Where do you sit in the cinema?

Apparently if you’re right handed you tend to sit to the right of the screen as this allows the right hemisphere of your brain to process the visual stimulus of the film.

I’m right handed but more often than not sit on the left hand side of the cinema.

How about you? Where do you sit in the cinema?

How ideas spread – Gladwell may be wrong

Malcom Gladwell shot to worldwide fame with The Tipping Point by suggesting that for ideas to spread you need to attract certain influential and well connected people to get your idea started and to send it viral. He used examples of shoe companies finding trendy kids in New York to start sowing the seeds and so on.

New research however suggests he may have been wrong. A guy called Duncan Watts did some research into how things spread.

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn’t the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn’t they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

So it would seem that far more important than whether you can get influential people to spread the word for you is whether society (or your target market) is open to new ideas in the first place. If they’re not then it doesn’t matter who you get to spread the word, it isn’t going to stick.

Tags: Add new tag, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, Tipping Point

The office Christmas party

‘Tis the season to be jolly (etc.) and it’s traditionally the time for the office Christmas party. True to tradition ours is tomorrow, with everyone decamping to head office for a talent show and dinner.

It’s a funny old thing isn’t it? Far be it from me to be all humbug and all, but I’ve never been a fan of ‘forced joviality’. You know what I mean? It’s like having to be romantic on Valentines Day because society (or Clintons) expects it of you. I’d much rather be romantic every day of the year than rubbish 364 days and mushy 1.

And it’s a similar thing with Christmas parties. There have obviously been lots of cases of these things going terribly wrong and the Beeb were asking this morning if the tradition is on the way out. Nevertheless though it seems many people like them, with recent research showing around 70% of workers like to have a Christmas bash.

Like I said, far be it for me to deny people a good time, but it seems to me that the purpose of these parties isn’t so much to celebrate the birth of Christ as to just get to people together and have some fun. In my eyes, this is something that should be done all year round and doesn’t require big set piece events.

Anyway, that’s my two penneth. Are you all having a party? What do you think of them?

Tags: Christmas, christmas party, parties

Poker and strategy

New article on The Management Blog about poker and strategy.

Tags: poker, strategy

‘Future of’ series from Singularity University

I’ve been a big fan of Ray Kurzweil ever since reading The Age of Spiritual Machines way back when.  So I’ve followed the launch of his Singularity University with great interest.  They’ve produced the following fascinating videos called The Future Of series.  Enjoy.

The Future of Nanotech

The Future of Energy

The Future of Robotics

The Future of Medicine

The Future of Synthetic Biology

Tags: Age of Spiritual Machines, Future, predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Raymond Kurzweil, Singularity, Singularity University