In March 1876, the New York Times trumpeted the birth of the home entertainment industry. It would be powered by the telephone. It (mostly) never happened. Exactly 134 years later Facebook became the most visited website in the USA, pulling in more visitors than Google. There’s a connection between these facts. We’re learning what the web is really for.

If we measured customer attention like Gross Domestic Product, we’d know we were in trouble. Advertising, promotion and information are locked in an inflationary spiral as too much data chases too few eyeballs. Per capita, ‘Gross Domestic Attention’ (let’s call it GDA) is falling off a cliff. Thinking about the SEO arms race, is making me get very clear that imagination is worth more than cash.

Government is a Seventeenth Century machine, with late Twentieth Century middleware operating in a sceptical Twenty-First Century environment.  To solve its (our?) public expenditure challenge needs solutions that do more with less, and not less with less.  Getting those solutions imagined, designed and implemented is going to need a different way of doing things.
Public policy [...]

Investing in customer insight but cutting customer contact makes no sense. Service teams have huge emotional investment in putting right the things that cause customers angst. They should be central to strategic product and service innovation.

In the rich world, we’re unlikely to solve our obesity epidemic any time soon. Weight gain will change the financial arithmetic of many products and services. Wise companies will innovate to develop propositions that meet the physical, social and identity needs of overweight consumers.