Sidewalk Life

How to Succeed in Our Modern Age

Whether you're a brand or a person, these points hold up.  Thanks to Andy Whitlock for the post. 

Intel Anthropologists Find Key to Tech Adoption

Hint:  it's not national wealth.

Interesting story in Wired on how markets adopt technology.  The map above shows fast adopters in bright colors, slow adopters in gray tones.

Intel researchers have created a "'Technology Metabolism Index,' which shows how citizens of countries' tech adoption exceeds or lags what one would expect given their levels of wealth."  Some of their findings about technological diffusion:

• smaller is quicker (large populations seem to get in the way)
• foreign investment seems to slow things down
• massive change stimulates adoption (major upheavals in living memory like the transition out of Communism and war)

Cooperations, Not Corporations

I've been thinking and reading a lot about systems lately.  Particularly the systems of capitalism and the corporation and how they define us as people.

In a similar fashion to Deep Economy, Copenhagen Institute for The Futures Studies The Corporate World issue  proposes an alternative system.  The main idea I take out of both of these is putting people first, rather than corporation first.  As Gitte Larsen says in her editors note;

"Capitalism is changing these days, and so is the company...  If companies wish to be viable in the future - we must rethink their real purpose."   

"The social company and the interest-based company are ideas about the company of the future that start from a human and social perspective."

You can read To Be in Good Company by Thomas Geuken and Gitte Larsen for free by downloading pdf below. 

Download fo-2007-06-en-article.pdf

Justin Timberlake's Cumulative Advantage

This article from the NY Times a couple months ago on cumulative advantage makes two points. 

First it suggests that JT isn't popular because he's good, but that he's popular because he's popular.  Second, that predicting his success (or anyone else who participates in the culture markets) is nearly impossible. 

For brands, it suggests putting ads into pre-testing might be a total waste of money.  Here's an excerpt.

The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like,
differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative
advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object
happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point,
it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random
fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run
differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is
similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory.
Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical
universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market
tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been
popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a
nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural
markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions
of individual people who participate in them.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people
make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one
another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part
because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of
ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really
sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so
much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same
things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

Yet our mutual dependence has unexpected
consequences, one of which is that if people do not make decisions
independently — if even in part they like things because other people like
them — then predicting hits is not only difficult but actually impossible,
no matter how much you know about individual tastes.