Warren Cammack

Made with Flare More Info’>

For those who haven’t heard of them Innovation Bay are a NFP who help to connect Sydneysiders who are interested in technology, entrepreneurship and innovation. They host a number of breakfast sessions where in addition to networking they have one or more industry speakers presenting in a fun way. They also host pitch/investor dinners and a host of other great events but to date I’ve only attended the breakfasts so cannot comment on these.

This morning’s event saw a panel of retail specialists discussing how their industry is changing. The panel comprised of:

– Michael Fox ‘ CEO, Shoes of Prey
– Fiona Moylan ‘ Business Manager New Ventures, Westfield
– Matt Newell ‘ Strategy Partner, The General Store
– Rolf Weber – Managing Directory, brandsExclusive
– Moderator: Ian Gardiner ‘ Co-Founder, Innovation BayKey Takeouts from the discussion:

– Retail in Australia has typically been supply driven competition i.e. lowest cost of flat screen TV. Now that online retailers are coming with giant economies of scale it’s moving to experience based demand driving sales
– Westfield found that consumers were searching on their website but using it for research only, creating wish lists and buying in store
– Unlikely that Amazon will open operations in Australia as postage costs are identical inside or outside of the country
– Would Alibaba come to Australia? Would the size of the market make it worthwhile for them?
– Westfield is focused on getting people into their centre using events as the attraction
– Consumer behaviour is shifting from product to experiences as people can really afford to buy anything so price is not a differentiator
– People want experiences more than anything and buy things as a memento of the occasion
– Shoes of Prey saw most of their business grow through word of mouth, they are now moving beyond this to testing the ability for customers to design four pairs of shoes and ask their friends for feedback on facebook
– How to convey quality online? Great photos, video, open a physical store
– Do you really need an app or will a mobile site suffice?Tags: innovation, retail

Made with Flare More Info’> When I was about 15 I had a notebook that I would use when training, writing down the weight and how many reps of each exercise I could do. This still happens today and in the gym I still see a number of people with the sheets their trainers have given them and they do what I did 15 years ago.

Times however have changed and there are a number of gadgets and apps that make the measurement of health and wellbeing much simpler and much more accurate than before.

In 2005 I started using a Polar Heart Rate Monitor  to see how hard I could push my body when training ‘ using the limit alerts to tell me when to speed up (and slow down) took the ability to know  how hard I was training to another level. The technology even allowed you to put the watch onto a fat USB pad and transfer the data to my PC for further analysis ‘ the start of my journey into the quantified self.

In 2009 I started using an app called Endomondo (World of Endorphins!) and it took measurement to a whole new level ‘ every run could be broken down to each step’s elevation and pace. As the app evolved it talked to my heart rate monitor and a ‘coach’ could tell me how I was going compared to my last run and whether I was on track to hit my desired fitness level.

In 2010 I took part in my first Global Corporate Challenge (GCC) which is a great initiative to get people in corporates moving and helping a great charitable cause. From a QS perspective the GCC requires the participant to wear a pedometer for three months and as part of a team ensure that they take enough steps to walk around the world in that time. This was the first time that the competitive element of movement and measurement kicked in for me as I could see a leaderboard of how the team were going and this pushed me to rev my teammates up as well as looking for opportunities to maximise the number of steps each day. In 2011 I was lucky enough to be in Beijing during the GCC and took the opportunity of a free day in the city to do some sight-seeing but instead of using public transport I decided to walk everywhere ‘ I covered 40km that day. My feet were bleeding at the end of it but this didn’t matter as I managed to exceed 50,000 steps that day.

jawbone-up

In late 2011 the Jawbone UP was released and shortly followed by the Nike Fuel band was launched and I was intrigued by the concept of wearing something that was able to measure so much more and be permanently part of you. As Nike had the horrible reputation of child labour I leant towards the UP however within months the reports of its instability and failure to maintain charge started to hit the Internet. I was hopeful they would sort out the problems and signed up to the wait list to buy one when the 2.0 version was released. This took nearly a year and despite signing on to the wait list I never received an email to buy one (note to self: if a company can’t follow-up with prospects who want to buy their product then avoid them like the plague!).

I was in San Francisco in early 2013 and the UP 2.0 was yet to be released in Australia so I bought one for myself and my significant other. Wearing it and loading the app on my iPhone immediately brought back the feeling of being part of the GCC and the need to maximise my steps each day became part of my routine. In addition the measurement of sleep duration and quality gave a whole new way of looking at health. Unfortunately I’ve subsequently had problems with the UP and having returned it about three months after buying it (and waiting 2 months for a replacement) it’s again just died and I’m not sure if I’ll bother using it again or switch to something slightly more reliable.

23andMe

About three months ago I became interested in looking at the genetic side of health and came across 23andme, a US company who have opened up genetic testing to the masses and enabled an understanding of how who we are will determine what we will be in the future. It’s a slightly scary concept particularly if there’s something nasty predicted ‘ Pandora’s box anyone? Unfortunately 23andme (and others) are not allowed to provide interpretations of the data due to FDA regulations however there are a number of resources on the web that will enable you to take the raw data and load it into something that will give you the insights you’re looking for.

About the same time I went to a conference (see Wired for Wonder in earlier posts) that made me think more about how happiness relates to health and productivity so I started measuring how happy my team were. I already capture a lot of data about how productive they are and now that I have a reasonable sample size I will crunch the numbers and generate the insights to determine what we need to do differently (or not change a thing). We’re planning to roll out a health and wellbeing programme across a much broader group in the coming weeks so it will be great to obtain a greater sample size and understand how happiness affects a broader group. It was very interesting to hear from Creel Price how he measured the happiness of his company each day via a simple question every time they logged on to their computers in the morning.

So onto 2014 ‘ I’m training for an ultra marathon in May and I’m looking for every way to make myself as likely to finish as possible. One of the things I need to do is drop some weight ‘ I’m about 8kgs off my peak weight and when you’re running 50KM every extra kilo counts! I’ve been using an app called Lift for about 4 months which has been a great way of embedding good habits and yesterday they launched Quantified Diets. This is a crowd sourced scientific study to determine which diet will help to lose the most weight. I’ve opted for the sleep diet’let’s see how we go!

The other QS method I’ve signed up to use is ubiome which measures the microbiome in your body ‘ this can have a massive impact on any number of things from how you absorb vitamins to your mood. I’ve only just ordered the kit so will have to provide an update once I’ve sent the sample back and obtained the results.

Finally, there are a whole load of other companies that provide blood analysis ‘ one of the more popular ones is insider tracker, send them a sample of your blood and they’ll send you a load of marker results that enable you to determine what foods work best for your nutrition and recovery as well as more fundamental insights such as whether you are just pushing it too hard.

Not sure I’m ready for the multiple blood tests just yet but there’s a whole load of data that I’ll have in the next month that will help to make sure I perform as well as I can in the ultra marathon in May ‘ and hey, if I survive that then I may look into the other tests to see how I can make sure my quality of life when I hit 100 is as good as it is now!

Firstly thanks to Rob Findlay for organising this event, rob’s an ex-NAB boy who’s now living in Singapore and puts on next bank in his spare time.Opher Yom-Tov, CCD, BT

Opening the event was Opher Yom-tov who is head of customer centred design at BT and talked about the amazing things that they’ve done within the Westpac group using CCD.

Talking about why ccd is important opher called out the new threats to the incumbents in the australian financial services. We’re unlikely to be out resourced by the start-ups who are nibbling away at the market but at this point we are at threat of being out innovated. To illustrate this point Opher talked about what Banks typically do to deal with uncertainty, they:

– Hire smart people
– Use the best consultants
– Use tools of MBA, excel, risk models
– Teach people to think analytically and rationally
– Build business cases to prove if we can make money or not
– Refer to a senior person who acts as Nero and provided the thumbs up (or down) based on his/her opinionBanks typically create ambitious 3-5 year roadmaps but focus on the near term when it comes to investments. They kill innovation by trying to prove the unprovable ‘ this is the quickest way to stop a potentially great idea.

Opher displayed an article that was written in 2001 and published in Business Week that proclaimed the business case for Apple opening it’s planned retail stores did not stack up. The article compared the profitability of Gateway retail stores and indicated that Apple would need to sell an inordinate amount of goods to pay for the prestigious locations and luxurious fit outs. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and the author must be kicking himself now that Apple can easily claim to have the most profitable retail spaces in the world.

A few case studies will not however persuade the powers that be to release funding for every new idea and this is where customer centred design (CCD) comes in to play. It improves the odds of success by approaching innovation by first understanding the people that will be impacted.

At it’s core CCD is about 3 things:
– Insight through empathy
– Experimentation ‘ ‘Fail early to succeed sooner.’ (David Kelly, founder of IDEO)
– Collaboration  ‘ ‘Gang up on the problem rather than each other’ (Thomas Stallkamp, President Chrysler)If you know that what you want to do will work then go straight to delivery and experiment with the how rather than the what.

Opher talked about how in the beginning BT focused on the process, for them it was -Capture, Create, Deliver. This is the typical process however it creates a linear mindset that does not allow for true innovation which does not work in this way. In relation to the business case Opher said that by testing with customers at every point it becomes cheaper and quicker to get good quality products and services to market. He also said that he believes the discipline should be called Human Centred Design as it’s not just about the end customer but rather everyone involved in the process from customer call centre staff, the partner of the end customer, the neighbour that they talk to at the BBQ etc.

BT did not stop with customer facing changes and have completed an exercise with their human resources department. They looked at what it is that makes people come to work and define and build the services based on this. One insight gleaned from this exercise was that people feel guilty for not spending enough time at home and were feeling rushed all the time. BT created ‘Home for Dinner’ a service that enables staff to order either ready made meals or the raw ingredients and recipe to cook it themselves. Staff browse a website and choose their meal which is put together by suppliers who then deliver it to the mailroom ready for staff to collect when they leave for the day.

Customer centred design is not just about asking customers what they want. A famous Steve Jobs quote is ‘It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’ It’s also about what’s right for the business and this is aided by the use of Quantitative Analysis in addition to the Qualitative Analysis that is fundamental to CCD. The whole process ensures that we encourage both a left and right brain view of the world.

Opher refers to the combination of skills and mindsets required as ‘Turtleneck meets Suit meets Pocket Protector. The teams involved need to have the ability to understand strategy, design thinking, lean six sigma, agile, lean startup, UX and data analytics. He also believes that it works best when merging internal and external consultants to form a  hybrid approach.

One of the common myths around customer centred design is that it’s just about digital experiences which is simply not true. BT won a design award for ‘Your World’, a piece of paper with the customer in the center and some pointers to help financial planners start a deep conversation with their clients. The method had been proven to help the client know things about themselves that they would otherwise be unable to articulate. From a business point of view it has doubled case sizes and created a much richer experience for customers.

Touching on the number of people who should be involved in the process Opher cited a quote from David Ogilvg who said ‘In all the lands and all the cities, there are no statues of committees’. Teams should be small and the best people to solve banking problems are bankers (supported by other people of course!).

On type of problem, Opher referenced a 2 day workshop his team ran in conjunction with their private banking team to assist in designing the right space for them in their new building. Within this time they had been able to clearly articulate what would be the perfect space to ensure their clients would be comfortable and therefore more likely to want to come back. If anyone talks about CCD taking too long Opher retorts with a question on whether the person can afford not to take the time to do it.

From a change perspective Opher says it’s not joust about teaching people the proces. You need to start with inlightened and inspired leadership to enable this to happen. It’s also best to start by incubating in one business area ‘ identify leaders who are willing to take the risk or who have experienced CCD before and understand the value. Across Westpac they are now seeing senior executives expecting the activity to be happening as part of the process rather than asking why it is being done.

Listening to Opher and talking to people from many other Banks across the world at the conference it became clear that everyone has already started on the CCD journey at it’s not a matter of if but when will we have true maturity in this discipline across all Banks.

Neal Cross, MasterCard Labs

I’ve known Neal for several years now from when he used to work at Microsoft in a Sydney and it’s always great to hear what he has to say as he’s full of amazing ideas and to quote him he has ‘THE best job in the world’ and is able to play with a load of new technology and enable his imagination to go wild.

Neal talked about his ‘Customer Centred Innovation Factories’ that generate 1000 ideas a year and release 3 products to market. MasterCard need to do this quickly and efficiently in order to run in a cost efficient manner whilst still enabling innovation to occur. The factory is split into three distinct ‘machines’:
– Aspire ‘ focussing on the generation of ideas and is essentially a crowd sourcing platform that is open to everyone in the company.
– Innovation Express ‘ which tests the idea through prototyping internally and testing without talking to end customers.
– Commercialisation ‘ a launch pad incubation process.Neal talked about the need to leverage the whole company to drive innovation. There’s also a great ROI of the whole process and it channels a lot of staff enthusiasm and energy which helps to motivate people even more that they would normally be. One way of achieving this additional motivation is through a competition that Labs run which enables staff to win $250k, find the next big thing for MasterCard and have the option of a new role in the company.

Neal discussed the difference between model and mechanics and the need to separate the What from the How. The example was that of Kodak who helped their customers to save memories but the company became more attached to the how of film forgetting about what they were there to do.

Design for edge cases e.g. design for tech experts and for tech illiterates and you’ll create an experience that will be great for everyone in between. A great example is that of Oxo kitchen utensils, the designer watched his arthritic wife struggle with peeling vegetables and (rather than actually helping her to cut them’) created a peeler that had more grip on it so it was easier for her to hold ‘ this was easier for everyone to hold. Mastercard are considering putting QKR into Google Glass to make the whole purchasing experience easier (for nerds?), maybe it will make it better for everyone, or maybe not.

Describing Innovation Express as a 48 hour hackathon where only the best people are taken to amazing locations and the CEO and directors judge the results. Neal said that they could give people longer but with a goal of presenting to the CEO people typically give it their all and produce amazing results in such a short time.

One of the great ideas to come out of Innovation Express is the concept of purchasing goods and services from within a digital magazine. Today you have to pop out of the magazine and go to another website if you want to make a purchase but this makes the whole experience seamless.

Neal wanted to use the process to solve a problem outside of the tech or payments space so he decided to try to save the orangutan. He flew an engineering team out to an area where Orangutans we’re protected and began by interviewing everyone involved in the eco-system (with the exception of the Orangutans unfortunately). It wasn’t clear how things progressed from there or if the Orangutans were actually saved but I’m sure Neal will share the outcome at one of his next talks.

Mastercard’s vision of 2020 is (obviously) one that involves payments and the opportunity to spend more money being integrated into everything we do. It’s both scary and extremely believable at the same time ‘ I just hope that there are some people in 2020 without American accents’

Rocky Scopelliti, Telstra

Rocky talked us through the key insights found as a result of Telstra’s recent Digital Investor study. We are about to witness the greatest ever inter-generational wealth transfer over the next 20 years as Gen X and Y will shift from owning 36% of Australia’s wealth to 70%. We also are now seeing digital heirs (those who only know the world as being technologically enabled) starting to choose where and how to invest their money.

The concept of self-directed financial management is becoming an increasingly important aspect. This is especially apparent as we look at Self Managed Super Funds of which 71% are held by people from Gen X and Y. It’s also clear that on average SMSF’s have outperformed retail super funds so these self-directed investors must be doing something right.

Rocky talked about the research they had done on education of the self directed investors and found that the most effective method was a combination of three concepts:
– Educational videos
– Alert services
– Online collaboration with an expertThere was also further improvements (albeit less impactful) through the use of:
– Accessing experts on demand
– Intelligent assistantsA question was thrown by the audience about the expected uptake of ‘Robo planners’, a variant on intelligent assistant. Rocky believes that demand for these will explode in the next few years’

Keith Dodds, ThoughtWorks

Between 75-90% of global CEOs regard innovation as crucial to their business but less than half have a body or person devoted to it. Keith believes that innovation comes from a combination of Design Thinking and System Thinking and benefits from Continuous Design and Continuous Delivery.

Keith played a video from Nordstrom innovation labs where they trial one idea a week. One of their simplest and most successful tries to solve the problem of buying expensive  sunglasses in a store. You try a number of different pairs on but yet are unable to easily compare what you look like in each one at the same time. The concept simply involves taking photos of you wearing each pair to reduce the effort involved.

He then played a video of lastminute.com setting up a pop-up design studio in London in order to solicit greater feedback. The company gave feedback that they were able to solicit more feedback in one day than one month using other means.

We then saw a video of Stanard Chartered’s mobile virtual assistant called Zoe which leverages the Nina platform from Nuance. This assistant has been programmed to help you not just with your banking but everything from locating theatre tickets to booking flights for your next holiday.

Keith then showed us a video that showed the retail experience of the future, this contained similar themes to the MasterCard one but focused on the in store experience becoming one that is tailored around an individual with changing rooms that play music that you like which varies depending on what you’re actually trying on. The idea that the mirrors can read NFC tags in the clothes and display specific information is extremely believable and brings forward the idea that we will need fewer people to assist us when technology can do a more efficient job.

Keith then changed tact a little and began talking about the amount of data that we currently generate and is stored across the world. He showed aerial photographs of toe data centres in the US. One of them was the NSA data centre in Utah which has enough capacity to store all the data in the world for the next 100 years. Scary.

Louise Long ‘ Head of Customer Experience Design, NAB

Louise titled her presentation ‘From noble to necessary (2007-2013). A story through notebooks.’ Using the novel approach of using extracts from her notebooks to tell the story of customer centred design evolution at NAB.

Louise believes that great customer experience professionals are generalists, not specialists. Having held a dozen different roles across various parts of the experience value chain she believes that understanding the bigger picture is key to ensuring there is a great experience.

Customer experience design became a focus at NAB after an infamous 2 page letter was sent to customers that tried to explain changes to the credit card terms and conditions. The Bank was slammed for its awful use of language and frankly incoherent message.

Louise started by defining how it was that the Bank should communicate with customers. The Bank sent out over 2000 different types of letter to customers and before she started the excercuse there wasn’t even an inventory of these. In parallel to fixing all of the language in the letters NAB enabled a capability to store PDFs of every letter a customer receives in their online banking platform, these letters were also available to staff so that if a customer called up to query something in a letter the contact centre agent could see exactly the same thing as the customer.

Louise called out Credit Suisse for the great work they did with their customer immersion programme which involved senior leaders being put in the shoes of their customers so they could truly understand how they were feeling.

She created an interaction database that would enable the mapping of intended changes to the impact it would have on every part of the process and hence the customer. Whilst this ambitious project didn’t quite work it did spawn a mandate that every project needed to have a customer impact assessment before funding would be released.

Louise further accelerated the acceptance and adoption of customer-centricity by giving internal stakeholders the right questions to ask rather than the answers. she also encourages every person to spend some time working in the branches to understand what it is that customers (both internal and external) really want.

Louise ended with an answer to a question that asked how she effects change to a holistic customer experience when a bank is split into many different departments. She  predicts that product managers will not exist in the future and instead experiences will be created by people who are focused on creating the best customer experience and will use features rather than products to do this.

Jin Zwicky ‘ VP Experience Design, OCBC

Jin talked about simplicity as an organisational capability and described herself as a simplicity coach. Simplicity is based on a combination of a mental model and the knowledge required to understand it. The closer the two are the easier it is to use and therefore simple.

It is usually the gao between what the bank wants and what people need that creates complexity. Simplicity changes behaviour by building understanding which builds confidence. Confident (and presumably satisfied) customers are 100% more likely to spend (Gallup banking survey 2005)Jim Marous ‘ Bank Marketing Strategy Blog

Jim spoke of his Digital Banking Nirvana saying it should be Simple, Engaging and Contextual. He gave an example of a US bank who created their mobile account opening process so that a new customer could take a photo of the front and bank of their driving licence. This data was then sent to a bureau that looked up the licence and retrieved a whole load of data which was then used to prepopulate the account opening forms making it much simpler and easier for the customer.

He then showed an example of GoBank who allow their customers to see account balances before logging in to their mobile banking platform. This is extremely common now though and a small Australian financial services provider called CommBank implemented this some time ago. Swedbank took this function and tried to make it more engaging by having user shake their phone in order to see the balance.

USAA have implemented voice control of their mobile banking app but admit it has had low uptake. The reason for building it was however for a portion of their customer base (USAA is a bank for armed forces personnel) who have been injured in battle and may not be able to easily use a touch screen for banking.

GoBank also implemented a budget fortune teller feature which created a very informal way of making people think more about transactions before they made them . This is very similar to the Safe To Spend concept that a number of other banks have or are implementing.

Moven have a concept called cred which gamifies good financial behaviour and enables people to benchmark themselves against others and receive advice as to how they can improve.

Mbank have implemented a google like search of transaction history enabling customers to easily find what they are looking for.

Finally Jim played the video advertising Coin, a US company who are trying to make it possible for people to carry one card with them rather than a whole wallet full of plastic. It’s not EMV compatible and it won’t work anywhere outside of the US but it solves a short term customer problem and Coin are fine with that.

Duena Blomstrom, Meniga ‘ Emotional Banking

Using a similar concept to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs banking interfaces are
– Pleasurable
– Usable
– Reliable
– FunctionalOne thing that banks forget to do is ensure that they remember to make the experience of banking pleasurable. As bankers we wear two hats, that of a banker but also of a consumer ‘ we just don’t wear the latter enough.

Duena put forward the concept of happy and sad money. Happy money can become sad money when people make impulse purchases that they can’t afford. There’s also neutral money which is spent on things that are just the cost of living.By defining your savings visually (by uploading a picture for example) it creates an association between emotion and a financial goal.

Are banks able to tell a story with transactions? Are they able to influence when we spend by playing on our emotions? Let’s see’

Ed Cortis, Head of Solution Delivery, Bankwest

Ed talked about the hackathons he has been running at Bankwest oer the last year. He started by covering the three different types of hackathon which he refers to as the Sprint, the 1500m and the Marathon.

The 48 hour hackathons are the sprints, Google’s 20% time is the marathon and variants  such as Atlassian’s FedEx day are the 1500m. The latter is what many are saying is a more effective 20% time. Unfortunately because of all the hype about FedEx day FedEx wrote to Atlassian asking them to stop using their name so now it’s called ShipIt day.

Hackathons aren’t new though, 3M started it first in 1948 with their 15% time however they cancelled it three years later. They came up with some great innovations in that time though including Post-it-notes, Clear bandages and Masking tape.

Many companies around the world now do hackathons and in addition to those already mentioned Facebook and LinkedIn are advocates of the method. LinkedIn also use an incubator tagged on to the end of their hackathons to enable great ideas that don’t quite make it into production. The incubators go for between 30 and 90 days and have resulted in some of the great changes on the LinkedIn platform,

Back to Bankwest and they spend approximately 1600 hours of accumulated time every 3-4 months. The ROI on this has been calculated to be approximately 2 times the investment. Not only do they create hard financial benefits but the hackathons also help to catalyse the agile cultural change in the organisation. Bankwest have also seen their IT staff turnover drop from 12% to 7% since the hackathons were introduced (this happened at the same time as Activity Based Working though).

In terms of learnings, Ed said that the key thing was business engagement and the effort that was put in to organising the events was critical. The pitching of the ideas needs to be great too ‘ if the hackathon teams don’t believe in the ideas then they won’t give it their all. The business are now so excited by the hackathons that they develop far more ideas than the teams are capable of delivering in a hackathon. The excitement led the the first Ninja hackathon where a business stakeholder whose idea did not make the cut bribed some of the teams to work on his idea anyway’.

At Bankwest they wish every day could be a hack day.

Made with Flare More Info’>

There’s a lot I could write here about Clare’s ability to mesmerise the audience with her amazing voice, charm and wit. However what I will say is that she was inspirational in her ability to take a theatre full of bankers, technologists and creative people and within 30 minutes have us all singing ‘What a wonderful world’ in (almost) perfect harmony.

Thanks Clare!

Made with Flare More Info’> Brene walked on stage and presented herself as a vulnerability researcher who for years had interviewed people to understand what made them vulnerable and what that actually meant. Several years ago someone told her that TEDx Houston was coming up and that she should speak about her research in front of the audience there. Why not she thought, I mean how many people would be there? even if she messed it up only a couple of hundred people would see her.

The video was published on Ted.com and the hits started to increase as the video went viral and newspapers and tv shows started to make reference to it. Comments started to appear underneath references to Brene on the Internet’

Her husband and friends told her not to read them but she did and what she saw was a mixture of encouragement, pity and some really awful, horrible words. Someone wrote that people like Brene shouldn’t be on camera talking about vulnerability until they’ve lost a few pounds. Another wrote that maybe she should look into having Botox to remove all the lines on her face.

Brene didn’t take all of this very well at all went into a state of depression, keeping herself at home and eating ice cream. She knew she needed to get herself out of the dark place and after watching back to back episodes of downton abbey she decided to jump onto the Internet to search for inspiration. In a moment of serendipity Google returned her with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt who in 1910 said’

‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.’

Brene then talked about how we can be both brave and afraid at the same time, the two are not mutually exclusive. There is nothing comfortable about courage as it is almost certain you will have your butt kicked at some point. This was something Brene, was brought up to expect with a family motto of ‘Lock and Load’ (she is from Texas) but never really thought about after she started high school.

Recounting a story of a man whom she interviewed as part of her research Brene spoke of a man whose life was constantly expecting disappointment. Every moment of joy was tainted by a thought that it had to end at some point and that there would be disappointment to follow. The man’s wife died when they were in their 80’s and this is when Brene interviewed him. He said that he wished he had embraced the joy of each moment he had rather than living in a constant bubble of pessimism.

Another great story was that of a 21 year old who said on watching Brene’s video took the courage to buy a ring and propose to his girlfriend. Taking the girl out to dinner he got down on one knee and presented the ring to be told that while he was a great guy she thought it best if they started to see other people. More than a little upset he went back to his house-mates and told them the story ‘ they said he was an idiot and should have played it cool by pretending he really wasn’t ‘in to the chick’. He corrected them and said it was the only thing to do and that by daring greatly he was opening himself up to the wonderful things that life has to offer. The guys in the room were overwhelmed with emotion and began crying saying ‘Right on man!’.

Vulnerability is courage and perfectionism is a form of armour, instead we should be striving for excellence and always open to criticism but remember that if you’re not in the arena then Brene won’t want to hear from you!

You can watch Brene’s original TED Talk here or buy Brene’s book here Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Tags: bravery, courage, daring, happiness

Made with Flare More Info’> Dandapani introduced himself as an Australian who knew from an early age that he wanted to be a monk. He graduated University and left for Hawaii to study with Gurudeva (Sivaya Subramuniyaswami) who in the 1970’s had established a Hindu monastery in Kauai.He then talked about the value of meditation and that the ability to focus the mind is becoming more important than ever as our lives become filled with more opportunities for distraction each day. Stating that at school we are told to concentrate but we are never taught how to do this ‘ most of the time we are teaching ourselves how to be distracted’Meditation is something that needs to be done regularly to succeed and practice does not discriminate between good and bad habit. Dandapani suggested that we think of our awareness as a ball of light highlighting different parts of the mind. Focus it on happiness and you will be happy, focus it on being calm and you will be calm etc. Wherever your awareness goes, energy flows towards it.In order to develop your will power it’s important to ensure that you finish what you begin, finish it well and do a little more than you think you are able to do. Over time this will build up to become habitual and it’s something you won’t need to focus on to accomplish in the future.He reflected on the simplicity of his life as a monk in the monastery talking about how he slept on a futon and making his bed each morning was simply a case of rolling it away. These days he sleeps in a queen sized bed with his wife and the bed takes about 15 minutes to make and has ten times more pillows than people ‘ he asks his wife who else will be sleeping in the bed that evening!A balanced life Dandapani surmised is one that is balanced and that we can direct awareness in a proportionate way to the thing that really matter to us. Death is the great impetus and everyone will at some point realise that time is finite and we can only do so much with that which we have. Understanding your desires is important and everyone should be clear on what we want to do ‘ he himself has ten things that he wrote down to guide his life. The two he shared were:
– I am the most important person in my life (if I’m the best I can be then I can be the best for others)
– Make time for the important people in my lifeEvaluate who matters to you. Do they uplift you? If not then be kind to them but don’t be engaged.Dandapani closed by saying ‘I used to help people all the time, I’m in the monk business!’@dandapanillchttp://www.linkedin.com/in/dandapaniDandapani.org

Made with Flare More Info’> Ping Fu strolled on stage in a pair of red, 3D printer manufactured high heel shoes. Her talk was equally as fascinating as her dress sense and started with a recount of her childhood where she served as a soldier in the Chinese army for 6 years.

She didn’t delve into the details of the horrors she experienced but alluded to the suffering that she endured. The one thing that stopped her from breaking down through all of this was something her father had told her when she was young, ‘Be like bamboo, it bends with the wind but never breaks.’ Ping said that she has used this to shape how she lives her life ‘ lots of external factors can have an impact on you but it’s your inner resilience and flexibility that will see you through it all.Having left the army she turned to study and as part of her research at university she studied infanticide in regional china. On her travels she encountered 8-9 month late abortions and other such horrific acts. When her tutor read her thesis he alerted the authorities and she was swiftly kicked out of university then forced to leave country.She applied to and was accepted to a US university where she intended to study English Literature (her previous studies were in Chinese literature) however when she arrived she found that her English language skills were insufficient to enable her to take the course.So Ping switched to Computer Science and her whole life changed, she progressed through academia and took on a teaching position. Along with one of her students she invented the Netscape browser, her University asked her what the next killer app was but she didn’t want to create a dot com ‘ everyone else was doing this at the time.She had a goal of making art interactive and sustainable for everyone. Seeing that art museums were struggling at a time when they charged $2.50 a ticket and the maintainance of the museum averaged $45 per person. She met the inventor of 3D printers and wanted to push this new technology into fields that it was not intended for and the rest is history.Closing her talk on the issue of IP and the ability to duplicate everything she pointed to the food and fashion industries were nothing can be protected and therefore we will see mass innovation in this space in a very short period of timeYou can read Ping’s book Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worldsor reach out to her on linkedin

Shawn’s energy was apparent as soon as he walked onto the stage and the pace at which the words flowed from his mouth was extraordinary so I hopefully managed to convey the key points with this post.

His talk focussed on the question of how do you change your brain to increase happiness?

We spend so much time in work that this is a great place to drive happiness in people. It’s great to see that more employers across the globe are looking to increase not jus the skills of their people but also the level of happiness that they have in their lives. Shawn recounted a story of meeting a CEO of a large US organisation, the gentleman took him for a drive in his Ferrari and wanted to know more about how he could help his staff to be happier people. Shawn began by asking the man why he didn’t wear a seatbelt, the man replied that there was no point as he was an optimist and had a belief that he would not die in his car. This, Shawn told him was optimism at its purest sense but what he taught was that people required a rational sense of optimism’and could he please put his seatbelt on.

Shawn talked about how in Economics we focus on eliminating the outliers in order to create a straight line of data to prove a pattern. Why do we do this though? By eliminating the outliers we focus on the normal, the average and we perpetuate the belief that average is good.

Shawn conducted an experiment with the audience in which we were paired up and had to stare at the other person whilst frowning, the other person had to try to not show any emotion. This was relatively easy and then the challenge was modified to be that the one person had to smile and stare at the other person. It was almost impossible not to replicate the smile. The interesting thing was when Shawn replayed how he conducted the same experiment in Abu Dhabi where the entirely female audience wore veils. Despite this barrier to seeing the other person’s face the women replicated the smile and when ask echo they did this they said it was easy to read the emotion of others through their eyes. Shawn has conducted this all over the world and typically 80-85% of people cannot hide their response to the smile.

There are further experiments that mimic the outcome ‘ of note are the ones conducted a queues in airports where the researcher will stand in line and begin to look anxious, check his or her watch and start bouncing on their toes. Within five minutes the whole queue will be equally anxious and fidgety.

Shawn also studied depression at Harvard University and she case studies of positive outliers who felt privileged to be there. He found that 80% of students experienced depressions and 10% felt suicidal. When questioned why he would study this when from an outsiders perspective these students have everything to be happy about comes down to his theory that it’s not about the external factors but how your brain processes them that matters.

Some amazing research based facts about happiness:

– Children who are happy are able to complete tasks more quickly (e.g putting blocks into the correct holes)

– Happy doctors are 19% more effective at diagnosing problems

– Social cohesion (happiness) is a better indicator of team performance than IQ or experience

– People who are happy are

– 3 times more creative

– 31% more productive

– Exhibit 23% fewer fatigue symptoms

– 10 times more engaged

– 39% more likely to live to 94

– Predictors of success in being happy are typically

– optimism

– strong social connections

– perceiving stress as a challenge to overcome

Lots of jobs require people to be constantly striving for better performance and looking for the flaws in processes that can be fixed in order to help and organisation run more productively. This is a great skill to have however its important to compartmentalize this so that you aren’t constantly trying to fix problems at home ‘ this would only lead to unhappiness.

Shawn recommended a couple of activities, again based on research that looks at why people are happy:

– 3 gratitudes (Emmons & McCulough 2003)

Write down three things each day that you are grateful for. After a month the brain will begin to seek out the positive before the negative.

– The doubler (slatcher and pennebaker 2006)

When you have a positive experience tell someone else about it and hence doubling the experience of joy.

You can watch his original TED talk (which is very similar to the one I heard) here:  Shawn Achor ‘ the happy secret to better work

You can also cyberstalk Shawn here:

I bought his book (The Happiness Advantage) and will post more details once I’ve read it and absorbed the happiness!

Share this:

Like this:

Like Loading…
Tags: happiness, life, Research

Wired for Wonder: Shawn Achor ‘ The Happiness Advantage

Shawn’s energy was apparent as soon as he walked onto the stage and the pace at which the words flowed

Share this:

No Comments

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a lunch hosted by the ACS Foundation where Clive Whincup, CIO Westpac spoke about Future Tech. Firstly, this was the first time I had met and heard Clive talk ‘ I was surprised to find out he was a fellow Northern Englishman and instantly associated with his analogies and sense of humour. Clive is a self-admitted geek and future gazer ‘ in addition to being a cynic of those who purport to be predictors of the future.

He started with a reference to Gartner’s hype cycle and the likelihood of their predictions being at best 5% correct. Not that they were wrong in what they thought would happen but more that they and others underestimate the impact of certain technologies. A great example is the general underestimation of the impact of the Internet ‘ potentially one of the reasons why the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000’s.

Clive referenced the start of his career when technology was something you couldn’t have a conversation with outside of the industry ‘ mainly because nobody could understand it. This changed when in 1996 Clive’s mother called him to ask if he knew Bill Gates and the fact that he was the richest man in the world, and he works in IT. When your mother knows about a technology leader it shows that society is changing in it’s views on the importance of technology. He then referred back to the launch of the iPad and how people wanted one but didn’t know why ‘ both this and mobile computing in general is so enticing for everyday consumers. They’re simple to use, (relatively) simple to write apps and simple to take with you. This simplicity is something that will challenge us more as technology becomes more powerful, will we get to the point where it’s beyond the capability of man and we will need computers to define the future? Watson (a super computer developed by IBM) is being used in American hospitals to diagnose illnesses ‘ it’s 95% as accurate as a doctor with 7 years experience. The only challenge is that Watson is a heuristic system that relies on who is teaching it. There comes a point when human beings can no longer teach computers we will likely get to a point when machines learn from machines.

I hope to still be alive when all of this is reality’.oh hang on, it already is!

I’ve been using Wave for about 6 months now and it’s made keeping on top of my business finances so much easier than my previous tools. I’d used MYOB many years ago and switched to Microsoft Accounting about 4 years back ‘ this was great except it didn’t support the latest version of office and I had to do some hacks to enable it to create invoices using anything but the standard template. Microsoft also stopped supporting the product so it was about time to shift. I’d had a look at Xero and other packages but given the relative simplicity of my business I didn’t need a lot of the features and I was loath to pay an ongoing fee when something simple would suffice.

I was also keen to try one of the cloud hosted offerings so that I could check up on my finances and run invoices without having to lug my laptop around with me. I found Wave via an obscure tech blog and gave it a go and I haven’t looked back since. It’s also pretty good for personal financial management and you can use the same login to manage both ‘ for those who like to keep the two sets of accounts separate it’s easy to use the tab at the top to switch between your business and personal financial lives.

Wave also offer full payroll capabilities and a number of other features that I haven’t even started to try out yet but if you’re thinking about switching accounting packages or starting a new business in 2013 then give Wave a go ‘ you won’t be disappointed!

Wave’s accounting tools are100% free,secure, and accountant-approved.

Share this:

Google+

Warren CammackLike this:

Like Loading…

Leave a Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

Next Bank Sydney 2013

Firstly thanks to Rob Findlay for organising this event, rob’s an ex-NAB boy who’s now living in Singapore and puts on [&hellip

Share this:

No Comments