How to make an impact in a fast moving world WSOY
Blanca Juti
How to make an impact in a fast moving world
Blanca Juti
WERNER SÖDERSTRÖM OSAKEYHTIÖ HELSINKI
© BLANCA JUTI AND WSOY 2016 ISBN 978-951-0-42371-4 PRINTED IN THE EU
Pepe and Melco, this book is dedicated to you.
How to make an impact in a fast moving world Prologue The world is crying out for game changers! 11
PART ONE The best time ever to be a game changer is now: seize the moment 21 – It’s global! Game changing can reach everyone 24 – The whole world is gathered around the same fireplace 25 – Millennials are shifting society’s values 28 – Our new found love of simplicity 34 – The rise of a new work ethic 36 – Power shifts to networks 45 – You are not alone: there’s a new collaborative society! 47 – It’s never been easier to get started 52
PART TWO A call to solve the world’s most wicked problems 59 – We need an energy miracle 63 – The hidden potential of new sources energy 64 – Rethinking consumption 66 – Game changing food 69 – A production overhaul 72 – Change lenses: waste is a treasure 77 – The hidden gems of urban potential 81 – Clean it up 85 – The cost of inequality and the reward of opportunity 89 – Girl power! 101 – A more inclusive world 126
PART THREE Want to be a game changer? Let’s do it! 131 – Start with a problem 133 – Unleash the power of storytelling 141 – Form a tribe 146 – Build a brand 151 – Get playing! 159 Epilogue 169 Acknowledgements 174
The world is crying out for game changers!
We are facing some pretty hairy problems such as climate change and growing social inequalities. And as we are increasingly witnessing, these problems impact us all. Our very future is in question. Game changers are those brave, intrepid, courageous, optimistic and impatient individuals, who put their ingenuity, passion and drive into solving the world’s most wicked problems, now. Game changers approach problems in a totally out-of-thebox way. Sometimes in retrospect their approach may seem simple, even obvious, but at the time, it was often the absolute opposite. A game changer is someone who makes a quantum leap: not from 1 to 1.1 but as the saying goes “from zero to ten.” Game changers make exponential changes, not linear ones. Throughout history there have been some truly remarkable game changers. Whoever created the wheel spearheaded the expansion of civilization. Years of faster and wider-reaching knowledge distribution followed after Gutenberg created the printed press. Lives were significantly saved after Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin and Marie Curie understood radioactivity. Without the development of the internal combustion engine, industrialization would not have been possible. Contraceptives gave women increasing freedom and allowed for their wider participation in society. Mandela’s compassion and forgiveness formed the basis for a modern, pluralistic South Africa. Though game changers have existed throughout history, there has never been a better moment in the history of the world to be a game changer than today. Never before have individuals been as empowered as today to innovate and scale up. The transformative moment we are living today is as transcendental as were discovering how to make fire, how to weld metals and how to industrialize production back when they too transformed the world. Game changing innovation is possible today at this unprecedented scale for three reasons: We are living through a huge technological leap. And it’s not only Moore’s law which states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every year allowing us greater computing power at lower costs. We see it in every single
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area of human endeavor: communications, medicine, industrial technology, you name it. Anything really that is powered by information technology. The world’s best known futurologist Ray Kurzweil asks us to think of communications alone: it took hundreds of thousands of years for language to develop, tens of thousands of years for written language to become widespread, 400 years for printed press to reach critical mass, 50 years for the telephone to reach a quarter of Americans and Europeans, 7 years for the mobile phone to reach critical mass and only about 3 years for social networks, wikis and blogs to be global phenomena1. This is because the speed of the digital world is no longer linear: it is exponential. Ray Kurzweil predicts that just as we have seen this amazing leap in telecommunications, we will see a huge revolution in medicine and the sciences in the decades to come. Secondly, for the first time in history, thanks to mobility and the Internet, practically everyone is hyper-connected to everyone else, without time lags or delays. Ideas flow from peer to peer and peer to many, anywhere in the world, as fast as they do to the building next door. This communications revolution is truly global and universal. Anyone can connect with anyone and soon things will be interconnected too. This is what we call the Internet of Things. Thirdly, there is a huge generation shift, which is impacting our social values. Millennials and Generation Z see the world very differently. Millennials are a purpose driven generation who are asking themselves, not what they want to be, but what problem they want to solve. These three elements – the speed of technological development, hyper- connectivity at a global level, generation and values shifting – when mixed together with human ingenuity, produce a powerful cocktail: we have more tools at our disposal and are able to collaborate and innovate more than at any point in history. 1 Ray Kurzweil — Immortality By 2045 / Global Future 2045 Congress’2013 https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=qlRTbl_IB-s
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If we only do it right, we have the possibility to take on the world’s most wicked problems head on and fast. The opportunity for major game changing innovation is here and it is up to you to seize it! Reflecting on our own lives gives us a sense of perspective. Less than fifty years ago, when I was born, the world was a very different place. I was born in Mexico in a tumultuous year. In 1968, there were a number of major political events. Students rebelled in Paris, throughout the US, Mexico and in many other places. Some of these student demonstrations, as in Mexico, ended badly: with a student massacre in Tlatelolco. Across the globe, authoritarian power was not uncommon. Actually it was more common than not. Prague, was invaded that year and lost its freedom for a couple of generations. Seeds of change were everywhere. In the US, students ended up successfully impacting the end of the war in Vietnam. African Americans were fighting for equal rights, something that was achieved that very year with the Civil Rights Act, five years after Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Women’s lib was gaining momentum with the invention of the pill. The following year, the first human step was taken on the moon. Looking back, it is clear there was a strong schism of generations. But turning things around was difficult. Those in power had a strong upper hand and game changing required a fair bit of political wrestling. Like many kids, during my very happy childhood in Mexico in the 70’s and early 80’s, I played outdoors with the neighbors, did quite a bit of sports, played an instrument (violin), took part in school plays, followed the news of the world (though sadly through censored TV channels) and occasionally went to the cinema. We had no VHS. We listened to music on cassettes. Computers were something you mainly had in offices for important equations and typewriters ruled for the most part. Our first home computer, the Commodore 64 arrived during my early teens but was rather rudimentary in its functions. And even though we traveled abroad and felt connected to the world, life seemed to be rather local after all. During my childhood, although most homes in the cities had a telephone line, in the countryside, only one out of every ten
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Mexican families had a telephone, a shared line for the family and often even for the neighbors too. We still sent and received handwritten letters that took weeks to reach our pen pals abroad and vice versa. The world was beginning to open up, but it was a slow world. Since then, I have been fortunate to play a role in some of the game changing technologies (mobile telephony, mobile internet, gaming and social media) that shrunk the world and made it one. Serendipity took me from Mexico via the United Kingdom to Finland, where I joined Nokia in 1998 and later Rovio, the creators of Angry Birds, in 2013. During those years, Nokia brought first mobile telephony and then the mobile Internet to billions of people who had never owned a phone or had access to the Internet before. And then Rovio got fans from all over the world playing the same game together and sharing experiences. Looking back at how technology evolved, it may all seem obvious, but it wasn’t. What was originally created for enterprises has been the engine of great social change and touched almost every individual in the planet instead. The Internet was a truly huge force of social change. The idea that you could find out any information at any point just by initializing a search is truly revolutionary. But what made the Internet even more powerful is that everyone became a contributor. This was not a top down world like the one of my childhood. Instead, anyone could become a reporter without a newspaper editor needing to sanction your story. Anyone could become a star, without the support of a major television channel. The Internet allowed the possibility to create game changing movements without permission from anyone. Soon a collaborative society was born. The operating system, Linux, released by a Finn, Linus Thorvald in 1991, was an early example of how far collaboration between individuals could go. Today, this open system is at the core of the Android operating system and hence the largest in the world. Likewise, edited by experts who volunteer all over the world, Wikipedia, founded in 2001, has become the largest reference work.
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The Internet too, has erased borders. The days when we consumed primarily local news, media and content have long gone. Today, a kid from Indonesia can follow Japanese manga, a singer from Korea can top the world charts, Millennials in Finland can launch a global restaurant phenomenon, and a Swedish YouTuber has more global fans out there than most major corporate brands. For me, the ultimate beauty of the Internet is that in making the playing field more even it allows for profound game changing innovations from the most unexpected of places. To start a meaningful change you do not have to have the scale of Apple. Innovation can come from anywhere and everywhere. Two kids born in 1997, living far away, who became huge game changers and advanced humanity zero to ten before they reached twenty, prove that point. American inventor Joack Andraka redefined how to detect Pancreatic cancer through a biomarker called mesothelin. How could a 15-year-old high school kid outsmart Big Pharma companies? By approaching the problem differently and creating a scientific following. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the world, Malala Yousafzai, has campaigned tirelessly for girl’s access to education, first in her native Swat Valley in Pakistan where the Taliban had banned girls from attending school, and then throughout the world. Malala, who had a prominent international blog before the Taliban attacked and nearly killed her, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by the age of 18 and is one of the world’s biggest advocates of girls’ rights. And it’s not just kids. Thousands of miles away from Malala and Joack an octogenarian scientist Tu Youyou creates an anti-malarial drug that inspires the Nobel committee and the scientific world. Without a medical degree or life spent in the West, Youyou instead found that a 2000-year-old tradition held some wisdom that she could apply and test. Game changing is about meaningful change for the better. Game changing innovation can have a profound impact on people’s lives, as in the case of exoskeletons that let the paralyzed walk again, glasses that let the color blind see colors, or trays that
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allow people with Alzheimer’s to feed themselves more easily. It can be environmental as with solar, wind and other sources of renewable energy. It can be social as with virtual reality that allows us to perceive the world better and grow our empathy, or as with software that gives us a direct translation of what someone is saying in a language we do not understand. It can stem from rethinking social issues totally afresh as with the new economic valuation of nature and biodiversity in business accounting. The opportunities to solve problems are many. And the world needs them all. This book is for those who like me, believe there is no time to lose. The world needs a solution to its most wicked problems, now: climate change, which is threatening our very existence; forces of radicalism that are sweeping the world; migratory moves caused by war, poverty, fear, drought and famine; the under-representation and sometimes repression of women in many parts of the world; the serious issue regarding cyber security and intrusion of individual privacy; the lack of universal access to education; the need for new sources of employment; the desire for everyone to live a dignified life; the cure for major diseases; the need for more joy and delight in the world. I am convinced there are game changers out there for each of these problems: people that come up with solutions as well as contributors and followers that help solutions take off. This book is for you. I have divided this book into three sections. In part one of this book I discuss what makes this world we live in a brave new world, giving us the best opportunity ever to create truly game changing solutions to the world’s most wicked problems. In part two of this book, I discuss the world’s problems that keep me and many others awake at night, while having a look at some of the current game changer ideas that are tackling the problems head on. In part three I share with you my experiences and suggest we can all become game changers. It’s in our power to do so.
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The opportunity for major game changing innovation is here and it is yours to grab. Let´s make a difference. There is no time to lose.
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The best time ever to be a game changer is now: seize the moment
On October 21 2015, Back to the Future stars Marty McFly and Doc Brown find themselves landing with their Delorean in Jimmy Kimmel’s live comedy show in New York. You can imagine how surprised they are! For them it has been a car ride. For us, it’s been 30 years since we last saw them! Marty and Doc are curious about the world they are landing in: What’s going on? What has happened in the last 3 decades? Poor Jimmy. He is normally very articulate, but this time, he is at odds explaining! He doesn’t have so much to show for the last thirty years. “No, we did not figure out flying cars,” he admits. Peace in the Middle East has not been achieved. People are still watching TV, although “most people will probably watch us on their phones in the toilet tomorrow.” The biggest achievement of this era, it turns out “is this thing we call smartphones”. Doc Brown is at first impressed by this “tiny super computer” until Jimmy confesses that we don’t really use it “for astrophysicists to triangulate complex equations in real time” as Doc had hoped. Instead, we use smartphones to “take selfies” and “send smiley faces to each other”. It’s a fun stunt that I hope you watch in YouTube and one that inspires reflection. Is it true? Have we achieved so little? In the last 30 years, we have seen some cool things: the end of the cold war, reunification of Germany, the rise of India and China as superpowers resulting in improved livelihoods for their populations and the end of Apartheid. But it is true that the last 30 years have not been stellar when it comes to solving the Middle East conflict, that we have some serious East-West issues (the rise of DAESH amongst them) and that we have caused tremendous harm to our planet. But there is a pretty large revolution happening out there that we may just be underestimating here. The opportunity to make impactful change on a global scale has never been so great as now.
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IT’S GLOBAL! GAME CHANGING CAN REACH EVERYONE Do you know how to boil a frog? This is a pretty cruel question that I hope no one tries to answer in practice, but its answer sheds some light. “You increase the heat very slowly, so that the frog does not notice”. And that is what has been happening. We have been in a pan of boiling water: the frog is us. The amount of change we are living in and the speed in which we live is unprecedented. The change is huge, even if we have not noticed it. The single most remarkable thing about the moment we live in, is that technology has enabled for the first time in history, the instant flow of ideas by peer to peer or peer to many from one corner of the world to another, without a single second delay. The world now truly is an oyster. Take a second to reflect on that. The minute a new Angry Birds game comes out, anyone in the world with a smartphone, can download it. Within 4 weeks, 50 million people were playing Angry Birds 2 in over 200 countries. Imagine that. In the same way, within less than 2 years a business like UBER can scale to 67 countries. That kind of global scale was simply not possible just a few years ago. When chess master Gary Kasparov visited Finland in the fall of 2015 he made that precise point. In 1969, when the first person stepped onto the moon, NASA had the same computer power at its disposal as any of us has today in our pocket: should we be using that power just to play Angry Birds, he asked, or use that power for something else. He may just be underestimating the power of the smartphone. In 1993, less than 1% of the world’s population had access to the Internet, mostly concentrated in few countries. Today, almost 3 billion people, or about 40% of the population do. And India, Brazil, Russia and Nigeria are among the top 10 largest Internet countries. So crucial is communication that in 2015 there are, in fact, more people with access to a mobile device than to a toilet, which is
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of course a problem. But mobile Internet can and does improve our lives on many levels. Phones and the Internet help us get a ride, find a place to stay, book a ticket, find a job, research a fact, measure our pulse and how deep we sleep. Phones also help refugees plan routes, check out the roughness of the sea, keep each other informed of what is ahead and maintain communications with those who stayed behind. Most importantly, the mobile Internet allows us to communicate with each other peer-to-peer and peer-to-many, without a second delay from one side of the world to another. Technology has shrunk the world. We are now hyperconnected. This was not possible just a decade ago! THE WHOLE WORLD IS GATHERED AROUND THE SAME FIREPLACE There is an interesting paradox going on. More than ever and thanks in great measure to the Internet, our freedom of choice has exploded. There are a huge number of different things we can do, read, listen, play, pursue and buy at any one point. And yet, as a global village, we are converging in fewer and fewer places and sharing a lot of common experiences. First, let’s talk about freedom of choice. Without the restrictions posed by brick and mortar or the need to meet face to face, the ability to find what you are interested in, no matter how niche, has grown dramatically. Say you pursue a really unique hobby, like rescuing dead languages. Even if nearby you there would be only a few people interested in the same things as you, when you look at the global pool, there would for sure be many others that share your passion. The Internet allows us to tap into that potential. That is the idea behind what Chris Anderson called The Long Tail in his 2006 book of the same name. The term caught on because he was spot on. There is a mesmerizing way to demonstrate the long tail by looking at figures. Can you believe there are close to 40 million entries in Wikipedia? That would have been very difficult for published
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reference sources like The British Encyclopedia to achieve. Did you know that every second of every day there are over 40,000 searches made in Google which makes about 3.5 billion daily and 1.2 trillion searches per year2? That is a lot of searches for the 7 billion people on the planet. We are a curious bunch! And can you imagine how many products you can buy in Amazon? Well I can assure you it is loads more than your local mall even though Amazon is a much smaller market place than Alibaba, its Chinese counterpart. Amazon sells a staggering 350 million different products! Interestingly though, where there is a proliferation of choice of products, apps and services, the opposite is happening in terms of where we meet. It’s almost as if we truly are a global village of seven billion people, all sitting together around one fireplace sharing experiences. Today, we are in fact converging around fewer, more global market places than ever before. We are all going to the same places to meet, search, learn, listen, view and buy: Facebook, YouTube, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Buzzfeed, Spotify, the App Store or Google Play. Consider these figures. Facebook alone has almost 1.5 billion monthly active users: that is 20% of the world’s population. Every day 1 billion people visit and engage in Facebook. YouTube has over 1 billion active users, WhatsApp has over 800 million, Alibaba has 350 million active users, Twitter is north of 300 million, while Tumblr surpasses 230 million. In China, which limits the participation of its population on Western sites, similar sites with incredible scale have sprouted: RenRen (similar to Facebook), Weibo (similar to Twitter), Youku (YouTube equivalent) and Alibaba (online retailer like Amazon but many times bigger) are huge gathering places. In Korea and Japan, there are also some strong regional social media, Talk and Line, which are preferred by local users. Because of the size of these markets, these are huge social networks and there is a lot of innovation emanating from them too. 2 Sources: Apple, Google, Amazon
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With so many people converging in few places, conversations and experiences become global and your ability to influence as a game changer can be global from the get go. The idea that the whole planet could gather around one fireplace is physically impossible to imagine, yet in the digital space, we are almost there. And we are spending a lot of time around that fireplace! We are now spending more time digitally connected to one another in the day than we do any other activity, including sleep and work3. According to research conducted by media company Activate, the average US citizens spends 5.18 hours watching videos (TV, YouTube, Netflix, and so on), 3.39 hours listening to audio, 1.27 hours in social media, 22 minutes in gaming and 19 minutes reading every day. When you add these hours together we are connected to tech and media more than half of our waking hours. The numbers seem high as there are only 24 hours in the day, but many of these are activities we multi task in (for instance, we can listen to music while we cook, exercise or drive). When you sit around the same fireplace, simultaneously, the likelihood of striking a conversation and engaging with others grows. Bonds form when we are sharing experiences. And today, we are sharing a lot of experiences. It doesn’t matter whether we live in Indonesia, Mali, Antarctica or for that matter the Vatican! People play Angry Birds all over the world. The App store has over 1 million apps, out of which almost half are games. Of those, the TOP 10 games represent 25% of the revenues of the app store. A huge amount of gamers are playing the same games. The same is true for other types of entertainment. Moviegoers from around the world are watching the same movies, music lovers are listening to the same music and people who love reading, are enjoying the same books. There’s incredible richness in that paradox. At one level, we can enjoy our diversity and the flavors of local culture. We can 3 Epic Slide Deck From Former Yahoo Board Member http://uk.businessinsider.com/michaelwolf-predicts-what-will-happen-in-the-tech-industry-in-2016-2015-10?r=US&IR=T
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exploit our niche interests and create global followers. At another, we can meet and enjoy our humanity together through shared experiences in shared spaces and grow empathy for one another. MILLENNIALS ARE SHIFTING SOCIETY’S VALUES Millennials (the generation born between 1980 and 2000) are an incredibly influential generation and they are drivers of much of the change I am referring to. I am fortunate to work in teams largely made up of Millennials and to be the parent of two. And over the years, because trends are often made by the young, I have spent countless hours co-creating products with Millennials. Millennials are the first truly global generation. They have grown up with technology but like my 15 year-old daughter reminds me, they may well be the last generation with baby photo albums comprising real printed pictures and the last generation to have watched videos on VHS and play with Tamagochis. Although they were not born with a tablet on their lap as Generation Z’s4 do today, Millennials are a truly native digital generation. If something defines Millennials more than anything else, it is the fact that technology has enabled them to become the most hyper-social and hyper-connected generation, ever. Aged 15 to mid-30’s, the older Millennials are already at work and having kids, while many young Millennials will be entering jobs in the next decade to become the most dominant force in the workplace. In the US and in many parts of the world, Millennials are already surpassing Generation X and Baby Boomers5 in the workforce. In the emerging world, where there are sometimes more under 15’s than Millennials, Millennials nonetheless are also playing a critical role in shaping society and are seriously influencing not just their parents and grandparents but the younger generation too. 4 Generation Z is the youngest generation alive today. They were born post 2000. 5 There are different definitions for Gen X and Baby Boomers but most commonly it is understood that Gen X is the generation born between 1960 and 1980 while Baby Boomers is the generation before that (babies born after WWII until 1960).
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And this is something I have seen no matter where I go to meet, work and conduct focus groups with Millennials. Millennials from emerging markets are embracing technology and open to the world just as much as Millennials in more developed countries. If anything, this is perhaps the first generation that no matter where they were born are influenced and follow many of the same things. Millennials born in Jakarta, Santiago de Chile or in Dusseldorf, listen to Rihanna, play Clash of Clans and watch Smosh. The hyper-sociability of Millennials is not only a digital phenomenon. In the US and Europe, due to rises in immigration in the last decades, Millennials are the most ethnically diverse and culturally tolerant generation. Millennials are also the most travelled. With growing exposure to other thoughts and ideas, Millennials are overwhelmingly more tolerant to the world. They are more open to differences in belief systems and sexual orientation, more open to new ideas and views than previous generations. This ease with openness to the world was evident in the recent UK referendum on the EU. The young overwhelmingly voted to remain in Europe while their parents and grandparents opted out. Social networks have given us incredible tools to self-organize and create movements around topics and interests that unite us and nobody uses these platforms as extensively and creatively as Millennials who have for the most part, also created them. YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter allow anyone to broadcast their ideas and interests. More than any generation before them, Millennials are huge content creators. They keenly share their views and concerns. They will endorse what they like. They will show their distaste for what they don’t. They are happy to co-create with brands. And they are happy to share their user-generated content too. Perhaps this is one of the reasons reality TV resonates with them. Millennials are rather creators than simple spectators. Adept at sharing, Millennials embody open source culture. Millennials are also the freest generation when it comes to choosing what they want of life now and in the future. More than any generations before, Millennials are more removed from their parents’ expectations when it comes to choosing a profession. This
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Game changing innovation is never evolutionary. By definition it’s revolutionary. Game changing requires us to tap into who we are and why we do things. It begins with the desire to solve a problem with fresh new eyes, rather than simply improve on an existing solution. This book is for those of you who want to seize that opportunity; you who believe you can make a positive impact in our fast changing world. The challenges are many but so are the opportunities. In Game Changer Blanca Juti will immerse you in a world populated by individuals who are changing the world in small and big ways. Drawing on her experiences in technology, start-ups, gaming, anthropology and storytelling, she suggests where to start and how to build a tribe. And she shares why, though game changing is tough, thanks to the speed of technology, collaborative networks and new social values, there has never been a better time to do it.
Blanca Juti (nĂŠe Merino) is an exdiplomat, anthropologist, brand builder and blogger. Through her work with Nokia, Rovio (Angry Birds) and Playmob, among other organizations, she has worked with game changing technologies that have shrunk the world and made it one. Blanca currently lives in Amsterdam where she spends her time seeking to brew a better world with Heineken.
*9789510423714* 69
ISBN 978-951-0-42371-4
Graphic design Chris Bolton | Photo Osma Harvilahti