Thanks Professor Brian Cox for inspiring me!

My Father once told me there are two things you never discuss in public – Politics and Religion.  I am going to break from this advice for this post as I want to share an experience I had earlier this week.

Level39 at Canary Wharf is a technology hub for up and coming Fin Tech and Smart Tech startups and investors. I was lucky enough to attend an event they ran on Wednesday night which was a talk by Professor Brian Cox. For those who don’t know Professor Cox, check out the link I have connected. To sum it up – he is one of those amazing people who is so committed to his industry, that he has learned the art of being able to explain extremely complex scientific concepts, to a person with an extremely NON scientific brain – like me!

Professor Cox went into detail about the possibility of life on other planets, an explanation of the Large Hadron Collider activity that he works on, and an attempt at explaining how much we know about what may have happened before the big bang. Whilst all of this was fascinating and his talk was extremely entertaining, it was the last 5 minutes of question time that made me sit up in my seat.

There were some interesting questions from a few people who were obviously quite involved in the scientific community, and Professor Cox managed, to not only answer their questions, but also explain the questions for the lay-people in the room (again, such as myself!).  The final question of the night was one that at first made me cringe. It was more a comment than a question and it was an opinion on the need to believe in God especially with all the fighting currently going on in the world.

Now the reason this comment made me cringe was not because I have a strong opinion for or against God (or a God’s) presence in the world at the moment. It was because I had made a terrible assumption that if you are pro-science then you must be against religion. I thought this question might raise the heat in the room and put Professor Cox under pressure, to get into a verbal stoush about God vs Science.

Stupid of me to make assumptions, because not only was the response Professor Cox gave brilliant, but he really proved me wrong! Without paraphrasing, his response was to say that he does not particularly know what we do with the information that Science uncovers, but he does know that it is the job of all of us to do something with it. That the world needs art, literature, psychology, philosophy and theology to help understand what it is that we can do with the information that scientists make sense of.

Professor Cox went on further to explain that scientists take small concepts, and explore and prove or disprove theories in incremental steps. They do not propose to know all the answers and believe that their industries job is a lifelong journey of small steps.

I thought this answer was graceful, informative and it set the challenge for everyone regardless of your belief system to take action and play your part in using the information which scientists help to discover, to make a difference.

If I am going to break my dad’s rule I may as well do it well. One thing that Professor Cox pointed out in his talk was the small amount which politicians in the UK allocate to scientific research in their annual budget. Part of the discussion was to inform the audience that scientific research is important and that one of the ways in which he along with social entrepreneur Lord Andrew Mawson are raising this awareness, is through the Science Summer School, set up via the St Pauls Way Transformation project.

Before the talk I was not overly interested in science other than to read through the occasional head line items in major press. However I was wrong – because science and the work these scientists are doing, is innovation but in a different field. After the talk I want to say thank you to Professor Brian Cox for opening my eyes and inspiring me to find out what I can do to support the scientific community, and the journey they have undertaken on behalf of all of us.

I would urge you to have a look at some of the links I have included on this page as well as Professor Cox’ website www.apolloschildren.com

You might just be inspired too…

What I learnt from reading the Jony Ive Bio

I just finished a great biography by Leander Kahney on Jonathan Ive the brilliant mind behind the product design of groundbreaking apple products like the iMac, iPhone, iPod and iPad.

It’s an excellent view into both the way Jony Ive thinks about design, and user experience, and how Apple adopted his methods, and built a team culture and leadership art centered around it.

One of the philosophies that is made quite clear in the book is that Jony immerses himself in the user needs and expectations when he is designing – before writing the story that will dictate the concept of a product. Steve Jobs was well known for telling partners and employees of Apple; that customers do not know what they want and so it’s Apples job to tell them.

I don’t think Jony Ive shared this same mentality. His view, was that customers do in fact know what they want and that it is a designer’s job to help them communicate this, through a lifetime of iterative product designs which the customer can experience, and ultimately build trust in the brand that their needs are being met.

Jony Ive and Apple push boundaries. Their commitment to reversing the product design process to allow design and user experience to dictate operations, and engineering, was their true innovation. This is what allowed them to claw back from being within the grasps of bankruptcy, to be one of the most successful companies in history, in just over a decade.

Every advertising company will tell you that at least one new client a week tells them they want to look and feel just like Apple. We all use their products, and we all read the articles and books published in their honour. Yet very few of the major brands out there have the same commitment to innovation that Apple do.

Having spent majority of my career in Financial Services, I can tell you that there is not one brand that has inspired me like Apple has, nor have I seen a commitment from an organisation in the industry, to change their operating model so drastically that it has re-written history.

With the amount of business change happening at the moment due to the technology industry providing greater connectivity, transparency and automation, why are there no standout brands re-writing history in the way Apple did, with its product design from the very late 90’s to the year the iPad came out in 2010?

Banking has remained the same for over 50 years. Sure we have created some new innovative products and our operational efficiency gains have been rapid due to the introduction of the Internet, but really has much changed from a customer experience point of view across lending, transacting and managing wealth?

My questions are important because like it or not customer needs change, but they do know what they want. Like Apple, it is up to the leadership of companies to foster a culture that strives to inspire with design and user experience first, and only then followed by operations and engineering.

If you believe that your company can not do this because of cost constraints or change management challenges, then it’s time to give up now otherwise you are just delaying the inevitable – which is your customers walk away never to return!

A quote out of Kahney’s book “The thing is, its very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better” – Jony Ive

That is the challenge to organisations wanting to build a successful future. My advice to leaders who are concerned with the amount of change and where to start is simply this; JUST START!

London Fin Tech leading the way

There is some serious disruption happening in the London Tech scene at the moment, and financial services seems to be a core focus for a lot of this disruption. With the increasing popularity of micro-finance, alternative currencies like bitcoin and stellar , as well as P2P and B2B lending, there are plenty of options for startup technology companies looking to get involved.

The larger financial institutions also face increased competition from challenger organisations; like Aldermore, Shawbrook and even Tesco who have set up their own bank and have around 7 million customer accounts.

In the race towards growth and dominance, the challenger banks have two major advantages; firstly they do not share the legacy issues of contributing to the financial crisis, in the way the major banks did. Secondly, and probably more importantly, they do not have the legacy technology footprint the major banks have.

The age old saying of what goes up must come down is true, and for most part this is a sweeping explanation for the role which major financial institutions all around the world played in the recent global financial crisis. For this reason, issues relating to the cause of the crisis may be forgiven over time, however, sleeping at the wheel when it comes to technology advancement will not be forgiven.

A recent McKinsey&Co publication stated; that due to a lack of spending and delayed digitization of retail banking processes, most European banks “have relatively shallow digital offerings focused on enabling basic customer transactions”.

My personal opinion and one of the major factors in my decision to recently move from Australia to London, is that the UK FinTech scene is such a buzz at the moment because there is so much pressure on the oldest financial hub in the world, to lead the way into the new banking and finance era. Innovation support from heavily backed organisations like Innovate Finance are being set up to promote the evolution of the financial services sector into a technology driven industry, as opposed to the relationship and manual process driven industry of decades gone by.

The internet movement has created connectivity, more personalised service, and overall transparency. These are all much needed factors in financial services. To see the combination of consumer demand and startup technologists focusing their efforts on disrupting the control held by so few, will be a very interesting development to watch.

The rapidly advancing Self-Driving Car

I love everything to do with technology and innovation. I particularly love hearing about entire industries being disrupted. I regularly include companies like Uber, Airbnb and Amazon in my blog, simply because they are such good case studies for learning about disruption.

I have been reading a lot lately about the Self-Driving-Car and the impact this technology will have over the next 5-10 years. I had really not taken any notice before, mainly because my mind struggled to contemplate the huge challenge in addressing the divide between the current infrastructure supporting the auto industry, and what the future would need to look like. Entire industries working together both private and government. Throw in the oil companies as well, and it all just gets far too complicated.

You may have read about Googles version which is all encompassing and if you haven’t seen the video here it is Google Self-Driving Car. In this video they focus on the convenience factor of a Self-Driving Car, with one lady saying how much more time she will be able to now spend with her children, and a blind person talking about how this could enrich his life. This is all great, but there is a question about how serious Google is about the project. Is it just another way to test their innovation capabilities and show off with a “feel good” PR message?

Let’s leave Google for a minute and think about some of the other organisations who are focusing on Self-Driving capability. I recently read a few tweets from Marc Andreessen and sent him a message to ask; who else was doing anything besides Google in this space? Marc responded to say that most of the major car companies are looking at this capability, and Mercedes are most of the way there. I decided to have a look around a bit and found this article from NitroBahn Merces-Benz Dominates Self-Driving Cars Features in the Industry

After reading this article and a few others, I managed to find about similar innovations from car companies, it’s a lot clearer to me now the huge disruption Self-Driving Cars will have. However as opposed to waking up one day and seeing hundreds of cars minus steering wheels (a la Google’s version) – this will be more a step change or rapid creep.

Companies are working on safety first and cherry picking minor accident avoidance, like assisted parking and cross traffic assist. There will be a rush on patents and given how interlinked the auto industry is, there will be technology created by one manufacturer sold at the highest price to the laggards.

Car companies will want to continue to develop the technology at a pace that aligns with their financial interests, and oil companies are most certainly keen to see optimised fuel efficiency via a machine driving the car, as a low priority advancement.

So back to Google. It is clear that their intentions are not simply to corner the entire Self-Driving Car market and become the new car manufacturer of choice. Their advancement however is going to put the car manufacturers under pressure to pick up the pace.

The global road safety record is appalling and if we have now reached a tipping point where Self-Driving Car capability is going to significantly disrupt this, then I am definitely going to be watching this space a lot closer.