thinkfuture: technology, philosophy and the future

Do you know which role in your organization is ultimately responsible for innovation? Some people might guess the CTO or the CEO. If you have a dedicated innovation group, then it might be the Chief Innovation Officer (CINO), or the VP or Innovation, or some other senior leader with innovation in their title. But you’d be wrong. Innovation is more than a job title – its a risk-taking, experimental culture. It’s an ethos which looks it as a continuous improvement as well as groundbreaking new ideas. It’s not afraid to move fast and break things, as long as it learns something from breaking those things. It’s not scared of following trails until they either dead-end or lead to the holy grail.

The story of Popsockets, founded by a philosophy major (just like me) is an awesome example of invention, design thinking and pivoting.

A fantastically interesting conversation as we discuss the future of work, culture change, agility, personal branding and much more. Here are the books we referenced. BTW, did you know that Warren Buffet spends 80% of his day reading? I know I'm slacking, are you?

You can reach Marti at  https://www.martikonstant.com/ 

We unpack what it takes to build a successful brand right now - and it's not as hard and you might think. Its an amazing wide ranging interview with Henry Kaminski, Jr. – Founder of Unique Designz. We dig into the best way to have a unique voice among all of the other voices out there, talk about the past, present and future of branding, the ups and down of building a business, and talk about how we are both members of the Jeff Bezos club. 

Your customers are trying to complete a specific task when they contact you - how easy do you make it?

Today's episode digs into AI based recruiting and bias.

What if we did eliminate bias, but we didn’t think it was, because of the output of the system? Even with a fully transparent AI picking candidates, would we ever get to a fully unbiased system?

Maybe, but I think that the only way we could do that is to allow the system to make the decisions and eliminate the human from the process. We all come with inherent biases that we can never eliminate – would it be ironic or not that the only way that we can eliminate bias from the system is if we exclude any humans from the decision-making process?

 To innovate – you must absorb many different sources of information – especially in the areas not in the area you are trying to innovate in, let those percolate in your brain, then apply them to your current challenges.  If you don’t fill up your funnel with new materials, (as in new experiences, new learning, new people, new places), then it becomes challenging to solve problems with new solutions.  You need to be a funnel – to capture many different and disparate sources into your head – capture new material so to speak and then allow your brain to use that new material to build new neural connections, which will trigger new ideas and fresh thinking. 

Wondering what SEO even means anymore? We peel back the layers of work needed to get the organic relevancy you've always wanted. In discussion with Damon Burton of SEONational, we cover meta keywords (not a thing anymore), loading speed, mobile friendliness, intuitive structure, relevant content creation, getting quality backlinks, newsjacking, what cadence of blog posting is ideal, length of posts, video, podcasts, and a number of tools to test your site and make it better - gtmetrix, wp fastest cache, wp smush, link assistant and awr cloud. The SEO of 2019 is more closely aligned with content marketing, than anything else, in my view. Listen and decide for yourself.  

 We talk about the past and future of AI and all of the elements of it - from computer vision to machine learning to data science. We cover AI taking your job, how virtual assistants work (and don't work), some of the most exciting breakthroughs in AI (many of which have just occurred in the last few years, as we finally have the data and the processing power to make them happen). We wrap up with how to start getting into AI. Her book, The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence: What You Must Know about AI  is available on Amazon. 

We delve into deep data analysis, does it have the answer to every question? A while back I blogged about big data, and the possibility that with enough of it, we'd be able to answer every question. While this was a future vision, we may be there right now. Today, we have a great conversation with Rado Kotorov, a Technology Innovator and Leader and his new startup, Trendalyze. They do time series patterns discovery and analytics for IoT, transactional and event data, which may finally unlock all of the secrets of big data. Imagine a world where we can track the patterns of a heart attack hours before it happens and proactively send medical personnel to your location. Yes. its that cool.