• To realise the value of ten years; ask a newly divorced couple.
• To realise the value of four years; ask a graduate.
• To realise the value of one year; ask a student who has failed a final exam.
• To realise the value of nine months; ask a mother who gave birth to a still born.
• To realise the value of one month; ask a mother who has given birth to a premature baby.
• To realise the value of one week; ask an editor of a weekly newspaper.
• To realise the value of one hour; ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.
• To realise the value of one minute; ask a person who has missed the train, bus or plane.
• To realise the value of one-second; ask a person who has survived an accident…
• To realise the value of one millisecond; ask the person who has won a silver medal in the Olympics
• Time waits for no one. Treasure every moment you have. You will treasure it even more when you can share it with someone special. To realise the value of a friend; lose one.

Recognise this? It’s a laptop from 1990 – 20 years ago.  How life has changed since.

Chatting to a 19 year old student at a recent social gathering about life through his lens as a Generation Y, it hit me how much change I had seen in my lifetime in the way our lives work.  Things that today’s generation just take for granted.

Jumping on the tube back into central London, I let my wander for a bit and mentally tagged a few of the things that I’ve seen become commonplace since my working life started around 1988.  So, in no particular order, here are 20 of them which have become commonplace in the last 20 years.

1. e-Mail (Corporate and Personal) – we talked more or wrote letters to people.
2. Internet/Google – we used encyclopedias or went to the library.
3. Mobile phones – we used phone boxes or land lines.
4. Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin – we met people in person.
5. e-Bay/Amazon/Marketplaces – we went to jumble sales, had garage sales or held on to it!
6. MP3 music/i-Pods – we bought vinyl or tape cassettes.
7. i-Pads/e-readers -we read paper books.
8. Youtube – we watched wrestling on World of Sport.
9. Wireless networks – we accessed computer networks at the office, not at home or out and about.
10. LCD displays/Plasma  Televisions - we used huge clunky CRT’s and TV’s needed a full corner of a room.
11. DVD’s – we used video.
12. CD’s, CD players in cars – we listened to vinyl LP’s or the radio/cassette in cars.  I didn’t get a CD player in my car until around 1996 from memory.
13. Sky TV - we only had BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and later Channel 5.
14. Dab Radio – we listened to conventional radio, often on Longwave.
15. PVR (Personal Video Recorders like Sky+) – we set times on video recorders.
16. SatNav – we used maps in atlases.
17. Skype – we used a normal phone.
18. Blogs – we kept secret diaries.
19. Digital Cameras - we used film and didn’t see the pictures until they were developed after a week or so.
20. Texting – seriously, we didn’t have text then.  We talked.

There is great cause for celebration. The world has taken an almighty shift and here we are, Generation X, right in the middle of it.  Witnessing the old and the new.  What the future might still bring is really exciting, augmented reality, facetime calling over high speed wireless broadband, 3D laptops and retinal scanning lasers.   Wow.

With technology change also comes societal change.  And when I’d moved on from thinking about the tech, I went on to think about things that I did growing up,  compared with now.  Things like: -

1. Going to Corner Shops more than supermarkets.  It fuelled the idea of us being a nation of shopkeepers, now the multiples rule.
2. Listening to the radio on a Sunday night to hear who was number 1 in the pop charts.  Monday morning conversation (yes, you had to wait till you saw your mates at school) was all about who was number one.
3. Visiting record shops to buy music meant you had to go out to town, it meant the high streets were much busier places.
4. Major household items like washing machines or televisions were purchased weekly from people like Provident or Radio Rentals.  Now they are seen as disposable items.
5. Having more adventure as kids.  I had a local adventure playground where you could just ask for wood, nails and a hammer and off you would go.  Today’s health and safety driven culture, just wouldn’t allow it.
6. Writing letters to people.  This was a skill in itself which is regretably dying.
7. Faxing important business information.  Retaining the formality of a written letter with more instananeousness and a proper signature!
8. Breaking bad news face to face or by phone call, rather than by written electronic means such as text or e-mail.  It’s so easy to hide behind technology nowadays, whereas folk tend to just want it straight, face to face.
9. Taking more in.  What I mean by that is that time wasn’t filled with constant interruption from mobile calls, texts, e-mails, status updates, there seemed to be more head time.
10. Computers didn’t rule our lives.  We did!

And on that bombshell, I’ll wish all of my readers a fantastic 2011.  It promises to be full of opportunity – if you look for it.

I’ve got the Mr. Sheen out on my crystal ball, given it a good clean, stared deeply into it and seen the future.  Saturdays lottery numbers are 7, 9, 22, 28, 35, 42 – buy a ticket now!

Seriously, thought I’d have a go at laying down some thoughts about where I think the world is moving for 2011.  In no particular order (and they may change as this is my first bash after thinking about this on the way home from work last night).

1. Crowd-forcing. Inspired by Crowd-sourcing.  The crowd pulling together to pressurise/threaten brands through negative on-line chatter and peer pressure.
2. Digi-paranoia. Fuelled by the Wikileaks scandal, people will become more paranoid about their on-line breadcrumb trail.  They’ll protect more of their digital assets, through pre-approving and using trusted platforms.
3. Talent thaw. 2010 has been a tough year for finding good people, the hatches were well and truly buttoned down and movements frozen.  As confidence returns, we’ll start to see the talent market thaw.
4. Life caching. As micro-moments continue to be recorded in the cloud by mobile devices, we’ll record/upload more data electronically than at any other time in mankind (despite paranoia trend, sheer qty of GB/TB on the web will make 2011 a record year).
5. Friend Filtering. 2011 will be the year of quality over quantity.  New social media start-up Path hits this trend, limiting your network to just 50 key people.  Competitiveness for this new inner-circle will drive new behaviour and take us back to “Face Friends” who matter, rather than Facebook Friends by the thousand.”
6. Centre-fall. De-volving from the middle, whether that be government or big business.  Applications in the cloud will allow businesses to challenge their conventions and methodologies of working.  The drive to competitiveness and the desire to see people take responsibility, will mean the hub will become less important than the spokes and rim.
7. De-cluttering. Removing things that crowd out our thoughts/consume our time (see next point).  Prioritising those things that truly add value.  Marketeers need to take note as traditional methods of interruptive marketing are becoming less and less effective, particularly in B2B.
8. Time poor war. Time continues to be the worlds most scarce commodity for the masses.  Time improvement tools just mean we are working more, not reducing work-time spent pursuing happiness or joy.  Generation X are kicking back against this as the last generation which may rescue the lost generation of “Y”‘s, before the values of deep friendship, downtime, family time are confined to words in wikipedia.  Hyper-tasking will be the new multi-tasking.
9. Relevancy. Staying relevant in peoples lives.  Having just the right amount of interaction.  Choosing moments.  Keeping an acceptable proximity.
10. Social Media Revolution. Wider business will take more notice of social media channels for conversations and relationship generation now all the glittery buzz is dying down.  It was never designed to be a transactional channel but a way of generating proximity, feedback and conversations with individuals.  As new business becomes harder (less public sector expenditure to cushion your overhead), new conversations and contacts will be key and more businesses will get moving with new conversation channels.
11. Trust and Transparency. A continuing theme for me.  People are more willing to trust a strangers view than a big brand ad when it comes to products and services.  User generated content will continue to grow exponentially, more people will blog, leave content on sites like Tripadvisor and Reevoo, use electronic platforms to distribute buzz (+ or -).  2010 was the year we’ll all remember for Wikileaks.  Wikileak yourself or your business, compare that with the messages you send on your marketing materials and ask yourself are the two things consistent.

What are your thoughts? What would you add?

Overheard this conversation in a cafe on Thursday.  Man A – “How’s the Christmas present shopping going?”  Man B – “I’m screwed.”  Man A – “Why?”  Man B – Because I’ve left it all to the last minute, thinking i’ll just get it on the web, and nobody can bloody deliver it to me.”

And there lies the problem of a bit of white powder.  Step forward retailers of the world, fill your shelves, staff your stores and prepare for the rush.  Most retailers will tell you that they’ve had a miserable run in to Christmas so far.  Snow has meant people have stayed indoors.  The planners of the world have already done their shopping on the web, had it delivered, despite the snow and the backlogs and are sitting pretty, all prepared.  The last minute.com-ers are panicing now.

It’s a stark reminder that the world does need multiple channels for us to buy our goods and services.  On-line or off-line, high street or local, this seasons snow drop has caused a big shift in where consumers have been spending their money.  And don’t the big box players know it.  Sales have started early, footfall counters have been quiet and there’s a lot of praying going on that the next couple of days is going to be superbusy with lastminute.com-ers buying any old gift set as long as it’s in a nice box (you’ll always be able to get Brut or Anais Anais if things get really bad).

Weather extremes rock retailers.  Sunny means BBQ’s and no shoppers, snow means stay indoors and no shoppers.  Rain is best, makes people miserable sitting indoors and they head straight for their local indoor shopping centre for a change of scenery.  It will be interesting to see the retail sales stats when they come out, clothes – as usual – will do well.  Electrials, mmm we’ll see. 

What will be interesting is when you open Santa’s stocking on Christmas day, you’ll quickly establish whether you’re nearest and dearest have been in a blind panic running round shops.   Tell tale signs are multi-tools or Top Gear annuals for the men or perfume gift sets/Trinny and Susanna book for the ladies.  Drop me a note if you get either

Personal relationships matter in businesses.  I was reminded of this earlier this week whilst attending a meeting with European colleagues this week.  Yes, we can communicate by e-mail, call each other in business hours, have video-conferences or webex conferences.  However, that doesn’t replace relationships which have the opportunity to develop in social downtime such as speaking over dinner, over a beer in a bar or on a coach on the way to a restaurant.

I’m fortunate to work for an organisation whose global top management still see value in this.  The cost of getting people somewhere is outweighed by the value this proximity brings in pulling us all together more strongly as people.  This investment means that discussion/accomodation and understanding is given a real opportunity.  Clearly there are known known’s taken into account such as  travel and hotel costs, carbon footprint, opportunity cost, however the value transcends this as we work together more strongly as a team.

I call this “real-actionships”.    That is; you can get far more done to resolve a problem or query with someone when you know them as a person.  Finding common ground, common interests and common understanding isn’t always possible when you are in meeting room, the business of business takes over, the agenda rules and outcomes count.  If there’s one thing Generation Y need to learn from about social media, is it’s not just about being an on-line practitioner, but an off-line expert in people relationships too.  Generation X have a lot to pass on here, consider it our legacy.  The art of verbal communication and relationship development with real human beings – “innit.”   LOL.

Earlier today on Twitter, I posted this infographic about how social media has emerged over the last ten years or so (I love infographics by the way). 

It’s a game changer and has led to a re-configuration of the world and we are all living through it, some actively, some as bystanders.  What I think is most interesting is the emergence of all these businesses which have entered the market in the last ten years- Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube.

Pre- 2000, many of these didn’t exist as businesses.  If you have a look back at the infographic, you can  how transient social media has been as a technology.  A continuum of ideas, start-ups and failures waiting for their moment for social media traction to grip.  And it has.

I began to think what the next ten years of that infographic might look like and how the worlds wiring is going to change again?  Augmented reality linked to geo-location may take us on a whole new journey of interaction and uncover more possibilities to stay in contact, in real time.  Mobile phone tariffs may offer gigabytes of data in their tariffs, not megabytes.  Mobile phones may need terabytes of disk space and ultra-high performance batteries to keep up with us and our need to update. 

Life-caching is at an unprecedented level.  A detailed breadcrumb trail on you and your movements on a moment by moment basis is being recorded in the cloud.  Life is being recorded in incredible detail for future historians to marvel over, they will be able to replay your life in microscopic detail.  What you did, who you knew, where you went.   Want to see what I mean?  Create a book using Twournal of your Twitter feed.

All I know is, you haven’t seen anything yet in terms of where the cloud or social media platforms may take us.  It’s a hell of a time to be alive to witness it.  Here’s an article on Harvard Business Review which outlines some of the upcoming social media trends for 2011, have a quick look and see whether you’re geared up to be involved.

Should I be at Harvard?  In the car this morning, I got to thinking about the importance of this latest Wikileak exposure of all the diplomatic material and how this is a gamechanging moment in transparency.  Next thing I know, Harvard Business Review posts an article up on the same subject, like minds eh.

Now I don’t think for a minute I’m Harvard material, however my thought process was not about the specific contents of this leak, but more about the idea, that things that you thought were secret, being outed and exposed in a public forum.  I though there were some important leadership lesson there.

Think about it for a minute.  What if every e-mail and internal communication you wrote or produced for the last five years were exposed on the internet.  Anything in your cupboard that you might feel embarrassed about?  Any phone calls you need to make to smooth over any cracks with people you might have been a little two faced with?  Anything you would have considered “top secret?”

That’s a worrying thought, however you have – in the last few days – seen evidence of how this could happen on a grand scale.  Transparency rules.  There’s the first lesson, be consistent with others and be prepared to back your opinions in public.

One of the Guardian journalists made a good point on Radio 4 when she said that a disclosure of this size, takes an incredible amount of analysis by experts.  Things need to be given context.  There’s only so much a database and algorithms can do.  At some point, an expert needs to make sense of it.  There’s the second lesson.  Computers can’t rule everything, human analysis is vital, opinion matters.

The third lesson is about the overwhelming amount of data that has been posted.  So much, it’s a fog.  The media partners involved have had to digest, sort and filter it all, to get to the key stories.  The money moment.  Information overload is a factor in everyone’s lives nowadays .  The key word is “filtering” and if you don’t filter out the things that really matter when communicating to others, then you will simply be noise.“

Big leaks like the recent Wikileak will become more commonplace.  If it can happen to the US government, it can happen to anyone.  Being consistent, transparent and honest internally reduces your risk of something happening externally.  Granted, politics is a completely different stage, however, the lessons are there to be learned.