The right tie.

How often has my wife asked what kind of meeting am I attending, to once answered, having the appropriate tie magically appear out of my tie draw. How often did I hear my Mother’s sage advice on clean underwear and hankies? How often have you heard, you only get one chance to impress? The single thought process, of receiving a good impression, whether it’s with the right tie or clean underpants, it can affect everyone, in their working life as well as their social circles. No amount of business books or seminars on the decision process can prepare you for making split second decisions about people you’ve just met and how you’ll feel about them long term. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has long believed the answer lies in heuristics, the mental shortcuts we all use when meeting people and making decisions, with only the 'known knowns’. The Nobel Prize winning author talks about being hard wired to make quick decisions, think cave man and sabre tooth tiger, and has a phrase ‘what you see is all there is’, when explaining the first impression. Malcolm Gladwell called this rapid cognition, ‘thin slicing’ in his seminal tome ‘Blink’, and also subscribes to the view, first impressions can make or break your career. 

So if there doesn’t seem to be much rationality around those first impressions, how can we influence the sub conscious decision making of others? Knowing only a limited amount about a person when you first meet them, we take the easy way out and believe what we see and from there take a long time to change our minds, if at all. From personal experience, I’ve formed opinions after just a few seconds, of people on stage, people out of their comfort zone, shy people, loud people and ego driven people, and haven’t changed that opinion until I got to know them. Unfortunately, if I never got to know them, that initial impression was never altered. 

So it sounds like cheating to simply smile when you first meet someone, it feels like hoodwinking when you show outward happiness, with research showing both those perceptions, classified as part of the ‘Expressivity Halo’, lead people to trust and feel they have just met some competent and in control. Throw in a great tie, some well polished shoes, some hankies and it quickly becomes apparent, what’s on the outside counts. Along with the ‘Similarity Attraction Hypothesis’, theorising we feel more at ease with people we have commonalities with, from hobbies to what movies we like, first impressions can be managed if not manipulated. 

The new rule of thumb should be, give people more than ten seconds for first impressions, listen closely and see if you can't connect on more levels than the outside veneer. Let's give people extra minutes, giving our brain time to work on a reflexive level rather than an analytical one. Get rid of the first impression blues, give it your best shot and you might be surprised how easy it is to meet new people, make better connections and perhaps change the minds of people, even if you're not wearing the right tie.

Black and white or just pragmatic?

Being of German decent, I get the whole black and white attitude of my parents. There is no room for grey or ambiguity, there are always obvious views or choices, based on precise information and they are happiest when they can point to a view held up over time. No one has made a good western since John Wayne passed, not even Clint Eastwood, springs to mind. Unfortunately the world does not work on absolutes and the frustration, ambiguity and complexity we encounter every day, leave my parents confused and retreating back to the black square, where they feel comfortable, fenced by old fashioned viewpoints, with limited choices. After all, the choice for their first Volkswagen came in two colours, black and white. For the rest of us, it seems the world holds no such ease when it comes to choice or viewpoints, with constant bombardment by technology, marketing and finance, making pragmatism an outdated concept as it slides into choice and viewpoint paralysis.

When small seeds of pragmatism bloom and the recent outrage by Germany over the NSA spying debacle, resulting in the CIA chief being asked to leave the country, is an example of pragmatism of the highest order, my parents smile knowingly. When asked how they were approaching the technology challenges around securing information, Patrick Sensburg, head of the parliamentary enquiry over ‘spygate’, sent government agencies back 50 years when he indicated they were procuring a large supply of typewriters and not electronic models, to counter the technology infiltration. According to Russian newspaper, Izvestiya, the Russian Federal Guard Service followed suit, ordering Triumph Adler typewriters to stay ahead of the online spying. While spying today is done from thousands of miles away, the early days of James Bond saw things done the old fashioned way, with lots of people on the ground, with the occasional digging through rubbish to collect used typewriter ribbons. So typewriters may not be the answer but along with long walks in the park and quiet coffees with their counterparts, some of the agencies are enjoying pre internet spy games, according to the Guardian newspaper. Seeing no immediate alternative to technology, the German government sort out a pragmatic solution with the resources at hand. In the background, I see my parents nodding their heads in approval.

The very nature of pragmatism, an approach evaluating theories and beliefs on the success of their practical application, is about limited choice. Yet today's consumer mindset is all about vastness of choice, throwing practically a curve ball no one can hit, certainly not out of the park. My parents don’t own any technology but they see how I interact with my technology hardware and have made comments around the lack of choice, showing pragmatism can work in a commercial sense. They’re of course talking about Apple, whose array of products all fit on a small coffee table, and who give limited choice to their customers, who become pragmatic in their approach to consuming the products. The success of the company has always hinged on not being everything to everyone and having the ability to provide black and white alternatives within a closed system, making choice easier and providing ample opportunity for the same viewpoints to be shared across their community. So in a world of vast choice, Apple’s pragmatic approach to their beliefs in a few well designed products, through practical application, has led to their success.

The comfort my parents find in pragmatism is what Apple has given their consumers and what the German government has given their staff. If you can find the black and white, if you can find the practical application of the things that matter in your life, then you are likely to find more comfort in your decisions and viewpoints. Is it time to get rid of the rainbow of choices and make black and white the new everything?

Reinvention is not star dust.

How often do you get a chance to start a new life, whenever it suits you? Witness protection aside, people in some walks of life, do change, do look for personalities and lives to suit their style but for most of us it’s a challenge. As much as people like to have the ability to change direction by creating a new you or a new personality, our inhibitions provide enough hurdles to keep us pushed in the same direction our parents, our teachers, our bosses our leaders picked for us. So how do we change direction, for the one direction we really really want to follow? Perhaps we can take a lead from music.

When I read Alvin Stardust died, it triggered a memory of someone who took a chance to change direction and personality, to be more than they were supposed to be. The passing of another 70’s rock star hardly made a splash in the media, after all, he only have a couple of hits and one of those ‘My Coo Ca Choo’, wasn’t even him in the beginning. So what to make of another rock chameleon, who wasn’t happy, born as Bernard William Jewry, going to great lengths to change his life. Bernard was into music early and as a roadie for Shane Fenton and the Fentones, he made the most of his chances when the real Shane died and Bernard took on the frontman name and responsibilities, having some minor hits in the process. While Shane was hitting the bandstands of Brighton and the piers, a young writer, producer, Peter Shelley, penned a pop song under an assumed name of Alvin Stardust, recorded it and ultimately had it picked to be sung on TV. Unfortunately Peter, after one appearance as Alvin Stardust, was not the stage hugging rock star his song conveyed and he started looking around for the real Alvin Stardust to do his music justice. Bernard aka Shane was in the mood for a change and after a meeting with Peter, Alvin Stardust was born, or invented or assumed or created. Reinventing himself as a leather clad rock god, Bernard aka Shane aka Alvin, went onto have a few more hits and eventually found a lucrative life on the nostalgia circuit and never once looked back on Bernard.

Music has long been the domain of hiding behind a facade, a mask and identities fabricated by creative minds and perhaps the reason it still attracts so many to a night on stage. Music isn’t interested in the everyday, the ordinary, the bland, it wants to be on stage and perhaps that’s the starting point for your change. Find a stage, find an audience, change your personality, make a statement, after all, today’s media gives you a myriad of channels to find your voice and change direction. Today it’s so much easier to find a venue for your talents, to change your personality and generally become a ‘rockstar’. Where Bernard had luck on his side, morphing into people he wanted to be, today you can use social media giants Youtube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, countless APPs purposely developed for changing your life, all built for you to find your voice.

So what are you waiting for, the world is your stage, go be a rock star.

Turn left with care.

Sometimes ideas sound so far fetched, so silly, you need to call MythBusters to validate and when it is validated, you still scratch your head in amazement. One such idea came from UPS and their ubiquitous brown trucks who figured out only turning one way, right, could save them time and money. To get a better grasp on the idea, I looked at a map of New York and did some trips around parts of the city I was acquainted with and came up with some revelations, three rights make a left and turning with the traffic is always the safest choice. So as ridiculous as it sounds, the UPS right turn strategy built out of their route optimisation algorithm, has made their software the envy of the logistics universe and provided them with benefits far beyond the initial scope.

On any given day, UPS delivers nearly 16 million parcels from their 93,637 vehicles, all looking to turn right, unless they are driving in Australia, where I wonder if they have the left turn strategy worked out? Aside from the staggering savings over the last decade, 50 million litres of petrol, carbon reduction, equivalent to taking 5,300 cars off the road for an entire year, UPS discovered the side effects of the right turn algorithm were even more important. They discovered drivers no longer crept out on crossings to monitor traffic, thus putting themselves at greater risk of sideswipe accidents because the reality is, many accidents start with a left hand turn. In fact, some states have special jury instructions for road accident cases, indicating the inherent problems of left hand turns against the traffic. So in a typical year of driving, saving over 28 million miles not driven, being back safely back in the depot and not turning against the traffic has resulted in a duty of care bonus for drivers and their employer. In fact the UPS accident rate has dropped by 30% in the past five years, to where the world’s largest package delivery company averages less than one accident for every million miles driven, leading to some drivers like Ralph Lendi driving seven million miles without incident.

Thinking out of the “block” has helped UPS revolutionise their business. Asking the hard questions about better processes and procedures will sometimes give you the old “we’ve always done it this way” reply but if you believe in your solution and there is merit from a revenue and more importantly employee benefit, don’t let the naysayers get you down. UPS took what they had, brown trucks delivering parcels all over the world and made it better, for the consumer, for the bottom line of UPS and for the drivers and delivery people. Their drive for efficiency, where no idea was discounted, turned into a bench mark solution and gives hope for anyone working on the hard questions.

To think outside the “box” is too often the throw away line given in meetings or think tanks where the boss is not about change but more the perception of doing something that might result in a change. So next time someone asks for the craziest solution in a meeting, tell them to turn right, it might get your idea up on that white board.

What if ?

Ted Turner tells the story about his Dad and how he wanted to own a big company, have a yacht and be a millionaire before his middle age. He accomplished the big company becoming a billboard magnate along the way joining the millionaire club and buying the yacht, then finding he had nothing more to accomplish because his goals had all been attained. He shortened what should have been a life of further achievements by suicide, having lost direction once his boxes had all been ticked. Without purpose of acquisition he didn't have a life definition. As far as he was concerned he was defined by the money and recognition and when he couldn’t go beyond that, life wasn’t worth living.

So it begs the question, what would you do if you didn't need money or attention? What would you do if you were the centre of attention and the house on the hill with the big cars and the yacht in the harbour was guaranteed? What would you stop doing and start doing if all of that were yours?

The majority of our lives so revolve around the accumulation of money, we rarely think beyond the next mortgage payment or credit card repayment to what else we could accomplish. Money like recognition has a way of defining us and our actions, to the extent we can't see any way to change direction. How often do you see the sportsperson doing one more round, one more year, tarnishing their reputations because they can't see themselves unrecognised once the cheering has stopped? How often do we see people continue to accumulate because they have not thought past goals they achieved long ago? Being defined by money or recognition leaves no room for any other actions beyond the original decision to make more of both.

Ted Turner decided long ago, not to be like his Dad. Sure he gained fame winning America’s Cup yacht races and owning the Atlanta Braves baseball team, making a fortune building the first 24/7 news channel CNN and parlaying that into a media empire including TNT, MGM and Time Warner, even helping develop Glasnost with his Goodwill Games, but he has long since moved beyond those early goals. Today Turner is making a difference beyond his achievements, donating a billion dollars to the UN, joining Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and other billionaires for the “Giving Pledge” to donate their wealth before they die, cultivating a herd of fifty thousand American bison to halt their extinction, helping cure children’s cancer with his blood foundation, fighting for nuclear disarmament and generally finding inventive ways to make a difference.

Not many people are in Ted’s position of power, recognition and monetary insouciance able to make such grand philanthropic gestures but then the thinking behind his gestures are the same as you and I helping out on a much smaller scale. Think as if you have enough money, enough recognition and then what difference can you make? What do you do well, what are your passions, how can you focus them on others? A good friend of mine, always testing herself physically via triathlons and extreme training sessions, has decided to run a 250 kilometre race across the Gobi desert to raise money for Riverkids charity to help abused children in Cambodia. Lisa is not independently wealthy, nor living with celebrity recognition but she has chosen to make a difference beyond those parameters and won’t let herself be defined by her job, her car, where she lives but rather her actions spurred by a question, what if?

From little things,

Big things grow, was a song written and sung by Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody, describing the 1966 Gurindji Tribal strike led by aboriginal activist Vincent Lingiari, that sparked the indigenous land rights movement in Australia. The strike lasted 8 years and ended with the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976, giving indigenous Australians freehold title to traditional lands in the Northern Territory, the power to negotiate over mining and development on those lands and also what type of compensation they could receive. Lingiari was eventually recognised with an Order of Australia for his efforts, that started with a small strike no one took notice of and no one believed would end with such an achievement.

The power of the individual is never stronger than when it is required for social change and Vincent Lingiari was the perfect lightning rod for change in the Northern Territory and his legacy lives on in the land rights movement and in the recognition he attained, having one of Australia's largest electorates named after him. The division of Lingiari encompasses most of the Northern Territory as well as Christmas and Cocos Islands and the fact the land has remained unchanged is a testament to him.

Yet not everyone can change the course of history like Vincent but everyone has the opportunity to bring about change, even in a small way, for the things they are passionate about. In 1949, Reyn Spooner, a young man from California, entranced with the Pacific, set up a small haberdashery store on Catalina Island. An inauspicious start to a lasting legacy that saw him move to Hawaii in 1956 to set up the "Little Grass Shack" with one sewing machine, in due time ending up at the shopping mecca that became Ala Moana Centre and to ubiquitous status as the "Brooks Brothers of the Pacific". Reyn pioneered the incarnation of the Aloha Shirt, known everywhere as the Hawaiian Shirt with his innovative washed out reverse print fabrics known as "Spooner Kloth". For someone with an array of Spooner originals in my closet, that would have been enough to have Reyn enter the hall of fame for casual shirts.

Yet there is more to be thankful for, as his influence would soon reach the far corners of the globe with his activist membership of the Hawaiian Fashion Guild, who in the mid 60s took the unorthodox method of distributing two Hawaiian shirts to every member of the Hawaiian House of Representative and Senate to promote what they considered was the spirit of Aloha. "Operation Liberation" had the desired effect and a resolution was passed in the Hawaiian Senate the aloha attire be worn over a summer and eventually the campaign lobbying for "Aloha Friday" was successful in seeing the aloha shirt replacing business shirts for the corporate sector on the last day of the week. By the 1970s, Hawaii's tradition of "Aloha Friday" had become the the norm in business attire and the custom eventually spread to California and beyond, to see "Casual Friday" accepted globally by the 1990s.

Two men, one an activist, one a sun worshiper, from different worlds, in their own ways affected their tribes and made the world a better place. So next time you pull on your favourite comfy jeans for casual Friday, think about Reyn and his passion for loud shirts with palm trees and hula dancers and if you ever get the chance to visit the majestic Top End, consider Vincent Lingiari and his achievements to keep the land pristine for all to enjoy. Change does not need a large stage, in fact if you can change things for the better, one handshake at a time, you'll be surprised what you can accomplish. From little things.....

Tell me story.

There is a trend for company leaders to have or develop a long forgotten skill, a skill for so long only used by tribal elders, who didn't need Internet access to get across their ideas and thoughts to their people. Telling stories and sharing stories to inspire staff and relating those stories to the business at hand is what's driving successful global brands today. With a purpose attached, a story is more powerful than an array of endless PowerPoint presentations covered with graphs and indecipherable mathematics. Slide presentations are waning and in their place pictorials and info-graphics woven into stories are more memorable and longer lasting than the last slide showing company results for the last quarter. In an epoch of information technology there is no requirement to inform, when at the flick of a switch or the touch of an APP, everything can be revealed. Yet how much of that information is remembered?

With a nod to Yamini Naidu (Hooked), business leaders of today look to "inspire and respect", moving away from "inform and expect", where the action items were mandated. Today it's about being as flexible as possible because the landscape is ever changing and leaders want their staff to remember more than statistics, they want them able to react according to the stories and culture of the company. Stories are easier to remember and as such bring a focus to situations that all the PowerPoint presentations in the world could not fix. For stories to have the ability to change people and their perspectives, they need to be real and aligned with people's thinking and world views. It's the reason great story tellers remain the most potent of leaders and it's the reason company decisions are made when a CEO becomes a story teller. Stories are outcome driven, using emotional and logical thought process and totally opposite to building a slide deck of data dumps, where the numbers become numbing to the brain. Yet without the data, there is no understanding and that becomes the challenge for story tellers who need to weave the narrative around the facts.

"Imagine if", has great portent for a story of change and immediately grabs the listener who wants to hear what that change involves. "Imagine if I can put 1000 songs in your pocket", is far more engaging than "this MP3 player has 10 gigabytes of memory that you can use to store things". Yet story telling needs to be more than just marketing, it needs to produce, ideas, change, decisions and generate revenue.

Companies as varied as Intel, GE and Boeing are among the leaders when it comes to providing the platform to communicate the stories relevant to their products, their people and their future. Even without the ability to stand in front of an audience, the company leaders have at their disposal a plethora of forums, market places, chat options, videos and online alternatives, providing avenues to tell their story in written narrative and the all important moving pictures. There are no reasons you should not be able to tell your story, there are no restrictions to shipping you story, so what's stopping you from becoming the next great corporate story teller?

It's a classic.

Or is it, what's a classic, do we know what we mean when we use classic? Individual tastes aside, most definitions lean towards something of timeless value, quality, a particular style, especially when describing art, cars or literature, based on the broad view of the populace. Some classics have been with us for years, the iconic '64 Thunderbird, the vast tomes like War and Peace, the day to day like the reliable Hills Hoist, the inspiring Guggenheim Museum and countless others, remaining fixed in our culture as the best possible and then through the haze of memory becoming more, becoming a bench mark for the future. We have come to agree on a formula for classics through the rose colored rear view mirror of the Thunderbird. Yet today's world moves quicker and time is compressed, so can something become a classic in a short time and can something become a classic from the new world of culture and technology where no one iteration or invention can afford to stand still without continually reinventing itself?

I read recently a movie should not be considered a classic if it has been remade. So if you consider that theory, the Godfather, Citizen Kane, the African Queen, ET, Gone with the Wind, It's a Wonderful Life and a host of others are safely ensconced as classics. Unlike movies, music swings the other way, for if a song has a history of being re recorded by other artists, it's considered a classic. Consider Yesterday by Sir Paul McCartney, which has been recorded by over 2,200 artists and copied by many more, considered a classic because of the sheer volume of facsimiles. People stack up differently and individuals in the public eye have a chance, depending on their image, to forever remain in the communal psyche. Steve McQueen in full racing whites, filming Le Mans, considered a classic movie star, with classic looks, classic style and an individual quality, staying true to the quintessential idea of what people thought a star should be. If that belief is true, then Elvis needs no further abstraction.

So the definition has broad enough parameters to leave room for anything and anyone to eventually be considered a classic. If they are are not copied or if they are copied a lot, if they become iconically aspirational and if culturally they affect change, if the product becomes so prized and valued anything can end up a classic.

So it's with great reverence I present the iPod as a classic, no not the sixth generation with the classic in the title but the little MP3 player that convinced us all, we needed to carry thousands of songs in our pocket. I mention the iPod because there is talk it may soon disappear from retail shelves. Tim Cook has indicated the iPod is a declining business sector in the Apple world and with decreases in the order of 50% year on year, we may soon by looking backwards when we mention the little MP3 player that could.

The smart phones and the tablets have pretty much eaten away the need for individual music players, so it's up to you now, will the iPod be just a memory of technology, did we take the time to appreciate the affect it had on our lives? The sheer volume of 350 million sold worldwide, the great runs you had with it strapped to your arm or clipped to your shorts while doing the downward dog, the ability to zone out the world and just listen to your world and the convenience of never ever being tethered to a record player, reel to reel tape, super 8 track or the audio cassette again, surely this deserves a nomination for becoming a classic.

Wrinkles at ten.

Ten years is a lifetime on the web. Look where we were ten tears ago and what we have today. Anyone or anything that has survived the changes of the last ten years is certainly older, has a few more wrinkles, has acquired some bad habits, unequivocally outlasted their competition, gained invaluable experience and should know everything there is to know up till now. Such is life for Facebook, the grandfather of all social media sites, celebrating ten years and looking to the future of social media with a maturity to admit there might be a few players worth their attention in the rear view mirror. Admitting to the competition and worrying about how close they really are in that rear view mirror are two different issues and Facebook continues to dominate the landscape, defying the need to be the latest and greatest.

Yet it seems despite one in seven people on the planet being on Facebook, naysayers are predicting a fall and theorising the frayed edges are caused by competition not yet out of puberty in online genealogy. Competition from Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr and Instagram style sites, where Twitter at just past seven years old is considered an elder, are gaining popularity but still have a long way to catch the "old fella". LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter all combined, still don't have the monthly visitation that Facebook commands, so talk of a MySpace obscurity seem greatly exaggerated. As a famous Elvis Presley album cover once quoted, "50 million fans can't be wrong", showing a love for a music icon, so too do 900 million monthly visitors show their love for an online icon.

One of the advantages Facebook lords over the competition is its ability to mimic and copy the best of the web. It already has a Twitter of sorts woven into its new mobile APP and the introduction of "Paper" will give Facebookers a new version of itself that social analysts declare as better than the original, along with acquiring anything in their path, ala Instagram. This brings with it a generalist view of bringing and being everything to all everyone and when you have over 1.2 billion members, you need to have a helicopter view and be good at a lot of things, without being the current love or a niche trend.

This generalist view and being the globe's meeting point, leads to a ubiquity that Facebook carries over into online life, dominated by others of ubiquitous standing, such as Google, Amazon, YouTube and Wikipedia. It's hard to see masses straying from the above if they continue to innovate, imitate, acquire and stay engaged with the masses. So for all of the talk about wrinkles and slowing down, the ubiquitous nature of Facebook continues to defy the logic that online is all about change and the newest and shiniest grab the attention. While Wall Street will always look to the next great thing, the pillars of the online world continue to hold sway and have become entrenched as bench marks of "blue chip" investments.

I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg never thought he'd be a pillar of Wall Street or celebrate 10 years, sitting in that student accommodation at Harvard University. Happy Birthday Mark, enjoy the attention, you do deserve it, even if some are wanting to deny you the Birthday present of ubiquity.

30,000 mornings.

I have a mantra that many of my friends and colleagues are aware of and it concerns the last ten minutes. I have lived long enough to have worked out, I can always earn another dollar but I can't get back the last ten minutes, so I had better spend it wisely, doing something I'm passionate about and spending it with the right people. This kind of thinking comes with tingles of mortality and wanting to leave more than a wisp of smoke at the end (too morbid?), it comes from self examination and having the ability to laugh at the in-congruencies of life and wondering if you shouldn't have achieved more but in the end having achieved more than you think. So how much time do you have left to spend with the right people and make a difference? With the average life expectancy around 80 years, you'll wake up to around 30,000 mornings but only about 24,000 mornings as an adult, where you have the ability and resources to decide if today is going to be a good day and if you're going to make a difference. How many of those mornings have you used to the best advantage?

I admit, where my 20s were concerned, a lot of those mornings slipped by without note, many without ever getting to greet the morning and many without making a speck of difference to anyone around me. The 30s turned into the me decade but from there I noticed a shift in thinking that wasn't about me at all. It seemed the world turned successfully without any interaction from me, in fact the daily news and the media seemed oblivious to anything I was doing. So I worked out it wasn't necessarily about the big things, the big changes, the global challenges where I had any influence, it was about the small things I could control, the small things I could change, the small things I could help others with. I wasn't going to rescue the Antarctic on the Sea Shepherd and I certainly wasn't going to alleviate global poverty with Sir Bob.

And that's the crux of thinking for many, do the little things that matter to others, one smile at a time, one handshake at a time, one relationship at a time. In the end it's easy to make a difference, be in the moment, be aware of others, put yourself in their shoes, work out how to spend that ten minutes wisely so you don't regret the time and along the way you'll discover a trail of influence you didn't know you had. Who knows who you may help and who knows what they'll accomplish? The worst you can do is give someone the confidence to keep going with a passion, that may lead to new imaginations, discoveries and knowledge that can be used and passed onto others to multiply into greatness.

It begs the question, what's left of your 30,000 mornings and what have you done with your last ten minutes?

Fit to burst.

I like to run, it gets rid of the day's frustrations, keeps me fit (ish) and most important of all, let's me eat pizza whenever I want. Sometimes I need extra motivation, be that new shoes or apparel to get back out there and run some more. Sometimes I need more and recently it was in the form of wearable technology. The big deal in running and health for 2014 and beyond is wearable technology telling you how much you've achieved, how many steps you've taken, how many calories (all the technology is US based) you've burned, how many flights of stairs you've ascended and how well you've slept. Most of this is collated and sold by the main players, Fitbit, Nike, Jawbone and now a host of new entrants like Sony and LG, are looking to sell you technology for something you didn't know you needed, until that belt feels a little tight and that top button becomes constrictive.

The big markets for this technology, are Boomers and corporate types needing a dig to the love handles, to motivate movement away from the computer. Yet at anywhere from $130 to $150 a pop for a rubber wristband with Bluetooth connectivity, the outlay needs serious consideration as to whether this is another ab roller or rowing machine gathering dust in the garage or collapsed under the bed. As an early adopter on all things cool in technology I had to have one and invested in a Fitbit Force ( not yet available in Australia) and wore it proudly on my wrist while cruising the halls of corporate land. I had it set for the minimum 10,000 steps per day and showed off the digital display to anyone vaguely interested in why I was wearing this piece of black rubber. At times I felt like a Fitbit spruiker but whenever there was interest, purchase validation and motivation for continued use, rose in proportion with the lycra outfit worn by the questioner.

Once set up, tethered to my iPad and attached to my non dominant hand I couldn't stop watching my daily progress and gaining understanding of how difficult it is, to achieve 10,000 steps in a normal office environment. This spurred me to get up and walk around the room, making sure my arms were swinging by my side but the office was not big enough to accumulate the distances I had set for myself. This left only one option, the outside, to move around via a run, a walk to a sandwich shop at least 4 kilometres away or a vigorous session of rolling out pizza dough, which I found out one night, accumulated 500 steps.

The whole point of the wearable technology trend will be the recording of our daily lives, bringing into focus our shortcomings, thinking we are fitter than the guy sitting next to us at work, that the lunchtime stroll to the sandwich shop is enough and that 25 metre sprint for the train is a weekly speed workout. If nothing else, the drill Sargent attached to my wrist is pushing me hard, for the time being. Yet like all before them, the fitness bands, watches that follow and eventually that electronic T shirt, have a history, of dormant fitness rowers, TV treadmills and collapsible cycles to contend with, while adding the aggravating wrinkle of pointing out we haven't come close to any real exercise by rolling out the pizzas. Will there be drawers filled with wristbands in the future?

Bubblegum.

Music has many landscapes, some you never admit exploring unless you are in the privacy of your own home. Bubblegum music was such a landscape because it was a guilty pleasure of catchy choruses, infectious riffs, addictive melodies and goofy lyrics. No one ever admitted liking bubblegum music because it didn't have the cache of the starving artist honing their skills in the subways of New York or the underground of London, think "Clapton is god" scrawled across the tiles at Islington station in 1967. No one talked openly about the Archies, the Monkees or The Partridge Family, let alone the 1910 Fruitgum Company and this continues today, through to Hanson and The Backstreet Boys. Yet someone had to be listening, the Beatles were outsold by the Monkees in 1967, the year of the epiphanous Sgt Pepper and again in 1969 by the Archies, after Abbey Road and Let it Be were released. By 1997 Hanson with "In an mmm bop they're gone, Mmm bop, ba duba dop" had again fooled the music cognoscente by becoming a worldwide hit that know one owned up to listening to or owning.

Those guilty pleasures of singing bubblegum in the shower have today been taken over by furtive glances at the the iPhone or the tablet waiting for your time penalty to finish so that you can attempt the next level of Candy Crush or better still hurl an Angry Bird at a bunch of farm animals. Yes bubblegum has gone online and no matter what people say about the inanity of Fruit Ninjas, Bejewelled, Doodlejump or Berserker Stickman, millions of people are playing the games. In the privacy of their homes, in lunch breaks, while waiting for the bus, whenever there is a break in meetings, in the toilets but no one admits it. Angry Birds was the most downloaded APP on the web for nearly two years, more than Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Maps, and when you take in the various iterations like Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Seasons, the top ten looked not unlike the pop charts whenever a bubblegum song hit number one.

When the Monkees and The Partridge Family hit the small screen and Hanson hit MTV with the boys being pushed around in shopping trolleys, it wasn't about competing with the established music scene, it was about escape, smiling at their antics and leaving your credibility at the door. For how else were you meant to sing the choruses without guilt, why else would you spend your hard earned cash, if not to eat that most delicious of chocolates without worrying about the diet. For a three minute singalong or a fifteen minute diversion, depending on you skill level on Tetris, you can leave behind everything else and where you once had to just sit and daydream to lose yourself, some developer is now working on your next escape. Daydreams and delicious treats, you know are not good for you, have always been, in the end, good for you. "Hey hey, we're the Monkees".

Unplugged.

Was a time this meant Eric Clapton on acoustic guitar, MTV getting a second go at rock guitarists without amps and pulling the cord from the kettle. Today the unplugged movement is about quiet, it's about no interruptions and it's about non contactability. Like the slow food movement, evoking long lunches under the Tuscan pines with unlimited vino, unplugged is all about taking back what has been taken away, time. Time taken up by the myriad of tech toys and applications overwhelming many to the point of exhaustion. Digital detoxing is a movement gaining focus for many who can't shake the need to turn off, not just the Angry Birds or Candy Crush but the work and social connections, that have become ubiquitous in our lives.

Used to be holidays and travel disconnected us all, with only the lonely postcard as a tether to home. Times have changed and today it's not about the physical freedom from work but the mental freedom to not feel obligation, to not feel the need to connect that finds people looking for WiFi free destinations. Once found the "cold turkey" of disconnect leaves many in a sweat thinking what others are saying about them on Facebook. As drastic as total escape sounds, there are other ways to ease into more control and it can start as easily as leaving your charger behind on a weekend trip, this will surely focus your energy on only the most important matters to conserve that all important battery.

If you can't unplug from your email list, can't resist tweeting, poking, liking, posting, instagraming, tagging, commenting or pinning, it begs the question about how self absorbed you are and how unconnected you are from real life? Unplugging relies on alternatives, you will have to talk with people, maybe shake hands, certainly have a discussion over a meal and maybe even have time to exercise, read a book and rejoin society. Ask yourself, "what's the worst that can happen, if I unplug for a while"? Maybe start with a morning or better still an afternoon, after all, research shows us 3pm is the lowest productivity period of the work day, so what are you doing online?

Why not show total commitment and your undivided attention and stop taking the phone into meetings, take your best friend at work to lunch and talk about your social life without referring to the social APPs and consider doing your body a favour with some exercise, it's much harder to answer the phone when you are out of breath? Why not steal a pen from office stationary and start prioritising the activities list giving you the most freedom from technology and try and integrate one each day.

Unplugged brought a whole new meaning to high octane rock and roll and it can mean as much if you can only turn off the automatic synch to Assassin's Creed, Clumsy Ninja or Bloomberg News and hide those gadgets for a while. To some it may be death, for others it may just be faking death but once you broadcast your intentions, you'll be surprised how many join you in your commitment. I'm not dead, I've just stopped tweeting for a while. :-)))

Secrets, who cares?

My parents are concerned with privacy, my Dad riles at the fact so many companies have his name on a list and he receives mail, junk or otherwise from all directions. He thinks his privacy has been impinged and is scared of what it means to his future. Why do they know so much about me, is a typical question from his generation along with some of my friends who have similar concerns. Yet overall, the majority of people I talk to, don't care at all. Especially if we're not talking about trade secrets (think eleven herbs and spices) or financial information (think credit card theft), then generations Y and beyond, have no concern about everyone knowing everything. The social media storm that has infiltrated every corner of our lives gives great scope for snooping and I wondered if people were prepared to walk the talk and be as open as they say?

Straw polls from anyone under 35 and discussions with my nieces and nephews certainly give credence to the fact, no one cares about their secrets, in fact secrets seem blasé when anyone is online. With Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, loyalty programs, online shopping, tracking APPs, Google search et al, there are enough ways to find out information that used to be the domain of your family doctor, lawyer or Grandparents. It's not only Santa who knows if you've been naughty or nice, it's most everyone else. Yet there is no tidal wave of information flooding my emails on the secret lives of my friends and colleagues. There are no salacious accounts of wrong doings, no tattle tale accounts of secret journals with romantic details or life plans not eventuated, no reckonings of opportunities lost, past or foreboding and certainly no enlightenment or advantages to be had with any of this knowledge.

A discussion with a legal friend, lamented the "young" generation putting their employment livelihood under stress with Facebook posts that left nothing to the imagination. This is a short term legacy lament with no future, no future because the soon to be employers will be of the same generation, with the same Facebook posts, totally unconcerned. I realised after more discussions and random visits to online sites and communities what seems important to me is meaningless to others and vice versa. Past providing gossip, information important to me is most likely of no interest to anyone else, so why go to the trouble of keeping it so secret? My parents would argue, why go to the trouble of making it public?

As the social side of technology blurs into all aspects of business and life, we'll see an even more open environment regarding information once deemed private and personal and the attitudes that govern our thinking today will seem antiquated in the future. In fact it's too late to shut the gate but don't worry, I won't come snooping. You're stuff is private and it will stay that way because I honestly don't care, do you?