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He has shaped the surfaces and interfaces that in turn shape our expectations and habits vis a vis the medium that McLuhan just called the electric one: the networked computer on our lap and in our pocket. Judging by his impact on people’s everyday life experience, he might well be looked at as the most influential person in the last half century. If this goes too far, then only slightly. Yes, the Google boys have shaped our idea of how to deal with the Internet; yes, Bill Gates has created the business model that made “a computer on every desk” possible; yes, Gorbachev has turned a bipolar world into a single, money-focused global marketplace; and yes, Bin Laden has managed to throw the spread of enlightenment back for more than a decade single-handedly.

Still, if you imagine how now smartphones spread into the pockets of Chinese average consumers, into favelas and shantytowns, and into the hands of African villagers who don’t even have enough to eat; and how iPads are invading education, business frontends, news and entertainment – could anyone claim a bigger footprint on the Condition Humaine than he who brought us the touch interface, the concept of the app, and as his legacy, Siri, the voice-activated assistant?

When Walter Isaacson tells the story of how Jobs approached him to write his biography and he mocking asked whether he felt equal in stature to Benjamin Franklin and Einstein, the two people he had previously written bios about, maybe he was actually right. Personally I think that Jobs was nothing less than a historical figure, not just a genius CEO (his leadership lessons are worthless if not outright dangerous for 99.999% of CEOs) or a genius designer (he attracted genius designers by challenging them but he wasn’t one himself).

His being a historical figure also means that he is only partly responsible for his achievements. It implies that his talent occurred at the right time and in the right place. Many lines just happened to intersect where he was: like the failure of Microsoft to embrace the web on time and their inability to ‘sandbox’ their ideas in closed hardware-software-systems; like the inability of the music and movie industries to handle the digital condition, allowing Apple to leapfrog the nerdy early adopters and go straight into the mainstream.

That’s why I believe Steve Jobs will be remembered as the Gutenberg of our era … or maybe some Alexander the Great overthrowing fiefdom after fiefdom of the old analog world. Like Alexander’s, the empire of Jobs is now destined to be divided – which we should not bemoan but welcome as a sign of maturity of the new order.

The work of heroes and geniuses is completed by administrators. And that’s a good thing, after all.

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I a recent conversation with a client we stumbled over an interesting insight. His business is still quite weak across Europe – with the exception of a few markets which seem to have nothing else in common than being predominantly catholic.
After some discussing, we came to the conclusion that this might actually be his recipe for success as there are many more catholic countries that he hadn‘t previously recognized as focus markets.
What‘s the story?
The product that this gentleman is dealing in is a line of functional food which is supposed to balance the effects of an unhealthy lifestyle. Now, this is a concept that sounds very familiar to catholics: commit a sin, then confess and pay an indulgence fee. Whereas it runs counter to any protestant ethics that is all about having the strength and discipline not to commit a sin in the first place.
So, from a marketer‘s point-of-view, catholics may well be the hotter target both for products offering „forbidden pleasures“ and for „compensatory consumption“ because of their superior sin guilt management.

Update: The comment from David below urges me to make one thing clear: My point is not a theological or ethical argument nor do I suggest that catholics are more frequent sinners than protestants. What I am making here is a psychological point, namely that the catholic faith offers those who are raised in its tradition better ways of coping with feelings of guilt and finding inner balance again. To benefit from this, they don’t even need to be practicing their faith if they have acquired the coping strategy, as psychology calls it, in the development of their personality.

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1. The Algorithmic Paradigm

Since the networked computer turned Turing’s and Shannon’s theories into reality, automation is taking control of more and more spheres of the human condition. Turning our economies and societies into machines seems to be the defining trend of the last 2 decades. As a consequence, human careers and happiness can only grow in the spaces between and on top of the algorithms. This trend will strongly affect the life planning of our youngsters, and they shouldn’t be facing it as clueless as we are.

2. Personality as Equity

My generation tends to discuss the privacy policies of Facebook, LinkedIn, Google or others as though we had a choice NOT to be present online, NOT to reveal our personality to the rest of the world. But that isn’t true anymore for most of us, and it will be less true for our kids. The next frontier of social skills, both for personal and career achievements, is the sophisticated management of our personality like it was our equity — which it is. My generation’s personality management skills are roughly equivalent to a Neanderthal at a cocktail party of New Yorker columnists. Our kids will be much better at it and I’m not sure they can learn a lot from us in this respect. What they can learn from us at best is to make sure that between all the data points that represent them in different public spheres, there’s still something left that can be called a personality.

Sure this is not the whole story for a media literacy curriculum. Just the 2 things that I find important.

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Note the horizontal scrollbar which gives an idea of the size of the text box (and of this bug)

This thing is so obvious that I didn’t even bother to report it to Microsoft. The more surprised I am seeing that this error just survived another major 300+ MB update.
All readers who have ever right-aligned a text box in PowerPoint — so I guess approximately everyone — will have noticed in their latest edition for Mac that the box grotesquely grows to the left when you write in it, in no proportion to the amount of text and far beyond the slide margins.
This has all kinds of awkward consequences, e.g. when you decide to switch to left-aligned again later, and is the kind of bug that would almost deserve an update of its own. But Redmond doesn’t seem to even use its own products, otherwise they couldn’t have left this unfixed for so long now.
They’re not using Macs, are all working on PCs? Well, as a matter of fact the same bug was in the big public beta for the current Windows Office. Haven’t bought the final product though, so I don’t know whether it’s been fixed there.
And to close this, this bug is only the most manifest true bug on top of the generally unstable text behavior in self-defined, i.e. non-template text boxes.
This deepens my impression that Microsoft’s after-release care of its products is limited to security holes these days (which they probably outsource to some Kasperski or Norton anyway).

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There used to be some programmers at Microsoft …

I have tried the method and it works surprisingly well. But I wasn’t put to serious testing of the results, so far …

I have never made a secret of my dislike of so-called neuro-marketing. My main argument is that it perpetuates a kind of misbehavior on the side of marketers that dates back to the days of the “Hidden Persuaders” but should have been retired long ago: the rude and inhumane habit of not talking to people on eye-level in a straightforward fashion, looking them in the eye — but to a hidden homunculus within their brain that actually directs their behavior.

There’s a straight ancestral line from the “implicit system” or “autopilot” of neuro-marketing to Freud’s unconscious. And marketers were happy to keep alive the illusion that the magic silver bullet can be found — in the shape of a headline, key visual or slogan — that will make target subjects seek their product like lab rats seek the pellet dispenser.

Marketers have good reasons to cling to the idea of man as a predictable stimulus-response machine. Without predictability, the rationale behind their budgets would evaporate. The alternative, talking and listening to people on eye-level, looks messy comparing with cause-and-effect, mass-broadcast marketing plans, and doesn’t seem to scale.

Against these concerns of a multi-billion marketing industry, my criticism of “bad manners” is much too soft to effect any change. But now there’s some harder currency of evidence that proves that man is fundamentally no stimulus-response machine and that our free will is not “an illusion”, as neuro-scientists believe, but a pervasive trait of life.

Björn Brembs, a professor of learning biology in Berlin, has shown in an article for the Proceedings of the Royal Society that there’s a large and growing library of scientific data supporting the existence of the free will.

Free Will 2.0 — as I reluctantly call it, and just for clarification, and just once and here — doesn’t revive the romantic notion of man as the chosen species, endowed with a soul, beyond the grasp of science. The new free will instead is an essential piece of evolution’s engineering, designed to render individuals less predictable for predators. And it occurs as early as in fruit flies, sea snails and cockroaches.

So, now that we can and should finally wave good-bye the illusions of “hidden persuaders”, “subliminal signals” and “unconscious purchase drivers”, shouldn’t that make us ready to re-invent marketing as a discipline for adults!

My headline is actually a quote from the interview. When asked about his core values in life, Julian answers that “capable generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims”. A statement everyone can subscribe to, yes? Except that it sounds a little … odd? idiosyncratic? …

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