by Blogger | Jul 15, 2023 | Lifestyle
Smartphone users have become “human snails carrying our homes in our pockets”, with a tendency to ignore friends and family in favour of their device, according to certain studies.
A team of anthropologists from UCL spent more than a year documenting smartphone use in nine countries around the world, from Ireland to Cameroon, and found that far from being trivial toys, people felt the same way about their devices as they did about their homes.
“The smartphone is no longer just a device that we use, it’s become the place where we live,” said Prof Daniel Miller, who led the study. “The flip side of that for human relationships is that at any point, whether over a meal, a meeting or other shared activity, a person we’re with can just disappear, having ‘gone home’ to their smartphone.”
This phenomenon was leading to the “death of proximity” when it comes to face-to-face interaction, he said.
“This behaviour, and the frustration, disappointment or even offence it can cause, is what we’re calling the ‘death of proximity’. We are learning to live with the jeopardy that even when we are physically together, we can be socially, emotionally or professionally alone.”
If there’s one specific cause for that transformation, the researchers suggest it may be chat apps such as WhatsApp, which they call the “heart of the smartphone”. “For many users across most regions, a single app now represents the most important thing that the smartphone does for them” – LINE in Japan, for instance, WeChat in China, and WhatsApp in Brazil.
“These apps are the platforms where siblings come together to take care of elderly parents, proud parents send out endless photographs of their babies, and migrants reconnect with families; they are the means by which you can still be a grandparent even if living in another country.”
Unlike many explorations of smartphone use, the study specifically focused on older adults, “those who consider themselves neither young nor elderly”.
“At first an emphasis upon older people may appear strange because we have become so used to concentrating upon youth, once thought the natural users of smartphones,” the researchers wrote, “however, a focus upon older people has helped to extract the study of smartphones from any specific demographic niche so that they may be considered as the possession of humanity as a whole.”
Even with that distinct focus, the researchers find that around the world smartphones are basic necessities. “The smartphone is perhaps the first object to challenge the house itself (and possibly also the workplace) in terms of the amount of time we dwell in it while awake,” they conclude, coining the term “transportal home” to describe the effect. “We are always ‘at home’ in our smartphone. We have become human snails carrying our home in our pockets.”
The researchers also describe how this “home” can be far from being a place of respite, with work communications and social media both having the potential to encroach.
They observe: “In other ways, the smartphone may reduce the prior experience of home as a refuge. Employees may now be expected to remain in contact with their work, for instance, even after leaving the workplace. A child bullied by other pupils at school now finds little or no respite through coming back to her or his home.”
But some cautioned against an overly negative view. “The smartphone is helping us create and recreate a vast range of helpful behaviours, from re-establishing extended families to creating new spaces for healthcare and political debate,” he said. It is only by looking at the vastly different uses and contexts that we can fully understand the consequences of smartphones for people’s lives around the world.”
by Blogger | Jul 15, 2023 | Lifestyle
Most people are creative from birth. When we are young, we like pretend play, ask bizarre questions, and make dinosaur-like drawings of blobs. But throughout time, many of us begin to squelch those urges as a result of socialization and formal education. We get the ability to be more circumspect, careful, and analytical. There seems to be two groups in the world: “creatives” and “noncreatives,” and far too many individuals inadvertently or consciously place themselves in the latter.
But we also understand that success in every field or sector depends on inventiveness. It’s the quality that chief executives all around the world are looking for most in leaders today, according to a recent IBM survey. Nobody can dispute the role that innovation has played in the development and ongoing success of several businesses, from upstarts like Facebook and Google to industry giants like Procter & Gamble and General Electric.
Fear of the Messy Unknown
Creative thinking in business begins with having empathy for your customers (whether they’re internal or external), and you can’t get that sitting behind a desk. Yes, we know it’s cozy in your office. Everything is reassuringly familiar; information comes from predictable sources; contradictory data are weeded out and ignored. Out in the world, it’s more chaotic. You have to deal with unexpected findings, with uncertainty, and with irrational people who say things you don’t want to hear. But that is where you find insights—and creative breakthroughs. Venturing forth in pursuit of learning, even without a hypothesis, can open you up to new information and help you discover nonobvious needs. Otherwise, you risk simply reconfirming ideas you’ve already had or waiting for others—your customers, your boss, or even your competitors—to tell you what to do.
Fear of Being Judged
If the scribbling, singing, dancing kindergartner symbolizes unfettered creative expression, the awkward teenager represents the opposite: someone who cares—deeply—about what other people think. It takes only a few years to develop that fear of judgment, but it stays with us throughout our adult lives, often constraining our careers. Most of us accept that when we are learning, say, to ski, others will see us fall down until practice pays off. But we can’t risk our business-world ego in the same way. As a result, we self-edit, killing potentially creative ideas because we’re afraid our bosses or peers will see us fail. We stick to “safe” solutions or suggestions. We hang back, allowing others to take risks. But you can’t be creative if you are constantly censoring yourself.
Half the battle is to resist judging yourself. If you can listen to your own intuition and embrace more of your ideas (good and bad), you’re already partway to overcoming this fear. So take baby steps, as Bandura’s clients did. Instead of letting thoughts run through your head and down the drain, capture them systematically in some form of idea notebook. Keep a whiteboard and marker in the shower. Schedule daily “white space” in your calendar, where your only task is to think or take a walk and daydream. When you try to generate ideas, shoot for 100 instead of 10. Defer your own judgment and you’ll be surprised at how many ideas you have—and like—by the end of the week.
Also, try using new language when you give feedback, and encourage your collaborators to do the same. At the d.school, our feedback typically starts with “I like…” and moves on to “I wish…” instead of just passing judgment with put-downs like “That will never work.” Opening with the positives and then using the first person for suggestions signals that “This is just my opinion and I want to help,” which makes listeners more receptive to your ideas.
Fear of the First Step
Even when we want to embrace our creative ideas, acting on them presents its own challenges. Creative efforts are hardest at the beginning. The writer faces the blank page; the teacher, the start of school; businesspeople, the first day of a new project. In a broader sense, we’re also talking about fear of charting a new path or breaking out of your predictable workflow. To overcome this inertia, good ideas are not enough. You need to stop planning and just get started—and the best way to do that is to stop focusing on the huge overall task and find a small piece you can tackle right away.
Fear of Losing Control
Confidence doesn’t simply mean believing your ideas are good. It means having the humility to let go of ideas that aren’t working and to accept good ideas from other people. When you abandon the status quo and work collaboratively, you sacrifice control over your product, your team, and your business. But the creative gains can more than compensate. Again, you can start small. If you’re facing a tough challenge, try calling a meeting with people fresh to the topic. Or break the routine of a weekly meeting by letting the most junior person in the room set the agenda and lead it. Look for opportunities to cede control and leverage different perspectives.
by Blogger | Jul 15, 2023 | Lifestyle
For managers of large corporations, these are uncertain times. They have a poor track record of dealing with significant, disruptive change even before the Internet and globalization. For instance, only one department store—Dayton Hudson—became a pioneer in cheap retailing out of hundreds of others. In the personal computer industry, none of the minicomputer businesses were successful. It is difficult for medical and business schools to adapt their curricula quickly enough to produce the managers and doctors that the markets want. The list might continue.
Not that management at large corporations are blind to impending disruptive shifts. Ordinarily, they can. They also have the means to fight back. The majority of large businesses have highly skilled managers and specialists, robust product lines, top-notch technological know-how, and substantial financial resources. The practice of carefully considering the capabilities of their organization as well as the talents of specific individuals is what managers lack.
Finding the ideal individual for the position and training staff to excel in their assignments are two qualities that distinguish exceptional managers. Unfortunately, most managers make the assumption that if every employee on a project is well-suited to their position, then the company they work for would be as well. That is not always the case. Even if two groups of equally qualified individuals worked in different organizations, the results would be very different. This is due to the fact that organizations possess capacities independent of the people and other resources they include. Good managers need to be proficient at evaluating people’s talents and impairments as well as their general abilities in order to constantly succeed.
This article provides managers with a framework to aid them in comprehending the potential of their enterprises. They will see how, even as their company’s core competencies expand, its limitations become more clearly defined. They will be able to identify various types of change and formulate sensible organizational responses to the opportunities that each type of change presents. And it will provide some practical advice that goes against a lot of what is presumed in our can-do corporate culture: the worst course of action may be to make significant changes to the current organization if an organization is facing huge change, such as a disruptive invention. Managers risk destroying the fundamental capabilities that support an enterprise in their attempts to transform it.
Managers need to know exactly what kinds of change the current organization can and cannot handle before jumping into the fray. We’ll first take a methodical look at how to identify a company’s fundamental skills on an organizational level, and then we’ll look at how those capabilities migrate as organizations develop and mature in order to assist them in doing that.
Where Capabilities Reside
Our research suggests that three factors affect what an organization can and cannot do: its resources, its processes, and its values. When thinking about what sorts of innovations their organization will be able to embrace, managers need to assess how each of these factors might affect their organization’s capacity to change.
Resources.
When they ask the question, “What can this company do?” the place most managers look for the answer is in its resources—both the tangible ones like people, equipment, technologies, and cash, and the less tangible ones like product designs, information, brands, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers. Without doubt, access to abundant, high-quality resources increases an organization’s chances of coping with change. But resource analysis doesn’t come close to telling the whole story.
Processes.
The second factor that affects what a company can and cannot do is its processes. By processes, we mean the patterns of interaction, coordination, communication, and decision making employees use to transform resources into products and services of greater worth. Such examples as the processes that govern product development, manufacturing, and budgeting come immediately to mind. Some processes are formal, in the sense that they are explicitly defined and documented. Others are informal: they are routines or ways of working that evolve over time. The former tend to be more visible, the latter less visible.
One of the dilemmas of management is that processes, by their very nature, are set up so that employees perform tasks in a consistent way, time after time. They are meant not to change or, if they must change, to change through tightly controlled procedures. When people use a process to do the task it was designed for, it is likely to perform efficiently. But when the same process is used to tackle a very different task, it is likely to perform sluggishly. Companies focused on developing and winning FDA approval for new drug compounds, for example, often prove inept at developing and winning approval for medical devices because the second task entails very different ways of working. In fact, a process that creates the capability to execute one task concurrently defines disabilities in executing other tasks.1
The most important capabilities and concurrent disabilities aren’t necessarily embodied in the most visible processes, like logistics, development, manufacturing, or customer service. In fact, they are more likely to be in the less visible, background processes that support decisions about where to invest resources—those that define how market research is habitually done, how such analysis is translated into financial projections, how plans and budgets are negotiated internally, and so on. It is in those processes that many organizations’ most serious disabilities in coping with change reside.
Values.
The third factor that affects what an organization can and cannot do is its values. Sometimes the phrase “corporate values” carries an ethical connotation: one thinks of the principles that ensure patient well-being for Johnson & Johnson or that guide decisions about employee safety at Alcoa. But within our framework, “values” has a broader meaning. We define an organization’s values as the standards by which employees set priorities that enable them to judge whether an order is attractive or unattractive, whether a customer is more important or less important, whether an idea for a new product is attractive or marginal, and so on. Prioritization decisions are made by employees at every level. Among salespeople, they consist of on-the-spot, day-to-day decisions about which products to push with customers and which to de-emphasize. At the executive tiers, they often take the form of decisions to invest, or not, in new products, services, and processes.
The larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to train employees throughout the organization to make independent decisions about priorities that are consistent with the strategic direction and the business model of the company. A key metric of good management, in fact, is whether such clear, consistent values have permeated the organization.
But consistent, broadly understood values also define what an organization cannot do. A company’s values reflect its cost structure or its business model because those define the rules its employees must follow for the company to prosper. If, for example, a company’s overhead costs require it to achieve gross profit margins of 40%, then a value or decision rule will have evolved that encourages middle managers to kill ideas that promise gross margins below 40%. Such an organization would be incapable of commercializing projects targeting low-margin markets—such as those in e-commerce—even though another organization’s values, driven by a very different cost structure, might facilitate the success of the same project.
Different companies, of course, embody different values. But we want to focus on two sets of values in particular that tend to evolve in most companies in very predictable ways. The inexorable evolution of these two values is what makes companies progressively less capable of addressing disruptive change successfully.
As in the previous example, the first value dictates the way the company judges acceptable gross margins. As companies add features and functions to their products and services, trying to capture more attractive customers in premium tiers of their markets, they often add overhead cost. As a result, gross margins that were once attractive become unattractive. For instance, Toyota entered the North American market with the Corona model, which targeted the lower end of the market. As that segment became crowded with look-alike models from Honda, Mazda, and Nissan, competition drove down profit margins. To improve its margins, Toyota then developed more sophisticated cars targeted at higher tiers. The process of developing cars like the Camry and the Lexus added costs to Toyota’s operation. It subsequently decided to exit the lower end of the market; the margins had become unacceptable because the company’s cost structure, and consequently its values, had changed.
In a departure from that pattern, Toyota recently introduced the Echo model, hoping to rejoin the entry-level tier with a $10,000 car. It is one thing for Toyota’s senior management to decide to launch this new model. It’s another for the many people in the Toyota system—including its dealers—to agree that selling more cars at lower margins is a better way to boost profits and equity values than selling more Camrys, Avalons, and Lexuses. Only time will tell whether Toyota can manage this down-market move. To be successful with the Echo, Toyota’s management will have to swim against a very strong current—the current of its own corporate values.
The second value relates to how big a business opportunity has to be before it can be interesting. Because a company’s stock price represents the discounted present value of its projected earnings stream, most managers feel compelled not just to maintain growth but to maintain a constant rate of growth. For a $40 million company to grow 25%, for instance, it needs to find $10 million in new business the next year. But a $40 billion company needs to find $10 billion in new business the next year to grow at that same rate. It follows that an opportunity that excites a small company isn’t big enough to be interesting to a large company. One of the bittersweet results of success, in fact, is that as companies become large, they lose the ability to enter small, emerging markets. This disability is not caused by a change in the resources within the companies—their resources typically are vast. Rather, it’s caused by an evolution in values.
The problem is magnified when companies suddenly become much bigger through mergers or acquisitions. Executives and Wall Street financiers who engineer megamergers between already-huge pharmaceutical companies, for example, need to take this effect into account. Although their merged research organizations might have more resources to throw at new product development, their commercial organizations will probably have lost their appetites for all but the biggest blockbuster drugs. This constitutes a very real disability in managing innovation. The same problem crops up in high-tech industries as well. In many ways, Hewlett-Packard’s recent decision to split itself into two companies is rooted in its recognition of this problem.
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