Blogs

Was on the air this morning at the MTV3's Huomenta Suomi program, with Tapio Hedman.

Tapio is soon about to start in his new job, as the Managing Director of SEK&GREY, one of the largest advertising agencies in Finland.

We talked about the 2012 Presidential Elections, social media, the role of advertising, and the like.

Video here embedded from Vimeo, as usual.

Taneli Tikka on MTV3 Huomenta Suomi on 30.1.2012 talking about presidential elections and social media from Taneli Tikka on Vimeo.

Here's a good video about entrepreneurship made by the Kauffman Foundation:

Video also in YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7VZIbeUrSU

This same topic; innovators, entrepreneurs etc as wealth creators, job creators in society is also a hot topic here in Finland at the moment. The country would desperately need precisely those things.

The global crisis of oversized governments, with reckless overspending and debt taking has already all but ruined the economy and will continue to haunt us for the near future. The governments will not be able to solve a problem they themselves have created.

Finland also has a massive oversized and bloated behemoth of a Government. Currently the 2010 figure for GDP % of the public sector in Finland is 55.3%, according to Eurostat, that means that the public sector in its entirety is larger than the private sector. How long can this madness go on? Not for long. I have been told that no nation in the history of the world has survived for long with a larger public sector than it's private sector.

The Finnish Statistical Bureau, Tilastokeskus, Also has some 2009 data available: they state that the public sector is 56.3% of GDP in 2009. Source here.

As the public sector expenditure is so massive % from GDP this forms a particular problem: it makes the economy increasingly dependent on the public sector and its cash flow. If simultaneously the public sector purchases from the private sector are conservative in attitude and always favor the big corporations then we have another particular problem as the spending never flows to the new. Public sector spending is massive and to large extent its just maintaining the status quo. A cynical person might comment that perhaps this is by design, working as intended?

Needless to say this is totally batshit insane and cannot be sustained for long. The public sector needs to diminish to half it's size, or possibly more, immediately. And the longer we wait, the more massive the cut will have to be later on. The only alternative to this is to rapidly grow the private sector in such a massive way that the GDP% balance shifts and the private sector quickly becomes much larger than the public sector. What do we need for this?: you guessed it; successful innovators and entrepreneurs. By the thousands.

This brings us back to entrepreneurs and innovators. They are the solution to turn this around and get the country, the EU and the economy back on a healthy track.

Every time a brilliant innovator and entrepreneur successfully takes a magnificent product/service/whatever to the markets we all benefit from it in a massive way;

Imagine someone inventing a free, easy to produce, endless energy source and taking that to market. Something like a quantum zero point energy source possibly. We would all benefit and be enriched by it in a massive way. Such an innovation would bring disproportionate amounts of wealth, extra free time in our lives, etc.

Imagine someone inventing a cell-phone (and network) that operates with gravitons and gravity-micro-ripples in the gravity field instead of the usual electromagnetic radiation and distortions in the electromagnetic field of earth as our current cell phones operate in. This tech, taken successfully to market, would mean massive benefits and cool stuff for us all. Making the cell phones work underground (or undersea) amongst other cool things.

The examples could go on forever. Every time an innovator or an entrepreneur creates something new, something valuable and successfully takes that to the markets - we all benefit as a result. We all receive a gift of more free time, the gift of increased performance, etc.

Imagine having to cook a chicken for dinner without any technology; taking a knife (or a sharp stone), butchering the chicken at first, then skinning it, processing it, taking a few hours to light a fire without any tech (or is fire tech also?, yes it is, in fact..), and perhaps after a full day of work you could have it cooked. Imagine having to visit Oulu without any tech: walking there from Helsinki would take more than 5 days according to Google Maps directions. Tech and successfully commercialized innovations make our life fabulous, rich and give us free time to do other things with our lives besides live in caves and hunt for food every day (as we would be without innovations and technology.)

The wealth created by such success would be diffused throughout the society in every level; making the poor richer, and also the rich richer. This diffusion happens through mutually voluntary exchange of value-for-value and ends up effectively diffusing wealth to every level and corner of society. Today, however this doesn't happen optimally: as the public sector is so freaking massive, larger than the private sector, we have a parasite in the system: instead of healthy natural diffusion we get suction. We have a massive freeraiding vermin in the system that sucks away the wealth created, and intercepts the diffusion - by means in intervention, excessive taxation, regulation, the non-producing public sector sucks a lot of it away, and doesn't allow for the diffusion to happen. Instead of voluntary value-for-value exchange we get involuntary value-for-nonvalue exchange. That isn't an exchange at all; it's more like a violation of individual rights and legalized robbery.

The Finns often think that "society" is the same as "government" or "the state". We must be pretty much the only nation thinking this way. Finns are government-worshippers, statists. In just about every other part of the world people tend to think that society = the people, and the that the people pay for the government, the people allow the government to exist by their mandate, and that the government works for the people. Lately I have seen interviews in the media here in Finland from the Green Party politicians saying that "we must increase taxes because the government needs to be pay for the society".. it's amazing how fucked up this issue can be in people's brains; it's the society that pays for the government, certainly not the other way around.

Innovators, entrepreneurs and growth companies cannot flourish in an environment of massive taxes, larger public sector than private, over-regulation and over-intervention at every level. Governments simply can't regulate and tax innovations and growth companies into existence and success. Cannot be done.

Today we have a crisis. This would be our way out. Currently however I am worried that the public debate on the issue is going to the other direction: more restrictions, more taxes, more tackling down this process of innovation and the new that could benefit us all. It's almost like the government would not want people to be better, would not want everyone to benefit from cool new things that enrich our lives and massively benefit us all. Is this the case for real? I'm starting to suspect that it is. I'm beginning to suspect that because one massively successful entrepreneur might capture 0.5% of the value for herself (and the 99.5% goes to the rest of us) the Finns are so jealous that they won't allow or accept this to happen. This is pure evil. Unethical behavior that leads to maximizing human misery and making the poor more poorer, along with making the rich more poorer too.

Think about it for a while, and consider how you can affect this attitude. We are in crisis, the clock is ticking, every day our oversized government is spending and going deeper into dept. Courageous urgent action is required and this topic needs to enter and stay in the public eye.

Started thinking about the different communications channels we all use, and how well they really reach people? And not only that; how well they really achieve the end goal of facilitating good communication and actually getting a meaningful exchange going between people?

I have most of my communication channels listed here in the contact section:

http://tane.li/contact

Today I was away from email for most of the day, just a normal 8 hour work day. Meanwhile: 100 unread emails keep piling up. I also use about 11 different email accounts that all come to the same reader.

The point being: email is pretty much destroyed as a communication tool by overuse and spam. People email each other carelessly. They email too long texts that are not summarized. They abuse all sorts of mailing lists. They also email half-finished thoughts and raw mindflow that's painful to read through waiting for the actual point or call to action to appear somewhere in there. They don't consider who really needs to receive that message in the first place. They don't consider is it going to be a meaningful exchange between the sender and receiver - they just fire away something half-baked. Also one common challenge is emailing people something that asks too much of them. Too much attention, too much time, too much consideration. Like emailing them an entire book as an attachment and asking the receiver to read it and summarize it.

People also abuse the expectations and time frames of email communication: emailing each other something and expecting an immediate reaction as the reply - almost as if they had just talked with the person over the phone. Cannot do that with email. It's asymmetric communication and you should treat and expect it as such. It helps significantly if the email is short, summarized, very clear and has an indication of when a reply is expected. Without this clarity and focus emails are a massive negative time sink that just end up frustrating you and wasting everybody's time.

How are the other channels working then?

The phone: often busy with actual work and no time to answer it. I don't have a voice mail service, because I hate using one and it would just be unfair to other people who would try leaving messages there. So; doesn't work too well at all.

SMS then: works a lot better. The receiver is in control of when to read it. And the messages are never too long.

Skype: never online. When I am, it sort of works OK.

Google chat: same thing as Skype

Facebook chat: I have disabled this. Way too much spam and chatter of the interrupting kind.

Facebook messages: don't quite work, slow to reply. Reason: too much spam. (Same as email)

LinkedIN messages: don't quite work, slow to reply. Reason: too much spam again.

Private message in Twitter: works extremely well! Can only be 140 characters; so it's laser sharp and never too long. Don't get that many of them, so it's easy and fast to reply. There's very little spam in Twitter, which is great.

==

Perhaps somebody should create an email service that can only send and receive emails of up to 200 characters. That could make it bearable and usable. Or would it?

How do you relate to your communication channels? Which one functions the best? Which ones don't work?

It has been an active start of the autumn with several interviews and things going on; more on video than usual.

On 13th of October 2011 Finland is celebrating our second annual national fail day - a bold attempt to influence culture and attitudes. Trying to suggest that Finns could recheck the negative attitude towards risk and failure - and view the whole topic with a more intelligent angle.

"Success is inspirational - failure is educational." (quote from Prof. Mike Shaner).

You can find more about fail day in finnish from here:

www.epaonnistumisenpaiva.fi

And here's my fail day video in Finnish:

The Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) also showed the video on their morningTV segment and interviewed mr. Petri Vilén on the phone. That's here (in finnish again, sorry folks):

The very next day I was also on MTV3 channel "Good Morning Finland" program again, this time talking about the upcoming changes with Facebook. In finnish again, video here:

Next year I will also be one of the people on stage in the Nordic Business Forum 2012 with sir Richard Branson and big names from Finland and abroad. They released the "teaser trailer" for the event yesterday on Youtube, it's here (in english):

Plenty more interesting things to come this autumn I hope! I have been mostly busy with developing Soprano Brain Alliance forward (we are still hiring, big time, btw). And working with a few startups on the side, as a kind of a hobby. Keeping it busy with mostly very positive things!

I have been using a few social media examples in my talks semi-frequently during the past year or so. Many blogs have written such lists of good showcases, so I decided to copycat the fad and share a list of stuff I am using from time to time.

Here it is then;

1) a book that explains the longer term strategic meaning of social media nicely, by Prof. C.K. Prahalad and Prof Venkat Ramaswamy

http://www.amazon.com/Future-Competition-Co-Creating-Unique-Customers/dp...

http://www.dancewithshadows.com/books/future-of-competition.asp

2) data about how brand engage their audiences:

http://www.engagementdb.com

http://www.slideshare.net/PingElizabeth/engagementdb-social-media-engage...

3) BestBuy, and especially their Twelp Force:

http://twitter.com/twelpforce

http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/21/best-buy-goes-all-twitter-crazy-with-tw...

4) Swedish state owned broadcasting company's campaign for paying your broadcasting fee:

http://www.tackfilm.se/version/

5) Prototype the experience; a cool video advert for a game that sucks your Facebook info right into it:

http://www.prototype-experience.com/

6) Journalists immersed into Discovery Channel's Shark Week -campaign, in a rather macabre manner:

http://www.movieline.com/2009/07/scores-of-journalists-killed-in-shark-w...

7) The Old Spice commercials and their rock star brand spokesperson on Twitter, Yahoo and others:

http://www.youtube.com/user/OldSpice

http://www.oldspice.com/videos/

8) SSI Shredding Systems, and their videos of sweet destruction:

http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/

9) Greg the Architect. Or how to turn a deadly-boring topic (SOA) into something interesting:

http://www.gregthearchitect.com/

10) "Why so serious?" an epic campaign for the Dark Knight movie (Wonder what they'll do for the upcoming film "the Dark Knight Rises" ? something pretty glorious, I'm sure)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpuC7HhCPWA

11) IRC-Galleria and the finnish airforce in 2006! This is one of the weirdest combinations of the time and amounted for quite bit of media attention:

http://www.digitoday.fi/tyo-ja-ura/2006/12/18/ilmavoimat-varvaa-lentajia... galleriassa/200623767/66

12) The tough competition: Youtube and funny kitten videos. This one has so much viewers it dwarfs the population of Scandinavia already:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bmhjf0rKe8

and it's long tail:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RJ5KJyUVwc

13) Lord of the rings creation through the 3 movies; by involving their fans in the creative process (also check out: wreckamovie, naturally)

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/1179.imc

14) masters of social media attention; Varusteleka and their net store. One of the best examples of Social Media usage in an enterprise in all of Finland. Brilliantly done!:

http://www.varusteleka.fi

15) The social media 2011 video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SuNx0UrnEo

..Naturally I have plenty more cases I typically go through, but these are some of the informative and juicy ones.

Know better ones? Feel free to share!