Sunday, January 26, 2014

No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France, but as the new General Manager and Performance Director for Team Sky (Great Britain’s professional cycling team), that’s what Brailsford was asked to do.

His approach was simple.

Brailsford believed in a concept that he referred to as the “aggregation of marginal gains.” He explained it as the “1 percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” His belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1 percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.

They started by optimizing the things you might expect: the nutrition of riders, their weekly training program, the ergonomics of the bike seat, and the weight of the tires.

But Brailsford and his team didn’t stop there. They searched for 1 percent improvements in tiny areas that were overlooked by almost everyone else: discovering the pillow that offered the best sleep and taking it with them to hotels, testing for the most effective type of massage gel, and teaching riders the best way to wash their hands to avoid infection. They searched for 1 percent improvements everywhere.

Brailsford believed that if they could successfully execute this strategy, then Team Sky would be in a position to win the Tour de France in five years time.

He was wrong. They won it in three years.

In 2012, Team Sky rider Sir Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France. That same year, Brailsford coached the British cycling team at the 2012 Olympic Games and dominated the competition by winning 70 percent of the gold medals available.

In 2013, Team Sky repeated their feat by winning the Tour de France again, this time with rider Chris Froome. Many have referred to the British cycling feats in the Olympics and the Tour de France over the past 10 years as the most successful run in modern cycling history.

And now for the important question: what can we learn from Brailsford’s approach?

The Aggregation of Marginal Gains

It’s so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making better decisions on a daily basis.

Almost every habit that you have — good or bad — is the result of many small decisions over time.

And yet, how easily we forget this when we want to make a change.

So often we convince ourselves that change is only meaningful if there is some large, visible outcome associated with it. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, traveling the world or any other goal, we often put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.

Meanwhile, improving by just 1 percent isn’t notable (and sometimes it isn’t even noticeable). But it can be just as meaningful, especially in the long run.

And from what I can tell, this pattern works the same way in reverse. (An aggregation of marginal losses, in other words.) If you find yourself stuck with bad habits or poor results, it’s usually not because something happened overnight. It’s the sum of many small choices — a 1 percent decline here and there — that eventually leads to a problem.

Inspiration for this image came from a graphic in The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson.

In the beginning, there is basically no difference between making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse. (In other words, it won’t impact you very much today.) But as time goes on, these small improvements or declines compound and you suddenly find a very big gap between people who make slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don’t. This is why small choices (“I’ll take a burger and fries”) don’t make much of a difference at the time, but add up over the long-term.

On a related note, this is why I love setting a schedule for important things, planning for failure, and using the “never miss twice” rule. I know that it’s not a big deal if I make a mistake or slip up on a habit every now and then. It’s the compound effect of never getting back on track that causes problems. By setting a schedule to never miss twice, you can prevent simple errors from snowballing out of control.

The Bottom Line

Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.
—Jim Rohn

You probably won’t find yourself in the Tour de France anytime soon, but the concept of aggregating marginal gains can be useful all the same.

Most people love to talk about success (and life in general) as an event. We talk about losing 50 pounds or building a successful business or winning the Tour de France as if they are events. But the truth is that most of the significant things in life aren’t stand-alone events, but rather the sum of all the moments when we chose to do things 1 percent better or 1 percent worse. Aggregating these marginal gains makes a difference.

There is power in small wins and slow gains. This is why average speed yields above average results. This is why the system is greater than the goal. This is why mastering your habits is more important than achieving a certain outcome.

Where are the 1 percent improvements in your life?

On The Edge - A Unique Look At Leadership

Start Rewarding the Risk takers

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140108150341-25295057-on-the-edge-a-unique-look-at-leadership?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

Ideas for Bengaluru

Put aside personal disagreements and differences

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140111042649-294484843-ideas-for-bengaluru?trk=mta-lnk

10 Creative Rituals You Should Steal

What good have I done today?

http://99u.com/articles/21137/10-creative-rituals-you-should-steal?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+The99Percent+%2899U%29

The Secret to Personal Power

Being Rather than doing?

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140110191259-75054000-the-secret-to-personal-power?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy

by Robert Scoble (Author) , Shel Israel (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Age-Context-Mobile-Sensors-Privacy/dp/1492348430/

Content is King, Commerce is Queen; Context is GOD is what the authors seem to indicate in this interesting read.

A background on context

I live in Bangalore currently. Whenever I visit Chennai my typical pattern is as follows

Have breakfast at my Aunt’s place, have lunch at my friends’ place and have dinner at my cousin’s place. At each of these places, my favorite dishes are ready before the time I enter their place and utmost care is taken to ensure that my voracious appetite is taken care to the brim. Over the days and years they have understood my consumption pattern and ensure that the one thing that matters to me the most is taken care.

At office parties where I get invited, which seems to be fewer as I get older, the background whisper is “If this bugger is coming, have the damned curd rice as part of the menu”

Recently I visited my cousin l and sister-in-law in the US and I could see the same enthusiasm to serve my interests. I have not been in regular touch with them owing to the usual excuses that I can command at will, but ‘out of sight’ did not translate to ‘out of mind’. They were bang on in serving my interests.

In all the above cases, it is not that my consumption pattern and preferences has been understood by everyone who took the pain to serve me, but the knowledge got transferred to them in some way and also someone took the pain to get that knowledge

I am sure you would have had similar experiences. It is not only with relations or friends or not necessarily with appetite, you would have had this kind of personalized contextual experience but possibly in all spheres of life. You would have experienced this with your hair stylist, your doctor, your next door kirana store, your panwala and many other places.

In all these experiences, I have experienced that AHA or WOW moments that has brought me a smile and I am sure it would have happened to you as well in various context.

Simply put, Age of Context is about machines creating these AHA or WOW moments and much more than that.

In others words, Age of context is about how the five forces of mobile, social media, data, sensors and location are going to affect your online experiences.

Next time I am sent on a sponsored trip to Las Vegas, I would possibly get an alert from Google on, “Go, get your curd rice from...!”

Will it? Well. The jury is out. Do share your thoughts. What follows is an extract of the interesting viewpoints that the authors elucidate and the next section is a verbatim of what the author’s state.

The Five Forces

Mobile is the convergent force that ties together the other four forces. The numbers of mobile phones have overtaken the number of people on the planet and according to Gartner 45 billion apps were downloaded by end of 2012 and that numbers are increasing. That amounts to more than six apps for every man, woman and child on earth. Your device will be the key to all the power of internet. It is where the super storm of context thunders into your life.

Today 1.5 billion people are on social media. A billion tweets were posted every 48 to 72 hours. No successful modern business deploys a go-forward strategy that does not include social media. When organizations use social media wisely, companies and customer come closer together. Employees and users often collaborate on making products and services better

Big Data is the new buzz word and everywhere you see the 3V’s (Volume , Variety and Velocity) being talked about. In the first data of a baby’s life today, the world creates 70 times the data contained in the entire library of Congress (“The Human face of Big Data” http://www.amazon.com/The-Human-Face-Big-Data/dp/1454908270/) . But Big data is not really about Big Data. It is about those cute little insights that appeal to us. The hugeness can intimidate but the little pieces can make us smarter and enable us to keep up with and make sense of, an accelerating world

Today, smartphones contain an average of seven sensors. A rapidly growing number of mobile apps use them to know where you are and what you are doing. Sensors know when you are heading or leaving home and can adjust your contextual thermostat accordingly.

Without Location there is no context and without context there is no Leadership is what Caterina Fake, CEO and founder of Findery (https://www.findery.com) has to say.

What is in store with the five forces?

I think the book offers very interesting possibilities, applications and I would recommend you to get hold of the book so that you can appreciate how the five forces can impact you. I have just listed a few of them to kindle your curiosity.

The ones you possibly are already familiar with

· Fitbit (http://www.fitbit.com)

· Fuel Band (http://www.nike.com/us/en_us/c/nikeplus-fuelband)

· Google Glass (http://www.google.com/glass/start/)

The ones you possibly are not familiar with

· Green Goose (http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/23/green-goose-sensors-monitor-your-life-you-earn-experience-point/)

· Proteus Digital Health (http://www.proteus.com/)

· Driptech (http://www.driptech.com)

· Atooma (http://www.atooma.com/welcome)

· Highlight (http://highlig.ht/about.html)

· Smart Textiles (http://www.smartfabricsconference.com/home.aspx)

And many more!!

The risks

If you have seen the wonderful ted talk titled Filter Bubble (http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk) by Eli Pariser, you would have realized that your privacy has been up for grabs sometime now. The authors do attempt to bring in a sense of balance to the risks that the five forces can bring in and are optimistic about the overall values that the five forces shall realize eventually.

What do I think? (Not that it matters to anyoneJ)

I have believed in the experience economy (http://www.amazon.com/The-Experience-Economy-Theater-Business/dp/B00DF86ZH6) and I believe the Age of Context sets up the case and platform for Staging Highly personalized and contextual experience for every consumer of the enterprise. May be Google shall send the “Curd Rice” alert next time when I land in LA.

However I also relate any technology advances or discussions that I come across to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs) and, I would have to say, though the Age of Context is applicable to all rungs in that ladder, it is currently applicable for people who have crossed rung two or more!

Age of Context talks about “Connected Human” but as http://internet.org/ states only 1 out of 3 people can go online and that in my view is where a sense of urgency needs to be exhibited.

Tail piece

I rewind in time over fourteen years and think about WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) which possibly started this revolution of mobile connecting to internet and one of my long time mentor and friend used to say “The day is not far off. When you cross the plaza theatre in MG Road Bangalore, if your favorite movie is playing, you will get a WAP Push notification to buy the ticket. The system shall understand everything about your pattern and that system is called Personality Server.”

I ask him now. “Boss – Plaza theatre has been converted into a mall. When is my WAP Push Coming”?

I am waiting. I am an eternal optimist.

Stay Tuned

Have Fun

Zunder