LIKE PATIENCE ON A MONUMENT

This describes the misery of Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I‘m not miserable just mildly frustrated that we seem unable nowadays to be patient and wait to see how “things play out.” In a world of instant opinion and overcrowded media, waiting, watching and thinking is seldom the way we behave. It’s a world of yes and no not maybe, yet “maybe” is the seldom used but most useful state to be in when not all the information needed to make a decision is available.

Truth is not an absolute. My truth and your truth will be different. This is what makes it tricky trying to understand where, for instance, the war in the Ukraine will end.

But what we can do is mentally assemble the chess pieces and try to see the likely way they’ll move. I’m wondering how the 34 million of Russians 15 -35 years old  are feeling and whether the reported migration of youth from the country represents a real trend.

As we’ve recently just seen in Iran and China youth can help change politics, even in these most autocratic regimes. I suspect how this plays out may be the most significant factor in the removal of and selection of a successor to Putin. I had a conversation with a wise man I’ve known for many years saying I thought this would play out sooner if the Russian military failure deepened. He delved back into history and foresaw a five-year struggle. Rather than fight over who’s right we’re both thinking about it. 

My thinking is that increasingly the young will influence the world and push things in specific directions, helping them “play out” favourably in creating a world in which they’ll be more comfortable. A greener world. A fairer world. A less aggressive world. A world where constant travel and sharing of ideas in a norm. A world of creativity and innovation.

This is not always going to be world I readily and constantly understand but it was ever thus. As a friend said to me recently “you were opinionated and radical once too.” I belonged to a coal-mining world where supermarkets and new restaurants were a novelty. A world where the cold war was the norm and every -ism you can imagine existed and was tolerated. 

This world today is a much better one and the abolition of obscenities like capital and corporal punishment are things we drove away with influential musicals like “Hang down your head and die” and “Oh what a lovely War” -  the products of young minds. Just as the world today is being steadily shaped by new generations.

Social media has taken a bashing recently but not wholly deservedly. Ideas, events and jokes are widely and quickly shared. Big players like Facebook and Snapchat are declining and being usurped by TikTok and We Chat and  new unheard of platforms. Innovation, novelty and surprise are increasingly the currencies that score. 

Qatar is a famous place now despite many misgivings, but I wonder if the rulers there quite understand what trends could play out there going forward now the toothpaste has left the tube...and other metaphors like this which should be banned...sorry.

But social media has made many of us impatient. We live in a world of trending news. But how we deal with that is up to us. Too much choice doesn’t mean we have to choose everything.

In a world of quite surprisingly violent change  we need patiently to watch and think how things may play out. This is history unfolding, it’s not a race.

PUTTING MY AFFAIRS IN ORDER

No don’t worry I’m not about to hand in my dinner pail just yet so far as I know. It’s just that bizarre thing of going on holiday, which I should clearly do more often and feeling impelled to leave everything tidy (or as tidy as a house in upheaval through redecoration can be left.)

I feel quite smug. I’ve proof read my latest four books. Packed - well actually my wife has packed but I told her what to put in. I’ve downloaded a mass of books on to our Kindles, completed a couple of projects. Given books to charity and ticked off everything on “my to-do list”.

What is on my mind now?

I’m concerned about the way social media is going. No the internet is not the answer - I agree with Andrew Keen on this one. Twitter is in trouble - CEO Dick Costolo gone - investors angry. They were promised the moon and haven’t yet got much more than a piece of cheese. Apple is out to demolish Spotify. And this week I saw something weird - a poster which should have been a tweet.

Good punchy stuff but guys, guys…I’m driving and get the idea that Stella Export has just been launched. Damn. I nearly hit that cyclist trying to read the small print….and you mate and you.

Too many words - there are just too many words. At FCO the axiom was fewer words good - example Wimbledon Shoe from Nike “McEnroe swears by them”.

It’s too complex an idea - we are better than Stella - no didn’t get that first or second time - in fact “Why Stella is stellar” is a great ad for….sorry …Stella.

My point is a social media idea has been whacked onto a poster is the mistaken belief they work the same way. They just don’t.

And having mentioned Nike I recall talking about marketing to the Brighton Chamber of Commerce and being reviled for praising Nike. Down here in Caroline Lucas country where even Naomi “No Logo” Klein is regarded as too soft on brands like Coke and Nike, big US brands are capitalist and vile.

Small is beautiful.

Well  I thought they were crazy but you know the stories about Nike coming out of from the FIFA debacle , the story in the Daily Mail - yes I know-  “How Nike lured Mo Farah to work with coach Alberto Salazar in Oregon” and more recently the comments of Julie Strasser - wife of the late Rob Strasser, one of Nike founders -  about the value shift in the company  from attitude creator to money machine, well,  all of those begin to question my previous judgement about a favourite brand.

And FIFA?

I hear Hillaire Belloc’s words in my ears:-
“And always keep ahold of nurse 
For fear of finding something worse.”

Rather like the Arab Spring I suspect the toppling of corrupt tyranny often leads to something much worse.

BIG DATA IS BRILLIANT

Everyone is talking about “Big Data.” It’s transforming the way we think and analyse stuff. We have discovered that correlation has become more important than causality. That what happens is more important than why it happens. The book by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier published last year - “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think” is highly recommended.

We know the increase of information is accelerating. For instance all the information and data that currently exists will double in the next three years. With more information we need less exactness. Nowadays the equation 2+2= 3.9 is good enough. We don’t need to be exact if we can see the big

Today social media and CCTV may be more useful research tools than anything else we have. Google Translate has extraordinarily proved to be the best translation service around. The software uses “corpus linguistics” techniques, where the programme "learns" from professionally translated documents, specifically UN and European Parliament proceedings but increasingly from all kinds of documentation – lots and lots of sources – big, big data. (In passing how it is nice that the forest of paper produced by the UN and EU can go to such good use.)

Intriguingly they say the service improved since the linguists they’d hired when they started up (well you would want linguists in a translation service wouldn’t you?) left the business because they wanted linguistic perfection whereas this being a product of big data is not that subtle. This is one of the few examples I’ve come across where big trumps clever.

The existence of robust data obviating the need for the tabloid use of anecdote allows us to spend more time using our brains to think rather than using them as pickaxes to mine for information. Anyone who tells you that guessing is more fun than knowing hasn’t come across the thrill of irrefutable information.

Its application is critical in the medical field where the speed of big data via social media allows a disease to be detected before it becomes an epidemic (and because detected early it can never become a pandemic.) We hear less about avian flu today in part thanks to big data.

So the big data  boom is happening and we have however sufficient glimpses of the future to see we’ll be doing less intellectual “grunt-work” in the future and more intellectual “stunt-work”.
To be sure there can and will be issues of data protection that arise from increasing access to data but the excitement lies in big data allowing us the freedom to think more clearly.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson