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Channel: Jonathan MacDonald – Author and Keynote Speaker

Understanding The Fintech Paradox

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Using discreet tactics that presumably wouldn’t be out-of-place in a Bond film, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) have a perpetual “watch-list” of words that are continually assessed for potential inclusion in the hallowed pages of the OED. Once a word is eventually included, it becomes part of that generation’s authentic lexicon –

Creating Value In Reality

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Tucked away on pages 417-422 of the 16th Volume of the 1995 Tourism Management book by Roger Cheong, are two articles relating to the ‘threats’ of Virtual Reality (VR) on tourism. The first is about how tourists might travel with VR, and developers use it in the planning process, seeing VR as a logical progression

The Purposeful Infinite and Vice Versa

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I’ve been trying my hand at improvisational comedy of late. From being a fan of London’s famous Comedy Store, I simply couldn’t resist taking one of the 20 places at their 5-week masterclass. Although I didn’t know what to expect, the insights were even more profound than I thought possible. We started with learning the

Designing Your Business For Perpetual Success

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Given the current global economic crisis that has been sparked from a health pandemic, the notion or idea that change is the only constant has never been more apt. In fact, the changes that are occurring are so rapid it’s like walking on shifting sands. It is our response to how we deal with such

Unlocking Commercial Advantage At Scale

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Walking into the offices at the Ministry Of Sound in London was mind-blowing. The design and layout were super cool and the people wandering around inside were equally cool too. I was there because I’d been invited to come and speak with the founder and Chairman, and I didn’t know quite what to expect. I’d originally met some of the senior executives to discuss whether I could help the digital roadmap of the company, but the conversation escalated quite rapidly and I found myself in the main room, with the main guy, talking about the main thing.

Ministry had been extremely successful over the years. It was probably the largest independent record label when I arrived, and nobody would refute that the dance music scene had been fuelled by Ministry’s artists. Then there was the club (which actually was adjacent to the offices), which was an artefact of legend. There were challenges though and in a nutshell, those challenges were about how the company could keep up with the speed of change.

Several years earlier, I’d been the Chairman of the retail arm of the Music Industries Association, and I’d been fairly vocal about the rate and personality of change that was happening, especially in the music world. I’d been met with huge resistance at that stage, and perhaps ironically, my reason for being called into the top table at Ministry was because they were battling with the exact changes that the Music Industry had rejected as being “irrelevant” a few years earlier.

Ministry was brave though. They realised that digital music was significantly adjusting how people consumed content, they realised that online shopping carts had to be streamlined and that the brand needed to regenerate to be relevant in the modern age. I was really enthused that the willingness to investigate change was in place and that the owner of the company was curious enough to invest in new growth streams.

In my book “Powered By Change” I speak about this type of mindset, especially in the second section of the book with a particular focus on people. I can pretty much sense whether a company will succeed or fail once I’ve met the leader(s) and ascertained whether they have the willingness to test, learn and improve. If they don’t, then there isn’t much that can be done – regardless of how historically successful they have been.

This is something that should be prioritised across all organisations. Whilst many focus on sales figures and profit levels, the real action is happening in the hearts and minds of the people. If the people involved aren’t willing to try and experiment, then the speed of change will overtake them and the organisation will be in all kinds of pain. As Jack Welch (chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001) once said, “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”

Ministry brought me in to help, support and accelerate their speed and breadth of innovation. I was honoured to be part of what kickstarted the company into a new era, with a franchised operation of clubs around the world (the most exciting being in Singapore), syndicated content (e.g. radio feeds), new physical products (e.g. fitness apparel) and a finely tuned online marketplace. All generated from having the willingness to invest in the future.

The 3 key takeaways I’d like to leave you with are:

1. Willingness is paramount to everything, including any existing core competencies.

2. Bravery is generated from willingness and is required when experimenting in new areas.

3. Remaining in a comfort zone gets increasingly uncomfortable as the speed of change accelerates, so the most comfortable mindset in the long-term is to break out of the comfort zone in the short-term.

The Ultimate Transformation

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We avoid looking at bills because we’re worried about seeing how far behind we are on their payments.

We don’t stand on weight scales or look in mirrors if we feel we’ve gained weight.

We turn off the news when the headlines make us upset.

We avoid getting an important medical test done, fearing bad results.

This is the outcome of the conflict between what our rational mind knows to be important and what our emotional mind anticipates will be painful.

There’s a competition, a tension between the two parts of our operating system.

It’s known as the Ostrich Effect.

Originally, the term was a way of describing how investors stuck their heads in the sand during bad market conditions. Now, from a psychological perspective, it’s seen a label for any denial mechanism that we consciously or unconsciously apply in situations.

As everything is in permanent transformation, perpetual change – of which today is the slowest pace we’ll ever experience, the Ostrich Effect is as popular as ever.

It’s a relatively comfortable safeguard against any realities that may be considered painful.

If there were to be the “Ostrich Effects Olympics”, they may play out as follows.

In fourth place, we surely need to address that the Ostrich Effect itself is named after the prevalent myth that ostriches bury their heads in the sand when faced with a dangerous situation. Contrary to that, ostriches do NOT bury their head in the sand when scared or frightened. In fact, when an ostrich senses danger and cannot run away, it will fall to the ground and remain still, attempting to blend in with the terrain. It should come as no surprise that, firstly, Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand as they wouldn’t be able to breathe(!) and, secondly, that despite the knowledge that the myth is just not true, we continue to use it as a metaphor.

In third place, finances appear to take the medal…after all, the term Ostrich Effect originated from the financial world of investments. From bill avoidance to “forgetting” to check balances and delaying payment through to denial of the existence of debt, we are world-class ‘Financial Ostriches’ as a race!

In second place, happiness takes silver, where examples are commonplace. Remaining unhappy, even if we are aware of the alternative, is exceptionally popular. We are programmed to believe that we shouldn’t ask for too much, strive for too high greatness, or carry an elevated sense of what is possible.

As I mentioned in my 2013 TEDx talk in Portugal, we are meant to remain mediocre, addicted to the noise so much we are unable or at least unlikely to find and act on our signal.

The human examples of tolerating mediocrity include staying in a job that sucks, continuing with a course that’s actually a curse, or keeping on within a relationship that is draining our soul.

Taking relationships as an example, and marriage specifically; in the insightful report by Tracy Mccole in DivorceMag.com, the three primary reasons people stay in unhappy marriages are:

  1. For Our Children
  2. Because of Happy Memories
  3. Because of Fear

Mccoles’ view, backed-up by Princeton University psychologist Daniel Kahneman, is that fear can be a very useful thing, as it is your brain’s way of protecting you from potential hazards. But when you become immobilized by fear, things get tricky. Of course, inaction is the best friend of fear, and they love to work together to keep you from moving forward.

Fear drives what could be a metaphorically happy Ostrich head, into the proverbial sand.

However, drum roll please, the outright winner of the Ostrich Olympics would most certainly be the way we deal with our health on an overall scale – in other words, life and death.

To some extent, life and death is too obvious a winner, largely as it encompasses “being human” in general. But as I started to look deeper into how we handle the concept of the transformation of life through to its end, I realised that it deserves its place as the thing that we trick ourselves about the most. Sure, ignorance can be bliss, but it’s also supremely harmful.

One piece of research I found fascinating on how the Ostrich Effect can have an impact in a workplace was from the Social Science Research Network (known now as the SSRN) in 2014 entitled “Experiencing Breast Cancer at the Workplace”

The researchers, Banerjee and Zanella studied the data of 7,000 women aged 50-64 who were working at a large, US-based organisation. They wanted to understand how likely it would be for these women to attend annual mammogram checks over the years following a colleague being diagnosed with breast cancer.

The data used over two years showed that 54 women had been diagnosed with breast cancer during that time.

The company encouraged uptake of this program by automatically scheduling eligible female employees into check-up appointments. Plus, the usual barriers to getting a mammogram (cost, location, long wait times) were taken away, as the workplace was offering free mammograms that were conducted on site relatively quickly.

Banerjee and Zanella had access to detailed information about each employee’s location in the workplace and used this to create a framework that outlined the various social interactions that would have likely occurred on a daily basis. As only one per cent of staff were new hires, the pool of people was relatively static.

The results they collected showed just how powerful the Ostrich Effect can be.

Around 70 per cent of women would usually have a mammogram, but following a colleague’s diagnosis, they found the women were almost ten per cent less likely to take the organisation up on its free screening offer.

In an NPR podcast called The Hidden Brain, Banerjee stated:

“We find that, on average, when a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer… her immediate female co-workers reduce their propensity to have a breast screening in the year in which the diagnosis takes place. And this impact is persistent for at least two more years after the diagnosis of that woman. When women in the closest proximity to the woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer learn of this information, their willingness to screen falls the most.” he says.

So, it appears that our reluctance to face potentially negative outcomes is greater than our desire to understand our true state.

This is something Bronnie Ware realised. Bronnie is an Australian nurse who spent several years caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded the most popular regrets those patients said as they approached death:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was the most common regret of all. It suggests that many people suffer a distinct sense of unfulfillment when looking back at their lives.
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. Bronnie reports this came from every male patient that she nursed. Now, our modern generations are perhaps less biased towards the ‘man’ going to work, so this will probably become more of a comment in females too I suspect.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. What’s interesting about this one is that, according to her reports, many patients developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result of not saying how they really felt.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I’m often amazed at how many of us take our friendships for granted. This isn’t to say that we don’t value them, but that we ‘accidentally’ assume the friend will ‘always be there’ when of course we know for a fact that one of you will go first.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. This begs the question of what were those people are letting themselves be if it wasn’t happy? It’s striking how people don’t comprehend that happiness can be a choice.

In all of these death bed regrets, there’s evidently been a realisation of a transition, which then generates an assessment of what really matters.

This could be classed as clarity.

What I’m fascinated with is why this doesn’t happen sooner?

Why does clarity tend to come when we’re finally unable to deny the fact that as soon as we’re born, we’re dying?

Bearing in mind we are all aware of life and death, surely the realisation should be automatic?

Shouldn’t it be that we become aware we’re going to die so we naturally gain clarity of what really matters to us?

No.

We avoid thoughts and discussions about life and death for many reasons. They can include:

– It’s seen as a bleak topic surrounded by sadness

– If we speak about it, it will bring it closer to us

– [Insert yours here – there are many to choose from!]

These are the “costs” of gaining clarity, and more often than not, the costs are seen as too expensive.

In other parts of our lives, clarity is not as straightforward. In business, for example, we can make predictions, but we never truly know what’s going to happen until it does. Then we gain clarity if we’re able to consciously assess what’s just happened. Clarity is an outcome rather than something that’s possible in advance.

Sheena Iyengar, Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, states that “The average CEO makes 50% of their decisions in 9 minutes or less.”

From observation, I’d say this is about right. Many decisions are based on pre-set beliefs and preferences – biases – that instruct at least half of all decisions.

Sometimes intuition plays a part, other times expert advice takes a role, but never does the absolute knowledge of the future, trigger a set of questions and answers based on an absolute fact.

Not once. In any business.

Of course, you’ll find it easy to observe business leaders being really certain about outcomes in advance of things happening, and maybe Bertrand Russell got it right when he said: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts“.

It should come as no surprise that this has its own named bias: The Dunning–Kruger Effect.

This is a cognitive bias where lesser skilled individuals suffer from a misguided sense of superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate.

I’m sure we can all think of an example of this 🙂

Conversely, in life we know for sure what’s going to happen before it does. It doesn’t require wisdom or intellect. It is agnostic in terms of talent, location and upbringing.

We don’t need to predict what’s going to happen, as the only thing we know is going to happen, is definitely going to happen.

But nonetheless, the gambles we take throughout our lives are oftentimes based on no evidence or from being in denial.

We don’t tell our loved ones they matter, we don’t treat ourselves like someone we care for, we don’t chase our dreams and we avoid discussing ‘difficult’ topics.

Like this one in fact.

What we’re facing is truly the ultimate transformation.

This sounds promising.

Ultimate ‘anything’ is usually an advertising slogan but here it’s undeniable, Our ultimate transformation is a dead cert.

No pun intended.

So how can we reduce the risk of having the types of regrets that Bronnie discovered?

If we could work that out, we could probably use the technique to avoid all other negative influences of the Ostrich Effect right?

Well. It’s really simple and it is in two parts.

1. Seek out all the information you can about how to live well and how to die well. Without fear.

2. Pursue your life well so that you die well. Without regret.

Such an easy two-point technique to state, but statistically very few of us will apply it.

Maybe at the time of filming, here in early 2021 after the incredible 2020 we all had, I wonder whether it is now time to adjust that statistic?

Maybe the outcome of last year is that we have become more aware of the transformational journey we’re on, and what matters to us, personally?

Maybe the penultimate transformation is our attitude to how we live and how we die? That would then provide a ‘North Star’ for us to live in a way that is fulfilling, loving and happy.

A navigation system toward beautiful inner peace.

If those two actions seem too large, perhaps we can zoom in to a few super practical points we can address immediately. When being confronted with a concept or other information, we could ask ourselves:

  • What about this information is hard for me to hear?
  • How does this information fit with what I think I already know?
  • How might ignoring this information affect my decision in the long run?
  • How might I include this information in a way that is productive to my thinking?

I believe these questions are all about accountability and, as a fellow human, I find them as equally tough to answer without any form of bias. It’s very difficult for us to be objective, yet these questions require a “setting-aside” of how we’d normally process a question (I.E. from a standpoint of beliefs and preferences); and consider them from a deeply analytical perspective.

Then, maybe, once we have uncovered some clarity, we are faced with a few more questions:

  • What am I currently doing (or not doing) that would I regret if I was on my death bed?
  • How much time am I working on things that are taking away from enjoying life more fully?
  • What feelings do I have that I haven’t expressed?
  • Who would I look back and wish I’d spent more (or less) time with?
  • Which parts of my life could I adjust, regardless of fear, to enable me to be happier and more fulfilled?

You may recognise these as, essentially, the counter-questions to the death bed regrets from Bronnie Ware’s research. I believe we do not need to wait until we are on our death beds to ask these questions – after all, we cannot predict what will happen to us, our friends, our family, or anyone else on the planet.

We only know one thing for sure. So why not act upon it now to ensure that we live our best possible life. There’s only one of them. It’s an extremely limited edition.

To paraphrase Ayn Rand from her “Ethics in Our Time” paper:

“We are free to evade reality, we are free to unfocus our minds and stumble blindly down any road we please, but not free to avoid the abyss we refuse to see.”

To which I say:

Let’s see it. Let’s grasp it. Let’s live by it. Let’s die by it.

—————-

This a transcript from my 13th February 2021 TEDx talk for Royal Holloway. The slide deck that accompanied it can be viewed by clicking here.

 

The Army Of Fanatics

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I remember when my son excitedly told me he had created an army and was desperate to show me.

I duly followed him into the lounge and saw his assembled army, split into two groups – one group on the higher level, apparently made up of the ‘king’ and helpers, and the other group as the ‘troops’.

I find it interesting that such hierarchy seems obvious at an early age – perhaps it starts from looking up to the people who raise you.

A common theme I have been discussing over the last few years has been the need for companies to create armies of fanatics. Groups of people who adore your products and services to such an extent that they will defend and protect the brand reputation.

These groups do this so efficiently that one could argue the assignment of budget to nurture and facilitate such armies is the single best usage of budget in business.

Unlike my son’s army, I perceive the need for these armies to be alongside rather than below any superior power. For the brave, your army of fanatics should be the people you follow rather than the other way round.

However – some companies have armies of fanatics who are certainly not followed and are very much sub-dominant to the holiest of holies. Let’s take Apple for example.

You may remember the photo taken on 5th Avenue on the eve of the first iPad launch. That was the Cult of Mac.

To some it matters little what Apple release, there will always be people who will do almost anything to buy, use, defend, advocate and worship the brand.

Apple fanboys come in different strengths. I was a lightweight fanboy as I considered each product separately rather than blindly follow any release. However, other fanboys queue for four or five days outside a store to buy a $500 piece of kit, regardless of its capability.

Apple cares about their army in terms of ensuring adoption (via retail transaction), but they sure as hell don’t listen to the army, let alone follow them.

I remember finding out that Real Madrid had a strong army of over 100,000 fanatics willing to pay €12/month to subscribe to fan club mobile services. Even without the dozens of extra games, wallpapers and apps, that is €14.5m per year… solely by servicing an army of fanatics with mobile phones.

I’m not talking about a customer base here. This isn’t just about people within your CRM system. Don’t be fooled if you just have an addressable 20 million customers. That’s not necessarily an army of fanatics. How many would defend you, advocate you relentlessly and follow everything you do?

So, how does a company start building such an army?

Here are five pointers to begin with:

  1. Access and assess the level of trust you have within your user base
  2. Determine the levels of value you provide and how that value could be scaled exponentially
  3. Identify key influencers and ensure they are rewarded for what they do – including bringing more people into the army
  4. Tirelessly continue to create more value whilst being guided by your army
  5. Progressively give more of your company benefit to your army. Share the wins yet absorb the losses

I believe the companies that get this right have an extraordinary competitive advantage.


This is a chapter in the book ’28 Thoughts On Digital Revolution’. You can find out more about Jonathan’s books here.

 

Podcast Interview With Sean and Boo


In Pursuit Of Human Freedom

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“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” – Nelson Mandela

In the mid to late ’80s the first versions of ‘online chat rooms’ were primitive. In the Well discussions moved slowly, but there was a sense of liberation in being able to discuss things with people on the other side of the world. I wasn’t even an adult at the time, but my dad was a technologist, so the induction into the digital world was natural.

The topics that inspired me always seemed to be related to human rights. I spent as much time looking into injustice as I did into philosophical viewpoints that offered alternative ways of viewing human fulfilment. In the ’90s, I started following the work of people like Tim May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore. I had a feeling that there was a rebellious streak to what was being discussed – it felt revolutionary. In the UK, companies started to enable email over our modem connections and being able to receive updates was also revolutionary for me. Having signed up to numerous mailing lists (trust me, it was all the rage back then), it felt magical that anyone could be connected to anyone and anything else in relatively real-time.

One such email list was the ‘Cypherpunks electronic mailing list‘ which seemed quite edgy at the time. You can read through some of the (incomplete) archives here if you wish – John Gilmore (mentioned earlier) hosted the mailing list originally from his toad.com domain. It’s important to note that the term Cypherpunk means different things – for some, it means anyone advocating cryptography as a tool for social change, social impact and expression. For others, ‘being a Cypherpunk’ meant being one of a few thousand subscribers…getting inspired by new thinking.

A real milestone for this was the 1993 publication of “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” by Eric Hughes.

The quote that resonated with me the most was: “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. … We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy“.

This was my personal springboard into the privacy aspects of what we were discussing, but there were different points of interest that various people focused on. Some of the discussions concentrated on the cryptographic financial aspect – and that workstream manifested, in part, as the 1998 “b-money” paper by Wei Dai.

Despite being around and involved in some of these discussions, I felt the financial focus was only a partial snapshot of a fuller challenge. Two years later that snapshot widened into the big picture in the 2000 publication “The Cluetrain Manifesto” by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger.

Point 9 of the manifesto reads: “These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.”

This felt more like it. I kinda suspected some kind of movement was happening…but it was only at this point that it was verified.

For me, this was a crystalization of what I was feeling at the time. To such an extent, I wrote a companion to Cluetrain called “The Survival Handbook For The 20th Century Retailer”, containing my view on what businesses could do about the potential of hyper-connectivity where organisations were no longer in charge of everything. My tendency leaned toward the philosophical foundations of freedom.

Based on my first book, a group of us went really deep into this direction and the conversations became more meaningful and practical as time went by. Another milestone happened in 2005 when the book “Communities Dominate Brands” was released by Alan Moore and Tomi Ahonen.

The power shift from organisations to the public was our main focus point. Our collective view of human rights was becoming more detailed and in contrast to how companies and Governments operated. I started speaking at many global events around this time, and by 2008 my second book “Every Single One Of Us – The Communication Ideal” was released. The group of us who were focused on privacy started to cross-reference each other – here’s Tomi on Communities Dominate Brands as an example, or the London Calling shout-out.

We put on events all over the world and invited those who were curious to discuss the shifting paradigms. One such event I hosted at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. I flew Tomi from Finland to attend. The editor of a major tech magazine was very critical at the event – basically saying that we were talking nonsense…that this whole ‘privacy’ thing was irrelevant. A decade later that same editor posted a public apology online to me, explaining that a) the topic and importance was absolutely justified and that b) we were just far earlier to the topic than most had considered.

A real groundswell was happening and during this period, more events took place, I was giving numerous talks each month, the online conversations were intensely busy; and within this turbulence, the Bitcoin Whitepaper was released by Satoshi.

As the cryptocurrency workstreams matured, others started to expand the concepts in different ways. For example, in 2011, a game called Cicada 3301 went live, involving PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) keys and steganography. This became the inspiration for The 12 Rings which I co-created later on. The 12 Rings was an experiment in creating the hardest online puzzle and involved a wide range of brand new cyphers I created, that the 53,000 players had to solve. Several of the winning 12 are now involved with Minima whom I had started advising at the beginning of the Minima journey (and I’m now the Chief Marketing Officer).

Just as The Communication Ideal evolved from Communities Dominate Brands, which evolved from Cluetrain; The 12 Rings evolved from Cicada and Minima’s whitepaper by Paddy Cerri was a natural evolution from the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Everyone involved in the creation of projects and platforms in this paradigm tends to be interested in human freedoms. That could be freedom of thought, speech, action, information, privacy, movement or otherwise. I’ve concentrated more on freedom of thought in recent times. My sixth book The Rise Of Advanced Thought has focused on that angle. (listen free on Spotify or buy on Amazon). Similarly, one of the reasons I established the Academy Of Advanced Thought was as a library of thought-related insight that can be tapped into for inspiration at any time. My work with Minima is something I enjoy immensely as I truly believe that for people to be free, we need to be connected together freely; which is what Minima enables.

It’s been a fascinating 40 years investigation to date, and I’m really enthused about the next 40 based on the foundations that have been created. I’m hopeful that we’ll pass the baton on to a generation of even more curious and free-thinkers. I’m also hopeful that human rights and ethical values will outweigh the greed-based controlling forces who seek to censor, restrict and limit human potential.

Why Web3 Requires Complete Decentralisation





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