Another trio of images to finish off the year and to mark a likely pause in service for some time till inspiration strikes anew.
A view from the Appennines.
A spread of superheroes from a local car boot sale.
A very discreet EV charging point in a local village high street.
Make of that what you will….
This is just a reflection on how cramped and crowded the UK is compared to the US. It’s based on having made my first visit to one of the US National Parks – Yosemite – and being surprised at its unexpectedness emptiness.
Now I have to quickly give a caveat to my impressions – when we first got to Yosemite, a small part of the park was closed due forest fires, with some potential visitors no doubt deciding not to go given the risk that all of the park might subsequently be shut/visitors need to leave, or more realistically, going there when there have been fires would compromise on the experience as the air might be less clea. As a first time visitors, it was hard for me to tell what different any smoke residue was having. As you can hopefully admire in the below photos, it was still rather beautiful.
The year we went was the first time visitors to Yosemite were required to buy a permit to enter. And our expectations for huge crowds were set by the fact that we were advised to reserve our permission to buy a permit as soon as the booking window (similar to booking for festivals) came out. It turned out we were only asked to show our permit once, and even then, it wasn’t clear that we needed to have made the advance reservation. Instead, the roads were in the main pretty empty and there didn’t seem to competition for car parks (except for one point at the weekend at the main commercial centre for the park). And in general, it was striking that there few signs of commerciality (even the shops I did see were pretty basic).
This is all very different to what goes on in UK national parks. For a start, there is just simply a much larger volume of people going into the them. The Lake District gets around 19m visitors a year , compared to Yosemite’s 3.3m . And then there is the fact that the US parks are genuine wilderness in that no one lives (or farms) in them. This is unlike the Lake District, which has 45, 000 who live in the area and supporting these ‘vibrant communities’ is very much part of the area’s long term vision.
Not sure I have strong view as to which is better but I have to say, you couldn’t really get a good of tea (or coffee really) in Yosemite. Maybe it’s about natural refreshment.
This post comes inspired from a trip to the US earlier this year in which we had the opportunity to interact with, albeit in a fairly limited way, the commercial consumerist landscape of the country. By this I mean that we were not just staying at someone’s house and therefore shielded from ‘buying stuff’. No, we were ‘out there’, staying in different hotel chains, buying clothes, shoes, food, making choices about meals etc.
Overall, it was a disappointing and sobering experience. Economic/financial priorities seemed to triumph over environmental ones, most clearly manifested in the hotel breakfasts. Every guest had to use disposable plates and cutlery – so that everything could be thrown anyway quickly at the end – and the hotel only had to employ (and pay) for one member of staff to do the whole breakfast process. There was no cooking required (on offer there were just cereals and toppings, dairy products in a fridge, bread things for guests to toast themselves, as well as precooked rather gruesome looking eggs and burgers), and no washing up either. In the rooms, the same principle applied. Cups for hot drinks were also disposable and individually wrapped in plastic (very annoying but I can see how it would be the only way to guarantee cleanliness).
Perhaps the organisations involved would have lots to say in their defence to justify their decisions (not sure actually), but I should be balanced and acknowledged that there were some paltry symbolic redeeming features. Namely that these disposable items were made from 90% certified sourcing and at least 10% certified forest content…..Make of that what you will…..I don’t really understand what that means.
Walmart was a bit better. As our luggage was delayed and some of it lost, we therefore had to cost-effectively and efficiently try to replenish our clothing stock. Quite a lot of items were made from recycled plastic. Not nice clothes but perhaps good clothes. When you’re trying to save the world, you can’t have the world.
No one would question that it’s the right thing to go for energy efficiency in the items we use or purchase. However, beyond the immediate satisfaction of knowing that we have made a ‘good purchase’ and hopefully helped the planet in the long term, big, unfathomable scheme of things, can we actually benefit or get some kind of financial return within our own life times? Or is it actually more pricey all the way through?
Let’s explore through a couple of different items, beginning with household appliances.
Which? recently released some pretty compelling research which suggests that it is can be worthwhile going for those fancy A++++ items. They found that consumers could save £336 a year – more than £3,000 over a decade – on their energy bills and help reduce their carbon footprint just by switching to more energy efficient appliances when their old white goods need replacing. Obviously, the case is strongest for items which tend to be high energy consumers, such as tumble dryers, compared to say, ovens, and perhaps the best way to reduce energy on drying is to use an alternative system (the air, whether inside or out!).
How about electric cars? Well, these are newer types of machines and rather more sophistic than your average white good, so it doesn’t seem as though the picture is clear cut. It looks as though it depends on the model you get and how you use it as to whether the significant upfront high cost is mitigated by lower costs later on. May be you should bank on getting non-financial value in the form of smugness when the rest of the world is queuing for fuel during shortages, or whatever fuel-related calamity we are facing in that moment.
And finally, solar panels. Don’t go thinking that you’ll be able to benefit from a subsidy or good feed-in tariffs – those are no longer part of the equation. However, the cost of the panels themselves has dropped a fair bit, whilst energy costs have gone up lots, so there’s other incentives for going for it. However, it requires patience: it can take anywhere between 11 and 27 years to recoup the costs of installing panels for a typical home, perhaps longer than some people might be staying in that same property (depending on area, moves might happen every 10-25 years).
But you know what? To me, the biggest challenge would be having to go through some hardcore and pretty extensive research to work out which might be the best option, balancing all the different variables under consideration. That’s why I’m sending thanks to all those helpful people who write product reviews!
Strategy – it’s one of those magical mystery words which, when dropped into conversations, always make it seem as though we’re talking about something clever and Very Important. How about then adding in ‘open’ at the start and doesn’t it all seem irresistibly ‘switched on’?
So ‘Open Strategy’ is the title of a book I read recently. Perhaps didn’t quite live up the expectations implied by my rather tongue-in-cheek comments above: ‘open strategy’ seemed very much like doing futures, where you recognise the value of looking out far and wide beyond the usual horizons of organisational curiosity and expertise and investing time and effort in thinking through these ‘off the radar’ concepts.
However, it did contain some useful elements. Let’s walk through the three key highlights.
The authors are German and as such, the case studies involve a pleasantly refreshing deviation from the norm of whizzy start-ups or soul-searching FMCG brands. Instead, they talk lots about authentically nuts-and-bolts kind of guys, such as a global leader in the manufacturing, processing and development of sophisticated steel products, or a manufacturing of hearing aids.
Within their thesis as to why open strategy is so valuable, the authors highlight important shortcomings about the expertise of experts. If you get a bunch of experts in on a particular topic, it’s not likely you’ll get lots of fresh perspectives as their views are narrow, linked by the fact their formal training and experiences are probably very similar. And then they probably won’t be that keen on ‘new’ ideas as if you’re intelligent, you’re also better at rationalising why something can’t be the case, and therefore ‘dissing’ the (potentially all important) signals of emerging change or impending doom or opportunity.
Does innovation have to be so very ‘blue sky’? Actually, it seems there’s a lot to be said for new ideas which come from combinations of what’s out there already, so it’s less about the ‘new new’ and more about thinking anew. To put it another more fancy-pants kind of way, what about ‘adjacent possibilities’, which use an existing competence or characteristic for a different purpose than the original. And we shouldn’t forget either that there are different areas in which a business can innovate. Sure, you can do the shiny NPD or new service, but what about rethinking a business model or how you approach giving and getting value in what you do? But perhaps there is a more fundamental question which needs to be addressed first of all. Is all this earnest energy about disruptive innovation really necessary? I happen to work somewhere where that is not the ‘do or die’ question the organisation is asking itself.
I was struck by the following quote from a recent piece giving the ‘facts’ on the topic. “While many believe that technological disruption has been rampant for decades, the internet has actually caused much less creative destruction than people think. Birkinshaw’s analysis of the Fortune 500 and the Global 500, in fact, reveals that most sectors have been surprisingly stable over the past 25 years. Very few firms on those lists today were launched after 1995.’ And it seems it can be ok ‘to wait and see’. “Chances are better than you might think that your incumbent company will be able to survive and thrive in the face of disruptive entrants. Rather than pursuing ad-hoc strategies, incumbents are better off taking their time to observe developments, scrutinize their options and pick an adequate response that meets their individual requirements and conditions.”
In case the above title is too oblique, let me follow up by explaining that I’ll be focusing on a book I recently read. It’s all about being customer-led and proposes that businesses undertake a Copernican shift to be inside-out, putting the customer at the centre of all that they do, rather than assuming that everything revolves around the business. No one would dispute that being customer-centric is a good thing and it sounds obvious, but is it?
Well, according to this book, it clearly isn’t that easy. We get to hear stories of companies whose ability to stay ‘in orbit’ ebbs and flows, sometimes totally zoned in on customers and reaping the rewards that come from doing so well and at other times, losing that focus, getting too concerned about their own success measures and looking inwards.
Being customer-centric seems to involve decisions big and small, bold and simple.
How about Tesco deciding to invest £60m on its ‘One in Front’ programme in 1994, a year when it had reported pre-tax profits of £528m? Tesco’s promise was that if any till had more than two customers -waiting, then an extra check-out would be opened and they would keep on opening checkouts until the queue subsided or until every till was manned. This decision, together with other initiatives, led to Tesco going from a struggling number 3 in the 1980s to the undisputed leader two decades later.
Or what about something much smaller scale? When Carolyn McCall joined Easyjet in 2010 as CEO, the airline was no longer the plucky start-up pioneering cheap air travel but ‘making good profits from unpleasant customer experiences’. McCall wanted the company to see things again from the passenger perspective and my example of a small thing was her request was for the business to stop referring to delayed aircraft or flights and to start talking about ‘180 delayed customers’ – not just a few words but fundamental to helping change the discourse at Easyjet.
And then there’s the challenge of knowing how to balance commitments to do the best for the customer and commitments not to blow budgets. Well, I rather like the direction given by AO to its front line teams: ‘Treat the customer as if she was your Gran, but then after the call, you need to explain what you did to your Mum.’ Nice, eh?
And I haven’t even mentioned Amazon!
Have you read Smarter Screens by Shlomo Benartzi? It’s something I’ve just finished and just wanted to take the opportunity to share some thoughts. The ideas in it didn’t come across as strikingly original – that coup went to Thinking Fast and Slow, which brought to our attention how badly but sort of efficiently we evaluate our choices and make decisions. Smarter Screens went over the same ground but through the lens of what this looks like in the digital environment. But – there is a but – Smarter Screens is still valuable as it is more literally useful. It’s full of practical examples, tools and recommendations of how to address the challenges it outlines.
Now I must confess that, for once in my life, I am in working in a setting where the business actually builds and makes things (I am not just peddling shiny ideas and fine fads). The company is digital-only, which mean that its site is the company, and therefore should be optimised, in particular given that it is product category (pensions) which won’t naturally engage people and on which they don’t tend to be willing to spend time. But now I’ve realised that it won’t be that straightforward to apply the very sensible ideas from the book. You can’t really just start over and scrap a site, saying it is too complex, too full of links, the aesthetics are not displaying the right finely tuned balance of contrast in terms of text versus white space and contrast colours, and more. It’ll probably be a case of ‘pick and mix’ coupled with a bit of ‘muddling through’.
So what did I come across that stood out? Here are five things:
No one can argue with the ambition to make life a bit easier for people, but how far should meeting this go? When does help become a take-over, and suggestions become prescriptions?
I have been thinking about how, in our everyday lives, we have accepted a certain degree of help and support from the organisations we deal with. A very obvious example is Google, which offers the autocomplete service. I expect we have all become so used to it, we don’t really see it happening. But this is essentially Google at work trying to read your mind: Google explicitly call these autocomplete “predictions” rather than “suggestions,” and there’s a good reason for that. Autocomplete is designed to help people complete a search they were intending to do, not to suggest new types of searches to be performed. These are Google’s best predictions of the query we were likely to continue entering.
However, the little helps I am thinking of relate more to the fact that we are now faced with many choices, working out what’s best can actually be a chore as much as a blessing. A suggestion of what to go for then arrives as a welcome blessing.
There are also places where you can need to put a bit of work in yourself first, but then can sit back and reap the rewards.
And what’s interesting with that last example above is that not only is about making life easier (taking the hassle out of comparing offers and making choosing easier), it’s also about saving money and getting a good deal. Now if only there was a meal planner tool that sophisticated!
Last month, I realised that I appeared to have inadvertently built up quite a stash of supermarket magazines – you know the free ones which are positioned around the entrance so you can’t resist their glowing glossy covers?
The growth of the pile was catalysed in the first lockdown when I was rendered sleepless by empty shelves and a completely irrational panic that I would never be able to find pasta, flour, eggs or loo roll, and thus did frequent trips to food shops to see if I picked that special magical moment when a delivery had just arrived and the stock was still in. Or if not, rather than walk away empty handed, I would pick up a magazine. And so the foodie lit built up.
As, at the time of writing (mid Feb), we are almost a year into lockdown-ing, I thought I would take a look back at this period through the lens of these magazines. In ‘normal’ times, I am not good at keeping up with reading them, so I found that my magazines actually dated back to August 2018, allowing me to see how we did things before life went all ‘weird’. So what did I find?
It seems that, from the perspective of this type of literature, lockdown doesn’t really change the themes that crop up. Across all magazines, we are still being told about nice little treats, such as how to make afternoon tea special, how to try our hand at baking, how to focus in on seasonal food, how to avoid food waste and lead more sustainable lives generally. Maybe that’s why I like these mags so much – they are a comfort blanket in times of both normal stress and pandemic stress. But of course in those pre-Covid mags, there were a few signs of a life that is now absent – most notably an advert for a cruise holiday. I’ll pass on that, thank you!
Moving onto to what I had that captures ‘peak first lockdown’ (mags from April-June 2020), we are getting ourselves organised to this new routine – there are pieces about how to have a happy home life, how to do personal fitness in one’s living room, advice for dealing with home schooling, taking advantage of more time indoors to do some hardcore cleaning and so forth.
Here’s a selection which reminds me of what we had to deal with:
And of course, everyone desperate to showing that they were doing their bit
And it reminded me of those odd repercussions of shutting down public life. Did you remember how we were told we had to eat more steaks to support the beef industry who were struggling with lack of demand for those high end products with the closure of restaurants? I tried but never found there was a glut of fillet mignon for the taking….
Moving onto September 2020 when it felt as though it wasn’t quite as bad – we had had a good summer, the spike in cases after all the holidaying wasn’t great, but kids were going back to school and we could do still more than in April, if we were careful. Getting by with fudges.
And then, what of the present? Lockdown living is implicit. We don’t need to mention it but it’s clear it’s feeding into content – the almost frenetic exhortations to make the most of an event (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day etc); the boosting of an overdone topic (chocolate now described as ‘chocuterie’) and the lush pictures of “unknown” UK holiday spots (read into that – all the best places will definitely be booked up.
And what next? Looking at the big picture, who knows? For me personally, I know what I am doing. Making crumpets. I saw the recipe and can’t resist the challenge. That’s about as much as I can cope with.
PowerPoint – love it or loathe? I’m not sure where I sit here, probably, boringly, on the fence.
But what I can tell you is there are some workplaces where using PowerPoint is the norm; and that also there are also some places where PowerPoint is a rarely clicked application on the desk top.
Experiencing the latter made me realise there are ‘unintended’ consequences of working predominantly in PowerPoint compared to predominantly not.
A very simple one is time. I personally find creating content in PowerPoint takes up a lot of time. To create visually engaging material, you have to effectively map out each slide in turn to work out where each point will be made, and how to place the supporting evidence in such a way that it reinforces what is being said but does not clutter the side. And if someone decides the point needs to be expanded or compressed, that can effectively mean starting from scratch as the content has to be re-organised and restructured on the slides differently.
Obviously, creating a visually engaging slide which consists of just one tasteful, atmospheric and evocative image would perhaps take not so long, but which type of image is appropriate and evocative in the right way is incredibly subjective. And actually, finding a good image (without copyright constraints) can be surprisingly time-consuming.
My next consequence is about telling the story. A Powerpoint, to be read solo, can often leave the reader audience short changed. Powerpoint, through its structure of separate slides, can seem like it is just a succession of points but it is hard to know how to interpret their integrated meaning – in essence, what to make of all this ‘stuff’? In fact, it could be argued that a PowerPoint is invalid unless presented with a presenter.
But it isn’t the case that points presented in Word are ‘faultless’. In Word, the succession of points happens smoothly and seamlessly, which means that the author can potentially manipulate the reader with their seductive flow, points building on points, with the connections and implications all carefully spun through. It is harder to see beyond what the author has intended in Word; we are at their mercy and easily seduced.
In my new Powerpoint-lite work world, it is even the case that seminars and conferences can take place without the usual reliance on slides and decks. People just stand up and talk, not even with notes sometimes, just a person in front of other people, saying the things that they know are important and people looking at the speaker and listening to them. In fact, the only time in this Powerpoint-lite world that I have come across glitzy slides is when consultants, the merchants of spin, have taken to the stage to sell and show off, not to share and inform.
And perhaps therein lies the clue as to the difference: my Powerpoint-lite world is far from consultancy and spin; it is the world of pensions where points needs to be carefully thought through and making the wrong choice can have consequences.
xrematon 