Nadeem Rizvi, Managing Director, Laser Micromachining Ltd
It is a generally-held belief that businesses do not like uncertainty and although economies throughout the world have been turbulent for some time now, the recent UK vote to leave the EU has only worsened this situation. Companies, particularly in the UK, will have to tread a careful path for the foreseeable future if they are to navigate the unpredictable times ahead; the problem is, however, that there is no simple recipe for doing this. Although each business has its own challenges, it is usually the case that companies which thrive tend to do so by innovating and improving their overall business practices. Stagnation is often the path to obsolescence.
One of the best ways to keep fresh ideas coming into a company is to look outwards and see what is happening in the wider world, not just in one’s own sector - this is even more true for technology businesses who inhabit a very fast-changing landscape and who cannot afford to slip behind even a little bit. What is difficult, though, is to judge what external information to trust and how balance all those factors with the current USP of one’s own business. So the challenge for each business often becomes one of how to choose the path which balances continuity with disruption – keeping faith in one’s existing strengths but not being afraid to bring in new ideas which can grow the business for the future.
Although there is nothing better than directly speaking with other business people (at events, exhibitions etc.), online resources also offer a unique way to keep up-to-date with the thinking of others, those who one would not normally meet. In this regard, one of the great success stories of recent times has been the growth of the TED foundation (ted.com) which has pioneered the spreading of ideas related to Technology Entertainment and Design.
TED has been running events for over twenty years but the increase in appetite for online resources has really catapulted its website platform into a widely-used and heavily-shared resource and most of its hundreds of online talks have now received millions of views. One of the things which is obvious about the TED platform is that, unlike sites like YouTube or Facebook, the content on TED is by invitation and the information which is presented is overseen for quality and suitability by the foundation which runs TED. In this regard the information on TED is from reasoned thinkers in their field and by those who have made successful contributions to their area.
The fact that not just anybody can upload their views on TED may seem rather limiting but it is, in fact, one of the strengths of the platform: the information provided has been selected by the organisation to be in line with its cited aim of furthering great ideas using the most innovative thinkers; so if you accept TED’s approach, you can place some value into the information you receive. This is generally in line with what happens in traditional peer review science - a body of experienced thinkers and experts endorse a new idea and add a weighty level of credibility to it so that the reader knows that there has been some rigorous scrutiny prior to its publication. The output of TED is similarly filtered though this does not limit the power of the ideas which are being offered.
Unfortunately, a lot of material which is generally available on the web has not had that level of examination (if any) before it is uploaded and this can make it very difficult for the reader to know what value to place on it; not all information is of equal value even if it can be equally accessed.
This idea of the weightiness of trust is actually explored in one of the most popular TED talks given by Joe Gebbia, one of the founders of Airbnb. In this talk Gebbia discusses how his company overcame the biggest obstacle to his vision – how do you make people trust a stranger enough to let them stay in your home? The psychology of humans is driven by a number of factors including ‘stranger danger’ and placing trust mostly in people who are like us, not markedly different people (be they from different countries or social backgrounds). Airbnb overcame this seemingly fundamental flaw in their business idea by ‘designing their website for trust’, the background to which Gebbia explains in his talk. Airbnb uses reviews by the host and the traveller to give confidence information about each other and the basic tenet of the solution was that people trusted each other more if there was the right level of information and, more importantly, if there was a large body of reviews giving the same backing. In the words of Gebbia ‘high reputation beats high similarity’, i.e. you can trust in the judgement of a large number of people all saying the same thing even if you would not normally believe them individually. The exponential growth of Airbnb is a solid testament that this approach works.
So when a business is trying to assimilate external ideas, it can be worthwhile checking what body of evidence there is for those ideas. This is not to say that companies should not go their own way; there are often big wins in being an outlier but the associated risks can also be a lot bigger.
It should be remembered that reputation is also a facet of this ‘body of evidence’ idea: if a lot of people are saying something good (or something bad) then it should be given some weighting in your considerations. If the idea (or company) which is under consideration is in a completely new area to your own expertise then their reputation can often be a very informative guide to whether one should pursue that option or not - if there is a solid body of evidence in favour then one can have strong faith that the risks with the approach are not going to be unreasonably high but you would do well to stay clear of a company/technology about which there were a lot of reasoned doubters.
In business, as in other walks of life, it is often worth heeding the wisdom of crowds when there is little else to go on, just as long as there is some surety that their view is trustworthy. Free advice is everywhere on the web but can be unreliable; trust and reputation can often be a better guide to a safer road ahead.