Take a letter Maria.

"Address it to my wife, tell her I won't be coming home tonight". How much easier that message would have been if RB Greaves could have just spoken into his iPhone4 Siri app and then hit the send button. How much easier it is becoming today, for corporate types who missed out on the personal assistant because of budget cuts to work with a virtual assistant or "Clayton's secretary" by simply talking into a mobile device. From the imagination of Stanley Kubrick and the talking computer, HAL 9000, in 2001 A Space Odyssey to Siri and its iterations in your phone today, the virtual assistant has leapt from the cinema screen into our palms and our world will never be the same again.

What is happening today, sees the integration of web services and the understanding of everything on the web via conversations. Conversations that used to happen between bosses and their secretaries, conversations that used to happen between clients and their consultants and conversations that used to happen between anyone and a service provider of information. This process will build till everyone from the smallest child to aging grand parents will have their own VA's because it's important to have your schedules and reminders aligned with the Kindergarten yearbook and as we get older it becomes more important to know, who is that person we are playing bridge with in the retirement home?

What everyone is waiting for now, is technology to catch up with expectations as global companies like Amazon, European banks and travel companies start working on ways to engage us on a conversational level as they become part of our personal VA's. Sitting in an airport bar because another flight has been delayed, your VA let's you know that your choices include a day hotel, another flight on another airline, catching up with colleagues who may be in the same town or indulging in your favourite past time of falconry, of which there is a club nearby.

All of this can only happen if the VA is fully integrated and understanding of location, time, personalisation intuition and web content aggregation. Once all of this occurs within a conversational context the value proposition of a lot of providers will need to change in a hurry. Providers are already up in arms over the commoditisation of services via the web but once an intelligent string of two way conversations occur, the user landscape will change forever.

So how long before we see everyone having a conversation with their hand held device, a conversation with a robot, a conversation with a piece of software? A conversation where no human interaction is involved and a conversation that gives you replies and answers that will always be about you, with no emotional attachment from the other end.

A main concern in all of this, is the incessant chatter that will be heard everywhere as people ask inane questions about the most menial tasks to be taken care of by their VA's. A flock of seagulls, a murder of crows and all sorts of bird like analogies around the squawking that would drown out even the loudest elevator musak and drive us crazy. So the next step will be for software that reads lips, then when people talk, it should be in face to face conversations, not face to phone.

Dinner for two.

Five hundred dollar dinner for two, seemed a lot at the time but it was for a best friend's 30th Birthday and the event seemed to warrant grand gestures. It was intriguing, it was hedonistic but most of all it was the idea of feasting on a fifteen course dinner that made me feel special, like a George Clooney character on the French Riviera. I have dined out on that dinner story many times and often added the analogy of one hundred $4.95 lunch time pizzas arriving at my desk to show what else I could have spent the money on. The pizzas are pedestrian but the Birthday meal was memorable on several levels and as such, changed my thinking on what I was likely to pay for regular products in the future.

I already pay more now for ordinary things, such as jeans, technology, haircuts, Thai food, after shave and breakfast cereals. I pay because I am buying ideas, notions of what could be, what might be and along with the changing perception of luxury becoming more about personal pleasure and self expression, it raises my purchases above just status. It's that feeling a product can somehow change you, give you the idea that you have raised your level of consumerism to connoisseurship.

Right here many people are replacing connoisseur with wanker but it's not just happening at the high end of town. We have long ago decided to become connoisseurs of coffee, hand held technology, designer t-shirts and bottled water. Ubiquitous items all, cheaply available, yet we continue to purchase at a high price because we see ourselves as different when we engage with these products. On purchasing, we then seek recognition from kindred spirits in the know about why the purchases were made, connoisseurs in designer jeans.

Apple has been one company very successful in selling ideas over product and able to gain leverage over their competitors and charge a premium. Steve Jobs was insightful when talking about not selling a product but selling what it could do for you, "it is not the customer's job to know what they want", he said. Which can be seen in products like the iPod, where we didn't know we wanted to carry our entire music collection around in our pocket, until Steve sold us the idea.

This was not a notion that held sway fifty years ago, when R&D departments used to design products to fill a need. A solution to that need was found, produced, likely copied and commoditised and sold at the lowest price. Marketing guru Ted Levitt used to regal his students with the tungsten carbon quarter inch drill which people didn't really want, what they wanted was a quarter inch hole, which could be produced with any old drill. It would be a long time before people started buying water in a fancy bottle because the idea of drinking Perrier or Fiji Water was satisfying a need to feel special, to feel like a connoisseur.

A recent purchase of a pair of expensive Ted Baker jeans was an example of what I am now prepared to pay when I already had other jeans in my closet. Yet the Ted Baker jeans made me feel like aging rock star Paul Rogers of Bad Company, still good enough to successfully front Queen. That's an idea worth paying for.

Reminders.

People look at their calendars, twitter, LinkedIn, work emails, private emails along with Facebook and their work colleagues and everything confirms how busy they are and how much better, off work wise, they would be somewhere else. People are getting constant reminders via surveys and polls how much is still to be accomplished, how many places they need to be, how many reports to finalise, how many people to see and bosses to impress, all to be successful and happy. All this reminding, is happening via the social universe and every peace of technology with built in reminders via music, vibration, alarm bells and in the case of the new perfume phones the wafting aroma of your favourite scent.

What all these survey reminders indicate, is how little time we have for the important things in life, how miserable we are at work, how under appreciated we have become and how low enthusiasm and engagement are in the work force. With every survey and report showing the divide between that one great job, and every other crappy 9 to 5, sorry 7 to 7, never any time for the kids and why am I here just to make management look good job, it's easy to see a trend. A trend esteemed pollsters like Gallup are hell bent on building entire departments around, while showing how disengaged we are and what should be done about it.

Having been around prior to the noise coming from the reminder bots I have only one comment, nothing has changed. My first after school job, packing groceries, left me scarred by countless lunch room employee tantrums concerning overtime, psychopathic bosses, not enough resources, people having break downs over late deliveries and the bananas being over ripe. There were so many disengaged people working at that store, it was a wonder anything got done, at least that was my 15 year old thinking at the time. Little did I know that this would become part of the working psyche and provide fodder for management consultants for the next 100 years.

What wasn't available in those lunch room dust ups was the ability to broadcast the feelings and comments and as such, employees that were engaged and who didn't frequent the lunch room whistled while they worked. I'm sure they would have been easily infected by the lunch room rabble, which many consider is happening today on a much broader spectrum. People are working just as hard, just as many hours, for just as little pay as before but so much more informed about how much worse off they are. With a 24/7 steam of information, there is little doubt everyone is aware of how miserable they are, even if they haven't been to the office lunch room in years.

Are employees more disengaged today than they used to be 30 or 40 years ago? Are employees struggling more with office politics, lunatic management, flexible work hours or even equitable pay? The social media universe would have us thinking so but is it just a circumstance of the times and technology we use? It's hard to imagine things are worse than when we sent children down the mines or when the retirement age was closer to the with the death rate.

We all have a choice and if you have a high suckability quotient in your job, if your boss is driving you batty, if you are being passed over for lesser lights, if you are constantly removing knives from your back, then change. Change your job, your attitude, change your life but most of all stop listening to others, via social media, via pollster reminders and via the lunch room rat bags, none of whom know anything about you. Lastly, it's a job, it's work, so man up and stop believing everything you read and just get on with it.


PS. I made up the part about the smellavison phone. Not a bad idea though, huh?

Heartbreaker.

Mr Joyce you are tarrying with my emotions, you are playing with my heart and you need to understand the deep empathy felt for the national carrier by anyone over 30. So I beseech you, in the inimitable words of Elton John, "don't go breaking my heart".

For many it was the first tentative step overseas, often to the Mother Land to consume copious amounts of alcohol in the epicenter of all things Australian, Earls Court. For others it was the trek to Asia, for navel gazing, conquering the odd mountain and the occasional puff on locally grown flora. Some only went as far as our most eastern state, across the Tasman, to engage in all things extreme and woolly.

Regardless of the first destination or rationality for leaving, everyone wanted to do it on the national carrier for reasons including safety, on time performance, onboard staff but more often than not, because until you stepped off the plane, you were still in Australia. That's an incredibly strong feeling of national fervor and commitment towards a brand experienced at a highly emotional level for travellers departing or returning home.

So when Mr Joyce talks about shutting down the airline, stranding 70,000 passengers and waging a war in the national press having a positive effect on the brand, it makes many experts wonder about the end game and the survival of an iconic brand. No one disputed the need for hard decisions regarding the ongoing union conflict but no brand expert would consider it an exercise in retention or loyalty putting a brand under so much stress. Some polls gave conflicting consumer views indicating they were willing to put up with the union squabbles a while longer. When one poll asked ‘Which of the following is likely to cause more damage to Qantas’ reputation?’ 59% of Australians nominated ‘Qantas’ decision to ground all planes’ versus just 32% who opted for ‘industrial action by workers’. This caused many of the major branding experts to identify a downward trend in the value of the Qantas brand with Brand Finance putting a figure of $100 million taken off the brand value of the airline.

The emotional attachment to a brand is often hard to explain and hard to measure but the bad taste left with an end user abused for financial reasons can cause irreparable damage. A brand purchase is often wholly reliant on the benefits, obvious and subliminal, that delight and exceed expectations, which leads to commitment and in the top brands, evangelism. It's that evangelism that Qantas could count on in years past, as travellers dabbed tears on hearing Peter Allen serenade them home. It's that evangelism that Qantas could count on, when stepping on board, was stepping onto the great southern land. It's that evangelism that Qantas needs to find again with the families, the students, the trekkers, the ordinary traveller who think its fun to eat tiny meals with tiny utensils.

The top end of town, the business community, is more pragmatic and has commoditized Qantas down to schedules, seating, mileage rewards and lounge access. This is the target audience Mr Joyce is referring to when he indicated the shutdown was good for the brand as the emotional quotient in this community is often replaced with corporate fare deals and on time performance. So on one level the shut down worked but on so many other small emotional, passionate and effusive levels it broke our hearts.

Job Vacancy.

For a long time, like most people, I didn't change jobs. I was in private business with a partner and we succeeded in what we set out to accomplish over nearly 20 years until we sold. Some time off, for no reason other than I could, and not knowing what I wanted to do next, gave me pause to think about my next job. I took a couple of years out from the industry I knew best and built a small restaurant and cooked for my supper, so to speak. Not a normal sequence of events compared to my past history but certainly more aligned with today's thinking that a couple of years can seem a lifetime. Jobs that lasted forever are changing and disappearing with the new business landscape. Banks and manufacturers are making sure of that, as the current headlines scream of job losses.

I mention the above in the context of people searching for that special niche that will satisfy a lifetime occupation, so that decades pass in working bliss, without challenge and thought of change. Today the cliched gold watch at 25 years is an anachronism of times past when the opportunity to move jobs was not just limited by the number of job vacancies but also by the number of occupations available to you. Today you can be anything you want to be or anything you dream to be, for a month, a year or even what seems a lifetime to some, two years. As technology changes, so does the occupational landscape and what people were happy doing ten, twenty or even five years ago is going through the greatest change in business history.

Jobs not around five years ago sustain entire industries today and challenge the status quo for the future. A drone dispatcher, as opposed to "top gun" pilot, the Star Trek tele transport operator as opposed to the taxi driver, the holographic and digital global architect and the amnesia brain surgeon are jobs in development requiring CV skills not present today. Up skilling required for robot designers, 3D engineers and replacing most things with technology has some futurists predicting two billion jobs to disappear by 2030.

What definitely won't be around are many of the face to face interactions we rely on daily. There certainly won't be check out operators in supermarkets, people handing over music CDS or movie DVDs for your weekend pizza nights, nor will there be people building your next house or even tending to your medical needs. So without that retirement package to set you up on your own desert island, what are the safe occupations that will test even the most ardent change manager? Seems all the projections counter with 3 jobs that will never be outsourced to technology or realigned to future needs. Politicians, prostitutes and criminals are coming into their own as job disintermediation takes place. So take heart that the drones we have running our country will, like the cockroaches, outlast the nuclear winter of change.

So if you don't want to enter the political, flesh or gun toting drug smuggling cyber criminal occupations, take heart that the opportunity technology and change brings gives generations following the ability to choose what they really want to be, even if it doesn't exist yet. What do you want to be when you grow up?

What Now?

Apple comes and goes as the world's most valuable company, depending on the daily share prices but what now? What now that Apple have achieved unimaginable heights of success that even Steve Jobs could not have predicted ten years ago? What now with a bank balance bigger than, well bigger than anyone has ever imagined, unless you have a key to fort Knox? What else can Apple come up with, that will keep them flying high? Nokia was big, so was Microsoft and not to be picking on the Canadians but what about Nortel or RIM, all global leaders at one time. Can that happen to Apple?

So many challenges from design to manufacturing to brand equity to consider every day, while keeping the competition at bay. Not to mention, keeping the customer satisfied. It seems unimaginable that Apple will continue to innovate at such a high level, especially with their biggest fan gone to geek heaven. The market will ask harder and harder questions of the company and the analysts won't let themselves be out guessed in their predictions for much longer. Imagine Apple missing three earnings quarters because the analysts have them rated so high it becomes impossible to maintain their growth status? Questions on the merit of Apple's achievements and the worth to society will spring forth if there are slip ups in design and profit.

Apple has an opportunity like IBM, who just celebrated 100 years as a company, to be that pillar upon which future generations grow with and prosper with. Apple's ubiquity can be assured if they take that IBM long term view and contribute to society and the economy on all levels and from all sources. An example is the side bits, as some techies have called the "Apps economy", responsible for more than 450,000 jobs in the US alone. The "Apps economy" shows no slowdown in the hiring process of developers as all technology embraces apps over heavier operating systems. With Apple paying $4 billion dollars to developers over the last four years alone, their worth to the US economy strengthens and likely will increase as demand for better IT processes increases.

So with a strong management set, left behind by Jobs, and continued innovation on tried and true products, with the occasional Apple surprise, it's a company that can withstand business pressures and march to the beat of it's own drum.

Yet the money still worries a lot of the market and many suggestions have been made as to appropriate uses from buying a global telecom network to obscene share dividends. I have a favourite suggestion and it's about saving the world. Imagine a company able to say they saved the world from financial ruin? Imagine a company gaining such cache and how much brand integrity and equity it would engender? Not hard to imagine that company lasting 100 years.

So Apple, use the $100 billion and pay the debt of the eight European countries constantly threatening to push the world over another GFC precipice. Pay the money, take the thanks and be in profit by the end of the next quarter. After all, would anybody by any other product, other than Apple for the rest of history? Worth a shot, don't you think?

Thank You Very Much.

Honesty as a business strategy, from my previous Extreme Sports article, seems to be gaining advocacy among business people looking to differentiate themselves from the used car mentality of making money at all costs. From this thinking, idea tangents fly in all directions and one particular tangent is also gaining momentum. There is always something to complain about, from the ubiquitous, weather, traffic, real estate, to the mundane, how come there are so few corn chips in those enormous packets, to global economics, why can't Greece just man up and go austerity drive?

In fact there is so much complaining that some experts have come to calling this global epidemic "gratitude deficit disorder" and calling for people to reverse the cycle and have more than just public holidays and successful cricket teams to be thankful for. People love to have an opinion and it often leans towards the complaining side of the equation, as examples of service and attitude issues encountered in our business lives become all consuming. So we tell everyone we know or at least everyone that will listen, about the sorry state of the business environment we have to endure and how hard it is to get things done the right way. When was the last time someone took time to thank you for something and not take your work for granted? When was the last time you went out of your way to thank someone for doing their work well or going the extra mile for you?

The old adage of telling only one person when you get great service and telling three when you don't has been magnified by the web into full blown tear them down because you can and tear them down because they don't know who you are syndrome.
We all expect and accept the best from products and services, so much so, that when things go the way they should, we don't even bother to acknowledge the people or the service encountered. It is all taken for granted but when the slightest deviation from this course takes place, we focus unendingly on the break down without reference to any prior satisfaction we may have had from the product or service.

Business is about filling a need and if you look at it obliquely, then the thank you business strategy has legs. Everyone wants to be recognised and appreciated for their efforts in making your experience the best. So if you can go out of your way and thank people and show their endeavours make a difference, that is the most satisfying feeling people can get. People will work for appreciation and suddenly you have engaged workers providing a product or service far superior than previously encountered. The only stipulation is the need for the gratitude to be sincere with no agenda attached. The guide to giving good thanks has always been the same, make sure it's about them, not you, make sure you are specific in your thanks, make sure it's an old school thanks and not just a quick email and lastly make sure it's a continuous process.

Thanks for attending, thanks for purchasing and thanks for choosing us, wont solicit the response required and comes across as self serving expedient marketing dross. Real gratitude is earned with honest and respectful recognition of a job well done. So could that cognition of real gratitude be a money spinner for your business. No one seems to be doing it, so why shouldn't you fill that gap?

Extreme Sports.

We all know them, sports taken to the limit of human endurance, usually requiring some kind of rubber band apparatus with a full medical team on the side line. They can usually be seen as the last news item as we marvel at the survival rate of the participants or on a niche cable channel where life and death are a ratings boost. Everything taken to extremes, captures the imagination of the viewer and transfixes us to the end because it's hard to believe anyone would put themselves into such situations.

Business is never as extreme, unless you are in the gun trade or need to navigate the Boxing Day sales for that forgotten Christmas present. Yet maybe there could be extreme limits for business, especially in the credibility and acknowledgement of customer dealings. Imagine if your clients believed everything you said, everything you wrote and everything you provided as a service or product? No struggle to reach targets, no effort in making profit and no travail in keeping clients.

Okay the above seems like some kind of deity, some God like personage without faults or maybe a business with no agenda but to satisfy their clients no matter what. To have never been let down by a business leads to extreme trust and companies are slowly coming to the realization this level of credibility can be the nirvana of success. Individually, positions of extreme trust used to be the domain of church, medicine and airline pilots but businesses are working towards a transparent relationship with their clients that could see some achieve it as they strive for "honesty as a competitive advantage".

Don Peppers in his forthcoming book of the same name, works the angle that Tony Hsieh has so successfully managed at Zappos, where culture is the competitive advantage. Peppers sees honesty as the strongest business strategy and it's hard to criticise a concept hard wired into human nature. Yet he still calls it extreme, making me think the concept is hard to grasp for a lot of people. Watching out for your clients interests, even when they aren't, puts you into what Peppers calls "proactively trustable".

"Extreme trust like this engages people’s natural impulse to show empathy, transcending the commercial domain of monetary incentives and tapping into the social domain of friendship, sharing, and reciprocity", according to Peppers. Face to face trust is something we are all used to encountering and bricks and mortar businesses have a huge advantage over the online world where connections are not so easily made. Body language and facial nuances missing in online transactions, require web businesses to be so transparent that trust is built via consistently exceeding service and credibility levels.

I have a lot of music on my iPod and I don't always remember every song bought, so when I buy a song through iTunes, I'm comforted by the fact the system remembers and won't let me re buy a previously purchased song. Just one example of how online players need to work to transparency and openness to engender extreme trust. The future for online, is transparently obvious, I'll only trust you if you show me you really do care, are completely open and want me as a lifetime customer. If you do that, then you have my extreme trust. No bungy cord required.