Category: Innovation

Standing Target: Four Hours a Day! How am I doing?

The Guardian:

Office workers should spend a minimum of two hours on their feet at work – building up to an ideal four hours – in order to avoid the ill effects of a sedentary lifestyle, according to a study co-commissioned by Public Health England.

The Telegraph:

Office workers should be on their feet for a minimum of two hours a day during working hours, according to the first official health guidelines.

The guidance, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, warns that UK sedentary behaviour now accounts for 60 per cent of people’s waking hours and for 70 per cent of those at high risk of a long term condition.

The British Journal of Sports Medicine:

The derived guidance is as follows: for those occupations which are predominantly desk based, workers should aim to initially progress towards accumulating 2 h/day of standing and light activity (light walking) during working hours, eventually progressing to a total accumulation of 4 h/day (prorated to part-time hours). To achieve this, seated-based work should be regularly broken up with standing-based work, the use of sit–stand desks, or the taking of short active standing breaks.

I’ve written before about sitting killing us, so was interested to hear that an official organisation like Public Health England are undertaking research into how long we should be standing to be healthy and starting to form guidelines.

The key points are that we should be starting from a base of 2 hours of standing a day, during the working day, building to 4 hours a day.

It’s worth clarifying that the studies weren’t just about standing, they were looking into “getting workers to stand and/or move more frequently”. It’s not just about going from sitting still to standing still; the point is to become more active generally.

I don’t, personally, have any great metrics on how much I stand, or sit, or move around during the working day. I can make some good approximations though.

My iPhone runs Moves which tracks my activities when I move with the phone. So I know how much time I spend walking, with my iPhone, but that’s not very accurate at work because I tend to leave my iPhone on my desk when I do all of those small movements in the day – get a drink, go to the loo, etc. Assuming that those activities account for less than 30 mins a day I’m still left with about three and a half hours of standing or movement left to do. With that in mind I went back through my activity log in Moves and realised that I have a long way to go – the amount of movement recorded during the working day is tiny. An example of a week’s movement during the working day: Monday – 11 mins; Tuesday – 12 mins; Wednesday – 39 mins (I went for a walk at lunchtime); Thursday – 4 mins; Friday – 10 mins. Oh dear.

I sometimes stand next to my desk while on a call, but it’s not three hours a day!

Most mornings I go for a 40 minute walk before going to work. I could cheat a bit and include that in my target. Then I would be down to needing an extra three hours and a few minutes of standing or moving to get to a total of four hours.

However you look at it, I have a lot of work to do to get close to the two hours, so building to four hours is going to take some effort.

Apart from getting my employer to invest in a stand-sit desk do you have any great activity ideas for me?

One thing I had thought of was taking more calls on my mobile and then walking.

The Hamburger Icon: Those Three Lines

If you’ve used an app on a mobile phone you will have seen this icon.

If you’ve used some web site you will have seen this icon.

View this blog on a small screen and you’ve seen it.

Firefox and Chrome both use it.

On a mobile device it’s home is normally in the top left-hand corner of the screen. If you are right-handed it’s at the furthest reach of your thumb, for me, as a left-hander, it’s nicely accessible.

It’s commonly known as the hamburger icon, the hamburger button or the sandwich button.

What you possibly aren’t aware of is that this icon causes a strong emotional response in some people:

That little three-lined button is the devil. Whether you call it a side menu, navigation drawer, or a hamburger, hiding your features off-screen behind a nondescript icon in the corner is usually a poor mobile design choice. Interaction theory, A/B tests, and the evolution of some of the top apps in the world all support the same thesis: The hamburger button is bad for engagement, and you should probably replace it with a tab bar or other navigation scheme.

TechCrunch

The hamburger icon—three little bars used to indicate a link to a menu—is one if the most controversial techniques on the Web right now. Designers, we are told, all hate it; customers, we tell everyone, hate it too. Why then, is it everywhere?

Web Designer Depot

Where did it come from?

This icon isn’t even that new. One form of it was included in the initial Graphical User Interfaced designed at Xerox Parc by Norm Cox somewhere around 1981. At that time is was known as the air vent:

“Interesting inside joke… we used to tell potential users that the image was an “air vent” to keep the window cool. It usually got a chuckle, and made the mark much more memorable.”

BBC

What’s the problem?

The issue isn’t really with the design of three lines, the issue is how it’s used and what it’s used for. Luis Abreu’s defines the issues as four things:

  1. Lower Discoverability – it’s not immediately obvious that it’s a button that does something.
  2. Less Efficient – you use this button the way to something else, by definition you end up clicking twice.
  3. Clash with Platform Navigation Patterns – it appears in places where we expect other things to be.
  4. Not Glanceable – you can’t highlight anything about the items behind the button.

Having recognised that it’s a problem some people have undertaken tests to work out how much of a problem it is. As an example, James Foster did some tests that replaced the icon with the word menu and discovered that people are more likely to click if it says menu.

Why do I care?

Sometimes it’s the small things that make a huge difference:

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”

Vincent Van Gogh

I’m rarely in a place where I design user interfaces, but I am often in the place where I create documents and presentations from which I am trying to get a response. Those documents and presentations use a design language that I hope the recipients understand. If people struggle to understand an icon that has been around for 40 years then I need to be very careful about the design language that I use.

The Hamburger Button is also a reminder of the longevity of choices. A set of choices made 40 years ago are living on. The Hamburger Button isn’t exceptional in this regard, just look at the save icon, the width of train-tracks, the QWERTY keyboard, and the Copyright system. I occasionally get asked about a naming standard document that I first wrote over 20 years ago.

Read more

Do we have a truth problem?

What is truth?

It’s a question that philosophers have debated over for millennia. Such philosophical debates are well beyond the remit of what I would normally talk about on this blog and I’m not going to change that with this post.

I only raise the question because I think we are increasingly struggling with understanding what is true.

Recently someone told me a story as if it were fact and then proceeded to tell me that it had to be true because they checked on Google! Is Google a keeper of truth?

The BBC recently highlighted a set of false rumours that were circulating around the Internet regarding the Nepal earthquakes.

Dramatic footage and images have emerged from Nepal, showing the devastation caused by the most deadly earthquake in the country in 81 years. But amid the authentic pictures are fake footage and viral hoaxes.

One of the biggest: On Facebook and YouTube, various versions of a video were erroneously described as closed-circuit television footage from a Kathmandu hotel. They show an earthquake causing violent waves in a swimming pool. The video was picked up by internationalmedia – including one of the BBC’s main news bulletins – and has been viewed more than 5m times. However it’s not from Nepal – it appears to have been be taken during an earthquake in Mexico, in April 2010.

Someone went through the effort of scrubbing the date stamp from the video to make it more believable! Even the BBC wasn’t sure about truth?

I don’t think a month goes by without someone sending me an email, tweet or Facebook post about some scare story that I need to respond to. Not one of them has been true?

In a world where information is replicated, sent, favourited, retweeted and recreated by billions of taping fingers and thousands of robots, how do we recognise the tellers of truth? In that same world how do we use the indexers of information to validate truth?

Google isn’t trying to be a truth teller – it’s just answering the questions you ask it from the index of information that it has.

How was a  parents told about the Game of 72 to know that is was completely fake?

We’ve had systems of trust for generations that have relied upon personal relationships and having proven track record. Most people know someone who they can rely on to tell the truth, likewise most of us know someone who’s words aren’t worth the breath that created them.

Once we started writing we began to place our trust in those doing the writing.  When it came to news, the journalist became our teller of truth.

Then came the radio and the television and the journalist retained their position.

The position of the journalist is under massive pressure though. The pressure to report ever more rapidly means that they have less time to validate a story. The ownership of news organisations creates problems when the owners want to portray a particular viewpoint. Revenue reduction for newspapers means that fewer journalists are covering more news.

We are becoming increasingly sceptical about the truth-telling of journalist.

That’s just one sphere of truth – the news.

How many times have you read about a new scientific study only to be told a month later that another one contradicts it.

The following diagram shows the diversity of outcomes from studies on foods and cancer:

How do you tell the truth from that? Should I drink tea or avoid it?

We are become increasingly sceptical about the truth-telling of scientist.

If we have a problem with journalists and scientists how do we decide who is trustworthy? Who are our tellers of truth?

I think we need a new set of skills to help us, or perhaps it’s just the same old skills but used in a new way. We need to learn how to do our own investigating. We need to learn to wait for stories to mature and for the truth to become clear. We need to become questioners.

"The Rise of Dynamic Teams" – Alan Lepofsky and Bryan Goode

Continuing my review of some of the sessions from Microsoft Ignite 2015 the title The Rise of Dynamic Teams caught my attention.

When I saw that the presenters were Alan Lepofsky and Bryan Goode it was definitely going to be one to watch.

This session has an overarching question raised by Alan:

Could you be more effective at work?

Well of course I can.

All I had to do is to think back to the last time I was frustrated at work and there clearly presented was an opportunity to be more effective.

Promised Productivity

Alan also highlight that we’ve been promised improved productivity for decades now, but in his opinion not really been delivered it.

My personal opinion is that we have improved our productivity, but mostly by doing the same things quicker, rather than working in different way. A good example of this is email where we send far more messages far quicker, but definitely less effectively.

Framing the problem

Many of us can recognise the issue of information overload. We use many different systems and are fed information all the time.

Alan frames a different problem which I also recognise – input overload. This is the problem we experience when we think about creating something and can’t decided what it is we are creating or where we are putting it – Which tool should I use? Where did I post it?

The point is that we now have a multitude of choices of tools so we don’t necessarily need more tools, but we do need to tools to be simpler and to collaborate together.

Best of Breed v Integrated Suites

Alan reflects on two distinct approaches to collaborative tooling – one which focusses on the best of breed capabilities and one which takes a suite of collaborative capabilities.

These are illustrated below:

Best of Breed Collaboration Tools

Suites Collaboration Tools

The key to the suites approach is the content of the centre combined with the ability to integrate third-party capability and have data portability.

I’m not sure I would put everything in the centre that Alan does but I wholly agree with the principal. One of the significant challenges with a suite approach is that by choosing a suite you risk creating a lock-in situation. This lock-in isn’t necessarily one of data lock-in, what’s more likely is capability lock-in.

Intelligent Collaboration

Alan explains what he means by Intelligent Collaboration:

“This is poised to be the coolest shift we’ve had in collaboration tools we’ve had in 20 years”

“The ability for us to start doing really cool things based on intelligence is really going to dramatically change the way we work”

In the Microsoft approach this intelligence will initially be focussed on the individual, but will then extend to teams and organisations.

The systems that we have today have a very limited view of context and what view they do have they tend not to use with any intelligence. Take the simple example of email build-up during a holiday period. You can set up an out-of-office response, but wouldn’t it be great if something more intelligent happened.

If we take that simple example and add onto it all of the sensors that will soon be reporting on our well-being and location. You can then imagine getting a response from your bosses intelligent assistant asking you to attend a meeting on her behalf because her flight back from holiday has been placed into quarantine due to an outbreak of a virus for which she is show the initial symptoms.

Adding to the context will enable many more intelligent interaction.

Imagine a digital assistant system that made decisions based on – location, time, time-zone, emotional state, physical state and many more.

The Rise of the Dynamic Team

This is the point in the session where Bryan Goode adds the Microsoft perspective. He does this by focussing on:

Modern Collaboration

The perspective defined by Bryan is that teams will continue to utilise many different tools and will be increasingly mobile.

Microsoft are also investing heavily in meeting experiences, something that is in desperate need of improvement for all of us.

Intelligent Fabric

In order to enable modern collaboration Bryan talks through the Microsoft view of the need for an Intelligent Fabric.

Two examples of this fabric being built are Office 365 Groups and Office Graph.

Office 365 Groups provide a unified capability across the Office 365 tools for the creation of teams. A group created in one of the Office 365 tools will be visible in all of the other tools – Sites, OneDrive, Yammer, Exchange. Doing this makes a group a fabric entity rather than being locked into any particular tool.

Office Graph brings together all of the signalling information from the Office 365 tools and any other integrated tools. It’s role is to bring together the meta-data from different interactions and activities.

Personalised Insight

An Intelligent Fabric is one thing, but creating value from it is the important part.

In the presentation Bryan demonstrates Office Delve which utilises the signalling from Office Graph to create personal insights.

The personal insights currently focus on the individual, but they are being extended to provide insights for groups and organisations.

“Teamwork is becoming a first-class entity across our products”

Bryan Goode

I’m not going to explain the demonstrations other than to say that they are worth watching, as is the rest of the presentation.

Conclusions

Productivity and collaboration are going to be a defining features of future organisations as can be seen from the posts that I wrote on the Productive Workplace.

Microsoft is in a position to generate a lot of innovation and disruption by building on top of the Office 365 ecosystem. Groups, Graph and Delve are just the start of that. Having released themselves from the shackles of delivery by Enterprise IT organisation they can potential move at a pace that places them ahead of the pack.

More…

The presentation and video for this session is here.

The video is also embedded below:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK1106/player

Which Countries Work The Most? The OECD Better Life Index

The statistics in the graphic at the bottom of this post come from the OECD Better Life Index. For the UK it makes for interesting reading.

The full index measures 11 different parameters across 35 countries. The graphic focusses on the data behind just one of those indexes – average yearly working hours. People in the UK sit in the top third of the ranking at 1,790 hours per year.

The interesting observation, from someone who works for an American lead company, is that we in the UK work longer hours (1,790) per year than they do in the USA (1,654). We are nowhere near the 2,226 hours they do in Mexico though.

On many measures of the Better Life Index the UK does quite well, ranking highly on:

  • Income
  • Community
  • Environment
  • Civic Engagement
  • Health
  • Safety

We sit in the middle of the pack for:

  • Housing
  • Jobs

The index areas where we aren’t happy:

  • Education
  • Life Satisfaction
  • Work-Life Balance

From a personal perspective the ranking looks about right, but I’m only one person in 62 million.

Going Tribal? Internet Tribes

Steve Denning recently wrote a post in Forbes highlighting what he regarded as 5 reasons why Google+ was died.

In Steve Denning fashion the article was well crafted and made some interesting points. It’s not the purpose of this post to assess the merits of that article; what has intrigued me was the responses to the article.

At one level Google+ is just another social media platform, but that’s not how many of the people who use it perceive it, or at least that’s not how they respond when challenged.

These are some of the responses:

I just checked your G+ profile – 2 POSTS on G+ and that’s it? Sorry but you have no right to write blatant hit pieces on G+ when you don’t even USE the product. Just because you don’t engage with people on G+ does not make it dead. You can check the author’s G+ profile here as he was to embarrassed to link it to his profile: https://plus.google.com/112179839227533740446/posts

and

Steve, it may have been better if you did some research and reached out to the community.

This just has you looking really stupid, writing an article just for linkbait.
We have seen it so often from contributors to MSM articles.

or

The only problem with Google+ is that people like yourself don’t know how to use it. I love Google+ Like Bob Dylan sings; Some feel the rain, others just get wet.

and

LMAO – I’m just another ghost calling from the dead G+! As a ghost I find it has the most informative and well reasoned subject matter and commentary! Really fb is for baby pictures and Twitter is for abuse.

With many more to choose from; there are also a whole load of well-reasoned comments.

You’ll notice here that there are a some characteristics to these comments:

  • They claim an allegiance to a club or tribe.
  • They claim a value and exclusivity to being part of the tribe.
  • They define Steve as being outside of the tribe and hence of a lower value. This is especially true as the commentators try to flag him as a member of different tribes such as Facebook or Apple.
  • They are adamant and definitive about the veracity of the tribe.

These behaviours aren’t unique to people who use Google+, it’s a common human response. Anyone who has seen a gang at work will recognise these traits:

  • You are either in the gang or you aren’t.
  • Your gang is always the best gang and you are privileged to be a member of it.
  • If you aren’t in the gang then you are in some way undervalued, particularly if you are a member of a different gang.
  • Membership of the gang is a lifelong choice.

Steve also wrote a second article – Has Google+ Really Died? – highlighting, among other thing, the responses that he’d received:

Enge’s study also sheds an interesting light on the reaction to my article last week, “Five Reasons Why Google+ Died?” There was a torrent of comments on Forbes itself and heavy traffic on Twitter and Google+ itself.

A good part of the commentary was supportive, particularly on Twitter. The article was headlined on the Forbes leadership page and picked up by SmartBrief on Leadership.

The negative comments fell into three main categories. Some were heartfelt user pleas, along the lines of: “I and some of my friends just love Google+. How could it have died!”

Others questioned in a more thoughtful way the analytic basis for my citation of the declaration by Scott Galloway, the NYU marketing professor, that Google+ was “already dead.”

A third category of negative comments was vituperative in tone: the comments questioned my intelligence, my analytic capability, my bona fides, my work ethic, my motivations, my financial integrity and even my right to say anything about Google+ at all. Not liking the message, these commentators attacked the messenger.

The tone of these latter comments often seemed to resemble that of people defending a struggling religious cult, rather than the users of a mere software tool. Looming over the discussion, of course, is Google’s track record of abruptly canceling products that haven’t met market expectations. Is Google about to pull the plug on Google+ too? The fans’ angst is understandable.

It’s interesting that he highlights how the comments on Twitter were supportive, perhaps that has a lot to do with the comments coming  from members of a different tribe?

The Internet is littered with competing tribes and I wonder whether it’s really doing us more harm than good. I’ve done a bit of research into conspiracy theories lately and it seems that a lot of that has to do with tribal thinking – you are part of a special in-crowd if you believe something different to the mainstream. Internet hoaxes fall into the same class – how many of you have seen fake pictures of surfers at the Sydney Opera House recently? People spread them around because they want to enforce their place in the tribe that they subscribe to.

We all have a deep-seated need to belong, but I wonder whether we are allowing that to get in the way a bit too often?

We have a huge choice of tribes to join but how do we know which ones are good and constructive ones?

History has shown us that we are stronger when tribes collaborate, are there any really good examples of that on the Internet?

Sorry no answers in this post, just questions.

"Our mission statement is to…"

I walk into a room, it’s a meeting room that anyone who has been to any corporate office anywhere on the planet would recognise. There’s a long table with chairs around it, at one end are a couple of large flat screens attached to the wall at shoulder height, the theme is wood and black leather.

There’s a business casual dress code so all the men are wearing shirts; the one lady is wearing a trouser suit.

Most of the people in the room are known to me but a couple of people are here to present who I don’t recognise. During the meeting introductions I find out that we are to receive a presentation from a vendor and they are the vendor’s technical sales representatives. At this point I’m already trying to line up a set of excuses for leaving the room, but I’m here now and an early exit would seem rude.

After the usual faffing about getting the screens to work properly one of the technical sales representatives moves to the first slide from which he reads these words:

Our mission statement is to…

Then it happens. It used to happen occasionally but recently something more permanent has happened in my brain, a connection has been broken, or perhaps a new connection has been made, I’m not sure which. On hearing the words “Our mission statement is to…” my brain experiences a complete blank out. I may as well be looking at a white screen and listening to white noise.

It doesn’t matter what the person says after these words I’m not going to hear them. If they said “Our mission statement is to undertake best-practice collaboration with polka-dot elephants enabling franchised delivery of cutting-edge chilli-marzipan rabbits to ethical nomadic muskrats in Uzbekistan” I wouldn’t know – I’ve gone to my blank place.

If I’m honest I’ve struggled to write this post because every time I write those words my brain goes off to the blank place and I have to focus quite hard to come back again.

I’d like to be able to describe the blank place to you, but I can’t, because it is just blank; there’s nothing there. I’m not sure when this behaviour started, I suspect that it’s been building up over time.

My theory about the cause is that it’s a self-preservation mechanism; even when I could hear mission statements I found them excruciating and I think my brain is trying to protect itself from any more pain. In my experience most mission statements may as well be a random selection of verbs and adjective, many of them are impossible to understand and the rest don’t say anything worth saying.

(If you want to have some fun with creating your own mission statement from random verbs and adjectives  the Mission Statement Generator does precisely that.)

Why do most mission statements fail? It’s only my opinion, but I think it’s because they don’t tell a story. We are story people, we’ve collected and retold them for millennia, they engage with our minds and our emotions, they communicate a message.

I’ve been to many sessions where someone has given me their mission statement and then told me a story. I can remember many of the stories – I can’t remember any of the mission statements. Life would be so much easier if they just left the mission statement out.

Am I the only one that this happens to? Do I need to seek out some medical help?

You might also like: The parable of Ray’s Helicopter Company.

The words “Our vision statement is to…” have exactly the same effect.

Desktop Scatterer, Folder Fanatic and File Dropper

As I walked around the office this morning I was struck by a colleague’s desktop on their PC. It was absolutely full of file icons, completely covered. I’ve seen this phenomena before but never to such an extreme. I found myself recoiling at what I saw as a complete and utter mess. You may have guessed by my tone that I’m not a desktop scatterer.

My desktop has 16 icons on it; all of them from applications that have decided that I need a desktop icon. Sometimes I delete them, but many will make their way back at a later date normally after an update. All of my files are in folders in a hierarchical structure; I am a bit of a folder fanatic.

There are other people who can never find anything, they seem to have an approach of dropping files into all sorts of places in the hope that they can find them later. There are times when the disorganised side of my personality turns me into file dropper also.

I’ve never really understood the desktop scatterer, I suspect that scatterer is a bit derogatory and the desktop is highly optimised to the way that they work. I understand the file dropper a bit, sometimes you just want to get on with things without having to think about organising what you are doing. Occasionally my folder fanaticism gets out of control and I put files within folders, within folder, within folders, within folders and can’t find anything.

The joy of being a folder fanatic or a file dropper is that there are now so many places to create folders and drop files available: local disks, usb drives, network drives, DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, SharePoint, Wiki, email, Box, ShareFile, etc.

We all think and work differently and there are (believe it or not) advantages and disadvantages to each of these approaches.

File structures and systems are going to be around for some time because they are so flexible and enable us to optimise how we work. Perhaps it’s time, though, that we started helping each other to be as productive as possible in their use, what works for you?

"Once again, these features are available now and you can start using them today."

Reading through an AWS Official blog post today I was struck by the power of the closing statement:

Once again, these features are available now and you can start using them today.

We have become used to continuous change that we forget how profound a statement it is.

For much of my working life I’ve lived through the era of packaged application deployment. Hundreds and thousands of devices, running hundreds of applications with each needing to be updated individually. These updates required terabytes of storage and gigabits of network bandwidth.

Changing a large application required weeks of planning and protracted project timelines. Only then would devices join the network and receive the required updates, even so success rates were variable, at best.

These changes were so massive that organisations would only do a few a year.  The organisational impact of moving any faster was just too high, you would want to finish one before you started the next one.

The move to Software-as-a-Service and Utility Services enables a world of continuous change. It’s no longer valid to talk about version x.y of something when it’s different every day.

Organisations can stop worrying about the impact of change and focus on the value of change.

The post itself is about an impressive set of enhancements to Amazon’s WorkSpaces offering, but the real power is in the ability to deliver the benefits without friction and without protracted deployment projects.

“start using them today” are very powerful words for organisations seeking to keep up with the competition.

Generation Z: Another Generational Caricature

One of my favourite quotes is by Soren Kierkegaard:

“Once you label me you negate me.”

I’ve previously posted about our labelling of the Millenials (Generation Y).

Shortly after I wrote that post I read an article in the New York Times about Generation Z which made me sigh – Make Way for Generation Z.

(At least we are now at the end of the alphabet and someone will have to do something a bit more interesting than just labelling the next generation as an increment from the last one. Perhaps we’ll move to special characters, how about Generation #?)

I was going to write something about why this article made me sigh, but then I came across someone who had done a better job – Generalization Z: The Times reduces generation Z to a caricature by Josh Bernoff in without bullshit:

While generalization in writing is a sin, drawing broad conclusions about a whole generation is far worse. Alexandra Levit’s piece about Generation Z in the New York Times is a great – that is, awful – example.

The sin of generalization has three basic flavors: generalizations hedged with weasel words; unsupported broad, sweeping statements; and generalization from one or two examples. They’re all lame, and you shouldn’t believe any of them.

Josh Bernoff goes on to explain in more detail where the original article fails. It’s a master lesson to all of us who write and the reconstructed article on Google Docs is great.

(If you would like to you can submit some BS to the site for analysis – now where was that email from finance?)

Thought Experiment: Glasses Tracker

Yesterday I was doing a job which required me to go up into a loft. Before I could get into the loft I needed to get to the cupboard where the loft hatch was, this meant opening up a number of locked doors. Once inside the cupboard I need to move a number of tables out then open the loft hatch and secure the ladder. It was only then I could go up into the loft space and get on with my work.

Having completed my work I did the same set of things in reverse: descend ladder, replace loft hatch, replace tables and lock doors.

A short while later I was sat at a desk having finished off the rest of the job. It was then that I picked up my keys and looked for my glasses. I expected the glasses to be on the desk, but they weren’t. Where were they? Then it occurred to me – “I wonder if I’ve left them in the loft”. Sure enough, after going through the process again, the loft is exactly where my eye-wear was.

Some years ago I left a set of glasses at Manchester airport on my way out on a business trip. On my return I visited the lost-property office to see if some kind person had handed them in. The friendly man behind the counter asked me the date on which I’d left my glasses he the took out a draw from a cabinet which was at least two metres by one metre.  The tray was full of hundreds of pairs of glasses and represented only a few days of misplaced eye-wear, some of which were very bizarre.  My spectacles weren’t there.

This got me thinking, in this world of shrinking electronics and the Internet of Things, why don’t we have GPS traceable glasses. There are clearly some styles of glasses with very little room for anything, but some of the designs have probably got ample space to store the required gadgetry?  Perhaps it’s enough to have them Bluetooth traceable, but GPS tracking would be better. Bluetooth might have resolved my loft problem, but I think it would have been less likely to have resolved my airport problem. Wouldn’t that be a great differentiator for the glasses manufacturers?

Some people have already thought about something similar:

  • Glasses TrackR – This seems to do a lot of what I want but it’s still a bit big. I like the 2-way ringer function to, which enables you to find your phone from your glasses. The limitation of 100 feet is going to be a common problem though.
  • LOOK – This is a Bluetooth variant that is more stylish, but it’s still an extra something attached to your glasses. Using Bluetooth gives it a 50 feet range which would be OK, but it’s still not GPS.

Both of these are currently concepts looking for funding, perhaps I should invest?

The challenge as always, is going to be power. You can pretty much guarantee that the time when you need this function will be the time when the batteries have dies. It’s also power that limits the range of the device, anyone who has GPS enabled on their phone knows what a power drain it can be.

So we’ve still got a way to go before this can become a reality, but it’s tantalizingly close.

Concept video for the LOOK:

Millennial are just like everyone else! No surprises there then.

Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends. Researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.

Wikipedia

Millennials are everywhere, both literally and figuratively:

They get characterised in all sorts of ways; the Pew Research Institute allows you to take a survey to assess How Millennial Are You? This survey includes the following questions:

  • Do you have a tattoo?
  • Do you have a piercing in a place other than an earlobe?

(I’m not very Millennial, but that’s not surprising as I was born in the 60’s which are nowhere near the 80’s and I’m lacking any bodily adornment)

Time Magazine characterised them as the Me Me Me Generation.

Recently IBM undertook some research to see whether all of the characterisations were true. You can perhaps imagine some of the findings by the title Myths, exaggerations and uncomfortable truths – The real story behind Millenials in the workplace:

In a multigenerational, global study of employees from organizations large and small we compared the preferences and behavioral patterns of Millennials with those of Gen X and Baby Boomers. We discovered that Millennials want many of the same things their older colleagues do. While there are some distinctions among the generations, Millennials’ attitudes are not poles apart from other employees’.

Our research debunks five common myths about Millennials and exposes three “uncomfortable truths” that apply to employees of all ages. Learn how a multigenerational workforce can thrive in today’s volatile work environment.

(Emphasis mine)

What were the myths:

  • Myth 1: Millennials’ career goals and expectations are different from those of older generations.
  • Myth 2: Millennials want constant acclaim and think everyone on the team should get a trophy.
  • Myth 3: Millennials are digital addicts who want to do – and share – everything online, without regard for personal or professional boundaries.
  • Myth 4: Millennials, unlike their older colleagues, can’t make a decision without first inviting everyone to weigh in.
  • Myth 5: Millennials are more likely to jump ship if a job doesn’t fulfill their passions.

Remember, they are called myths because they aren’t true. In the main the research discovered that the Millennial generation is just like the Baby Boomer and Gen X generations in all of these traits. There are some situations where it’s the other generations that are different – “Gen X employees use their personal social media accounts for work purposes more frequently that other employees” – but there are no polar differences between the generations.

So why is so much being written about the differences that the Millenials will bring, some of it is also research based, but I’m sure that there is a good deal of confirmation bias to it also (but perhaps I like the IBM research because it confirms my bias).