Brian Solis is a digital analyst who studies disruptive technology and its impact on business at the Altimeter Group and is the author of a new book called X: The Experience When Business Meets Design. He was in Australia this week to speak at the Australian Digital Summit – presented by Telstra – and Larry Heath caught up with him to talk about the book and our digital future…
Tell me a little bit about the book. What is the thinking behind this one?
It’s my seventh book, but since my platform is talking about change and transformation and how you need to understand how everything is not only evolving, but how you need to either evolve or not, and what to do about it, so the irony was ‘here’s my seventh book, I’m going to tell you more about how the world is changing and what you need to do about it, but I’m going to not be innovative myself, and I’m just going to put it in a book that looks and feels just like every other book you’ve probably ever read. So I thought, ‘well, look, hey, how about I do this… how about I take the principles of what the book is talking about, how to bring about change completely understanding that change is hard to see if I couldn’t reinvent what a book could be in a digital world. By book, I mean a print book. How could I make it matter in a digital economy?
So I spent a lot of time studying how people use their apps, from Tinder, to Clear, to Facebook, you know, and then also studying attentions spans. I used teenagers as sort of this catalyst, this form of inspiration. How would I reinvent the textbook for a teenager in school? What would that look like in terms of something not just that was highly designed, but incredibly productive and delightful to go through, and also a catalyst for learning, right? That was the result of what this new book was going to become, was that I went through the whole design aspect of it before I could write it so that I knew what I was writing to – different forms of sentences. Only so many sentences could be together before you needed a break – like a white space break, or a visual break. The way that the text was laid out on the page with the visuals were laid out on the page, you feel like you’re swiping right or swiping left. It’s all very interesting. The reason why this is important is it took 3 and a half years to do it. It’s the longest of all my books, I had to walk away from it in the middle of it to publish another book.
It’s very meta, and though the real story of it is that the design of it required new expertise, so it wasn’t done by the publisher, I had to do it. The shape of it is the shape of an iPad Air 2, to get that cut and produced required a new printing process. To make it at the price point of a regular business book and not $100 for example required a new process for it to be produced and distributed. So everything about it had to be reinvented. So now that is the magic of the book- that the book is a lesson in what the book teaches you to do, and so it was a very proud moment that it’s here, that it’s debuting in Australia today. To see the trials and tribulations of trying to bring about change, to recognise that the point of the book was actually the result of the book. I hope it’s as inspiring to people as its been life-changing to me.
Will it change the way that you do everything you do from here on out- at least in the print world and likely the digital space as well?
Yeah, I’m asking everybody to not buy the digital version whether it’s Kindle or iPad, I just want you to feel this inspired, so that you can see what your work could look like. Yeah, I’m never going backwards, I mean, I’ll never write a regular book again. Now it’s also making me think about ways to be more innovative on the digital front – what could a book be on the digital side of things? Because if you think about what a book is digitally, today, it’s very skeuomorphic, which means it’s… well, it looks like a book. So, if you use an iPad, you can curl the page. So it’s not terribly innovative. I was talking to- I could probably say this-
Almost the innovation was almost the lack of innovation.
Yeah, exactly, right? So it was intentional. Steve Jobs wanted us to be familiar, that’s how he was going to get older and younger consumers alike to be able to buy new devices. But now we’re beyond that. So I was talking to the manager at Radiohead, saying that I would love to see them – because I knew that they were working on an album, and at the time it was secret, but I said, ‘Maybe what you should think about is the same approach I took the book. What if you made an album like you always do, which is what people want, but at the same time, what if you reimagined the album for like, Oculus Rift? What if you became one of the killer experiences that when Oculus Rift was released, that they had to buy this Radiohead experience, which would be the new music, but set in a visual landscape?’ So you rethink the concept of what an album could be. The reason why I share that as an example is because I’m never going to go back to a regular book, but it’s also expanding the universe of possibilities for how to tell a story, or how to bring people together.
We were talking before about how people are expecting things instantly, people expect instant gratification… and they want it for free. So there’s this really interesting dynamic now between these new forms of technology bring back that idea of value to a product- whether it be a book or an album, whether it be a video game, a film… Introducing 3D glasses, the Oculus Rift, things like that – in your nature of thinking about it, is there a financial aspect to that as well? Thinking about ways that print can be made profitable again, and ways that we can re-engage with people that have maybe been disenfranchised by this notion of being able to get things for free and otherwise?
Yeah, well, I think the key word that you mentioned was ‘value’. Every one of those industries that you mentioned, maybe aside from the porn industry, has sort of lost sight of what value can be, right? Not everybody, but many people. The state of music is in a sad state just because the infrastructure of the business sort of lost sight of value, and people’s behaviours and their expectations were the net result of the lack of value delivery, and the lack of innovation in infrastructures and what have you. So all of the innovation came from the outside – torrents and the peer-to-peer networks. All of this technology took away- not from artists- but say, from the management systems that allowed these artists to devalue the state of the music industry. There isn’t a lack of great art, for example, whether it’s film, or whether it’s music, and I go out of my way to ask people to support the artists that they actually love and not to take it just because you can get something streamed for free, or for $10 a month through Apple Music or Spotify. It doesn’t mean that that money is getting to the artist. We know that it very well could be, but the same system that takes away the value is also taking from the artist as well, so you’re seeing a lot of them go very independent. We have Lindsey Sterling, for example, who is quite famous- making $6 million a year on YouTube.
Not to mention her live shows- she was just in Australia not too long ago, selling out The Metro.
Quite, quite brilliant. So it’s like you have a DIY mentality. So you have Boyce Avenue – one of the largest bands on YouTube, and they’re also independent. Making… I think it’s also about $6 million a year. Just from advertising, not from anything else. To me, this shows that you don’t necessarily need the man, or the mechanism from which to break your music, and yet artists still feel like they have to rely on it because the same change that say, I went through as an author, they also have to go through in terms of new forms of artistry that’s hard to embrace, because you spend so much time on your craft, but it’s not good enough. I’ll share a quick example with you – I’m fortunate enough to be friends with Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, and I brought him out to SXSW with me to do this big keynote about how the state of music was sort of like this precursor to the state of everything, and he talked about the idea that musicians are also part of the problem, right? Not just fans. Artists and musicians were part of the problem, that they weren’t being innovative enough in creating an experiences that were worth paying for, and finding ways to not just sink everything into the music, but sink everything into the experience that you want people to have and pay for. And that was a message that was hard to artists to hear.
Especially from Billy Corgan
Yeah, because I left out every single expletive that he used in the process. But that’s at the heart of the matter. We all have to find ways of innovative, not just in our craft, but in how our craft gets appreciated and valued, and this is true whether you’re an artist, or whether you’re an employee at some company, whether you’re an executive. This is that renaissance time, and it’s really up to those who have the vision to see something differently, but also the wherewithal and the resilience to do what other people can’t or won’t.
When you sit in a room like this, and you hear everyone speaking, it’s all very positive. The nature of disruption and the nature of change is all positive. There’s of course the legal ramifications of things like that which still have to catch up, that are making things difficult in some regions and for some businesses, but on the whole, it seems like everything is very positive. Is that the way you see things as well, that everything right now is moving towards a positive future, or is there some negative attributes to what’s happening now with disruption and that aspect of Silicon Valley?
I’m a hopeless optimist, and I do live in Silicon Valley, so there’s this- I don’t want to call it this optimistic or opportunistic – I mean, everything in Silicon Valley is very driven by a sense of purpose. You are on a mission to do something and disruption – I don’t know if I would say that that’s a purpose, but to improve something, to enable something, to facilitate something differently that you couldn’t do yesterday, that’s noble.
It’s such a different idea. There was a time when you would never had said the word ‘purpose’ – rather, ‘profit’.
I think the first P’s of any business were people – not people – profit, product, price and promotion. Those were the original P’s that everybody learned at school. The irony of that was the P’s that were always missing were people, purpose, promise, perspective… You know, all of the things that were much more human in nature. So I think that digital transformation is also having a negative effect on… well, not having a negative effect, but it is being taken negatively by some because it’s forcing you – you either adapt or you die. It’s forcing you out of your comfort zone, and that’s really hard for people because a lot of people don’t want to be pushed. They want to be led, or inspired, or taught. I’ll tell you one of the negative downsides to this is that we’re watching –right now- an ageing workforce that refuses to introduce new values. So you have Catherine, who’s teaching you how to code in a day, but if you don’t want to learn how to code in a day, then you’re not going to learn how to code in a day and therefore whatever ends up happening over time, you know, there’s a great video that talks about ‘Humans need not apply’ and it shows you every job over the last hundred years that has been replaced by technology, and it predicts the next sets of jobs. We go into this fully well knowing what’s on our horizons. Disruption is something that happens to you, or because if you. Disrupt or be disrupted.
———
Brian’s new book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design is available now from all good bookstores and digital retailers. To keep up with Brian, check him out on Twitter at: @briansolis.
———-
