Why I will never be the same after Webstock 2017
Webstock 2017 was, by accident and design, the most powerful Webstock of the eight I have been to.
It was the perfect antidote to the malign influences that have been dominating headlines in recent months.
That didn’t mean it was an easy Webstock. In fact it’s the only Webstock – the only conference – where I found I had been welling up on several occasions during the day. And I’m not generally a welling-up kind of guy – at public events anyway.
I have been inspired and enlightened to resurrect this old blog by many of the speakers’ incredible insights.
But this first post is in direct response to the events involving the speaker right at the end that have already received much comment, social media attention and obvious painful angst from the conference organisers.
Like many at the conference I spent a lot of the weekend thinking about my own reaction – or non-reaction – to a display of unreconstructed sexism.
I talked it over with my wife. Who kindly explained to me it was an obvious example of the conditioning that patriarchy creates in most people. I talked about it with some of the women I was at the conference with who said it happens so often in their lives that their reactions to this sort of behaviour becomes dulled. But I was way beyond dull in that moment.
And I talked about it over coffee with a business acquaintance who had also been at Webstock. We had met up to talk business. We ended up talking about sexism and our reaction to Friday. We talked about how in a strange way it made the inspirational, nourishing parts of the conference even more inspirational and nourishing. It was a brief, but brutal yang to the perfect yin of the rest of the conference.
I left our coffee with my thinking over the weekend consolidating. Vowing to not just talk about it. To become more attuned and more mindful – and to break my patriarchal conditioning. I admit it shouldn’t have needed this event for me to do this but change is never perfect.
Tash and Mike – it is clear from the honest and heart-wrenching responses you have given, you have been through a personal hell this weekend. I know we all send our love to you in what was a nightmare situation for you, but your reaction to it has been as inspirational as the rest of the conference.
Through a strange mixture of accident and design Webstock 2017 has again rocked the world for a number of us. And this time for me it goes beyond a post-conference enthusiasm.
Webstock you have changed my life.
Why Blockchain and IoT can help save the Earth
The internet and associated technology are evolving constantly. But we are now entering a new phase of digital transformation driven by two step-change advances, Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IOT).
As well as driving a whole host of digital advances, I also think this transformation can potentially lead us to become more responsible inhabitants of the non-digital world.
The combination of Blockchain and IOT may lead us to a world in which everything around us is connected and in which we essentially inhabit a global computer. Depending on your technophilia know this sentence will probably give an image either of Skynet or a more benevolent global digital society operated by smart machines.
If this sounds ridiculously futuristic take a trip back in time to 1994, and how people wrestled with the concept of the internet then, so simple to us now, so confusing then…
You’ll note the attempts by the personalities on the couch to explain it are so painful a more informed audience member is prompted to volunteer a more fact-based explanation, but which ends up being reduced by the lady on the right to “so it’s a computer billboard”.
Which was probably true about most sites in the early 90s but its limited vision missed the potential of the internet over the next two decades to transform communications, business, education, social interactions and society in general.
New Kid on the Blockchain
Today many like William Mougayar have been reliving the Today Show experience and engaging in the vexing task of trying to explain this new thing.
I think Mougayar is probably one of the best writers on the subject at the moment. If you want to go a bit deeper this is a good post and he’s just published a very readable book.
But for most people these explanations are a bit like explaining in 1994 the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web – when the conversation we should be having is the aspirational vision that writers like William Gibson were conjuring at the time:
“I sometimes suspect that we’re seeing something in the Internet as significant as the birth of cities. It’s something that profound and with that sort of infinite possibilities. It’s really something new; it’s a new kind of civilization. And of course the thing I love about it is that it’s transnational, non-profit – it isn’t owned by anyone – and it’s shape is completely user driven. What it is is determined by the needs of millions and millions of users. So cyberspace is evolving to meet the needs of individuals all over the world. – William Gibson, 1995“
Or as someone else put it: “Forget how the technology works and focus on what it does.”
The way I see it is that Blockchain is leap transforming the internet from a global network of information storage and content sharing, to a global network of value storage and value transfers. Just like the information internet disrupted information and content based industries like news, books and music, this next evolution will do the same first to any industry that manages value: banks; payment networks; exchanges; lawyers; auditors.
It creates new digital paradigms for the likes of finance and even identity and its decentralised, immutable nature means there would be true digital trust at a global level, like never before.
Just like the digital disruption of the last 20 years that tore information industries apart, this new model internet will knock down walls and break up silos of industries so far largely uninterrupted. It will also move the world closer to the promise of Ethereum – essentially a world computer.
Clever things
Now combine Blockchain with the other oncoming evolution, the Internet of Things, as IBM are investigating and I think that a technology revolution could be harnessed to drive environmental sustainability.
By 2020 Cisco estimates 50bn physical devices will be digitally networked with sensors and transmitting data about what they do – from vehicles, wearables and healthcare to connected homes which will even include, for example, smart toilets.
The smart toilet will use sensors to report on your health. It will save lives through early warnings on health issues. But it could also save water and even prevent pollution. Today I may carelessly drop an earbud (or worse) into a toilet bowl and there is only my conscience standing between me and the action of flushing that object into our waterways. However a toilet that can detect pregnancy or prostate issues could easily be programmed to stubbornly refuse to flush non-biodegradeable litter.
Smarter life on earth
Now take this beyond the humble, possibly comical-sounding idea of a smart toilet and imagine a world of connected devices monitoring and recording our other activities and their impacts on ourselves or the natural world. Devices can be programmed with environmentally sustainable actions such as optimising buildings for energy use; alerts for water leaks; automated lighting adjusters to save energy; monitoring soil and air.
And with Blockchain this information and the actions around it would be lodged in an immutable, trusted global network that can’t be lobbied or bribed or corrupted.
Now it’s not just my conscience between the earbud, the flush button and the deep blue sea. This digitised world could actually enforce doing the right thing by the environment.
Within this future world, populated by humans and their smart devices, the smart toilet is just one example of how this next generation internet could compel us to become more at one with the planet we call home.
PS: Ethereum conference in New Zealand next week
If you want to learn more about the business opportunities around Blockchain and Ethereum come to www.ethereum.nz next week in Auckland and Wellington. You will hear from five speakers from all over the world, including Ethereum founder and CTO Taylor Gerring, and have the opportunity to ask questions
Digital disruption: A personal journey to cutting the cable
We cut the cable recently. After consuming cable TV since the 1990s suddenly the scrolling acres of EPG content are no more – and guess what? We’re saving money and lives are slightly better for it.
The issue had been bubbling away for some time. Over the past three years out of the 90+ channels Vodafone provided us via the T-Box, I had progressively found my viewing being whittled down to a core of Sky Sports rugby; the occasional movie; news and oddly, the terrestrial TV fodder based around news time.
What had changed over that period? The first crack in our relationship with cable TV was the purchase of Apple TV. I bought the little black box without really having any idea of how we would use it – but encouraged by the enthusiastic comments by a work colleague.
Our broadband plan of the time wasn’t huge so there was a disincentive to streaming lots of movies but we had fun sharing You Tube clips from our other devices on the big screen. At the time United Video were still receiving Friday and Saturday night visits from us to choose a movie we’d all like. This was a long-standing behaviour that had begun decades earlier with video stores in the towns and cities I lived in in NZ or the UK. Using DVD stores also involved racking up a fair amount in overdue fines when the discs weren’t returned on time. But this was a familiar and well-worn end-of-week ritual for us all.
The second crack in the cable relationship was two poor decisions by our providers. One was Sky TV’s decision not to secure at any cost the rights to screen English Premier League football on Sky Sports in New Zealand, allowing Coliseum Sports to step into the gap adn offer the matches streaming over the internet. Recently Spark entered a joint venture with Coliseum to create Lightbox Sport.
The third issue was the obvious lack of investment by our provider in updating the usability of the dated EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) or any move to provide viewing on demand, rather than via a set schedule or by recording. An issue that was exacerbated when the recording option so often failed by CUTTING OFF THE LAST FIVE MINUTES of the programme (my screaming caps indicate the scars have still not healed).
As a content provider, not delivering the finale of a gripping drama or thriller is pretty much the highest order of epic failure. It was happening too often and from conversations with friends and colleagues – it was happening to everyone, not just us.
However, while Vodafone and Sky were losing us on the content side – Apple TV and Premier League Pass were demanding more data and it was right now that our relationship with Vodafone actually peaked as we doubled our data plan – but the critical point for Vodafone was that it wasn’t solely their content driving our consumption any more.
Fast forward a year from that time and our use of the “DVD store” was practically zero. Tellingly the DVD store was now diversifying about one-third of its floorspace into selling confectionary alongside DVD rentals. It didn’t solve the underlying problem however.
The agonies of choosing a movie we all like had now moved from the DVD store shelves to the Apple TV movie selector.
The next step change was that our two youngest children were now near teenagers and also accessing and consuming video content – mostly videos about their favourite game at the time, Mindcraft or Pokemon. After a period of constantly exceeding our monthly broadband limit I realised we were at a crossroads. I could attempt to continue with a campaign of curbing video access that had limited success or… Or I could look at the behaviour of my millennial offspring and truly understand what David Bowie meant when he said that one day music would be like running water or electricity. I chose to be swept along in this deluge and cranked up our broadband package to an unlimited usage.
Enter Netflix. Not the emasculated NZ version, which has one-eighth of the content of the US version, but the teeming ocean of more than 1100 content titles of movies, TV series and documentaries all without adverts and all available in HD for $NZ15 a month. Unlimited. On demand. Available on any screen in our house any time we want it. No fixed term contract. BAM!
Our relationship with Vodafone and Sky was over before we knew it. One month into Netflix (plus Lightbox for Vikings) we realised we hadn’t watched cable that much at all. Certainly not enough to justify the $90-odd per month we were playing. The only hook cable had in us (well me) was sport outside of the EPL. For me that means the Crusaders and the All Blacks. But, in the interests of experimentation, I reckoned I could survive until the World Cup in September.
In retrospect we pulled the plug 7 days too soon. We gave back the T Box two days before Cricket World Cup semi final. Our contract still had some time to run and luckily I found I still had access to Sky Go – enabling my sporty son and I to watch the most thrilling game of cricket we’ve ever seen – in between Sky Go’s technical problems that required the equivalent of a reboot every 20-30 minutes. After I tweeted my displeasure I found my access to SkyGo had gone completely (no doubt coincidence – I don’t think my tweets carry that much punch) and went out and purchased a Freeview box for $89 to watch the final via Prime, and also to add in access to “old style” TV just in case the need arises.
Now a couple of months into internet TV there has been more of a change than just access to a universe of amazing content. We have become very discriminating viewers. Instead of opting for the easy family viewing option of reality TV documentaries (cops; sharks; city dwellers on desert islands…) we watch science documentaries like Cosmos; even venturing into Ted talks on robotics with the boys. There are no adverts to divert our attention so we focus solidly on a good documentary. Sometimes we split off into individual screens for watching, gaming, reading, interacting and we also gather together to watch a shared movie or TV. But our screen time is now active rather than passive. And there’s been one other big change.
For the first time in a long time I have come home to a silent house where people are reading, drawing or playing. Our TV consumption has moved from the hypnotic cycle of programmes and ads to watching specific movies, TV shows and documentaries. Admittedly with compelling series like House of Cards or The Fall my wife and I will binge on two or three episodes at a time. But it is a very different viewing experience from the passive viewing of broadcast TV. A straw poll of family members was unanimous – we feel in control.
For the broadcasters this is a real challenge. Apart from product placement we are immune from TV advertising. In fact we just can’t take the barrage of yelling and flashing images when we take a peak back into broadcast TV via the Freeview box. And “TV events” now come to me only via social media, filtered – just like how I get my news.
Yes I am in the early adopter/early majority camp but this is the first light airs of massive disruption – because there’s a growing movement away from the broadcast nature of TV. And how are the large NZ media companies dealing with this right now? In what has been likened to emulating King Canute they are lawyering up and making fighting noises to maintain the status quo.
But as NBR writer Chris Keall writes: “Global mode services let you skirt old-school exclusive distribution monopolies, not bust copyright. You still pay your money, and content makers still get their slice.”
As he reflects, the old model is now fundamentally broken. Which will make for interesting viewing from the consumers’ perspective.
Why online means the end of IT as we know it
If you work for any fast growing company these days it’s highly likely that enabling customers to access your products and services through online is a key plank in your company’s strategy and success.
Which, in an age of mass technology consumerism, probably also means that your company has a technology-enabled workforce to support your customers. And your Information Technology department has a dual focus of supporting the enterprise as well as an external focus in creating great digital customer experiences.
And what I’ve firmly come to believe is that this situation of having the most technologically-skilled part of your workforce getting it both ways is bad for your IT department and bad for your business.
If you look back this wasn’t the nature of IT departments when IT departments originated back in the 60s and 70s. Your original IT department was born out of the teams of skilled technicians who made the telephone network in your organisation work; kept the fax machines humming and were the team responsible for grappling with the implication of the 4004 microprocessor post 1971.
But because most companies weren’t technology-focused, IT weren’t part of the “business” as we’d recognise “the business” now. They were the electrical engineers who kept the lights on and spent their days ensuring the workforce could communicate and share information as efficiently as possible. They would never, or rarely, deal with the needs of external customers.
With the dawning of the internet and the growth of digital businesses in the 80s and 90s it suddenly occurred to businesses that these backroom guys were also the ones who were also able to code web pages; build servers and were suddenly essential to digitally enablement. IT’s role was now about building internet experiences and more for your external customers and also keeping the phones and fax machines running.
So the technology guys suddenly became absolutely key to business strategies and the customer experience. For technology companies founded in the 1970s like Apple, Microsoft the IT department was the business. To work for one of these companies you obviously needed to understand technology – but equally obviously your customer needs as well. These technology companies, so familiar now, changed the face of business and IT forever.
Amazon is a company founded in the mid 1980s and whose success is purely due to embracing the new paradigm from the get go. This was an IT department selling books to the world who then ended up selling IT to the world. Their CEO Jeff Bezos came from Wall Street but was, and is, intensely customer focused.
True to his words Bezos created a company that didn’t separate the IT department from the business, its IT department was its business.
And Amazon’s success should be a template for all companies worth their salt these days – and for most digital start-ups this is the case. The techies aren’t in the basement cooking up the medicine – they’re in customer-facing delivery teams working alongside the product and marketing teams.
The focus of an IT department should be not just on satisfying internal customers. They need to be part of the business (if not the business) that’s working to satisfy the customers who buy your products and services. Drag them out of the basement and get them in front of real customers.
In the companies I’ve worked for in the last 10 years (Orange; Telecom NZ and Kiwibank) I’ve experienced both ends of the spectrum as the pendulum has swung between IT teams being integrated or not integrated into business units. In that time the most success I have seen is when IT hasn’t been IT, but been driving the business from the front. And that’s why many companies, including my own, are embracing Agile software development and delivery.
That’s great for external customers – and internal staff too:
Google CIO Ben Fried: “I see a lot of CIOs spending a lot of time — which is very important to do — on major business initiatives. But I often see an inadequate amount of time spent where the day-to-day, most frequent touchpoints are, which is with all the other ways the people in the company are their users. One of the big changes that has come with the mass consumerization of technology is that IT needs to flip that around a little and spend more time focusing on the overall employee experience.” There’s more from him here.
With online being a key strategy for all large businesses I believe the pendulum is now stuck and the era of large IT departments is over. IT is our business.
An experience with Google Glass
I had an experience with some step-change technology recently that reinforced how sometimes your opinion is worthless until you’ve actually tried something.
I’m talking about Google Glass. Last month I had the great privilege of visiting Google’s Googleplex campus in Mountain View, San Francisco, and found myself wearing a pair of the internet connected eyeware.
Like every other person on the tech-obsessive-geek-scale I had read much and watched as many videos as I could when these glasses were first announced. I had followed Google’s founder and Head of Innovation Sergey Brin as introduced Google Glass through a team sky-diving from a Zeppelin, filming their descent live on the internet using Google Glasses.
I had also looked at the media around the first prototype, bulkier versions and thought – “no way”. And I’d certainly had more than a few water-cooler conversations around the potentially socially-awkward nature of talking to someone else while wearing a pair of glasses behind which you may or may not be searching information on that person or filming them.
“Remember when video cameras first came on phones and everyone was worried you’d be filmed in the changing room”, remarked one male colleague.
“What if you’re standing by a children’s playground wearing one of those? How could you prove you’re just looking at the sports results and not some videophile.”
The whole action of someone’s eye’s flicking upwards and away from you to look at an invisible screen while in conversation just silently screamed as being socially unacceptable.
And to be honest my encounter with Google Glasses at Mountain View couldn’t answer those questions completely. But what I did learn was that as a user the experience was quite amazing and which left me hungering for more. The experience was so positive any previous doubts suddenly vanished into the air like soap bubbles.
The frames are very very light, stylish but robust. I wear glasses everyday and they felt just as comfortable as my frames do.
The right hand frame arm is where the glasses gear is kept and that was barely wider than some designer frames you get on regular glasses.
To fire up Google Glass you simply say “Ok Glass” and suddenly there’s a screen that seems about the size of a widescreen TV hovering at what appears a metre or so away from your eyes, slightly up to the right. When you look up at it the screen it appears to move down into your path of vision.
You can use a number of voice commands to call up maps; Google search; take a picture and other commands to send or share via Google+, Facebook or Twitter. Or you can tap and swipe down with your fingers on the right hand frame.
Sound comes through sound waves going through your cranium, rather than via your ears. It feels a bit weird at first but then is quite natural. And apparently the Project X team at Google have had reports from deaf users that they can now hear things again – an amazing and unexpected spin-off.
You are suddenly hands-free on everything your smartphone can offer you. It really is like the first time you take your hands off the handlebars of a bike – it’s a rush! You act a bit crazy.
After a few minutes it was amazing how comfortable it felt having the internet literally right in your face. I felt like a learner driver – and my New Zealand accent was giving the glasses some pause for thought – but very quickly it had gone from feeling like a sci-fi experience to one of usefulness and joy.
Sergey Brin’s vision right from the start of founding Google was that one day search queries would be irrelevant – the right information would just come straight to you. He believes Google Glass is that vision made manifest. He talks more about the philosophy of Google Glass in this Ted Talk.
I believe there is one set of Google Glasses in New Zealand being worn by an artist somewhere down south. He was given them by Google to aid with sculpture but now apparently uses them in every part of his day. He told them he couldn’t go back to life without them.
If I’d read that before wearing them I probably would’ve scoffed at that remark. Google Glass are definitely the shock of the new – and I guess sometimes you just have to physically experience the new for it to make sense.
Tesla and wireless electricity – a 157th birthday commemoration
Who knew the internet was envisioned in 1908 – five years after the Wright Brothers flight and the year New Zealand completed its first North Island end-to-end passenger rail service?
Nikola Tesla – luminary in all respects
In 1908 the Serbian-American physicist and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla in predicted: “It will be possible for a businessman in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London… An instrument not bigger than a watch will enable its bearer to hear anywhere… music or song [or] the speech of a political leader… delivered in some other place, however distant.”
Tesla was definitely a man out of his time – a visionary and inventor in the same league of Da Vinci, and today would be his 157th birthday. As well as envisioning the internet Tesla’s list of inventions is incredible – radio (US Supreme Court recognised his precedence over Marconi in 1943); remote controls; alternating current and the AC motor.
So my post today is in honour of this great man who, like Turing, was treated badly by his time. For more on this there’s a great, vitriolic Oatmeal post on on why Tesla was the greatest geek that ever lived.
Nikola Tesla holding a gas-filled phosphor-coated light bulb which was illuminated without wires by an electromagnetic field from the “Tesla Coil”.
But while I am in awe of Tesla’s inventions such as AC and radio – it’s his work in wireless electricity that really really spins my wheels and, because it’s his birthday, I wanted to profile that stream of his genius and where it is today. While Tesla achieved fame his inventions never received the backing to achieve their vision. He died on January 7th, 1943 in the Hotel New Yorker, where he had lived for the last ten years of his life.
As I write at my desk my mind is immediately drawn to the web of of wires that powers the six entertainment devices in our living room and the multiple other electrical things around the house. But mainly the constant, half-starved nature of my smartphones that crave electricity on a daily basis like ultra-marathon runners crave carbs. Imagine a world free of wires and in which devices magically power up without ever having to plug in.
Tesla successfully proved wireless electricity in 1891 – the same year he became an American citizen.
At his lab, Tesla produced streams of electricity 135 feet long. People walking along the street observed sparks jumping between their feet and the ground. Electricity sprang from taps when turned on. Light bulbs within 100 feet of the lab glowed even when turned off. For Tesla I would imagine the vision of our world literally wrapped in wire would have been nightmarish.
While Tesla was famously predicting an unprecedented global industrial revolution from wireless electricity in 1906 – in 2013 the focus is more how this technology can address specific commercial and personal painpoints.
A New Zealand company is leading the world in delivering the vision of a wireless electronic future.
PowerbyProxi is a start-up that’s come out of Auckland University’s engineering department and which has taken some ground-breaking wireless power technology innovations and created business and consumer products. They say wireless power today is a proximity based system – to do things efficiently power can be transmitted over a maximum distance of about 8 inches. So customer benefits and value have to be derived from within that fundamental design envelope.
The company was founded in 2006 by Fady Mishriki and Greg Cross – 101 years after Tesla closed up shop and laid off his staff after losing backing for a 187ft tall tower in New York that would transmit both signals and power without wires to any point on the globe. The huge magnifying transmitter would turn the earth into a gigantic dynamo which would project its electricity in unlimited amounts anywhere in the world. His financial backer, J P Morgan, infamously pulled the plug on this by declaring: “If anyone can draw on the power, where do we put the meter?” (Source – Tesla society biography)
So fast-forward to 2013 and Power By Proxi has invented a way to wirelessly transfer efficient power in the most difficult places: from a miniaturized receiver inside a AA battery to a mission critical solution in the demanding and hostile environment of a wind turbine control system. The company has worked with customers on over 50 real world projects initially focusing on complex industrial applications.
But it also has created the first commercial wireless recharging system capable of 3D power transfer, regardless of how the device is positioned in the recharging unit.
In the US in 2006, Marin Soljacic, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sent wireless electricity across a room to light a 60-watt bulb. Soljacic used electromagnetic induction, but with a twist. By tuning the sending and receiving coils in his electromagnetic field to resonate at the same frequency and engage only at that frequency (the way glass will shatter when struck by sound waves of just the right pitch), the current is focused and bypasses everything else, humans included. Resonant coupling, as Soljacic’s process is known, is far more efficient than Tesla’s attempts, and safer too.
Soljacic has a company called WiTricity, and he can now send 3,000 watts across a room—or a garage, since 3,000 watts can charge an electric car. You can see a compelling demo of wireless electricity by WiTricity in this TED talk.
I find it fascinating that a technology demonstrated over a century ago is now being taken seriously by science and business. And today I salute the genius of the 19th Century-born Nikola Tesla who pioneered what seems like such a 21st Century concept.
Triage – an app that lives up to its hype
There are two possible explanations when the best thing of your week turned out to be the discovery of an email productivity app.
One is that it was a very bad week – and last week wouldn’t be collecting an award for the most stellar seven days of my life, not the worst – but definitely sitting middling to poor.
But the other explanation is that I actually discovered an app that lives up to its hype – and that is no small thing.
It’s called Triage and it’s from Wellington innovation house Southgate Labs. It is awesome. Period.
Triage by Southgate Labs
Triage is so simple. Once you sign in with your Gmail, Yahoo, ICloud or any other IMAP email account it gives you a screen with your emails represented as cards with just enough information to be able to see what the email is about. The ones you want to keep you swipe up the ones you don’t want you swipe down. You can click on an email to read the full thing. And that’s it.
It’s not about engaging with the individual emails (although you can write brief replies if you want to) – it’s about organising your inbox so you are left with only the important emails. The aim is that you can then can go into your inbox later and suddenly it’s all sorted and relevant. The app is only available for IOS at the moment but judging by the international blogging and media attention it’s getting I would imagine Southgate Labs would be building on its success on other platforms.
Southgate Labs founder Rowan Simpson has written an engaging blog about the genesis of the idea – which is well worth a read for an insight into our innovation is born. The final spark came from his colleague Michael Koziarski (Koz) who asked:
“Imagine if there was an app that let me use a spare 5 minutes here and there to quickly filter out all of the emails which I can just read and delete, so that when I get back to my desk I only have to deal with the messages which require a bit more thought and attention”.
“Wouldn’t it be better if the inbox on your phone was just the new messages which have arrived since the last time you checked.”
“What I really need is something which forces me to do something with each message one at a time, rather than presenting an overwhelming list of unread messages, that I just end up scrolling back and forth through without ever really dealing to at all.”
Triage does that. It’s so simple it’s genius. Apply First Aid to you inbox now – get it here.
Flabby finances and fit bodies
You would think personal finance management – the art of managing your money and achieving goals – would be the easiest thing to provide an online solution for.
That was certainly the thinking three or four years ago when every bank worth its salt started developing online tools that allowed customers to get a rich and useful picture of their overall finances – Kiwibank’s Heaps is an example.
Heaps! personal finance management
I mean it makes perfect logical sense – every bank has a wealth of transactional information that, when packaged right, can provide a huge amount of insight into where a customer’s money is going and also through automation take out all the hard work of having to manually pull together a budget.
This was the topic of a great cubicle conversation with one of my colleagues this week. D and I have been working together for the past five years on a number of major online projects – including online personal finance management.
Now D is probably one of the fittest and strongest men I know as he puts his body through a regular gym/cross fitness regime every week – and has done so as long as I’ve been working with him. His physical and mental discipline have given him a toned and hard-muscled body that would put most of us to shame. That’s his thing and even through major life interventions such as children, injury, work pressure he has kept at the training and never stopped.
My thing is Aikido. I’ve been training three times a week for as long as D and I have been working together – so it’s a good common bond that can set off some good conversations about the physical and mental sacrifices and rewards you get from long-term, dedication to doing something positive with your body.
And that’s how we got to talking about the similarities between personal finance management and physical body management – whether that be the cross-training gym, the dojo or even an organisation like Weightwatchers or Jenny Craig.
“Never be too rich…”
I don’t think there’s one person I know who wouldn’t have just a little sympathy for Wallace Simpson’s notorious quote that: “One can’t be too rich or too thin”. By that I mean probably 95% of us would love to be a few kilograms lighter and a few thousand dollars richer. Not obsessively thinner or richer – just in control of both.
The trouble is 95 per cent of people who attempt to lose weight fail. This year it’s estimated in the US 100 million people are dieting trying to achieve the latter part of Mrs Simpson’s edict. It’s a billion dollar industry but for most it is a cyclical pattern of joining a gym or weight-loss program in January and abandonment sometime after.
With trying to get your finances into shape it’s a similar pattern – even with tools that take out all the hard work. Some people do stick at it religiously – but they are the people who were running a budget on a spreadsheet before they got these great online tools.
Finance writer Amanda Morrall says the trick is not to treat personal finances as something separate from the rest of your life. In her latest book Money Matters: Get Your Life and $$$ Sorted, Morrall looks at how average people, with ordinary jobs, have achieved financial management, and indeed wealth, through actually connecting with their true selves. It’s a powerful insight and a great book that combines solutions with motivating tips to get people living the life they should be living.
A quote in the book has been resounding in my head since reading it. Morrall quotes the Dalai Lama responding to a question about what surprised him most about humanity:
“Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices his money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die; and then dies having never really lived.”
I think that describes too many of us.
Common link
But back to my cubicle conversation with D. After a bit we found a common link between building physical strength and muscle; mastering a martial art; losing weight and keeping it off or spending less than you earn and building wealth. What’s the secret?
I think it’s a mixture of truly understanding what your life’s purpose is and, as Morrall writes, building your life around that. Otherwise you end up risking falling “into the trap of consumption where financial vampires are only too willing to take advantage of your vulnerability and exploit your financial weaknesses”.
Joining a gym or a dojo or a weightloss programme are pretty much in the same vein as opening up a tool like Heaps, Xero or Sorted. They are all capable of enabling a life-changing action – but only if they can be coupled with some internal motivation to make a life-changing action.
True it may only take one small step to begin the journey – and online can be a powerful source of sparks of inspiration – but the first step must be followed by many others heading in the same direction to get somewhere meaningful.
Creating personality online
Kiwibank customers have been engaging with their Online Relationship Managers for a a year or so now.
Kiwibank Online Relationship Manager Becks on mobile
I have written about our unique online customer champions before and they also received a fair amount of media attention (for a banking innovation) when we put them into the Kiwibank mobile banking app on IOS and Android. And to cap off the publicity they won the 2012 NZ Innovators Award for Marketing and Communications late last year.
The rationale behind the Online Relationship Managers (or the Oh-Ar-Ems as they have become known at Kiwibank) was to reinvent the traditional personal banking relationship model for customers who are now more at home in a digital world rather than a bricks and mortar one. And, as most banks know, that’s a mobile digital world these days.
The good old days
The traditional, 20th Century-style relationship manager is someone you meet when you first join the bank at a branch somewhere in town. Most people meet them once and then probably won’t see them again until there’s a life-change moment requiring a lending or investment decision e.g. you need a bigger house; want to go on a trip; upgrade the car etc. This happens maybe every couple of years or so. If you’re like me you try and deal with bank relationship managers mostly by email – rather than sacrifice a lunchtime walking down to the branch and sitting in an office for an hour.
And if you get a good one the irony is you probably won’t have them very long because the bank, for good reasons, will probably promote them and they’ll be off become a branch manager somewhere else. With my first bank after coming back to New Zealand from the UK I had three relationship managers in four years. It didn’t bother me too much because I knew I was just another name in a very long list of customers and I tried to keep my dealings with them to emails, because it was easier for the few interactions I had.
The first was reasonably extrovert and bubbly late-20s early 30s woman and sorted out my mortgage; the next was sporty-looking late 30s-early 40s Kiwi bloke who during my set up for internet banking managed to misspell my log in name so I’ve had to misspell it ever since. Maybe not a biggie – and probably made it more secure – but I’ve still always felt that I’ve had to carry a small bank error with me in every online interaction.
The third was a down-to-earth 40-something proud Mum of two who nailed a “moment of truth” refinancing request at a critical time for me and my family. And she also gave me a humorous insight into how her bank set and communicated its interest rates by cheerily sharing with me some insider stories as she tapped away at her computer.
Good eggs each and every one of them – although as I only got to meet each of them once over that four year period I never felt we were that connected.
My banking rite of passage
My interactions with these relationship managers were very different from the first experience I can remember with a bank manager. I would have been about 11 or 12 and my father took me down to our bank branch in Ashburton as “it was about time you met the people at the bank”. As we approached the glossy pale-wood varnished counter a female teller greeted Dad. Behind her a large man in a dark suit and tie appeared from out of an office and, with a very hale and hearty salutation, came from behind the counter and pumped Dad’s hand. Dad introduced me and said he “thought it was about time my son met the Bank” in a kind of jokey fashion.
The Bank Manager turned his full attention to me, looking me right in the eye and shaking my hand, my other hand clutching the cash to deposit. As my face grew redder as a result of this unrelenting adult attention – he told me how pleased he would be to look after my money over the years. He asked if I wanted to give over that money, I looked to Dad and he nodded approval of this action. I was then directed to the teller where I went through the process of handing over my cash and receiving a passbook with the cash translated into a single entry in blue pen, dated, stamped and signed. The teller explained that over time the bank would pay me interest on what money was in the account – so the more I put in (ie the less I spent on trips to Christchurch toy shops) the more money the bank would pay me.
As we left the bank I felt like I had been inducted through a rite of passage. I had been given an insight into an engine of society and met an engineer who managed that engine. He knew my Dad and now me – so I was now inextricably linked by more than just my passbook and some numbers in it. The Bank Manager knew my name and my face and even though I knew my humble finances were small in this scheme of things – they were now generating interest, both financial and personal. And therefore I was now a person of interest.
And as with many other experiences in life that was the glamour moment of banking for me. After that it was vanilla and in the background as banking became more and more commoditised. Like buying toothpaste or petrol – the only standout experience being Barclays in the UK who gave me a fantastic student package which made the difference during my university years. I stuck with them for 10 years after that before being seduced by a revolving home loan deal with a building society.
For most of us the bank managers of old, who knew you, your business and your family, and could exercise that personal touch at moments of truth have gone the way of the Moa and the Dodo. Their replacements, while decent people, aren’t set up by banks to be anything more than a pale comparison. And most of us don’t have the time or inclination to troop down to their office to engage – what’s the point if there’s no real personality to deal with. You might as well do an email.
Putting the personality back into personal banking
So what if you could have a real individual to look after your banking with all the convenience of online, to ensure your interaction with the bank was on your terms? That’s what we asked ourselves at Kiwibank and came up with the Online Relationship Managers – the relationship managers for 21st century banking but for all our online customers. They would turn the traditional model on its head by focusing on three key problems that came out of customer research :
1. I want to be treated as an individual;
2. I want the convenience of delegating my issues online:
3: I want to deal with one person
What was key was that the service experience had to embody the values of Kiwibank – Make It Easy, Do What’s Right, Raise The Bar and Go Further Together. To be a part of Kiwibank you really have to sign up to these – it’s the only place I’ve worked where they are not just lip-service.The hardest conversations we had in the project were about how we could ensure the Online Relationship Managers would live up to these values. In my opinion they are our Taonga and what make the difference in our service experience.
The easiest decision was to put the Online Relationship Managers onto our mobile app. The internet is now all about mobility and this suddenly meant customers now have a bank in the palm of their hand.
But at the heart of it, our Online Relationship Managers are not about technology – it’s a service innovation by putting people into an internet banking environment that has been purely about transactional information in the past.
The reaction of customers has been fascinating. There have been two marriage requests; a few “fancy dinner?” invites; regular delight at being wished a happy birthday or Kiwibank anniversary date.
The most heart-warming was from a woman who needed help to finance a trip for a relative who was dying of cancer and whose problem was sorted out by their Online Relationship Manager.
Bill Gates once famously prophesised that society needed banking, but not necessarily banks. Banks that have looked to gain scale by automating and removing the human factor are living up to that statement. Banking has always been more than a ledger and without personality in the online environment, Bill Gates’ words are bang on.
Tui 