Every desktop and device is a printing press or a broadcast station

It has been a while since the last post. I have been focused on pursuing my personal “what’s next” and that has led me down many paths with many people. I have had the pleasure of meeting with over 100 people in last 45 days. That has translated into start ups (founders and senior executives), VC’s, corporate executives, people recruiters, financial analysts, educational scholars and industry peers. I also attended a conference on “visual thinking” (www.vizthink.com) that opened my eyes to a more robust way to think and present. In addition, I have also been observing, reading, listening and surfing the web like I first did when I discovered the “Louve” in Paris from my office desktop in LA – back in 1993. The “ah ha” of that moment is alive and back in a new way.

I believe this personal sabbatical has allowed me the time to scan the landscape in a manner I could never do while employed full-time. Hence, in my next gig, I will push for a corporate policy to allow sabbaticals after four years. Life is moving too fast, to not stop and take notice. And, you need to do that with a clear lens. We are indeed in a period of accelerated creative destruction to borrow from Joseph Schumpeter.

What have I learned? That in a period of creative destruction, I believe decision making needs to be swift and supported with as many analytics as you can muster – pull trigger and fix later. Shoot, aim and fire is now a venn diagram that is inter-dependent and no longer sequential. Sequential thinking is too calculated and too slow in today’s pace of play. Risk is as much not making as making a decision.

The other big “ah ha” for me is that every desktop and device is now a Printing Press and a Broadcasting Station. We are the media, the storytellers, the conversationalists and we are designing the communication the way we want to receive it and disperse it. All this being enabled by technology, access and speed – at a cost of burger. Not rocket science by any means, just that the atoms of change are all around us. The collision of those atoms are the creative destruction. The outcome of the collision is witnessed in the Microsoft-Yahoo merger scenario. Google has bypassed both and is the youngest of the bunch. Old models yield dependencies and legacies. New models are unencumbered. Who has more risk?

I have more questions now than answers. What is IP? Who owns it? Who cares? Advertising as a model is broken from a traditional sense. Twenty-five years of experience and learning will now have to be “unlearned” and shifted. Every start up I meet views advertising as an “open flowing spicket” to support their concept, when the truth be told – advertising is not growing as a whole. Shifting yes, growing no. Social media is significant in size and scope. Advertising modes of “yester-year” are not a fit with social graphs. A new model is begging to be developed. The chase begins.

Discovery engines and Supercrunching is another door open to me. As someone who slowed down on discovering due to time constraints and likely age (as in who needs it), I learned that curiosity is what makes us tick. You can never stop being curious. As creative destruction moves forward, our need for constant discovery is more necessary today than ever before. How do you discover new stuff? A problem for a solution waiting to happen. Pandora, Netflix and StumbleUpon are great examples as a piece of the solution. How does one embrace and share these discoveries beyond a Facebook module or app in a multi-generational way? A small percentage of us leverage or know about these kinds of services.

So who wins going forward? Media titans dig in to protect. Technology continues to enable and accelerate individual voices. The coveted curators of the media past are now a blur in today’s blogosphere opinions. New companies emerge by the hour, but struggle to get traction. Established companies creep into/onto each others turf and lose focus.

A recent Andy Grove article sited his letters written to large corporate chieftains asking them to think about solving several world problems, even though it adjunct to their sweet spot. (e.g. Walmart – Healthcare and GE – Electric Automobiles). Apple has already gone down this path (iPod and iPhone) through elegant design and simple ergonomics. An interesting plea to leverage assets in a manner that has no legacy hurdles or rules, yet with resources that can be deployed to achieve scale and impact.

The attached video by MakiProductions produced over one year ago and recently updated (mashed up) with a music overlay was conceived and executed by a 20 year old student in Canada and delivered on YouTube. He figured out how to simplify a very complex set of metrics into an elegant message that stops to make you think. Something that today’s politicians try to achieve through double talk and rhetoric. Perhaps hiring the 20 year old as a speech writer becomes a game changer?

The axiom of “good ideas can come from anywhere” has never been more true than today. Are we equipped to receive them, embrace them and embellish them in today’s new world order of “everybody is media”? User generated sites run amok. Big media is blending UGC within Curated content. Start pages have shifted. Hyper personalization and customization is becoming a reality, yet fraught with privacy concerns.

We are entering a new paradigm and I for one am excited by the prospects. I mean, isn’t this why we get up in the morning?