GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

NASA is an ideas factory. The agency has generated countless spin-off innovations in their quest to repeatedly go where no man has gone before. Now as the aging shuttle fleet heads into retirement and fiscal pressures keep the space program planted on terra firma, it’s worth remembering how imagination and the pursuit of excellence has benefited the rest of us. Here are ten inventions we use everyday that we owe to rocket science:

1. Memory foam – we’re all safer and many of us sleep better at night thanks to this one, a foam that can absorb intense pressure but ‘remembers’ its original shape (think mattresses, crash helmets and a raft of other applications)
2. Ear thermometers – the same technology they use to measure the temperature of the stars means there’s no need to stick anything where the sun doesn’t shine…
3. Shoe insoles – the technology used in your sneakers was first used in moon boots
4. Invisible braces – the most popular innovation in the history of orthodontics
5. Scratch-resistant lenses – tougher, longer-lasting glasses, indispensable for near and far-sighted geniuses without the patience to be more careful
6. Long-distance telecommunications – NASA didn’t just make the world seem smaller from space – thanks to the satellite you can talk to almost anyone, anywhere, anytime
7. Adjustable smoke detectors – that is, smoke detectors that can prevent false alarms, straight from the space station
8. Safety grooving – sounds boring, but is life saving; these are thin grooves first used by NASA to improve runway safety by reducing surface water levels, now used on roads everywhere
9. Cordless tools – an extension cord would probably be the least cool thing you can imagine in space, so NASA did away with them altogether
10. Water filters – millions of people use them everyday; NASA was the first to make water taste great in the modern era, so next time you’re grateful for a cool glass of water spare a thought for the space program.

Image credit: io9

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

I’m permanently wired as Gen B; and CEO for some thousands of Gen Y. I’m interested in the literature of both. Call it GenLit. TGI Global, interactive solutions for the hospitality industry, published this article about reaching out to Gen Y. This up and coming generation has some serious spending power, and are in many ways more willing to spend than Gen B. We have different values (work to live vs don’t live to work), are more demanding (loyalty is won moment by moment) and are more connected than anyone. Gen Y is always, always on. The advice is for travelers, applies across the board. This is it crunched down:

1. Remove the “Yawn Factor”… Keep it fresh

Gen Y is not attracted by the ‘proper’ message. Use social media to get your voice heard in the online marketplace. Build unique microsites for your Gen Y promotions that feature a more edgy design element. Create specials that include amenities that are important to them, like the availability of wireless networks, iPod docking stations or touch screen room service access on site.

2. Get conversational

A moment’s attention isn’t enough. It’s likely that a Gen Y-er will be tweeting from check-in to check-out, commenting on every experience in between. Give them the incentive – an experience – that will make them your destination or brand ambassador.

3. If you build it, they will come…

A series of networks that is. Gen Y is hooked on mobile. Try something like Google’s “Favorite Places” mobile based bar codes to leverage your your with a Gen Y consumer.

4. Make it “bragworthy”

The Gen Y crowd is looking for an experience that will wow their friends and earn them bragging rights on their return. This is evident in the glut of new hotels that follow extreme themes, such as the Ice Hotel in Sweden that is the equivalent of living in an igloo or the Drainpipe Hotel in Austria, that enables visitors to sleep in a capsule made completely out of re-purposed municipal drainpipes.

5. Start now

Gen Y may not have the extreme buying power that you seek right now, but this innovative group represents the future of your business, and they will take some wooing. By reaching out to younger employees on your property to get their feedback, or having them help manage your social media campaigns on your site, you stand to connect to this audience on a closer level.

Image Credit: Real Estate Radio USA

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

I’ve blogged before about not getting a lot of free time – and liking it that way. For me, work-life integration is about finding compelling work and devoting everything I have to performing at peak. So it’s interesting to read that the American College of Sports Medicine’s top 20 predicted worldwide fitness trends for 2011 includes, for the first time, workplace fitness incentive programs.

These programs are backed up by a sound business case – think enhanced camaraderie and morale, reduced absenteeism, improved productivity and decreased health care costs. There’s something evolutionary “at work” here too. This trend is further evidence of silos breaking down between work and private life.

Even more fundamentally, the trend is hooking into a fundamental secret to our psychological states. People are happiest living in the moment – such as when they are playing sport or exercising – not worrying about before or daydreaming about what comes after what comes next. Being in the now is instinctive and intuitive. It’s the place where sport happens, the place where life excites, the place where emotion rules.

Google has taken hold of this concept. Of the top ten reasons for joining its team (note the terminology: it’s “life at Google”, not “getting a job at Google”), number four is: “Work and play are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to code and pass the puck at the same time.”

I love it. I recently spoke at Oxylane, a leading French company who deeply grasp the concept of happiness through sport, and have the joy of making people’s lives better by supporting their physical health. They manufacture more sporting goods than anyone else in Europe and have an inspired vision: nobody should miss out on the pleasure and benefits of sport. It seems the world is catching on.

Image credit: Aktiv Oslo

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

It took more than two years for Michelangelo to carve his famed David, but now you can have a mini-masterpiece of your own in a matter of moments. A group called blablabLAB has created a small kiosk in the heart of Barcelona’s La Rambla pedestrian mall where, if you will just stand still briefly, a machine will complete a 3D scan of your whole body before producing a statuette replica of your chosen pose. Cleverly, the whole thing isn’t just fun – in the instant that you pose for your scan, and afterwards when your statue is complete, it makes you part of La Rambla by transforming you into one of the many human statues that line the mall. Participation. A magic moment. A lasting memory. A keepsake you can’t help but love. Brilliant.

Image Source: Rebelart.net

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

I have written often about the importance of happiness for your own life and for the good of society. Friends of the Earth did a brilliant World Happiness Index a few years ago (just last week I was in one of their happiest places on the planet, Costa Rica). Britain has introduced happiness as a national economic indicator. And the New York Times has just reported that the 76,000 residents of Somerville Massachusetts are being asked to rate their level of happiness on a 1-to-10 scale in an annual civic survey. The blue collar but gentrifying city wants to make decisions about transportation, space planning, policing, education, affordable housing, and how the happiness of citizens factors into these decisions. I say bravo, especially to the man who, in answer to the question “How satisfied are you with your life in general?” rated himself only a 6, explaining, “I would like to be three inches taller and speak Quechua fluently.

Image source: Massachusetts Mapsite

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

Last week I was back home in New Zealand, speaking to Deloitte alumni in Auckland and Wellington. Deloitte NZ CEO Murray Jack and his team had a great energy, and a vital question to ask: How can New Zealand win from the edge? It’s a time-honored theme for a country half a world away from most places, and more relevant than ever in an era of massive power shifts.

I started with a story that I feel sheds a good deal of light on the answer. A few days earlier I’d met a few young New Zealand entrepreneurs with some great ideas, ready to take on the world (stand up Stolen Rum (The Rum Runners) and 90 Seconds). Their concepts were exciting and they were up for anything. The only problem was where they were setting their sights: Melbourne. Sydney. London. Having been in Beijing earlier in the week, talking to students just as hungry to engage with the world as these aspiring young New Zealanders, the absurdity of it struck me powerfully. Here we are with China, the world’s most populous nation, with a rapidly growing economy not far from our doorstep, waiting with open arms, and still we’re obsessed with the mature markets of Australia and the UK! These are not markets to ignore, but there are other markets to prioritize for targeting your big idea. New Zealand will always be on the edge – which is a good thing – but the world is coming closer. We just need to open our eyes to the biggest opportunity, then act. To win from the edge we need to get enraged with the well-worn path to the status quo and adopt new thinking about how to succeed in the world. We need to start making things happen with China.

Image credit: Brian Joseph from Paradise Road

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

In his book Outliers Malcolm Gladwell shares a theory that if you practice something for 10,000 hours you become excellent at it. It’s something I’ve posted on before – the theory puts a number on the concept of grit, the amount of sheer perseverance needed to be truly successful at anything. And now someone has decided to put the theory to the test.

Dan McLoughlin is on a quest to transform himself from someone who had barely lifted a club, into a golf pro in 10,000 hours. He calls it The Dan Plan. It will take him six hours a day, six days a week, for six years. A little over one year in and he’s spent 1,400+ hours on the course, with a laser-like focus on building his short-game, working away from the hole, putt by putt, chip by chip. Forget about the hard yards. Dan is doing them all.

The point has been made that people have achieved excellence in other fields in 10,000 hours. But according to psychology professor Dr. Anders Ericsson, one of the experts consulted while Dan was formulating his plan, few start this late in life, from a zero-base, and document their efforts in such a deliberate way.

Dan humbly says that more than anything his experiment is about testing human potential, and opening up people’s eyes to what they can achieve if they give themselves over to a dream with relentless determination. Even if he doesn’t go all the way, he will have become the best golfer he can possibly be. In that sense he can’t fail…but I say nothing is impossible! Go for it Dan!

Dan McLaughlin. Image source: The Churn

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

Recently I wrote about our love affair with television. One of the factors that is fueling the growth of TV in its many guises globally is mobile connectivity, which is going stratospheric, shattering all kinds of limits. In an always-on world our smallest screens wire us to hot hubs, free us to shift to the edge, and unshackle enterprise and entertainment. Here are seven big trends to ponder next time you pick up your iPhone, furnished by a Cisco report earlier this year:

1. Growth is rapacious. Global mobile traffic nearly tripled for the third year in a row in 2010. At 237 petabytes per month, traffic was three times the size of the entire global internet in 2000.
2. Sisomo is taking over. Mobile video traffic will exceed 50 percent of all mobile data traffic for the first time in 2011. It’ll be two-thirds by 2015.
3. Nothing is impossible. There are 48 million people in the world who have mobile phones, even though they do not have electricity at home. The off-grid, on-net population will reach 138 million by 2015.
4. Competition is heating up. At the start of 2010 iPhone use was at least four times higher than that of any other smartphone platform. That’s changing fast. Towards the end of the year, iPhone use was only 1.75 times higher than that of number two, Android.
5. Why stop, ever? There will be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015, up 56-fold from 14 million at the end of 2010.
6. There’s plenty to go around. There will be over 7.1 billion mobile-connected devices in 2015 – roughly equivalent to the world’s population by then (7.2 billion).
7. Goodbye, megabyte. The average smartphone will generate 1.3 gigabytes of traffic per month in 2015, 16 times more than the 2010 average of 79 megabytes per month. Growth in the next five years will see global mobile traffic reach 6.3 exabytes per month by 2015. How big is that? It’s been suggested that every word ever spoken by human beings would equate to five exabytes. So six every month is a lot of chatter!

Image Source: Mac HD Converter

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

Earlier this year an AdAge study gave grist to my intuition that TV will continue to be unstoppable in our lifetime. TV is the only medium touched by the Web that isn’t crushed by it – it rolls it in, integrating technology and absorbing and colonizing new media as it’s introduced. As a device, a format and a host (of news/sport/drama/entertainment, gaming, social media, web, advertising), TV is here to stay.

Even as television and the Internet merge, what we have always known as television will continue as a vital cultural, political and entertainment medium. Whether you’re watching television on a TV or pc or tablet or mobile, whether live or downloaded, it’ll still be television. YouTube streamed 8.5 billion videos in January alone. Is this television? You betcha!

The distinctions are in fact immaterial, and the language needs to shift. We call it sisomo – sight, sound and motion – and whether it’s high tech CSI from Jerry Bruckheimer or a journalist on a webcam from Tahrir Square in Cairo or a student giving a book review from his dorm, it’s all sisomo.

Last month Netflix helped to dissolve the boundaries further. Netflix is an on-demand online video streaming service that has spent $100m on a yet to be made series called House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey. YouTube is thought to be preparing to spend a similar amount on commissioning content. Those are big moves into original material, betting on the reality that consumers don’t care who delivers their sisomo, as long as they can get it when they want it.

Sure all of this is a shot across the bow of the TV networks. The content wars are heating up, which is great news for sisomo lovers everywhere. But the winners won’t be determined by delivery channel. Inspired, compulsive story telling will be what wins the day.

As consumers we’ll reward those who tell the best stories by paying in several ways – for the device, the connection, the rental, the subscription, the pay-per-view, agreeing to receive advertising or selling access to advertisers, paying credit card fees or buying currencies for playing games.

Even then, competition will bring pricing to equilibrium and (as I’ve written before) only two questions will matter in judging television and where we choose to watch and participate: Will they want to see it again? Will they want to share it? And as participation deepens you can add: Will they want to improve it?

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GUEST POST from Kevin Roberts

Earlier this month I spoke at the National Speakers Association of Australia (no pressure!!!). Shortly afterwards I got a warm thank-you from incoming President, Yvonne Adele, who also happens to be the inventor of a global overnight brainstorming service called Ideas While You Sleep. It’s Twitter-powered, participation-driven, harnessing the fertile mind of the crowd to empower the individual. Clients submit their challenge late afternoon in their local time zone, and Ideas While You Sleep churns out 100 ideas while you’re burning the midnight oil and catching a few z’s, courtesy of hundreds of ideas agents around the world. Great idea, smart business. Ideas are the currency of the future and Yvonne has opened an express-exchange in an always-on world: cash for concepts, now.

Image credit: The Evil Eye Cafe

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