Steve Jobs, innovation, art and leadership

Here's a great interview with Steve Jobs from Computer World in 1995 (I've edited it down to the best bits just over 7 minutes, you can see the rest here). In it he covers:

How small companies will always challenge big (the main idea behind The Innovators Dilemma).  

How difficult starting a business is (success or failure being mostly down to perseverance).  

How San Francisco became such a hotbed of invention (his answer: music, hippies, LSD and exceptional colleges).

I've been reading Jobs' biography which is long but pretty good. What really struck me was his complete respect for artists. He  understood the hard work behind great art and creativity ("Genius: one percent inspiration and 99 percent persperation" as Edison and Michaelangelo are both meant to have said).

He often talked about Apple existing at the intersection of art and technology. As Andy Hertzfeld (who was on the original Mac team but is now at Google) says 'Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too. The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make lots of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.' 

He was a terrible manager, awful to work for in traditional ways (rare praise, inability to delegate, used lies and manipulation excessively) but he knew all of this. The reason he was such 'an asshole' (his words) was because he honestly believed he was facilitating people to create the best work of their lives (they almost universally agree with this).

"He would shout at a meeting, 'You asshole, you never do anything right," Debi Coleman recalled. "It was like an hourly occurrence. Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him."  

Tesco Virtual Subway Store

Great use of mobile/poster interaction in South Korea. Allows you to do your shopping while waiting for the train. 

Vodafone. The evolution of mobile

From ringtones to snakes to maps. 

Smartphones now make up 20% of 3 billion devices worldwide, with market share blazing towards 50% over next 2 years (Ofcom).

“It’s an always on medium. People love their mobile phones so much  researchers found people often feel a phantom ‘tingle’ in their pocket that normally proceeds the excitement of a text/call.” 

Why we struggle with Data Overload

I just found Linda Stone's writing on the back of a Henry Jenkins article. Boy is she smart. This article's so great I'm just going to rip it. She quotes Dee Hock, the Founder of Visa and his definition of how information evolves. She then uses it to describe how technology is evolving us, how we’re evolving technology and how both are evolving culture.

• Noise becomes data when it has a cognitive pattern.
• Data becomes information when assembled into a coherent whole, which can be related to other information.
• Information becomes knowledge when integrated with other information in a form useful for making decisions and determining actions.
• Knowledge becomes understanding when related to other knowledge in a manner useful in anticipating, judging and acting.
• Understanding becomes wisdom when informed by purpose, ethics, principles, memory and projection.

Further, she maps this evolution to a timeline:

• 1945-1965 - Noise to Data
• 1965-1985 - Data to Information
• 1985-2005 - Information to Knowledge
• 2005-2025 - Knowledge to Understanding
• 2025-2045 - Understanding to Wisdom

Today, we are Knowledge Workers evolving into Understanding Workers. Understanding Workers use technology to anticipate, judge and act. Think about it. This is what we’re doing with FitBit, Quantified Self, 23andMe.com, Facebook, and so many other technologies of this era.

As we move into an Era of Conscious Computing, we’ll also be moving deeper into Understanding and closer toward Wisdom.

Data gets a bad rep sometimes but as we all know, in the right hands it can be pretty amazing...

 

RSA Animates, The Secret Powers of Time

The RSA is one of my favourite London institutions. It's housed in a beautiful old building just off the Strand and has a brilliant purpose 'a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress'. They put on brilliant lectures, it's the closest London gets to TED, and they're free. In sharing the talks online they've decided to animate the talks which is a brilliant move. This is one of my favourites. It's not strictly related to brands or advertising but is 10 minutes of thought stimulating brilliance.

Expendables YouTube Overlay

Smart use of interactive elements to promote the movie. 

Expendables YouTube Ad from Sparkelife on Vimeo.

Not another social media video..

... I hear you. This one's worth a quick look as it's so UK focussed.

A typical combination of some useful, some frankly irrelevant and misleading ones. 

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