by Charles Plant | May 23, 2011 | Innovation
If computers, voice mail and cell phones weren’t enough to overwhelm the typical corporate user and blur the boundaries between work and home then email was the next nail in the coffin. In case you have forgotten, Email started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. These systems were primitive and only allowed communication between users who logged into the same host. This came to be useful in large corporations as a means of communicating internally as all employees with a terminal on a mainframe could become an email user. In the 1980s, networked personal computers on Local Area Networks became very useful. Server-based systems similar to the earlier mainframe systems were then developed. Unfortunately, these systems allowed communication only between users logged into the same server just as early systems were limited to users of the same mainframe. Over time, these systems came to be linked together as long as companies were using the same protocol. Eventaually the adoption of ARPANET and later Internet protocols allowed email messages to be sent over the internet efficiently.
Some statistics about email usage in 2010 show that the numbers for email are:
- 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
- 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
- 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
- 480 million – New email users since the year before.
- 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
- 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
- 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
- 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.
by Charles Plant | May 7, 2011 | Entrepreneurship
A blog about feudalism recently showed that the system worked for the peasant farmer much better than it does for us now.
“In a recent chat at the highly literary Hay Festival in Wales, Andrew Simms and David Boyle, authors of The New Economics: A Bigger Picture and both directors of the New Economics Foundation think-tank, argued that for a small farmer in the 12th century to make a sufficient amount to live on for a year, he would be able to (and did) take 170 days holiday almost half a year When you dig up 12th-century skeletons you find they are taller than or as tall as skeletons at any other part of history other than our own. That suggests they were getting economics right.”
How is it that we have gone from working a half year only to working full days as well as nights, weekends, and holidays?
We must be getting something wrong that the peasant farmer got right. What I suspect is that in feudal times, people worked until the job was done. Nowadays, due to the industrial revolution and the factory method of production we work a standard number of hours instead of until the work is done.
But we moved out of the factory into the information age. Why is it we are still working factory hours when we could chose to work until the job gets done instead of until the time is done.
by Charles Plant | Apr 23, 2011 | Innovation
Mobile phone technology, while not increasing the volume of data or the volume of communications received by an individual on a daily basis, certainly started to blur the boundaries of home and office and by working and vacations by making it possible to reach people everywhere. No longer was an employee “out of the office” as the office could travel with the employee wherever he or she went. Statistics on mobile phone usage are interesting. It shows that globally there are more than four times as many cellular subscribers as there are land lines. Even in the Americas there are three and a half as many cell phones as land-lines.
Mobile phone statistics state that:
- In 1985, there was less than half a million cell phone in use, now there are nearly 280 million
- 1.2 billion handsets are sold every year
- Over 150 million phones are being replaced every year
- On average, people use their cell phones for only 18 months
- 4,239,956 people are having a cell phone conversation at any given second in the world.
- Wireless revenues were more than 250 times greater in 2010 than in 2000
- 15% of Americans have interrupted sex to answer a cell phone call
- 32% of men and 23% of woman say the can’t live without their cell phone
- 27% of North American citizens used cell phones in 1999 – 93% of North American citizens used phones in 2010.
by Charles Plant | Apr 7, 2011 | Management
When you come right down to it, the way we work is very similar to the way people worked in the pre-industrialized middle ages. While we don’t call it Feudalism anymore, the effect is quite the same. Feudalism in its heyday was the exchange of land for military service. The feudal lords (equivalent to today’s private equity investors) granted land rights to the landed gentry (entrepreneurs and business owners). The landed gentry in turn granted land rights to peasants (middle managers) who in turn employed serfs (front line workers).
The work of a peasant or craftsperson was probably very enjoyable, particularly if you account for the fact that you can’t be farming crops in the winter. If you accept what Malcolm Gladwell said about the work of rice farmers there are many parallels. He held that rice farming was actually a very enjoyable pursuit because it was meaningful. There was a clear relationship between effort and reward so that the harder and more intelligently you work, the more you prosper. Secondly, the work is complex in that there are numerous factors that need to be balanced and calculated to be successful. Finally the work was autonomous, you could pretty much do what you wanted, when you wanted. Hard work yes, but very meaningful.
Today’s peasants (middle managers) though don’t have quite as enjoyable a life as peasants did under feudalism. What we have lost in the move from feudalism is this sense of autonomy and the direct linkage between effort, results, and rewards.
by Charles Plant | Sep 13, 2010 | Innovation
In the course of looking for background on Canadian Inventions, I came upon a list of the top 50 Canadian Inventions (Five-Pin Bowling is number 4). This list came out of a show put on by the CBC (who else) in 2007. Following on the heels of the Greatest Canadian this show put it to all Canadians to rank our 50 greatest inventions. To see some background on the show go to www.cbc.ca/inventions/
I was trolling through this list and suddenly it struck me. I couldn’t identify a single company that had been created and gained worldwide prominence out of the first 15 inventions. Where was the pharmaceutical giant spawned from the development of insulin, the nutraceutical behemoth formed from Pablum? Instead I found a list of fabulous inventions which for the most part were opportunities not seized. Certainly Poutine has been a worldwide phenom but have we capitalized on its creation to bring untold wealth back home?
In the top 15 companies there were only two examples of a Canadian company that continues today to benefit from the commercialization of a Canadian invention. (Cobalt-60 by AECL and the Canadarm by MacDonald Dettwiler, for now anyway). I was very pleased to see that Wonderbra made the list but it was marketed by a Canadian firm for only 4 years before the company was sold to Sara Lee.
To be fair, Bombardier with the Skidoo, and RIM hit the list at numbers 17 and 18 but I was once told to keep lists short and I didn’t have time to keep on researching. Here then for your edification and enjoyment are Canada’s top 15 inventions and where they ended up.
1. Insulin, Treatment for Diabetes [1921, Frederick Banting, Charles Best] Marketed by Eli Lilly, US based pharmaceutical giant who made it big specifically as a result of insulin.
2. Telephone [1876, Alexander Graham Bell] Conceived in Canada. Patented and Marketed in the US by National Bell Telephone Company.
3. Light Bulb [1874, Henry Woodward, Mathew Evans] Unsuccessful at commercializing it. Sold their invention to Thomas Edison in 1879
4. Five Pin Bowling [1908, Thomas F. Ryan] Not a commercializable product
5. Wonderbra [1964, Louise Poirier] First successfully commercialized in Canada by Canadian Lady – Canadelle but by 1968 the company had been sold to Sara Lee out of the US.
6. Pacemaker [1950, John Hopps, Wilfred Bigelow, John Callaghan] Among many contributors to development – successfully commercialized by Cardiac Pacemakers Inc of the US in 1972.
7. Robertson Screw, 1908 [Peter Robertson] Sold almost entirely in Canada as the inventor refused to license the screws to anyone (including Ford) due to problems with the first licensee in the UK.
8. Zipper [1913, Gideon Sundback] Not really invented in Canada. Sundback was a Swedish born engineer working in the US at the Hookless Fastener Company
9. Electric Wheelchair [1952, George Klein] No Canadian manufacturer stepped up to the plate to build them so the designs were sent to the US.
10. Poutine [1957, Fernand Lachance] Not a commercializable product – actually not even a tasty one.
11. Cobalt-60 “Bomb” Cancer Treatment [1951, Harold Johns] Commercialized still by AECL.
12. Java Programming Language [1994, James Arthur Gosling] Done in the US by a Canadian for Sun Microsystems
13. Bloody Caesar [1969, Walter Chell] Not a commercializable product – but this one is tasty. Who wouldn’t want to own this patent.
14. Canadarm [1975, Spar Aerospace/NRC] Actually remained Canadian but may not remain so as MacDonald Detwiller tried to sell itself to a US company this year
15. Standard time [1878, Sir Sandford Fleming] Not a commercializable product
