Maybe it takes tech to beat tech.

Or founders who plan to walk their talk even after them become successful, unlike the “don’t be evil” guys.

More entrepreneurs are pursuing social or environmental goals, said Greg Brown, a professor of finance at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina.

Companies like Toms, Warby Parker and Uncommon Goods have pushed this concept into the mainstream by creating successful business models built around helping others. This trend has led to the rise of B Corporations, a certification for companies that meet high standards of social responsibility. The program started in 2007, and now more than 2,500 companies have been certified in more than 50 countries.

Including Afghanistan.

Not all these startups make it and many are choosing to do it sans investors who often start pushing for growth and revenue, social mission be dammed.

And they are slowly succeeding.

Companies like Moka are a reflection of how consumers think as well, Professor Brown said. As people’s wealth increases, they think more about quality and less about quantity. They also consider the social context of what they’re buying.

Others are developing tech to defend against tech.

The “bracelet of silence” is not the first device invented by researchers to stuff up digital assistants’ ears. In 2018, two designers created Project Alias, an appendage that can be placed over a smart speaker to deafen it. But Ms. Zheng argues that a jammer should be portable to protect people as they move through different environments, given that you don’t always know where a microphone is lurking.

These may not be the solution, assuming there is one, but this definitely isn’t.

Rather than building individual defenses, Mr. Hartzog believes, we need policymakers to pass laws that more effectively guard our privacy and give us control over our data.

You have on to consider tech’s actions in Europe to know that laws don’t stop tech.

There’s another potential positive brewing in tech — actually a disruption of sorts.

That’s the long-time coming move away from current ageist thinking.

As brilliant as young coders are, though, the industry can’t survive on technical chops alone. Last year, Harvard Business Review shared that the average age of a successful startup founder isn’t 25 or 30—it’s 45 years old.

Call it a miracle, but investors, the majority over 40, are starting to value the experience that comes with age.

Hopefully, in the long-run, the potential for success will outweigh the hang-up on age.

As a whole, entrepreneurial communities also need to do more to bring diverse groups to meet-ups, panels and speaking engagements. The importance of having more voices at the table can’t be diminished.

Let’s just hope it isn’t too long.

Image credit: Ron Mader

If, like me, you wonder if there is anything to stop tech from its all-consuming forward march, there may be.

Tech needs two things to keep going

• workers and
• users

So what happens when those segments start rebelling?

There’s a tech backlash best seen in the newest crop of workers.

“Working at Google or Facebook seemed like the coolest thing ever my freshman year, because you’d get paid a ton of money but it was socially responsible,” said Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, 21, a senior at the University of Michigan. “It was like a utopian workplace.”

Now, he said, “there’s more hesitation about the moral qualities of these jobs. It’s like how people look at Wall Street.”

“It felt like in my freshman year Google, Palantir and Facebook were these shiny places everyone wanted to be. It was like, ‘Wow, you work at Facebook. You must be really smart,’” said Ms. Dogru, 23. “Now if a classmate tells me they’re joining Palantir or Facebook, there’s an awkward gap where they feel like they have to justify themselves.”

Audrey Steinkamp, a 19-year-old sophomore at Yale, which sends about 10 percent of each graduating class into tech, said that taking a job in Silicon Valley is seen as “selling out,” no different from the economics majors going into consulting who are “lovingly and not-so-lovingly called ‘snakes.’”

“The work you do at a place like Facebook could be harmful at a much larger scale than an investment bank,” Ms. Dogru said. “It’s in the pockets of millions of people, and it’s a source of news for millions of people. It’s working at a scary scale.”

Oops, seems that the moral considerations of where to work are of much more importance for both college and grad students.

Agriculture is supposed to be a market “ripe for disruption,” including tractors that do everything except scratch your back.

You’d think farmers would be cheering.

Instead they are searching out tractors made in the 1970s and 80s that are more profitable to use.

Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it’s not because they’re antiques.

Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.

And it’s the “sophisticated software” they don’t want.

But tractors from the 1970s and 1980s aren’t so dramatically different from tractors produced in the 2000s, other than the irksome software, and at a time when farmers are struggling financially, older tractors can make a lot of business sense.

Both are good news.

Constricting the worker pipeline at one end and a user rebellion at the other are two of the few things that can act as Daniel to tech’s Goliath.

Image credit: Roger W

A few days ago CB insights shared a link to their collection of quotes about disruption from big name corporate leaders; they called it Foot In Mouth.

I sent it to my “list” with the following comment.

Ignorance? Idiocy? Arrogance?
All of the above?

The replies I received, one from my sister, a retired IT head, and the other from KG, were far more insightful than the queries I sent.

I thought both were worth sharing, so here they are.

From my sister.

Do you know of Joel Barker, the futurist?  He’s been around since the mid-70s. I saw a video of his at a conference once, where he talked about paradigm shifts. His example then was Swiss watch makers. When two young kids brought the quartz watch to the Swiss watchmaking community for funding, the Swiss said, “No one will ever want a watch that doesn’t wind.” The kids went to the Japanese and the rest was history. Barker says that when humans have a paradigm, they automatically filter OUT anything that doesn’t support their paradigm. The Japanese had no watch paradigm and so could see the potential. I think those examples from CB are as much paradigm lock-in as stupidity. Or put another way, paradigms lead us to make dumb choices sometimes.

From KG

Upton Sinclair famously stated, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” We may call it stupidity, but it really is vested interests. That’s why innovation comes from those who have little to lose or have no other alternative. No one thinks of vested interests when they work in our favor, only when (usually in hindsight) they are show to have caused loss are they called stupid.

In a time of proven global warming, the US has chosen, as the only nation in the world, to reject the potentially cataclysmic consequences of a warmer globe and have invested $4 trillion to develop the domestic oil & gas industry rather than investing these monies in future technologies that can save the planet. These vested interests are causing an existential crisis, and all the systems we’ve built.

There are so many areas that we are struggling with as a species due to vested interests — things that threaten our survival. These range from the ones that are commonly spoken about, like global warming and environmental destruction. They also include synthetic chemicals and nano materials that are giving us cancer and making us sterile, an economic system that ignores externalities and the tragedy of the commons, and our challenges with making sustainable decisions in an increasingly complex World.

What are your thoughts?

Image credit: Gerd Leonhard

Have you heard of/read Malcolm Berko? He writes a twice-a-week column answering financial/investment questions — just one answer in each column.

In addition to being broadly educated and financially knowledgeable, he is a superb and truly witty writer, doesn’t suffer fools at all, and, after reading him for decades, has no sacred cows. (I highly recommend him.)

I thought this recent question and his response would explain the coverage, and downright scare hype, surrounding AI, robots and the tech upheaval of many industries, such as retail.

Here is the salient part of the question.

My professor believes that “its disruptive pricing power chokes employment, restrains wage growth and is bankrupting competitors.” He believes that Amazon is “too negatively impactive on our economy, especially wages, and must be restrained by government-decreed divestiture.”

Berko wasted few words on what he thought of the prof and went on to explain as follows:

Joseph Schumpeter, a brilliant economist and bald as an egg, who passed away in 1950, explained capitalism as a series 50- to 60-year waves of technological revolutions causing gales of creative destruction, or GCDs, in which old industries are swept away and replaced by new industries. These new industries generate new economic activity, employing more people, who buy more products, creating more demand and, resultantly, increased employment.

• First GCD, between the 1780s and 1840s, was fueled by steam power. During those years, the steam engine increased our gross domestic product fivefold, and employment grew fourfold.

• Second GCD, between the 1840s and 1890s, the railroads replaced wagon trains, stagecoaches and sailing ships. (…) Resultantly, our GDP exploded sixfold, and employment grew fivefold.

• Third GDC, between the 1890s and the 1940s, was charged by electricity. Inexpensive electrical power hugely improved industrial efficiency and labor productivity. This bred a sixfold growth in GDP and a fourfold rise in our working population.

• Fourth GDC between the 1940s and the 1990s was powered by oil and the automobile. People moved to the suburbs and families owned two cars as the GDP increased eightfold and the workforce grew fivefold.

• Fifth GDC is information technology and the microchip. It’s making other technologies obsolete and altering our social, cultural, political and economic futures in ways we never imagined possible. We’re on the cusp of that wave today.

Excellent for understanding what’s happening, but what neither Schumpeter nor Berko adress is the enormous upheaval, fear and human pain that comes with each wave.

It is terrifying to be told that skills you have worked to develop and hone for 5, 10 or 20 years, or longer, have no value.

But in today’s world, where what-you-do-is-who-you-are, that often means that you, the person, has no value.

While Berko is correct about the potential of an unimaginable future, which you may not even live to see, that future is of little solace and does nothing to mitigate the terror and economic woes facing you today or tomorrow.

Two parts of the solution is to put your energy into coping and immediately develop the most important skill/attitude they probably didn’t bother teaching you in school.

Learn to love learning.

PS I sincerely hope you take the time to read Berko’s full column. I guarantee it will be time well spent, as are all him writings.

Image credit: Creator’s.com

Entrepreneurs love to talk about disrupting.

Most recently they have been disrupting finance.

Harvard’s Jim Heskett posits the idea that tech itself is ripe for disruption, especially if you agree with Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Tech is ungainly for many of us.

Too much of it is developed by the young for the young

Both hardware and software are built by techies in love with the bleeding edge for early adopters and people captivated by potential — whether they will ever have use for it is incidental.

We’re told that the typical user of information technology today utilizes less than 5 percent of the capability made available by today’s hardware and software. A small number of basic functions repeatedly are put to good use by the typical user. They are the need-to-have functions. The functions thought by designers to be nice to have may enhance marketing efforts and satisfy software engineers’ desires to make complex things, but they largely go unused. For some, they even make access to “need to have” functions more confusing.

While many companies add (expensive) bells and whistles to drive growth, others work to provide a more minimalist approach that crushes competitors.

Heskett uses Intuit as an example of a company that focuses on consistently making its software simpler.

It did it by providing simple and inexpensive solutions to everyday problems. Scott [Cook, Intuit co-founder] likes to say that Intuit had 47th mover advantage, in part because it adopted a strategy that identified the pencil as the company’s most important competitor.

Does Heskett’s idea have legs? Is tech, in fact, ripe for Intuit-quality disruption?

If you have strong feelings or thoughts on the subject be sure to add your thoughts to the open forum; Even if you don’t comment it’s worth following; Heskett’s ideas always draw eclectic, well thought-through responses from his audience.

Image credit: Harvard Business School

If any consumer industry is ripe for disruption it’s healthcare—not just its recordkeeping.

Yet it would be hard to find any industry in which the established players are more resistant or just plain obstructive.

But thanks to people such as Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, and Dr. Isaac Yonemoto, founder of open-source IndySci, real disruption is happening.

Eleven years ago at 19 Holmes decided that she would spend her Stanford tuition on changing the healthcare status quo, which she did by upending one of the oldest, most expensive, completely ubiquitous, and least changed diagnostic tools—blood testing.

The new tests can be done without going to the doctor, which saves both money and time. Most results are available in about four hours, which means that you could swing by a pharmacy and have a test done the day before a doctor’s visit, and then the results would be available for the physician.

Each test costs less than 50% of standard Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. If those two programs were to perform all tests at those prices, they’d save $202 billion over the next decade.

As an example of how helpful that can be, Holmes told Wired that Theranos charges $35 for a fertility test, which is usually paid for out-of-pocket and costs up to $2,000.

Those who aren’t partial to needles and vials of blood (most of us) should note that the Theranos test requires only one drop of blood from a prick of the finger.

Last year the company cut a deal with Walgreens to roll out Theranos Wellness Centers inside each of its 8000-plus pharmacies.

Dr. Isaac Yonemoto is used crowdfunding (campaign ended October 28) to finance Project Marilyn to create open sourced, patent-free cancer drugs.

The global market for these drugs surpassed $1 trillion this year. The average monthly cost of a brand-name cancer drug in the U.S. is about $10,000, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. (…) “The big picture is we’ll be trying to solve the problem of expensive pharmaceuticals by releasing drug candidates that put downward pressure on price through competition.”

Elizabeth Holmes’ one-drop blood test is the start of true disruption and if Dr. Isaac Yonemoto’s Project Marilyn is even half as successful as Linus Torvalds’ Linux they will change the face of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry forever.

A look at what entrepreneurial minds are doing, whether they are starting a company or work at an innovative enterprise.

In May I wrote that graphene has the potential to change the world and it seems that Elon Musk plans to take advantage of it.

Tesla could soon achieve this 500-mile battery thanks to a development in graphene-based anodes, which can reportedly quadruple the density and output of lithium-ion batteries.

When I wrote about Ryan Grepper’s Kickestarter campaign to fund his reinvention of the lowly cooler in July he had raised $5M and counting. It ends tomorrow and is the most highly funded campaign ever.

However, with the financial support of 48,971 backers, Coolest Cooler has raised a whopping $10,362,461 — making it 20,721% funded. And the campaign doesn’t end until Friday.

The reinvention of the boring, unsexy butter knife is cool enough to attract boring non-shoppers with no little-to-no interest in the trendy—such as my sister. The attraction comes from the fact that it solves an annoying problem—something entrepreneurs should give more thought to doing.

The Stupendous Splendiferous ButterUp, a butter knife developed by Australia’s DM Initiatives, has a built-in grater that is designed to soften butter and make it easier to spread. 

Four college guys have developed a solution for women to a problem created by guys. It’s a badly needed product that gives women a simple way to know if their drink has been doctored.

The polish — called “Undercover Colors” — will change shades if it becomes exposed to a drugged drink. (…) Simply dip your finger in the liquid. If the polish changes colors, you’ll know not to keep sipping.

When it comes to large company innovation, I’m not sure who is more impressive.

The giant that re-imagined one of the most necessary and embarrassing products on the market today or the ad agency that created a hip way to get the word out.

The company is Kimberly Clark, the product is adult diapers and the agency is Ogilvy & Mather”s New York office.

Adult diapers are used by all ages, often due to injury, and the younger the user the greater the embarrassment at the check stand.

Nearly half of those who experience some form of urinary incontinence are under 50, according the brand. Among the causes are, for women, weakened pelvic muscles that can stem from pregnancy and childbirth and, for men, prostate cancer.

Here’s the ad.

YouTube credit: Depends

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Wednesday I showcased tech careers that have nothing to do with startups, consumers, or social media.

If you plan to spend the sweat, blood and tears it takes to start a company isn’t it best to start one with the greatest chance of succeeding?

Then why not follow in the market steps of Palo Alto Networks, Jive, and Splunk, instead of Facebook and Groupon?

According to Sequoia Capital’s Jim Goetz, the $500 Billion market for enterprise software is ripe for disruption; doing so makes you far more likely to succeed.

“At Sequoia, upwards of a hundred entrepreneurs a week present and if we’re lucky, maybe a dozen of them are focusing on the enterprise. In the last 10 years, there have been 56 IPOs in the enterprise space that have gotten north of a billion [dollars in market capitalization] and just 23 in consumer.”

I have a somewhat cynical take on why there’s a shortage of enterprise startups.

• Enterprise solutions rarely start in a dorm room.
• You need to have some familarity with a market to disrupt it.
• It’s difficult to create a solution to problems of which you are unaware, haven’t experienced and wouldn’t know how to solve if you had.
• It’s easier to create something jazzy and fun and give it away than it is to solve a real problem that must be bought (with real money).

Appearances can be deceiving, but looking at the management of Palo Alto Networks, Jive Software and Splunk it seems that only one founder (Jive) was actually “young” when the company started.

Another thing is that they didn’t fast-track to their IPO based on hope and hype; instead they IPOed on revenues and real growth.

These are the kind of companies that grow, add value and help create a new middle-class.

Be sure to join me next Wednesday for a look at founder Henry Ford’s thoughts on that subject and why you should care.

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Post from Leadership Turn  Image credit: nookiez  CC license

Chapter four from IBM’s The Enterprise of the Future (a steady Saturday feature since July 12; be sure and download your free copy) is about extreme innovation, AKA, serious disruption.

Innovative products and services aren’t enough any more.

“As one U.S. CEO explained, “We’re starting to think about things we couldn’t do before.” With the Internet, businesses can now find niche markets for rare, surplus or highly specialized goods — a virtual “garage sale,” as it’s often called. Business processes, as well as some products and services, are becoming more virtual. New delivery channels and electronic methods of distribution are overturning traditional industry conventions. And these advances are not just changing the way individual companies work — they’re creating entirely new industries.”

So what exactly is happening? Is there a direction that the majority believe will work?

“Among those making extensive changes to their business models, enterprise model innovation is the dominant choice. Forty-four percent of CEO s are focused solely on enterprise model innovation or are implementing it in combination with other forms of business model innovation. This trend toward enterprise model innovation is even more pronounced in emerging economies (53 percent).”

What does ‘enterprise model innovation’ mean? It refers to the challenge of offering your customers something truly different all by yourself—a business model that is fast dying in a world of speedy global connections, sophisticated, interconnected consumers and breathtaking speed of change.

“While 38 percent of CEO s plan to keep work within their organizations, 71 percent — nearly twice as many — plan to focus on collaboration and partnerships.“

And the most important point, as pointed out by one Australian CEO, “It’s about deciding when to collaborate, whom to involve, how to lessen the destructive force of competition.”

More on this next Saturday.

Is your company involved in enterprise model innovation?

Your comments—priceless

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