The alchemy of difference

When a liability is a feature

This popped up in my social media feeds not long ago.

When I stopped laughing I got to thinking: “What other liabilities are actually features?”

Back in 1881, a five year old boy in Indiana, USA, got his right hand caught in a chopping machine. He lost his index finger. A year later, he fell badly while chasing a rabbit, and broke the remaining fingers on the same hand. They weren’t set properly, so his hand, as a young adult, looked like this.

A liability, right?

Well, perhaps, unless you play baseball. That boy, Mordecai Brown, became “Finger Brown” a baseball pitcher, whose bewildering throws meant he served 14 years as a professional (with 239 wins vs just 130 losses) and ended up with the sixth best performance ever as a pitcher (2.06 runs per innings; as a comparison, the average pro pitcher has an ERA of double that).

Question: What apparent shortcoming in your own service offerings can you reframe as a feature?

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Reliability vs randomness

Warning: Not a restaurant review.

I wrote here about the venerable US department store, JC Penney, which misstepped badly with its ‘lower middle class’ demographic by creating a new, ordered, minimalist look. Problem was that their customers loved the former clutter and the seemingly chance bargains they’d score.

When that disappeared, so did the customers.

I’ve spent this week working in Bangkok, which is chaotic, by design.

Bangkok is structured around small neighbourhoods within khlongs (canals), which makes it a long way removed from Singapore’s order, even though both have elevated freeways, giant shopping malls, and high-tech billboards and high-rise apartments everywhere. So, even in the most high-end of Bangkok’s malls, the Siam Paragon, you can easily ‘get lost’ in their food court - it’s been designed as a maze of alleyways housing at least 100 food outlets.

It’s a sanitised experience, but one open to discovery.

All this made me consider the desire we have, as humans, for BOTH order and chaos, reliability and randomness. It’s the appeal of social media after all: the idea that scrolling or swiping within a predictable format will take us to hitherto unknown — and possibly unasked-for — content.

And, where I finished my trip, just before writing this, was an exemplar of supreme order and remarkable discovery.

I took the plunge and booked a seat at Gaggan, a remarkable shrine to creative eating. It’s received every accolade possible: Michelin stars, Top 10 “Best Restaurant in the World” for multiple years - you get the picture. But, it’s as far as possible far from the sedate, ordered sequence of courses you’d get at, say, Alain Ducasse in Paris.

Gaggan Anand serves up 22 courses over two-and-a-half hours. There’s music. It’s loud, pumping between courses - rap and electronica and 80s hits all thematically linked to the food. The lighting is orchestrated too: at times pitch black, then neon, then conventional ambient mood lighting. There’s a constant patter of stories from the chefs, explaining the food. (And, they’re hilarious). There are even condoms free to take in the bathrooms, which tells you something about the atmosphere they’re trying to create.

Does it work? Reviews are sharply polarised but, for me, overwhelmingly yes.

I loved the theatre of being told how to eat a morsel, but not being told what we were eating. Of being challenged to eat cake that didn’t turn out to be cake (it was fungi and truffles). Of eating almost entirely without cutlery, And, this highly choreographed experience has 14 kitchen staff ‘performing’ to 14 guests.

But, back to my point. The reason it works is because it absolutely teeters on the brink of balancing tight control with a sense of adventure and discovery. As a guest, you know you’re in the best hands possible, but that it’s entirely unpredictable.

I can’t wait to go back.

Question: What can you do to satisfy the OPPOSING needs of your customers: reliability and discovery?

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Right on the cusp

Cultural diversity is good, right?

Yes, I thought you’d say that.

I happen to agree.

However, technology hasn’t yet caught up to enable communication across languages to be completely seamless. Not yet.

But, I saw this week just how close we are.

In Bangkok I was with a group of CEOs from across the Asia-Pacific. More than half of the delegates were Chinese-speaking (from China itself, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore), and others from Japan and Thailand. Australians and New Zealanders rounded out the group.

The problem we had was that not everyone had an equal grasp of English, the language they customarily transact their business in, and in which I ran the meeting.

We had two workarounds: (i) Google Translate was running hot for two delegates who couldn’t follow spoken English (although they could read slides); and (ii) I prepared detailed text summaries within an hour of each session ending, so they could translate them and prepare responses and questions.

But, I left what was a very successful meeting with two feelings. Firstly, that we’d left some people under-engaged. And, secondly, that we’re THIS close to bridging these gaps with four technologies.

Here are two that already exist:

• Real-time video translation using tools like these;

• Making ‘avatars’ of ourselves (or anyone!), to communicate key points, and then translate these into any of 100+ languages.

These will morph, quite rapidly, I predict into:

• Live translation of a real person presenting.

And, ultimately, into:

• Live translation, without delay, of multi-speaker conversations bouncing around a room (think Douglas Adams’s BabelFish).

I, for one, can’t wait until meetings like the one I just ran are frictionless and we can gain access to everyone’s ideas and contributions, irrespective of language fluency.

Question: How are you using emerging technologies to dissolve cultural boundaries?

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As always, I love knowing you’re finding the questions and the stories of interest. So please take a millisecond to click the heart and keep the Substack robot nourished.

I’ll look forward to joining you again next Friday, so I hope you enjoy the week ahead,

Andrew