The BurbleIt’s a shame that the lockdown has got in the way of this years Pride festivals across the UK. But I am doing my bit by staying in and drinking beer. @proud beer is a great beer with a great idea. Every bottle sold includes a contribution to a number of LGTB+ causes.
Drink Proud. Be who you are.
A recent report from PWC titled ‘Will robots steal our jobs’ summarised a number of investigations into the potential impact on jobs as a result of the rapid development and implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI, which in this context includes robotics and machine learning.) The report indicated that up to 30% of insurance and financial services roles could be impacted although exact numbers remain not surprisingly, elusive. Let me repeat that, up to 1/3rd of all roles in the insurance industry might cease to exist or have to change in a significant way.
That’s a pretty astonishing estimate. With some significant impacts.
Companies are going to undergo major transformations; changing what they do, how they create value, and how they deal with customers. And perhaps, the biggest impact will be on employees; how will they deal with this transformation?
According to an article in Business Insider millenials are killing certain businesses and I am glad to say that most of the ones being ‘killed’ are ones that I am cheerfully glad to see the back of. And I suspect most people of all ages will be. So here’s my take on some of what’s going on
Now I come to think of it I am a millennial after all. Just from the wrong millennium.
If you read my last blog on trust and business you might be forgiven for thinking that the argument was built on a little hype on the development of technology. And of course there is nothing out there at the moment other than hype about technology.
But I thought this article from ZDnet which arrived in my inbox about the same time I published my last blog posting provides some additional support for my argument that business and society are about to under go some radical changes. Technology developments tend to take longer than we envisage and tend to disappear off in various directions before reaching any form of conclusion but even supposing that AI exceeds human capabilities in more than 125 years that is actually close enough to imagine.
For anyone born today with a life expectancy of around 100 years it is possible that we will see technology become more advanced than humans. That should not scare us but simply drive us on to do more and better things with technology.
Companies and businesses have a problem – Trust. Put simply there is a decline in how much trust is being placed in business by customers and society in general. And a business that isn’t trusted isn’t going to survive for long. But is trust that important?
I think so. Customers are spending more time researching the companies they buy from, and the fact that so much information is available on line, opens up a business to a lot more scrutiny than previously possible. As customers are subject to exponential levels of change they will look to anchor themselves through relationships based on trust.
Would you go to a Doctor you didn’t trust?
And businesses play a huge role in society, providing income and rewarding places to work, generating wealth and making tax payments to help governments support their chosen areas of investment. The problem is partly guilt by association. As Edelman reported there is a collapse in trust in 4 of the major institutions (Business, Government, NGOs and Media) in many countries around the world.
At the same time however, businesses face some challenges that while not specific to industry will have a large and potentially dramatic impact. The 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) is beginning to reshape what business is and what it does and how it does it.
And trust is going to be come one of the most important topics businesses will have to deal with.
Trust is something that is extremely important in business. Whether it is between colleagues or between companies and their customers or between companies and their suppliers trust underpins everything that is written down in a contract. Without trust business simply doesn’t work as well as it should.
Of course trust becomes even more important when dealing internationally with people from different backgrounds and cultures.
So let’s get a definition written down
Trust as a noun is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something.
The little Google Car pictured above is a prime example of a growing need to trust. In this case trusting a software engineer who has written the code that is helping you navigate your way around town. As I talked about in ‘Can sheep drive?‘ we will all to have a lot of trust in technology going forward.
But what about trust in business. Well there we seem to have a problem. According to a report by the World Economic Forum – We’re losing trust in business. How can we get it back? people are losing trust in business. And while this is not really a surprise with the focus on fake news currently it does present serious challenges, particularly to businesses that operate outside of their locality ie where the owner or staff are not known by their customers or suppliers.
The article goes on to highlight a number of areas businesses need to think through such as
And while I think the irony of the World Economic Forum highlighting a lack of trust in business is interesting in itself the article seems to miss one very major aspect. The almost complete focus on the investor and shareholder above all others. The quarterly reporting cycle focusing as it does on numbers and shareholder returns is probably the biggest contributor to a lack of trust.
Perhaps its time for a quarterly reporting process on what value has been added to society rather that just focusing on the eps?
Anyone have any other ideas?
Sometimes the way this country works leaves me baffled. While many things in the UK are clearly better than they used to be; Measles outbreaks, Cooking programs on TV (anyone for Fanny Cradock – a dry bird?) and Chelsea FC, many things have carried on exactly as before.
And anything that is free or involves a form simply hasn’t changed at all.
This week found me at my local Doctors surgery to obtain a repeat prescription. Apparently to stop my head falling off or something similar its important that I have some medicine. And since I left the UK the process has improved no end; now you can have a repeat prescription automatically filled by a pharmacist. Simple really. You get your prescription, log it at the chemist and the go along at the appropriate time and pick up the drugs. Its funny that even a sentence with the word drugs in it sounds naughty – I must be really getting old.
Anyhow as with all good systems it works by a combination of electronics and forms. Tghe pharmacy sends a request to the doctor and they authorise it. Simple. Except it isn’t.
Normally the pharmacy text me when they have the prescription but in this case having received nothing I went to the surgery and then onto the pharmacy. The surgery confirmed they had done what they needed to and I should go to the pharmacist. Which I did.
The pharmacy confirmed that the drugs (cue shiver again) had been approved but they didn’t have the ‘form’.
‘So that’s good its been approved’
‘yes’
‘So I can have the drugs?’
‘No – we haven’t got the form’
‘What form?’
‘The one the surgery printed off – they need to send it to us.’
‘But you have it approved on the system?’
‘yes but now the surgery have printed off a the form we actually need to see it – even though we can see its been approved on the system’
So we go round this a couple more times and of course I give up. There is nothing quite like a process in the UK for being both designed to withstand a nuclear war and completely useless if you need it to work. Which brings me back to biscuits.
My first run in with officialdom and processes that make no sense came in the early 80’s on a British Rail train. This was a time when a tea trolley still made its way up and down the train and it was from such a trolley that I ordered a cup of something warm and brown that claimed to be tea and asked for some bourbon creams.
‘Oh I am sorry sir you see their free so you can’t have them’
‘pardon’
‘you see their free sir – so obviously I can’t give them to you’
‘if I paid for them would that make a difference?’
‘well no sir, as i said they’re free’
Which after a while I realised meant that they were free in business class but not for me. I can see why we British Rail never made any money. And so I sat back drank my tea and dreamed of free biscuits. I think it was this incident that led me to try that little bit harder to travel in business as much as I can. Eventually the tea trolley came back down the train and I saw that the bourbons remained unclaimed. Surely now they would be mine.
No apparently they were still free and thus not available, even if I wanted to pay for them.
You can be sure of something in the UK. You cannot beat either a form or a process. And some things never change…
And I know the picture has nothing to do with the blog but as its cold and dark you can never beat a picture form Koh Samui.
Back to a theme of mine that I have blogged about before – Self Driving Cars. I am fascinated by the fact that people can see a time when you won’t need a steering wheel in a car and you’ll be able to get into a car and sit back and do anything you want. I can see a revolution coming in how people get around, work and interact with each other. With society relying so much on the car any change in how it works is going to have a profound affect.
In a small way Hanoi represents the future of the car. Last weekend found me and my family in a taxi trying to get from the airport to the hotel in the French Quarter of Hanoi. My son cheerfully described Hanoi as like Milton Keynes until we got into the center of the town which he then described as mayhem. In two years Hanoi has gone from a city that is all motorbikes to one that is being overrun with cars. And unlike bikes cars in Hanoi don’t swerve around you. And the point here is that cars being driven by computer, or robot depending on your view point, are much more likely to stop or steer round you than crash making towns and cities a much better place in the future.
Autonomous cars are coming and while there will be a long period of time before they come into their own there is one question we need to ask. Will they work?
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The business world has so many opportunities to reshape itself and drive better outcomes - we are only scratching at the surface of the change agenda and all the possibilities open to us. What ever happens next must embrace how we all work better together, how we are organised, the things we do and the many tools we use to make the change. Let’s make good things happen
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