I like this idea.

““People don’t need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don’t need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don’t need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment.””

- Donella H. Meadows, The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

On one hand, it makes some people think a whole generation is lazy and feeling entitled (see Time – Millenials are the laziest generation) but the will to work exists and people who have ‘followed the rules’ and gone to university still don’t find jobs to match their degrees. Their (McKinsey) study of 4,500 young workers reported that 45% of 18-24-year old adults have jobs unrelated to their studies and a further half see them as interim roles they plan on leaving as soon as something better comes along.

On the other hand, the more depressing reality is that there’s a serious skills gap at the core, even for those thinking they’re doing everything right: 70 % of employers say candidates lack skills while 70% of universities surveyed by McKinsey believe they prepare students adequately for the job market.

So what’s interesting about it? There are three big implications for this skills & talent problem:

• Winners and losers - a growing gap between the scientific elite and the scientifically challenged of the future. IPSOS also shows that as scientists, academics and statisticians gain more credibility, politicians lose more along the way - with serious implications for who you turn to for policy, news and solutions.

• A MOOC from Harvard will be better than a degree from your local university. Why do an expensive, 3, 4, or 5-year degree that’s not been updated to the requirements of the real world and will not give you the skills you need to work straight away? If you’re going to get into debt, you might as well do it for something that’s relevant and updating as you go along. I was a MOOC skeptic until I read that Georgia’s Institute of Technology is offering its first online degree created in collaboration with AT&T for only $7,000. As Collini says in What are universities for?, ”discussion of universities, as of many other matters, has become afflicted with ‘Champions League syndrome’. It is assumed that all the ‘top’ universities ‘play’ in the same ‘league’.” Until a couple of weeks ago I hadn’t given it that much thought, but now I’ve been persuaded: good universities will become better, mediocre (real world) universities will disappear as more people favour of online courses from institutions.
• The end of facts and generalisations. ’Big data’ and ‘new media’ may be annoying monikers, but the reality is they’ll change what we understand by ‘normal’ and what we use as reference points. No more “generally, this group of people behaves in this way” because there won’t be any more ‘generally’. Remember Joi Ito’s principles: have good compasses, not maps. All the data gathered about us isn’t bad: social networks, sites and connected objects are gathering all this data and drawing important — sometimes survival-related — meaning from it, not just saving 2 years of idle time every day. Maybe one year of logging runs and walks seems boring, but if walks disappear and runs get shorter there’s something a bit more interesting in there from a health perspective.

* On a sidenote, I’m not afraid of robots taking our jobs (another popular narrative), because there’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that robots create more jobs than they destroy - I’m afraid of people not being able to learn how to make the transition (or being curious enough to – because you can’t teach curiosity).

I’d get online and look up and 40 minutes would have gone by, and my reading time for the night would have been pissed away, and all I would have learned was that, you know, a certain celebrity had lived in her car awhile, or that a cat had dialled 911.

George Saunders – My Desktop

(To me) there’s something curiously fascinating about how other people go to work, arrange their desk, hang around places. I have a fetish for Selby-style books and posts about people in their places. But because there are only seven of us in LSU, we’ve covered most of everyone’s personal whims and curiosities as far as work goes.

So enter a place with at least one thousand people working on four floors and it becomes a real challenge to get to your desk for 9 AM, find any biscuits anywhere, keep personal belongings locked away or to even find your desk at times. To survive here, you have to be military trained and organised to some extent. For instance, there are probably amazing employee discounts, but little did we know what it looks like when the big drop comes in and you have to wait your turn to collect the parcel:

You know when people say they like ‘fast-paced’ environments on their CVs and it’s a load of crap – they haven’t seen fast-paced until they’ve been at ASOS. They haven’t seen their own desk disappear overnight to make room for a massive – and I mean massive – internal sample sale:

And although I haven’t got pictures of it, the same amount of clothes goes to a custom clothes-recycling scheme they have going with Oxfam.

It’s changed a lot about how I think of my own clothes and experimenting with things – in the words of their head of marketing, “wear some red lipstick. No one dies!” And it’s easy to do that when everyone just thumbs up everyone else’s outfit:

Despite the good crazy, the people I met are some of the nicest and most competent professionals in their industry, so it’s been a real pleasure to chat to anyone who deals with any moving part of the world’s 2nd largest shopping website. The amount of data is dizzying and exciting (to me) and even though there’s lots of work to do, their work ethic redefines ‘fast’. Whenever I think they are slow to get something done because we’ve done it in a snap before, I remember that the same process that takes them three weeks takes 9-12 months anywhere else.

It’s been weird and wonderful at the same time and frankly, we’d have been none the wiser if we had taken the role of consultants working from our desks somewhere far away. If you can get away with it, work in someone else’s office. Meet them, queue with them for the cafeteria – it says a lot about their culture.

ASOS, I am in awe of you.

Seeing as they’re not client work and a piece of thinking, I’m going to publish some bits here if they’re interesting enough. Most are posts that have been in drafts for ages but needed a kick from behind to write.

Before that, two things to know about The Economist:

1. Is the Economist left or right?
The Economist is not inherently left-wing or right-wing; its political philosophy is rooted in 19th-century Classical Liberalism of the John Stuart Mill variety. Essentially we are fans of Free Markets (The Economist was founded to oppose the Corn Laws) and individual choice. So we favour, for example, a small state and the abolition of agricultural subsidies (right-wing fiscally liberal positions); but we also support gay marriage and the legalisation of drugs (left-wing socially liberal positions).

2. Is The Economist a biased news source?
Short response: … Yes, if only because it insists on sprinkling “opinion” into what are supposed to be factual accounts of “news.

Post 1: A big talent and skills gap

Truth is , I don’t really know – and I don’t know because (in this country):

…landlines come in a bundle and most have lots of free minutes already; it’d be a challenge to use those to begin with, nevermind using up beyond the allowance.

…most companies are either selling their lines or renting them out to internet providers who make a loss on them to sell their broadband.

…4G is coming, and if/when that gets better, it will make people question having a broadband connection in their home in the first place. Even BT is now gearing up to offer 4G, which hints at where they think growth will come from.

…people still use landlines, it’s just that those under 30 don’t. The habit isn’t there, but it’s also because no one is at home during the day – and the question may or may not be about using landlines at work. It raises the interesting issue of ‘who would you actually like to speak to late at night or at the weekend?’ (if not your close circle of friends). And who would you sit on the phone with for hours or for short, often bursts? Hmm.

…even though you could invent reasons to use the landline more – late night sex chat, QVC, TV selling, live voting for talent shows, dial in to skype from your landline and get older people using it, battery life sucks on mobiles, your mobile gives you cancer (doubtful it’ll fly in any parts of the world these days) – and create a compelling one, the issue in my mind lies in the now limpless product itself. It’s not that we don’t speak to our friends, the medium and format have changed. My landline sadly doesn’t let me ‘forward’ all my unanswered emails and calls to it so I can pick them up in the evening, and the fact that no one’s come up with product innovation may suggest no one sees a good enough reason to (or maybe I’m too pessimistic).

…that and we’re not prone to emergencies like earthquakes, floods, all the natural disasters that make landlines far more reliable than mobiles

Anwyay, I found this and it got me thinking about the problem again:

But sadly no answer.

A few pounds later and a LoveFilm trial yielded value in the form of the wonderful Diana Vreeland: The Eye Must Travel documentary. Reaffirms my beliefs that anyone worth remembering has probably been called too extravagant, too annoying, too opinionated and many other things in pursuit of their art. No matter. For someone who spent her time championing fashion and imagination when other magazines were telling you about how to bake the perfect pie and prepare yourself for your husband, I’m pretty sure this quote will stick:

“You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.”

 

Diana Vreeland

On one hand because foursquare is funny just like that, with some cool trivia for the moment (5120 miles since last check in – Will I remember this in 3 months? No.) while others fade into my crap memory and it’s no bad thing.

On the other hand, because I caught up with Graham Furlong – now CSO at Made Movement, who would have been my boss at JWT had he not left before I joined – and asked him what the strangest thing about doing business in the US is. Maybe not the strangest, but he said you have to get your head round the fact that any business meeting equals a flight somewhere. Europeans maybe don’t get that as much, which is no bad thing if you hate flying.

Anyway, all this reminded me of a photo of a flyer done by a ‘creative’ studio moving in next door to someone I know, just letting people know they’ve got all the cool shit in their office. More books than vinyl, for balance, letting you know exactly how much money we spend on framing pictures and how many pieces of expensive kit we crammed in.

Sure, sometimes you need to remind the world that creative people work in environments that aren’t the boring, stark corporate hellholes most people go to every day (in dress code), but really, frankly, it’s like advertising has much bigger issues in staying relevant to clients these days. Telling everyone you’re still young, cool, relevant and somewhat dysfunctional is a cute distraction to make yourself feel better and delay thinking about why you’re in the business or maybe wonder why resentment has kicked in. Maybe.