TrendWatcher

In case you don’t follow baseball, Major League Baseball made a deal with Columbia Pictures to put the logo for Spiderman 2 on the bases for a number of games this season. This made some baseball fans mad, and yesterday, MLB and Columbia scaled the promotion back.

There have been a number of instances lately where a public outcry affected corporate America. It’s clear that consumers have a strong voice, but unfortunately the voice isn’t unified. People tend to look at these things like elections. You cast your vote and then don’t worry about it. The constitution and our laws take over after the election and keep those in charge from going against the will of the people. Unfortunately there isn’t a constitution to keep corporations true to their word.

I don’t remember the date, but earlier this year/late last year, Walmart was about to roll out RFID tags in some of its stores. There was huge public outcry from the privacy people and they got a lot of consumers on board. As a result, Walmart delayed the roll out. Well, now nobody is paying attention and Walmart is rolling them out.

Political parties do a great job of keeping people organized. Sure they have there problems. It’s hard to find a place to hang your hat if you are pro-life and economically liberal or pro-choice and economically conservative, but for the most part a two party system at least keeps people interested.

If someone can figure out a way to keep consumers organized, we can wield a whole lot more power. Corporate America isn’t going to be too happy about it, but they will deal with it. I see a couple of hurdles:

1. People don’t have the time to stay involved.
2. There are too many issues to be dealt with.

Reducing the time it takes to be active in the consumer discussion and focusing the issues could go along way in giving Americans some of their voice back. Any bright ideas? Post them in the comments.

Yesterday I read a good article in the Harvard Business Review called “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” by Ken Dychtwald, Tamara Erickson, and Bob Morison. It mainly focused on things that HR could and should do to wade through the up coming labor shortage that will occur when the Baby Boomers start retiring.

HR changing is a good start, but it is going to take a cultural shift to get people to rethink retirement. HR can make all the changes it wants, but if someone feels that they have the RIGHT to stop working at 65 and yet they are still working at 70, HR is going to have to deal with some bitterness.

I don’t think that the professional world is going to have much of a problem retiring retirement, but the middle to lower middle class, wage earning Americans are going to get pretty uppity about it.

It is safe to say that the Government isn’t going to do a whole lot to help us here. Corporate America wields a ton of power and they may be able to accomplish some change, but it will be slow. As a nation, we need to identify and create some cultural trends that will begin to affect the way people view working after the age of 60.

There is already a trend of ‘people not having enough money to retire’, but we need some positive reasons to keep working.

Take a minute or two to brainstorm and come up with a trend that could be helpful to increasing Americans’ desire to keep working and post it in the comments.

TrendFunction: Antitrend*Whitelists

Raise your hand if you like getting unsolicited emails?

Me either.

I don’t care if it is from the GAP, Amazon.com, or Joe’s Place for Canadian Drugs. I don’t want it in my in box.

Microsoft is about to have its Hotmail service’s business model shaken up by Google’s Gmail and they come up with THIS to entice people to stay? I have a feeling its not going to work. If Google knows what’s good for them, and they seem to know that very well, they will exploit the heck out of this. I’ve been using my Gmail account for two weeks and I’ve only received one spam message. It went straight to my spam folder and I never had to read it. Google is trying to solve the spam problem and Microsoft is trying to make money off of it. I’m really pro-Microsoft and this makes me scratch my head.

Note to marketers: I don’t care how legitimate your business model is, if you send me an unsolicited message it is spam.

I came up with the following solution while dwelling on the concept of open learning:

A web community where those who want to continue learning on their own terms can congregate, learn, and display their accomplishments to the world.

This solution answers the problems discussed in part 1.

1. Most people aren’t self starters.
2. One of the biggest parts of education is interacting with other people and sharing ideas.

There is an incredible invention that solves these two problems that people seem to forget about these days. It’s the Internet. Despite the hard times that Internet companies have fallen on recently, one thing that the Internet continues to do better than anything before it is to bring people with similar interests together to form communities. When you are daily watching the advancement of your peers and interacting with them, self starting becomes much easier. The interaction of people on the Internet may not meet the real-time tradition of university learning, but the fact that discussions, questions, answers, and conclusions can be captured in digital form brings a number of advantages to the table.

3. Another part of education is the accountability that a professor provides.(i.e. grades)

The professor problem is a little harder to solve. One thing I have seen while participating in internet communities and online multi-player games is that people love to help out, they love to get credit for helping out, and they love to talk about the things that they know. Professors get paid to teach while mentors do it because they love to see their knowledge go to other people(this is not to say that most professors aren’t also mentors, most certainly are). People know a good teacher when they see one and this new community could allow people to give “Mentor Points” to those that help them through a course.

4. MIT publishes the list of materials used, but rarely are ALL the materials needed available for free. Many resources are copyrighted works available only through educational libraries.

This is a tough one as well. I don’t know the rules about libraries and what is allowed and what isn’t in reference to copyrighted works, but this community could build up its own library and allow the checking out of resources through applications like netLibrary.com.

5. What would you do if someone told you that they gave themselves an ivy league education? I’d chuckle at lease a little bit.

The solution to this problem provides the lynchpin to the business plan for such a community to come into existence. More and more people will consider Open Learning if they have a way to prove that they have studied certain things and completed the courses. For a fee, this new community could publish the “Participation Scores” of individuals to the world. A link to this report of participation can easily be put on a resume for future employer to look at.

Feel free to tell me why I’m stupid and this will never work.

Ok, so it isn't a new word, but a new definition. Currently:

googly

n : a cricket ball bowled as if to break one way that actually breaks in the opposite way

New:

googly
adj: some one who goes on and on about a topic.

Another said, "He's[Bill Clinton] like a walking Google. I don't care what word you put in, he will keep going and going."

TrendFunction: Outsourcing + Open Source + Reeducation

If you haven’t checked out MIT’s OpenCourseWare yet, you should. MIT, one of the leading institutions of higher learning in the world, has published the details of over 700 courses. For the self-starting person there is the opportunity to give yourself an virtual ivy league education in everything from Anthropology to Artificial Intelligence. What an incredible opportunity! In an environment where more and more jobs are going overseas there is a huge need for people to re-educate themselves and expand their horizons. MIT’s OpenCourseWare is a great resource for this. There are a few obstacles that would-be-ivy-leaguers need to overcome before setting out on their personal renaissance.

1. Most people aren’t self starters.
2. One of the biggest parts of education is interacting with other people and sharing ideas.
3. Another part of education is the accountability that a professor provides.(i.e. grades)
4. MIT publishes the list of materials used, but rarely are ALL the materials needed available for free. Many resources are copyrighted works available only through educational libraries.
5. What would you do if someone told you that they gave themselves an ivy league education? I’d chuckle at lease a little bit.

I’m sure there are a number of other obstacles, but I’d like to discuss solutions to these 5 specifically. Solving these five could put us well on the way to a more affordable higher education. I have some ideas that I think would help, and I’ll post them tomorrow. In the mean time, give your ideas in the comments.