Where is the Puck?

Another great trend research tool based on the search popularity. This one is by AOL: http://hotsearches.aol.com/

Check out their 2007 Year End Top Searches to see this year’s biggest gadgets, TV shows, new stories…

“The management of an institution, whether a business, a university, a hospital, has to be grounded in basic and predictable trends that persist regardless of today’s headlines. It has to exploit these trends as opportunities”. Peter Drucker, “Managing in the Next Society”

According to IMF chief economist Simon Johnson and “World Economic Outlook” report released yesterday the following economic trends are expected in the coming years:
-    The US will suffer a “mild” recession in 2008, and it won’t fare much better next year. United States is expected to slow to a crawl of just 0.5 percent this year: the worst pace in 17 years.
-    The US economy will grow by a feeble 0.6 percent in 2009, when measured by an annual average.
-    House prices in the United States will continue to drop, with declines this year in the range of 14 to 20 percent
-    The Fund is projecting the global economy to grow by 3.7 percent this year and 3.8 percent next year.
-    Despite the somewhat pessimistic report, the IMF said it still views the US.currency value as “somewhat on the strong side”.  The IMF said the euro is also on the strong side, while the yen remains “somewhat undervalued.”

Great book from Malcolm Gladwell (mentioned elsewhere on this blog) about “how little things can make a big difference…. The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like a wildfire”

According to Malcolm Gladwell “we are about to enter the age of  WORD OF MOUTH, and … paradoxically all of the sophistication and wizardry and limitless access to information of the New Economy is going to lead us to rely more and more on very primitive kinds of social contacts.”

How interesting and true! The more technology we have available, the greater importance of  real human, “primitive”, contact will be. Gladwell’s Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen will play critical role in the process. Yet, Word of Mouth, supported by the new digital technologies and Internet,  will become even more powerful force. Call it “WORD OF MOUSE” if you want.

Quote from Gladwell’s famous book “The Tipping point”: “The best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life  is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do.”

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” By Roy Amara, past president of The Institute for the Future.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO on the business of predicting the “next big thing”: “You can’t go out and ask people what the next big thing is…There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.”

Apple is a great company. According to Fortune they are America’s and world’s most admired company in 2008!

Ever wondered what made Apple such a great company? What makes them so admired both by customers but also by their investors (with total annual return to investors of 94% over the past five years)?

It is because they never set goal to “MEET customer’s expectations”. They go extra mile, they EXCEED expectations, they WOW their customers. They love what they do. They are passionate. They excel. They DELIGHT! In a word, they have great KNOW-WOW!

Still not sure? Here are the excerpts of in interview with Steve Jobs illustrating Apple’s culture (interview done by Fortune senior editor Betsy Morris). Note how many times Jobs mentions words “GREAT” and “LOVE”:

- “We all had cell phones. We just hated them, they were so awful to use…It was a great challenge…. Let’s make a great phone that we fall in love with…”
- “We did iTunes because we all love music”.
- “We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants… We just want to make great products”.
- “When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself.”
- “We made more. We worked harder. We said: ‘This is great. Let’s do more’.”
- “We do put our heart and soul into these things.”

“Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf” - Steve Jobs