The Future Place Blog

Ouliers Update

Well, I finished Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers yesterday, and I can confirm that I would definitely recommend it as a good read. It is really well written, has some interesting anecdotes, and suggests that policy makers in areas such as education could be adopting a more scientific approach.

I wonder whether this new work will be understood in the way The Tipping Point was, or misunderstood in the way Blink often is. The message that many people seem to take from Blink is that we should trust our first impressions. What the book shows is that first impressions, and even second impression are very unreliable for most people. For some well trained and insightful people, a blink is enough, but for most of us it can be worse than having no data at all. The fact that Paul Eckman and a few people he has trained can interpret facial expressions should actually remind us that most of us can't interpret facial expression reliably.

My take on the Gladwell's new book is that outliers are people who are special (in terms of physique, intellect or some other characteristic) and who are then lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time - and who then exploit the combination. Special might mean being in the top 10%, perhaps the top 1%, but they have to be 'good enough', before the other factors have a chance.

In terms of my own children, I think one of the key messages I will try to pass on is that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to be really good at something.

What supermarkets know about how we buy

This week's Economist has a great article looking at the work supermarkets have done to understand the buying, thinking, and emotional processes of their customers. The article starts with the basics, such as putting bread and milk at the back of the store to make sure that shoppers visit as much of the store as possible, but moves on to cover thinkers such as Damasio.

One of my particular areas of interest has been the electronic wake, so I was interested to read about projects using people's mobiles to track them around a retail centre (without consent) and the growth of the use of RFIDs to track people, products, and behaviour.

There is nothing ground breaking in the article, but it is a great catch-up for anybody who is not regularly involved in researching retail.

Oultiers - a great read for the Christmas break

I am about one-third of my way through Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers : the story of success", and I warmly recommend it for anybody looking for an informative and easy read over the break that many people will be taking for Christmas.

The strength of the book is not so much that the facts are new and earth shattering. Its strengths are three-fold:

1. It is really well written, which makes it very easy to read;
2. It makes its points via a wide selection of cases, which will be great for borrowing;
3. And, in the style of Freakonomics, it encourages us to look at the data, rather than trust to folklore.

The book makes the old point that to be successful you have to be good and lucky, but it also shows how much more important luck is than being good. You have to be good enough to succeed, then you need to be in the right place at the right time. For example, the best place to be if you wanted to be one of the richest men or women ever, was to have been a man the US in the 19th Century, and to have been born between 1830 and 1840. In a list of the 75 richest people ever, including Cleopatra, William II of England, Nicholas II of Russian, nearly one-in-five were born within a single nine-year span.

I have some issues with the book, but then I always do. I feel that Gladwell does not take survivor bias sufficiently into account, nor when he talks about the 10,000 hours of practice, that he says is required to be really good at something, does he sufficiently take into account the positive feedback required to keep practicing, but perhaps they will come in the last two-thirds of the book - which I hope to read over the next few days.

Internet Cable from Europe to Middle-East Severed

The BBC report that an undersea cable near Egypt has resulted in widespread connection problems between Europe, Middle-East and Asia.

This story reminds us how essential the Internet has become. This problem has resulted in a slowdown, not a blackout. But at some point in the future there will be a blackout, because everything breaks eventually, and what will happen then?

Mobile phones spelling the end of CATI

Research has an article about a US report showing that about one-third of US homes either do not have a land-line or only use it occasionally. This is something I have been talking about for a couple of years.

In many markets the penetration of access to the Internet is higher than regular use of a land-line, for example Finland and Estonia, and the position is now quite close in the US.

As I have said before, we are in a period of accelerating change, and all the old certainties are breaking down. We need to respond flexibly to challenges facing market research.

Writ Served via Facebook

The BBC report that an Australian couple have been served with a repossession order on their home via their Facebook page. The lawyer trying to repossess their house had tried all the usual avenues, e.g. post, phone, hanging around outside the home, but had been unable to contact them.

The message here, beyond the sad news that somebody is losing their home, is that Social Networking is becoming an ever greater part of the 'normal' world.

New Presentation Course to Debut in Beijing

For the last couple of years or so I have been developing a new workshop, looking at how market researchers can use the latest trends and thinking in presenting to improve the effectiveness of their presentations. During that time I have had the chance to work with a number of companies and organisations in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

The people who have attended my sessions seem to have found it useful, and I have also found that it has led to increased sucess in my own work, both in business and at Conferences. For example in the last 18 months I have won 3 MRS Conference Awards (one best presentation, and two special contribution) and one from the 2008 BIG Conference.

I now have the honour of running a full-day version of this workshop for ESOMAR, with the inaugural session being in Beijing at the Asia Pacific Conference.

The details are the workshop can be found here.

I hope to see some of you at an upcoming workshop, if not in Beijing, then hopefully at some other location.

Clone Brush - What a lovely tool!

I am sure many of you will already be aware of PaintShop Pro's Clone Brush, but if you are not, it is a real joy. What the Clone Brush does is let you pick up some reference material from elsewhere in the picture and to paint it over something you want to remove. The classic example is when you want to remove graffiti from a picture of a building.

Below is a quick example of removing me from a lovely picture of a lifting bridge from a recent barge holiday.

Before

After

For notes on how to use the Clone Brush click here.

Useful information on Facebook's growth

Ben Lorica at O'Reilly Radar has a great post with a really interesting set of data about the continued global growth of Facebook. Quite often we focus on where the leading edge is moving, many of whom have already left Facebook. But we also need to recognise that Facebook is still growing.

One interesting tidbit was that Facebook has more members in Canada than it does in the whole of Asia, despite increased growth in Asia. As well as the data, check out the comments at the bottom of Ben's post. There are lots of well informed comments and responses.

My latest personal brush with Facebook has been via my 16 year old son who is standing for election for the position of President of the student body at his sixth-form college, he and all the other candidates have created Facebook groups as part of their campaigns, operating as a place for campaign photos, outrageous claims, and spin.

What are you carrying digitally?

Wired has an interesting report looking at how US Border agents are sometimes looking at pictures on digital cameras, tunes on iPods, and even word typed into your Google cache as part of the check at customs and immigration - and I guess if it is happening in the US it will be happening elsewhere.