The rise of micro mavens: Building business empires around personal brands

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Trevor Young, aka PR Warrior, is launching a new site Micro Domination which covers the “Global Microbrand Revolution”.

The site already includes an excellent free e-book The Micro Maven Revolution. You can download it from here or by clicking on the cover below.

Trevor opens the book by practising what he preaches, highlighting his capabilities and brand in a low-key way in front of excellent content. He then describes the core idea:
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Sorry Grant Thornton, amorphous fears about IP loss should not trump value creation

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Sorry, Grant Thornton, I think your instinct is very likely wrong.

I saw this advertisement (also in French and Flemish) in Brussels-Midi station when I was recently passing through.

Grant Thornton claims to have an ‘instinct for growth’. For some reason it seems to have an instinct (it appears without any evidence) that expanding into new markets will lead to loss of intellectual property. So the instinct is one for inaction, and in turn no growth.
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Big moves at Fairfax: The global extinction of newspapers moves closer

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Today’s ‘Fairfax of the Future’ announcement from Australia’s second largest newspaper publisher Fairfax is massive news in Australia, and very significant in a global media context.

It has been a busy media day for me, so far doing interviews for SBS World News and ABC24 News as well as a number of radio stations, due to my earlier predictions of the extinction of newspapers. My Newspaper Extinction Timeline was launched in October 2010, at the time getting mainstream media coverage in over 30 countries and being seen by well over 1 million readers within one week.

Newspaper_Timeline_front.gif
Click on image to download full framework

Recently I have been reconsidering some of the forecast extinction dates for a number of countries, notably after my recent European speaking tour. Fairfax’s announcements today significantly shift forward the likely loss of news-on-paper as a significant media format, and in fact make 2022 seem an exceedingly optimistic timespan for newspapers to survive in Australia.
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Travelling for work: 7 principles for productivity and value

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Over the last 9 weeks I’ve been on a plane every week, have been on 26 flights or inter-city trains, and delivered 28 keynotes or workshops across 8 countries. This week I will be at home all week :-).

I have long had the concept of “the right amount of travel”, that is enough but not too much. How much that is depends on personal temperament, your relationship and family situation, health, life stage, and many other things. I do love travelling but there is certainly such a thing as too much. Fortunately on the European segment of my recent travels Victoria and the girls spent four weeks based out of Paris to overlap with me, so we were able to spend time together there and in London, which made it a lot more palatable.

The nature of my work is that I do have to travel extensively, so it is critical that I get the most out of my time travelling. I need to work at getting better at it myself, but here are some principles that I try to work by, and you might find useful.

1. Travel is the ultimate learning experience.
I am fortunate in that I travel widely rather than to the same places all the time, so I always have things to learn wherever I go. Wherever I go I look around myself continuously to learn from what I see, whoever I meet I ask about what they are seeing change, whatever companies I engage with I observe their unique culture and experiences. While all of this is of course essential to a futurist, I believe we all need to take every opportunity available to learn what is happening across the glorious global diversity of business, society, and humanity.
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Will offices still exist in the future?

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I’m currently doing a five-city speaking tour for Canon, speaking about the future of workspace. In my keynote I talk about the driving forces of change in work and organizations, the changing nature of the workspace, and the leadership required to create the next phase of work.

Until recently there were two major workspaces for knowledge work: offices and field work. Communication technologies, economic shifts, and changing corporate attitudes have enabled the rapid rise of home workers. In addition, co-working facilities or what I call the cloud workplace are becoming prominent in providing many of advantages to workers of office work without requiring commuting into a central office.

When we think about the future of workspace, given the massive shift to distributed work, the question arises of whether centralized office will still have a reason to exist in the future.
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How Luxembourg is playing to become a technology hub

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A few weeks ago I gave the keynote at the IT Nation Golden i Gala and Awards and earlier in the day ran a CIO workshop on Creating the Organisation of the Future.

In my brief time in Luxembourg I learned about some of the many things that are happening in the tech scene in nation. As a tiny country of half a million people, it has the highest GDP per capita in the world, currently based primarily on its strong financial services industry, facilitated by its strong banking secrecy laws. Luxembourg is the second largest funds management market in the world after the US. However an economy dependent on financial services is not necessarily the best position to be today. As such the government and business sectors are seeking to build Luxembourg into a technology hub, with ICT named by the government as the third of five pillars for national development.
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Researchers develop ‘smart’ touch-responsive internet-enabled newspaper

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My European speaking tour (ending today) has had two primary themes: crowdsourcing and the future of corporate IT. However at a couple of points, notably a guest lecture to Moscow’s Higher School of Economics’ School of Journalism, I have delved into the future of media. As always, my well-known Newspaper Extinction Timeline has come up as a hot topic of discussion.

One of things I always have to point out is that we should not be comparing newspapers with the tablets of today when we think about the choices people will make in how they access news. Tablets similar to those of today will be given away for free and digital paper which has all the qualities of today’s paper plus the advantages of digital at a low cost will be the alternative.

The e-ink initiatives have some way to go, however it seems there are other paths to this outcome, as shown in this video.

In a post on BBC College of Journalism website Paul Egglestone of University of Lancashire’s school of journalism writes:
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Open Meeting Protocol and the structure of emergent collaboration

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Last week I had an early evening meeting set up with Indy Johar, the inspiring co-founder of Hub Westminster. When I arrived I found that Indy had invoked an ‘Open Meeting Protocol’, offering £10 to Matt Sevenoaks of KPMG to join the meeting, who in turn invited Shelley Kuipers, the CEO of Chaordix, who as it happens I had conversed with on email as reecently as a few days before but had never met in real-life. Another Hub Westminster member Pamela joined us.

To be frank I don’t completely understand the protocol, even after viewing the very interesting Prezi explanation below from David Pinto. In essence it is a structure for inviting people to join a meeting by paying them (nominally) £10, and thus participating in a value-creating structure.

eco^external on Prezi

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Exploring crowd business models

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For me, the most interesting part of my new book Getting Results From Crowds is Chapter 22 on Crowd Business Models (which you can download here). I knew that after getting the book out a major direction for me would be delving deeper into the wonders of crowd business models. I’m now beginning to do some more exploring, together with lots of other people.

Next Monday I run a Crowd Business Models workshop in Sydney, the first in a global series of crowdsourcing workshops.

My Crowd Business Models framework below, like all my frameworks, is in perpetual beta. Part of the intention of the workshop series is that we will collectively evolve my crowdsourcing frameworks, including the one for crowd business models.


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Themes of the day: Consumerization of IT, Crowdsourcing for small business, Crowdsourcing in PR

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These are frantically busy days, which is squeezing my ability to blog and capture some of the fascinating stuff flying by. In coming months I think I’ll try to do more ‘mini-blogging’, just capturing quick thoughts and impressions rather than writing up every interesting speaking engagement or media appearance I do.

Yesterday I gave three presentations, and I’d love to write (at least) a full blog post about what we covered for each one. However that’s not possible, so I’ll just share quick thoughts about each topic and what I will try to write more about later.

The day started by giving the keynote at a Consumerization of IT event run by CIO Magazine, supported by HP and Microsoft.
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