose their sense of perspective, judgment, and logic.  Put more bluntly, the smartest among us can come across as downright dumb, if subjected to sufficient degrees of pressure.  Understandably, the thinking mechanisms in our brain have their limits.  So, just as with any piece of machinery, these mechanisms can break down, if operated beyond its predesigned uses.

What to do, then?

All parties involved in this rioting need to find a way, of course, to calm down and regain self-control.  So better judgment can prevail once again.  RIM itself must grasp human nature in all of its glorious (and IN-glorious) manifestations, especially how it gets played out in groups (i.e., mobs).  As Apple and Google understand rather superbly, their success is based not just on how innovative their technology is, but also on how well they grasp human thinking, emotion and behavior.  How well the executives at RIM understand these, I don’t know.

It is laudable indeed that RIM, as a “good corporate citizen,” will work with authorities to help in any way that it can.  But this is not enough!  The company must give a firm, clear message that it does not condone the violence in the UK and that, at the same time, people ought not kill the messenger.  BB is not to blame for the rioting!  But as of right now, there is no such message on the RIM website.

Amidst this awful rioting, RIM has an opportunity to strengthen its position, and to do so in a sensitive but strong manner.  Is it late-to-act again?

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD

Women, Business and Leadership

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I posted about women in business and leadership on Facebook.

Here's what the Bloomberg says in the article above:

"Women are driving most of the consumer activity on the Web today,” said Aileen Lee, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who devotes about half of her investment portfolio to startups founded by females. “They’re the majority of users on Facebook, on Twitter, on Zynga. That gives websites that figure out how to harness social media early on an advantage because they can grow more quickly."

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD

Business of Content

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Why content isn't king.

At first blush, I didn't buy into this article title.

You see, I plan to launch a few internet businesses, and “Content is my competitive advantage” is my tagline. I am fortunate to know a lot of things and to grasp things quite well. I love to tinker with ideas, and think about their implications for our life, work and relationships. So, whether it’s writing or speaking about these, content is king for me. At the end of the day, “content aggregators” like Netflix, still need good content to offer their customers, right?

In fact, the dirty little secret of the media industry is that content aggregators, not content creators, have long been the overwhelming source of value creation.

Still, this article is a very good one. There is literally a mass of content out there. We could spend hours and hours wading through the blogs that millions of people write. So it makes perfectly good sense that those companies, like Netflix, that can bring such content together for us are likely to do very well, especially if it’s of interest or value to us.

In the mostly forgotten era of the MCA/Universal chief Lew Wasserman, being a media mogul meant enforcing a culture of informal cooperation, where the bottom line mattered more than one-upping your peers. Wasserman was not literally "the Last Mogul,” as multiple biographers have dubbed him, but he may have been the last one who didn’t think the defining genius of moguldom was out-bidding all the other moguls for the hottest talent, technology, or property of the moment.

How a CEO competes is always a matter of choice, perhaps having to do with style, personality or values. There really is no way for anyone of us to dictate how he or she should compete. Still, Mr. Wasserman offers good lessons on business leadership that CEOs should heed. Our world now is so much more complex and connected than ever before that competition via ‘one-upmanship’ isn’t going to succeed. Instead, finding effective ways to partner, collaborate, and gather others is a critical ingredient of business. This is another reason, I think, why content aggregators in media make very good sense.

Netflix is the rare aggregator that manages the direct customer relationship itself, which allows it both to excel in customer service and to perfect the product by harnessing customer feedback.

I want to engage my customers. I want to captivate them with my stuff. I want to know what they’re thinking about my stuff and about other things, too. Through media and technology, we have such wealth of opportunities now to connect with customers, to learn what they need and what interests them, and to cultivate an active community among them. So my point previously, about how critical collaboration is, most definitely applies with customers as well.

Content creator or content aggregator, where do you weigh in?

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD