Tom Goodwin

ALL WE HAVE IS NOW

Realistically if you were to build your company today, it wouldn't quite look like it does.

Ambitious CEO's, CIO's and CMO's are wrestling with the altered economics, dynamics, threats and opportunities of a world where technology has changed consumer behaviors, expectations and altered how companies are valued by the stock market.

It's very easy to change in a superficial way. It's fast, cheap, risk free, and requires no political risk or buy in. Deep change is what makes a difference.

We use imagination, clarity, and optimism to provoke ambitious companies into meaningful change.

It starts with well intentioned provocation, rethinking the assumptions you've made, generating a new vision, then building new processes, structures and protocols for your future. It then requires a change of culture to foster an environment of innovation and agility.

If you are happy with robust thinking, honesty, and unleashing the power of bold optimistic thinking, please get in touch to find out more about our program and booking a provocation session.

Co-Founder

I’ve spent the last 2 years really trying to understand how the world has and hasn’t changed. I’ve had to be patient. 

At the same time many companies are bringing people back to the office now and need a big event to create a sense of excitement and shared purpose, or many have yet to do so, but still need an optimistic and provocative speaker to drive a sense of belonging, a reminder of what their job can really be about. And some big events are finally kicking off and I’m keen to get out there again.

So I’m now launching a series of new Keynote presentations I’m able to deliver virtually or ideally in person.

Keynote Speaker

Tom Goodwin   

I sit on some boards now and I say it how it is.
So far it's going better than expected.
Not everyone likes what I say, but they always like how I say it.
Feel free to get in touch for well intentioned honesty and provocation

Advisory Board Member

Interesting Speakers 

Myself and Adriana Stan set up a service to help improve the quality of Speakers at events and the events themselves.  It's a thin matching service, meaning we put a lot of effort into finding great speakers, try to send you good suggestions and contact details with minimum effort, then get out of the way. For this we charge both the speaker and event absolutely no money at all.  It's to help improve events, not make money.

Publicis Groupe

Technology has always changed how people behave and what is possible in business. The pace of change isn't necessarily faster than before, but this does seem like a uniquely useful moment for companies to unleash the power of what is new. 

The internet, converged devices, improved processing power and many more technologies combine to create a new canvas of possibility, and with it, new consumer demands and incredible new ways for companies to make money by better serving people. 

I have a global role for Publicis Groupe to understand the changes that matter and those that don't, to understand what we can reasonably predict and take advantage of. I'm excited to be part of a team that helps build what a holding company should be, with a focus on unleashing the power of culture, diversity, and technology.

Head of Futures and Insight  - Publicis Groupe

EVP, Head of Innovation for Zenith Media- Part of Publicis Groupe.
I look after all content and innovation initiatives with a goal of unleashing the power of new technology, building products not just buying media, for making what content marketing can become, for navigating what’s changed and what’s not. Innovation is of course about ideas and conversations, but also making it happen. I'm now hoping to focus on the latter.

EVP, Head of Innovation for Zenith Media

Interesting People, Interesting Times. 

As a physical event with a Podcast, we've put this on hold for the moment.

This is the start of an experiment ( alongside Adriana Stan) with an unknown destination, but a certain vision; to explore the themes of the moment and to get curious people together.

Born from a frustration with the huge gulf between how fascinating and dynamic the world is right now and how boring and corporate every conference is, the event smashes together a diverse group of people to bring about conversation, with provocations and inspirations from proper and passionate speakers.  

Fuelled further by a sense we're all looking at our phones, connecting intimately with people across the planet, while we let the fascinating folk around us  go past.  It's a real life event for real life.

I guess it draws on the ideas of “parlors” or “salons” of the past, but that sounds very pretentious.  

It’s more proper than an “open mic night”, more subversive than a TED event, less structured than a Pecha Kucha, more augmented and ambitious than a Meetup.

It's got no commercial goal. This is what my attempt to being a patron of the arts, or the interesting looks like. 

See www.ipit.club for more details.

Accidental Co-Founder - Interesting People, Interesting Times (IPIT)

Author

Buy my book here.
https://buydigitaldarwinismbook.com

Author, Digital Darwinism.

Havas Media

My role is about leadership and inspiration through change.

I’m here DO what’s new and next in advertising, not just speak about it. Please get in touch after reading the below. I mean it.

It’s hard not to notice that the world is changing fast & that the companies that thrive have built or rebuilt themselves for the modern age. 

If Advertising was to rebuilt itself for today it would look entirely different, but so far despite all the chatter virtually every aspect of advertising has changed remarkably little in 100 years. 

The way we work is still around channels, not people.
 
I’ve joined Havas in a new role to help reimagine and make happen what advertising should become, they’ve grasped more quickly than most that the big changes happen when you are next to data, media partners and budgets. I’m here with a platform and scope to do new things.

So this is request to pitch me. Whether you’re a media owner, a data provider, an ad tech company, a digital agency, a content maker or any other company or individual who can work with me to do something new and profound, give me a shout.

SVP Strategy and Innovation

Mediapost

I have a bi weekly column here too.
This is it.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/author/4949/tom-goodwin/

Freelance Columnist

Tomorrow Innovation

I set up Tomorrow to reimagine the future of advertising, it's done way better than I hoped, but I was offered the chance to take what I did for a huge Media agency, but the spirit lives one.

Tomorrow were consultants to marketers and agencies to guide them through the mirky world of the current marketing landscape and to solve profound business problems. Providing guiding hands through the current landscape of hype, gimmicks, misinformation and a dangerous generation of people who ignore marketing techniques proven over generations.

Tomorrow exists to create solutions based on knowledge about the future, about technology, about brands by the application of creativity.

Director

IPG Media Lab

Lead Growth for IPG Media Lab in the broadest sense using creativity, passion for technology, strategic understanding and entrepreneurialism to build new and on existing client relationships yet also build new product offerings and revenue models.

Advertising agencies keep talking about the future, yet nobody is really doing anything about it.

Are viral videos, QR codes and mobile banner ads really all we can come up with when we have predictive computing , google glass, self driving cars , facial recognition and the Internet of things to spark incredible brand experiences?

A new role for a 21st Century Marketing Agency, injecting innovation, collaboration with unlimited partners and wide industry knowledge to create game changing advertising, brand experiences  and products whatever and whoever it takes.

Director, Partner Development

Hello, I'm a digital business transformation specialist, and the founder of All We Have Is Now (AWHIN, Inc), a consultancy created to help companies unleash the power of new technology, with a focus on making better products and services and on consumer centricity.

I'm the host of "The Edge", an original series on Euronews which reaches 250 million households, explores the future of business and culture through technology and spotlights the companies and people taking bold leaps into what’s next.

And recently I wrote  Digital Darwinism, a business book that has been translated into seven languages, now in a brand new edition.

As you can see I've got 700,000 followers on here, after being voted as the #1 Voice in Marketing. I'm a global Keynote speaker, delivering over 100 keynote speeches at leading public and private events across more than 42 countries.  I like to span the gap between pundit and practitioner. 

I now advise Fortune 500 companies and startups on business transformation and innovation. As a proponent of “nowism,” a more practical form of futurism, I think that we have all the technology we need at our disposal and we can drive meaningful growth by taking action and using our imagination to unleash its power. 

Over the past 20 years, I've built a career spanning digital, creative/advertising, and media agencies, and studied the impact of new technology, new consumer behaviors, and changing rules of business. 

This experience informs my work in digital transformation and innovation. My work has been referenced in The New York Times and The Economist. I've published over 500 articles in publications including The Guardian, TechCrunch, Forbes, Digiday, Quartz, Marketing Week, Adweek, and the World Economic Forum. 

I don't know more than others, but I know enough to ask good questions and listen to those who know more about things.  My style is provocative. I do this to get better and more passionate answers, not because I care one iota about engagement stats or building a community, but because I'm curious and like to learn.

I passionately believe that we're alive at the most interesting time in the world, that new technology is making incredible things possible and that it creates enormously exciting and profound new things achievable for many people and businesses.  I also think change is misunderstood, that many things are not changing, that many movements create existential threats and I'm here to try to provide guidance through this.

I think realistically in the last 5 years….every single year 

Google search has got worse 
LinkedIn has got worse
Twitter has got worse
YouTube has got worse
Google maps has got worse
Online ads have got even worse
Amazon has got worse 
Uber - worse
Airbnb - worse 


and yes , I’ve read the Enshitification piece, and it was easy to see coming since most platforms were always going to have to eeek out more ( or some profit). 

But that doesn’t explain everything 

Amazon gets worse because it’s so keen to let anyone sell anything and with no safeguards or care to laws or quality.  

YouTube gets worse because people can make lazy videos using AI voices and generated scripts and can still game the algorithm using click farms and fakery 

Linkedin gets worse because it doesn’t know what it’s trying to be.  A quality professional networking site / a Blogging platform / A social media platform . And it’s trying to make money from all sides  

Airbnb gets worse because in the need to scale to meet shareholder growth expectation they moved from hosts with spare space, to gamers who scrimp on furnishings.

So while a lot of the race to the bottom is a desire for more ad money from more engagement , from near monopolies,  a lot is also 

- A focus on the wrong metrics 
- Entirely short term goals 
- No long term vision 
- Disregard for the actual value of human attention
- No consideration for quality assurance 

and while I hate how miserable this post is. 

The reality is there is a massive opportunity for people to step into the spaces these companies have dominated with empathy , and competence and respect.

And a key word in this could be curation and making something good enough for people to pay for 


The weird thing about getting senior in a company is you tend to get removed from reality and your customer.
- Airline leaders don't just never fly economy, they don't sit in their lounges, they don't book their own tickets, they don't spend hours on hold trying to change a flight, they don't sweat scrolling websites endlessly to find out if their rucksack will be $0 or $100 to take on.

- Auto CEO's may drive their Companies' cars but they won't buy a car from a Dealer, nor try to configure online, or compare prices around them, nor take it for a service or for a mandatory fix after a product recall.

- The CEO of L'Oreal would famously arrange store visits in each market, but the route was planned in meticulous detail beforehand, outdoor ads would be procured along the route, the most favorable retailers would be briefed months ahead and told to reduce the facings of competitor products.  Rather like the Queen of England, the goal was to create a false comforting reality, not understand the world.  

- The Executive board of Hertz have surely never tried to rent one of their own cars, the leaders of CVS can't have tried themselves to use their own App to get a prescription, British Gas leaders have never stayed in for a boiler repair, Virgin or Charter execs have never tried to get their own service installed.

But why not? It's our job. It's our Job to understand ALL of this.

The worst place to view any company or brand or product is from within it.

A CMO gets bored of a logo after looking at it 1029 times a day, after 2 years and seeks a refresh. A brand manager thinks it's obvious what the advert is trying to say. 

When you work in marketing you loose your human head and put on a weird marketing head, where you let people say things like " People want conversations with brands" without expressing utter bewilderment. You talk about "fans" of your products, you talk about "loyalty" to soft drinks, or brand Onions for hours. 

If you work on Nespresso, your customers may think about what you make, as much as you think about Corona beer.  You may care about your laundry detergent as much as your Tire brand.

Marketing and CX is a brilliant career because our job is primarily obvious so long as we empathize, remove ourselves from our current vantage point, and think a bit.  

It's the art of making things easy. 
It's the beauty of simplicity and consistency.
It's the act of knowing our place, and expecting little, and doing the simple things that matter, really well, most of the time.

Empathy isn't putting yourself in someones position, it's not walking a mile in their shoes, it's putting themselves in their position.

We should all spend a lot longer not being us.

Business Transformation Consultant- A focus on pragmatic use of AI and how it impacts culture, workflows and business structure | Author | Keynote Speaker | Trainer | 4 x LinkedIn #1 Voice in Marketing

I'm always amazed that we're so keen to get more data, we rarely think about why we need it.
Data is like water, most of the time there is a greater risk of drowning than dehydration.
Companies are always so keen to get more, and as its become cheaper, faster, more abundant, easier to store, easier to process, we're thinking less and less.

Core to any plans should be simple Data strategy.

The first question of which, is always this, what decisions are we looking to make with it?


I love Advertising, and I love the ad industry, but if I think long and hard, no industry has done a worse job of innovating around new technology than it has.  Which is a bit odd considering it's supposed to be smart, creative and ambitious. 

In the last 25 years industries with more boring minds, with less risk tolerance like Retailing, Car making , Banking, Entertainment, Electronics, Airlines, Healthcare and a million other things have all got better, but advertising seems to have got far far worse. 

How can this be?

Some explanations 
1) We've become obsessed with data. 

Data is now our client, not the consumer.
Everything that can be measured should be, and everything that can be impacted fast, should be prioritized over things that matter and take longer.

2) We became obsessed with targeting.

We now seek to make the most precise ads for the smallest number of people, not the biggest feeling ads for the greatest number of people. Laundry detergent makers talk about how the goal is "Personalization at scale", this makes huge sense for a niche Car makers or a tiny hotel chain, but no sense whatsoever for anyone aiming to reach the mass market, which is most of our clients. 

3) We forgot the basics that work.
99% of what we new about advertising in 1940 is true today, what happened to jingles and taglines and consistency? It's nuts. 

4) We ignore our audience.
We lost respect for them, we lost interest in them, we now use aggressive language to hit them, we're trying to convert them, target them, no longer are we hoping to entertain them or seduce them, we're now embarrassed by what we have to say and hope to smash into their skulls.

5) Ads move down the funnel to the Point of Purchase.
The entire industry is now so shortermist, so aggressive, so impatient, that only the success we create now, and that we can prove matters. Over time more and more money gets shifted to the place where it's not likely to create the most success, but where it's easiest to prove that it has, even if it hasn't. It's nuts.

6) We test and learn, and optimize.
We used to dream up big ideas, we used to thrive on stories and bigness and on magic. And now people run a million thoughtless A-B tests and double down on what seems to work.

7) We undervalue human attention.
Digital media became so cheap because it didn't work well, and the more time we spend online, the more media inventory was created, so the cost of human attention has always been artificially low.  Since everything seems so cheap, nobody ever really cared about the quality of advertising made, nobody spent the time to make it worthwhile.  

8) We’ve made silos of specialisms not found ways to focus on the bigger picture

I just hope we turn this decline around.

Its the best time ever to rethink what advertising could be.

We've the best devices around us we've ever known to impact messages with craft, meaning and impact, that allow people to interact immediately and in many different ways.

I'm always stunned at how we default to assuming data has value.

The more precisely it's measured, the closer it is to an interaction, the faster it's gathered, the more we feel it has merit.

- Vizio know when you are watching TV and what you are watching 
- iRobot mops know your floor layout
- Amazon Go knows how long you looked at a Tuna Sandwich
- Walgreen's Fridges know you walked past and didn't open the door.

So what?
Seriously. 
We're going to target people with sofas based on the perfect shaped size gap in their lounge???
We're going to assume that since person X bought some Pepsi after seeing a TV ad for it, it was are our advert that made them do it?
We're going to hunt down the Tuna Sandwich browser and retarget them?

Don't be absurd 


The vast majority of data is absolutely useless, and will remain so, regardless of computing power or how much of it we have, for 99% of people.

A significant amount of data, has some form of theoretical value, it could be analyzed, combined, cleaned, tortured, tested and we may get something from it, but its far more likely to get in the way.

We forget that so much of the world is about doing the basics right.
Focus on doing what matters, not what is most sophisticated.

We should remember that almost all of the Corporate world isn't driven by doing things better, but reducing risk.

It's remarkably rarely about driving efficiency, and more often about keeping power.

Next time you're  selling something, you probably need to show how it's a safe option, not (just) a transformative option.

The entire world of Consultancy, is often the insurance business more than the progress business. 

Which is a shame for people like me who dream of how companies can improve how they work, how they can leverage technology for greater impact and how they can transform the way they help and serve customers. 


One thing about Generative AI debate that puzzles me, is how many people don't value the idea that doing things is good for you.

Reading is good for you
Writing is good for you
Analyzing is good for you
Thinking is good for you.
Remembering is good for you.

Quite a lot of things are boring, repetitive, and are beneath you, but that's life.

By all means strive to be efficient, strive to automate what's of no value, but don't discount hard work. 

It's like a whole generation of people think the gym is a waste of time because the weights ultimately end up in the same place.

Someone using AI may take your job, but they may not last that long.

Of course these things are false choices, use AI, explore AI, design around AI, but just don't think everything you do that isn't remarkable, isn't helpful

And don't learn to be so efficient, you forget to develop. 


Thought leadership is generally nonsense.

I see quite a lot of "thought leadership" as the mere gathering of existing thoughts, surveys, data points and case studies and packaging them nicely.

People take a Boston Consulting Idea, a McKinsey data point, a case study from HBR and commonly retweeted lines " AI won't take your job, someone using AI will" and they turn into into 800 words, a book, a Keynote and Consulting.

It's not theft, quite often a perfectly pleasant presentation will say " here's a useful model from Bain' , or "As Accenture popularized" . I'm just not sure it adds much.

Especially as these places are almost always wrong or out of date. 

Isn't the Metaverse supposed to be worth $10tn.
Isn't Blockchain best used with a 8 step process
Isn't Spatial computing all over Gartners quadrant of hype or whatever it's called
Wasn't most of whats been said about "Disruption" nonsense.  
Aren't the case studies by definition out of date and codified survivorship bias merchandised nicely 

Am I doing this wrong?
Isn't the point of thinking and sharing to help spur new thinking.
To learn from your audience and how they correct you.
To test out new ideas and theories
To do what you can to lead to new ways of working or thinking or digesting the world. 

We need more people to push us to think harder, not to tidy up charts from White Papers, digest a few chapters of a flawed "business book" and use data like "86% of CIO's think IOT will bring about enormous possibilities but the need for agile progressive working methods "

$1,000 BN is wasted by companies on digital transformation that doesn't work, and I'd guess most of that is because being entirely wrong but plausible remains a perfectly good way to enjoy a career

Meanwhile I've never met a Client that was pleased with money they spent on a large consulting firm

( this is sampling bias, because they are always writing to me to ask for my help in getting more out of them, because they were hired before they got there ) 

And we should probably be more worried about all of this .  

Meanwhile the funny thing about being a bit of a thought leader, is that in the tiny fleeting moments  you do it really well and say something a bit special , everyone steals your stuff and passes it off as their own.  

1890 - “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half"   - John Wanamaker  

2024 - "75% of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but some of it is fraud, some is inefficiency, some of it is chasing the wrong KPI's, but that keep the CEO happy , and I could find out what's going on, but my power is derived from my media budget, and I'm scared to find out what's really happening and also short term metrics are  far more important, as I’m forced to hit quarterly targets “ 

I’m just saying there are incredible opportunities out there to do advertising and marketing in a much more compelling and efficient way,  but somehow we’re a bit lost. 

I think the starting point is acknowledge how far from ideal things are, and to realize quite how different things could be if we were more ambitious about the way we use technology and more empathetic about what really works and matters .

QR codes to get menus was one of the worst ideas ever, they fill me with unexpected rage. 

QR codes to buy anything you like in the world around you with one click, is one of the best ideas ever, it fills me with joy. 

It’s never about the tech. It’s about the context.  Some people won’t ever understand the array of reasons why these ideas are opposite 


Few people have realized that by making it easier and easier and easier to apply for jobs, and advertise jobs.

We've made it harder and harder and harder to get a job or recruit the best person.

I remember fondly people saying "Voice" would change everything.

I was a bit confused because I got one of the first Alexa's ever sold & played with it a lot & it was quite obviously great at some things but absolutely awful at others.

The idea you'd buy things with your voice was utterly absurd.

Did you want to have a conversation with a speaker about what sized battery you wanted, screaming out AAA, rechargeable, yes, 24, before hoping the price was OK. Or did you want to see words & images that could convey a thousand words in a millisecond

The idea you'd search for things made sense until you realized it took a really really long time to listen to basic information.

It was pretty clear that 2 weeks in, it was destined to be a small part of our world, alongside punch cards, keyboards, touch interfaces, computer mice, and other inputs that never died.

Yet 6 months later the world was ablaze, smart speaker sales were exploding, kids were using voice, skills would be launched, the future of brands were under threat. I had clients asking me to make skills for them.

I refused and explained why and lost business and trust.

I was considered ignorant for not thinking the same way that large Consultancies were, it never dawned on me that saying No to technology was rarely the result of a lack of interest, or experimentation or imagination, but quite the opposite.  

But here we are & smart speakers languish, skills are cancelled and little changed.

The key value in the role of guides to the future or technology or business futures is deep curiosity but vast amounts of empathy.

When people tell you 5G will change everything, pause to think what role it will have in most people's lives.

When people think Clubhouse is worth billions, try it out and consider if most people would find everything about it odious if they were not bored and lonely in lockdowns.

When people boast about 3D printed items, look around your house. 

"When people demand" drone delivery, look at your last 20 delivered items.

It was quite obvious almost everything that was big in the pandemic was going to die afterwards because it was destined to be a blip and that those in the tech press and VC worlds were removed from any remotely normal people or dialog.

The isn't to say that the future is always obvious

-Planes seemed impossible until they were everywhere
-The advent of the bicycle changed the world in many ways we didn't see coming
-Articles about early cars said we'd never want them, before 3 years later asking how we could live with only one

But normally you know.

You can see a "smart changing room" & think that not how people work.

You can see "trying on glasses with AR" and know that's not going to be a mass market thing

You can see "just walk out technology" but also see that "you can't just walk in"

Fall in love with people not technology
https://lnkd.in/e8t62457


arstechnica.com • 4 min read

Amazon virtually kills efforts to develop Alexa Skills, disappointing dozens

Me at Conferences, or reading Best Practice or Case Studies. 

A lot of what we celebrate and codify into playbooks is merely the results of 10,000 people who tried, and 1 success.

A path retrospectively rewritten to seem more logical and deliberate, and with success as inevitable. 

Be careful with advice on the internet, it may be like lottery winners talking about the methods they used to pick numbers. 

I'd focus less on the past and more on the newly possible.
Less on other Companies and more on your customers.
Less on playbooks and more on imagination.
Less on other leaders and more on your own brilliant teams.


A big new thing seems to be that everything is an advertising platform.
Every retailer is slowly becoming an ad network.
Every bank will be selling our data and our attention to place ads.
It's spanning the real world and the digital world.

There has been a VERY slow realization that if you have people on your site, your app or in your store or lobby or station, you can make money from ads.

Digital screens are now incredibly cheap to make and to install, they can bend, are ultra thin, can be without bezels and can be connected to the internet. Screens are now like wallpaper.

We first saw elevators become places to put digital ads, then washrooms, now slowly but surely people who have real world locations with high footfall, from shopping malls to QSR joints, to Car rental locations to Car parks to hotel lobbies to car dealerships to car chargers,  will slowly accept screens installed for free for a revshare.

At the same time, people with cyber space, not physical space will realize every eyeball on their site is a chance to make more money. 

Since the entire internet is a screen we can buy from, and since advertising money keeps moving closer to the point of sale where it can most easily be attributed as successful, we will see more and more sites become retail ad networks or publishing networks.

It's not really what people want, but that's why we are here.

Since we all flocked to paid TV with no ads, since we all installed ad blockers and since we don't buy magazines and newspapers, the ad money has found it harder and harder to find a home.

A weird quiet challenge these days is that brands have billions to spend and find it harder and harder to find quality, brand safe, real human eyeballs to appear in front of. The reason Meta and Google continue to make so much money, is these days it's quite hard to spend your money.

So as I predicted in 2017, this will be the age of insidious advertising, an age where every space that can have ads, will slowly have ads. 

Many presumed voice or AI would see the end of advertising, this couldn't be less true,  Advertising is as inevitable and as required as brands, we will just see advertising and other commercial attention based exposure models seep into other aspects of our life.

Quite often things are not that complex. We just get too close to them.  
 
We are terrified that what we do isn’t that hard. We create language as tribes to help us feel special, to make us feel like expert insiders. To keep away others.

A lot of things are simple but very hard. 

Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean common sense can’t be illuminating. 

And if we REALLY want to understand something , take a step back. 

KPI’s can lead us astray, Data can be so illuminating that it’s blinding.  It means we stop looking for what we can’t see. 

Sometimes we just have to feel our way. Use instinct. 

Instinct is a billion data points that we process so well, we didn’t realize we were doing it.  

Let's talk about timesheets.
I'm perplexed by them

Many people spend more than an hour a week filling them in, typically with archaic software. 

Certain types of people may spend longer, MUCH longer. They become debilitating.

Others's randomly fill them in, spending less than 5 mins, ensuring vacations are marked, training is documented, but generally just ensuring their proportion of time averages out about right.

And quite a lot of workplaces don't use timesheets at all.

The whole existence of timesheets seems both entirely predictable and explainable but not especially defendable.

- Most Clients are rarely paying for effort, they are paying for advice or outcomes. 

I don't want 27 hours of design work, I want 3 ideas presented, one route developed, one round of feedback and a high res image with usage rights.

I don't want 3 hours of a partners time and 15 hours of a legal researcher, I want my questions answered and advice. I couldn't care less if you do it in 1/3rd the time and "make more money". In fact, the best lawyers should be making more money not because they bill longer, but because they provide value more efficiently. 

I don't want 10 hours a month of someone's time, I want permission to call them up and ask them questions, in a way that works for both of us long term.   

People tend to know if they are getting value, and knowing how much effort is being expended, rarely matters.

- Agencies don't need timesheets to see how well utilized people are.

We tend to have a pretty good idea who is doing good work and who isn't.

We tend to have a strong sense of who is pulling the wool over our eyes and who is struggling from crushing amounts of work.

If people are doing a great job, why does it matter if they get there faster?

In face selling Time and Materials has been to the detriment of the entire world of productivity.

Nobody is incentivized to use technology to do things faster, nobody is rewarded for being more efficient, or faster, or better.

Across the world teams of people swell in size because instead of charging for outcomes, outputs or a mutually agreed sense of value, we overstaff teams, add in administrators to manage them, and overload Clients with people because they are paying for bums on seats.   Overwhelmed by the amount of "work everything takes", Clients employ ever more staff to keep up.  And we end up with 300 people doing worse quality work than 14 people could do.

- We don't need time sheets, we need communication.

- We don't need to waste about a trillion dollars a year of time on people doing administration, we need trust.

- We don't need AI to do our timesheets, although it would be one of the most obvious first things to automate, we need to eliminate them. 

A lot of smart posts have been written about the death of "Prime"
They are all broadly right, but something we forget is this.
Death is the default.

Your company doesn't die because you messed up, it dies because it only survives if you keep doing things well

You will be a one hit wonder in music, unless you keep making amazing songs.

You will be at best a fad, unless there is something consistently remarkable about what you do.

The faster things rise, the faster they fall. Companies that ascended rapidly because the barriers to entry were lower in a DTC world , like Allbirds or Peloton or Stitch Fix or Figs or Glossier are particularly vulnerable to there also being less friction to stop their rapid demise.

The world is prone to fads. From loom bands to flappy birds to fidget spinner to Slime, to Polly Pockets to Tamagotchis to Pogs to Pokemon, twas ever thus.

The real reporting shouldn't be on how Prime failed or why Hoka is rising over Nike, but on how amazing it is that Liquid Death or Red Bull or Taylor Swift can somehow keep thriving.  



https://lnkd.in/e-HydK6b


marketingweek.com • 5 min read

‘You can’t cheat the fundamentals’: Why Prime has been reduced to the bargain bin

There are quite a lot of things people find really hard.
There are quite a lot of things that take a really long time to get good at.

It doesn't mean you are doing things wrong.

It doesn't mean you are not good at them.

It means they are hard and take practice.

I think there is a weird modern thing, were somehow we expect everything to be easy.

Pretty much everything worth doing is super hard, thats why it's worth doing.

And pretty much everything hard is where growth comes from.


Generative AI isn't magic, it's probability.

It's not a leveler, it's a reason to become even more expert. 

And whats interesting is how you feel about AI depends a lot on how much you know about a domain.

---

If you know nothing about tax policy or immigration law or Vertebroplasty or Architecture or Plumbing, or IVF, or Material Science, or anything .  it's quite easy to ask broad questions, and get plausible answers, to find what its produced amazing, and to think you understand something.

---

If you know a moderate amount about these domains or any others, it's quite easy to find the outputs laughably weak, generic, simplified, or just plane wrong. You can ask better questions, and probe further, and realize more accurately the limitations of the methodology.

---
But if you know an incredible amount about something, let's take stem cells for example ( not that I do).

One would imagine you may  enough about a particular LLM to know which one is most likely to have the best starting architecture and data. 

You'd be able to access the incredible database of existing white papers, and ensure they are uploaded. 

You could upload your own proprietary data. You could ask extremely good and pointed questions, you could interrogate the model with super thoughtful helpful questions.  

You could get more from the Generative AI, because of what you know, because of what data have access to, and because of what you know you don't know.

But more than anything else, by knowing more, you'd know what was spouted out that was nonsense, you'd know when to doubt yourself and when to doubt the model.

----

So when people see AI as a magical way to raise but level the playing field, to allow anyone to be superpowered, we should remember it's not quite like that. 

If anything it's a lever arm to everyone, so the greater the power you have, the more you can get out. Knowing more, remembering more, thinking more, around your domain ( not about AI)  are no longer unnecessary but more beneficial than ever. 

And spare a thought to the experts these days who must have the most frustrating conversations they've ever had. 

The back surgery patient telling the surgeon stuff that makes no sense, the accountant being told they are wrong because someone used ChatGPT, the therapist trying to bring a Client back on track after been given terrible advice, the Psychiatrist dealing with patents who've self diagnosed with a LLM and bought powerful prescription drugs online. etc etc etc

It's quite interesting because our PERCEPTION of how useful AI is, follows a curve a bit like uncanny valley in Robotics, while our ACTUAL value follows something more complex, where for those who know less, the value can be enormous or negative.

"We have always done it that way." are often said to be the 7 most expensive words in business. 

I'd suggest these 4 words can even more expensive 
"this time it's different"

The hard thing in life is knowing when you have to change, and when you can sit it out.

Generally speaking the best approach isn't to work around the threats of change, but the possibilities it brings.

Often in life companies don't HAVE to change. The largest companies today are actually very very rarely prone to disruptive threats. 

The list of failures is still remarkably small, Blockbusters, Nokia, Circuit City, Borders, Polaroid..... a list that doesn't grow rapidly and will probably soon include disruptive startups like All Birds, Glossier, Peloton, Stitch Fix, Wayfair etc

But large companies SHOULD  change, not because it's necessary for short term survival, but because it's a long term way to grow. 

Why wouldn't companies embrace new tech to develop new revenue streams, why wouldn't companies change before they are forced to, why wouldn't companies strive for better, and unleash the power of new technology?

We need more proactive, positive, controlled possibility driven change.
And less resistance, fear, ignorance, and reactive, defensive change 

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