Image by Bytemarks via Flickr

The past 150 years have seen an enormous consolidation of power in the hands of professionalized medicine.   What if we are at the turn of the tide – where increasingly our health (typically the domain of medicine) and well being (typically the domain of psychologists and the like) will be self managed?

At the fringes the alpha-geeks (people pursuing their goals out of passion – not desire for profit) are doing just that.   It is called The Quantified Self, people who gather regularly to share the ways that they are quantifying their own behavior in order to get “smarter”, “faster” “healthier” etc.

They are developing software and services, they are congregating in dozens of cities to share insights and innovation.  They are taking back their health and well-being.   In the snap below you see the categories of self-tracking devices and applications that are available.  In that category structure you see the outlines of the operating system for personal health.

Image via Wikipedia

In  Enemy at the Gate, a detailed account of Ottoman, Hapsburg relations centered on the 1683 siege of Vienna, historian Andrew Wheatcroft notes that by the late 19th century both empires were decrepit and nearing their turn to exit from the world stage.  In response they began developing rich narratives about their past. They were the first to develop what Wheatcroft calls, “heritage cultures.”

“Both the Hapsburg monarchy and the Ottoman empire turned their attention inwards.   France, Britain, Germany and Russia could anticipate a great, imperial future.   The two second rank European states had only one good option, make the forlorn grandeur of their past the central principle of their present and future status.”   These states began to market themselves based on elaborate rituals of commemoration and history.

I think heritage cultures exist in business and they are usually easy to spot.   A  “heritage company” touts its past in order to legitimize its present and credential its future.   Heritage companies spend a fair amount of time using words like “history” (“A long history of innovation…”) and legacy (“with a legacy of caring for the environment…”).    These phrases litter their brand and marketing communications.  More importantly, (and from personal experience) they are often used as internal mantras to bolster opinion among a skeptical workforce.

The problem is that people transact with a business based on a belief about what that relationship means now and in the future.   The past may credential a company but like the song lyric (“what have you done for me lately?”) the “past” in a customer’s mind extends only a few years back and the shelf life on reputation is spitefully brief.

Forward looking companies do not spend much time referencing the past.  Do you see a company like BMW, GE, Apple, Nike or Starbucks touting it’s heritage?  Heritage is great for craftsmen, less so for innovators helping build our future.   If one cannot make the case for the future it is natural to cling to the past.  But in business past is never prologue.  Making claims on the future by citing your past is a sure giveaway that something is missing at present.

I am always struck by how powerful it can be to be driven by a single, counterintuitive question.

Consider this one: In early 2007 the Spanish bank BBVA asked IDEO to re-think their self-service channel – the automated teller machine (ATM) from scratch. The question was not how to further automate the teller, but rather how to humanize the machine.

In simply inverting this line of inquiry (let’s focus on humanizing the machine) you find entirely new possibilities for innovation.

Focusing on self-service as a means to lower  transaction costs  will  give you automation.  Focusing on simplicity and human needs will give you something remarkable.

This video walks through the process of how a team from IDEO went about rethinking the ATM experience and is worth watching not for the future of the ATM – but for how a company can simply invert their normal question – or objective – and begin striving for something remarkable.

Related articles

• IDEO redesigns the ATM (designboom.com)

I was reviewing some notes for an upcoming presentation and found this gem of a quote from a BusinessWeek interview with Jeff Bezos.

Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?
A: Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is “why should we do that—we don’t have any skills in that area.” That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with “what do my customers need?” Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company.

Particularly in times of rapid change – the question of what you decide to focus on can be critically important.    This also, in my opinion, reinforces the business logic of Amazon’s recent purchase of Zappos which I wrote about here.

I often say that on the social web there are no experts – only experiments.  The fastest learner wins.

We are living through a sea change in business – Think about media with music, newspapers and publishing – or manufacturing with Flip (nearly two guys in a garage – design, manufacture in China, market online – then hit the big box stores and finally sell to Cisco for 1/2 billion) Astro Gaming (similar story without the buyout yet), and the new crowdsourced Crunchpad- think about the ubiquity of mobile devices and their rapid evolution or the rise of Twitter and the first chink in Google’s armor etc.

In these conditions the only lasting advantage a company has lies in its ability to adapt rapidly.

Which brings me to Eric Ries.  I have had the privilege to do some work recently with Eric, author of the Lessons Learned blog — Eric’s basic premise is that a startup needs to maximize its resources and have a relentless focus on creating tight, iterative decision loops.  A lean startup is defined by

1. Leveraging already-existing software and services whenever possible (off the shelf, open source etc.)
2. Using Agile development to quickly prototype, test and deploy functional code
3. Aggressively testing reality every chance they get with REAL customers (aka customer development)

Startups obviously need to run lean – they have modest resources and no real idea if the products they are putting out will meet actual customer demand.

But these conditions (uncertainty and rapid change) and these practices (customer development, agile and rapid prototyping) are not only advantages for startups – As Eric points out, they can be defensive tools for an Enterprise.    This is an interview I ran with Eric on behalf of O’Reilly Media.  It originally appeared a few days ago in a post by Tim O’Reilly welcoming Eric to the Radar community.

Eric will be running Lean Startup Master Classes over the coming months — whether you are a startup or not – this is a game changing approach to product development.

This is a cross post from Radar:

This interview is with April Allderdice, CEO and cofounder of MicroEnergy Credits. MicroEnergy Credits has developed a mechanism using microfinance institutions and GPS cell phones to allow carbon credits to reach small households in the developing world. Until now the relatively high transaction costs involved in set up and verification of a carbon trade has made the market available only to large companies.

During our interview I was reminded of another fantastic idea with similar characteristics. Simon Berry, CEO of ruralnet UK, proposes “that Coca-Cola use their distribution channels (which are amazing in developing countries) to distribute oral rehydration salts. Maybe by dedicating one compartment in every 10 crates as ‘the life saving’ compartment.” (join the Facebook group here to pressure Coca Cola) Once you plug into Coca Cola’s already-existing distribution channels the cost of delivering small amounts of vital medicines to remote parts of the world drops precipitously.

The genius of both of these ideas is that they are using something “old” to do something very new.

Imagine how many existing distribution networks could be “rented” out for their capacity to deliver needed goods/services at extraordinarily low cost.   If Zappos can syndicate customer experience and Amazon can syndicate their competence at online storage and computing… Why not Coca Cola, Walmart syndicating their distribution competence.?  As we begin the necessary journey to transform industry away from unsustainable consumption – this might be a step in the right direction.