Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Trends

Are you the frog in the pot?

By

During summer, a period notoriously known for its lack of news, the media seem to have been very busy reporting and analysing a steady news stream predicting their own demise. We have seen headlines such as ‘Not dead yet’ or ‘Thinking the unthinkable’ the latter referring to a possible scenario in a not too distant future where the New York Times is no longer published — not on paper at least.

If you have not followed the discussion the crux of the matter is very well summed up in the following video clip:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Political Humor Joke of the Day

My point here is not so much to enter into the discussion — to me the conclusion is inevitable — but to point out the fact that once again an industry has been caught out by the famous frog syndrome.
( if you drop a frog into a very hot water it will do its very best to scramble and get out, if however you put it in a pot of cold water and heat the pot slowly, the frog will not try to get out before it’s too late ) i.e. not responding to gradual changes in your environment. The situation in which print media finds itself today was predicted five if not 10 years ago. They just all hoped that the pot would not get too hot. In 10 years time this will be a classic business school case in line with the one about the buggy whip manufacturers, typesetting and landline telephones.

So how does that relate to the world of hotels, travel and conference centres? Well – I think there is a similar shift taking place in our environment. Well possibly not directly in our own environment but in the environment that provides us with our business.

There are three key drivers of this shift: The financial crisis, energy/co2 awareness and Web 2.0 together they have inspired a growing number of business leaders to rethink the need for travel and face-to-face meetings.

IKEA a trendsetting company is running an internal campaign under the banner of: Meet more – travel less. Encouraging the use of interactive web technology for meeting purposes while at the same time reducing travel costs and CO2 emissions. The target for 2009 is to reduce travel by 50 percent and CO2 emission as a consequence by 25 percent. And they are not the only ones, they are just very visible in the way they do it.

It makes sense. Cramming 20, 50 or 500 people into a conference room and feeding them an endless parade of PowerPoint slides, be they ever so pretty and well-designed is not efficient knowledge transfer, (let alone learning) We know that.

Ah but wait – I hear you say – what about the networking? That is the truly important part of meetings – it may be important, but traveling 4 or 6 hours, spending 2 days away from the job and then taking a chance on who you share the stand-up coffee table with during a 10 minute break is not efficient networking.
You could spend an hour systematically working LinkdIn, Facebook or even Twitter and you would probably produce some far more interesting connections and possibilities. So lets not kid ourselves about the networking.

And there is a fourth driver adding to this:

“During the next 5-10 years, the Millennium generation will become a signi?cant proportion of meeting participants. This is perhaps the largest generation gap in history and the consequences for meetings will be fundamental. If meetings for the older generations serve the purposes of information and networking, this means online communities, such as Facebook and MySpace to the younger generations, and they learn from Google, Wikipedia and online peers more than parents, teachers
and conference speakers. They don’t see the difference between virtual and real any more than they see why work and play should not happen at the same time. ” From The Meeting Manifesto

But it is not just meeting planers who are shifting their focus to ROI – the other sector where we can see a shift is taking place as well is within the training industry. Traditional training companies are also in the hot pot if they still believe in classrooms and PowerPoint’.

“Learning budgets are decreasing. Spending on external services are decreasing even more. And learning departments need to do more with fewer resources.

If you are inside a corporate learning department, assuming you still have your job, then you feel this by being more busy. In many ways, that’s not a bad feeling compared to either the person who lost their job. Or the people who have seen their learning business crushed by this”
Read more here

So two major purchasers of hotel rooms, F&B and meeting space, the meeting organizers and the training companies are in this shifting paradigm. Looking for new solutions and ways to connect but with out the travel. What was once a considered a perk – is now almost a curse.

Meetings and tourism are now two different worlds.

Tourism is all about pleasure and experiences which is fine, but meetings/training are business and business means somebody is looking for a return on investment. If there is no ROI or if it is too low, meetings (gatherings/trainings etc) in their current form will be cut.

That is what is happening in the market just now.

And if you think that once the so-called crisis is over then everything will be back to normal and we can do business as usual then and you have just joined all those very uncomfortable newspapermen in their very hot pot.

—-
If you would like to pursue this subject here are a few links that you may find interesting:

European Event ROI Making Meetings and Events More Profitable.

The Meeting Architecture Manifesto

The state of Learning as a Business

Creative Foodies… in the USA

By

The 10 Most Creative People in Food

The Magazine FastCompnay has launched a series on the 100 most creative business profiles. Here is their take on who are the top 10 creative Foodies.

1. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Jean-Georges Management
The Alsace-born celebrity chef has built a multimillion-dollar, multi-Michelin-starred empire without slapping his face on a frying pan or frozen pizza. Vongerichten’s unprecedented partnership with Starwood Hotels has given him license to unleash his creativity — and his take on Asian flavors — in 50 new restaurants over the next five years. “If I could have my dream,” he has said, “I would open a new restaurant every month.”

2. Dan Barber, Blue Hill restaurants
Barber is foodies’ latest locavore darling, the driving spirit behind the two acclaimed Blue Hill restaurants, and a passionate advocate for regional farm networks. The winner of the 2009 Outstanding Chef award from the James Beard Foundation, he practices what he preaches at his family’s farm and at the nonprofit Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.

3. Will Allen, Growing Power
Since he used his life savings to buy the last working farm in Milwaukee, Allen has been dedicated to creating a more just food system. Growing Power’s network of urban teaching farms raises vegetables, fish, livestock, and honeybees; supplies local restaurants; creates sustainable cafeteria programs for corporations; and distributes food to more than 100,000 families. “We’re not just growing food, we’re growing people too,” he says.

4. Dan Cutforth and Jane Lispitz, Magical Elves Productions
Top Chef creators and executive producers Cutforth and Lispitz –”the elves,” as they’re known – have used reality television, of all things, to lift up serious cooking rather than reduce it to farce (we’re looking at you, Gordon Ramsey). In the process, Top Chef has become a pillar of the Bravo network’s urban-sophisticate strategy, spawning a popular Web site, cookbooks, and merchandise — making it an example of the 21st century integrated media brand.

5. Floyd Zaiger, Zaiger Genetics
The father of the pluot, 83-year-old Zaiger, has developed — by hand pollination, not genetic manipulation — some 200 new and improved fruits, from low-acid peaches to cherries that grow in warm climates to the golden red apricot-plum cross known as an aprium. “Developing a new cross takes 12 to 15 years,” says Zaiger’s daughter, Leith Gardner. “You need a little patience.” Coming next: a blue-skinned aprium.

6. Ed Kaczmarek, Kraft
Pay for an ad? Only if it’s extra cheesy. Director of innovation Kaczmarek’s Kraft iFood Assistant, which offers Kraft devotees with iPhones, thousands of recipes and more, proves not only that brands can create meaningful mobile experiences but also that customers will pay for them. Kraft’s cooking app ($0.99) cracked the iPhone’s top 100 apps list, rising at one point to the No. 2 slot in the lifestyle section, and helped the $42 billion company better understand its customers and what they’re shopping for.

7. Temple Grandin, Associate professor, Colorado State University
“There are similarities between my autistic mind and animal thinking,” Grandin says. The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow, the title of her video bio on YouTube, has relied on that understanding to develop more humane ways of treating cattle destined for slaughter. She has no fans in the animal-rights blogosphere, but the walled, curved chutes she has designed and the handling standards she has set up for companies like Swift and McDonald’s — no flapping objects, no shadows, no spraying in the face — reduce stress in the animals and improve the efficiency of the operation as well as the quality of the meat.

8. Becky Frankiewicz, VP of portfolio marketing for Frito-Lay North America
Who says good for you has to mean “tastes like cardboard”? Frankiewicz is leading the shift for Frito-Lay’s Smartfood and Baked Lays brands to appeal to women, using design and taste to communicate that healthy snacking isn’t an oxymoron. New packaging is more elegant, appealing, and signals health benefits, and new technology lets flavor be baked into each crisp.

9. Jeff Jordan, CEO of OpenTable
Jordan, an eBay vet, has helped make restaurant reservations fun, adding features such as detailed users reviews and clever lists to help restaurant fans make better decisions in the same place they make their reservations. Perhaps his neatest trick has been to take OpenTable public in the current market climate — and get a 1999-style response. OpenTable stock hit a high of $35.50 on its opening day in late May, a nice bump from its initial price of $20 a share.

10. David Chang, Momofuku
The intense, award-winning chef launched his quirky downtown Manhattan mini-kingdom with inventive takes on Asian noodles and pork buns. Besides producing great food, Chang hits all the stylish notes — local produce, cool staff, lots and lots of pork. Plus, his latest (and priciest) venture, Ko, is the only restaurant we know that takes reservations only online.

Read more about the 100 Most Creative People in Business

Speed of change

By

I often refer to the speed of change as the main reason for us to speed up our learning.
Changes requires adaptation.
Adaptation for humans means learning new stuff.

On of my main inspirations in understanding how fast change is happening in our society is Ray Kurzweil whom I often refer to in my presentations. Here is a taste of what Kurzweil means when he speaks of change…

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’ve said that the year 2045 is the year of the singularity. Can you explain what that is?

RAY KURZWEIL: By 2029, we’ll have finished the reverse engineering of the human brain. There’s already 20 regions of the brain we’ve modeled and simulated and tested. We’ll have very powerful and very small computers by that time. Most of the computers in the world are not yet in our bodies and brains, but some of them are in our brains. If you’re a Parkinson’s patient you can put a computer in your brain. It’s not blood cell-sized today, it’s pea-sized.

And if you take what we can do today and realize these technologies will be a billion times more powerful per dollar in 25 years, a hundred thousand times smaller, you get some idea of what we’ll be able to do.

And one thing we’ll be able to do is send millions of nanobots, blood cell-sized devices, inside our bloodstream. They’ll keep us healthy from inside. They’ll go inside our brains and interact with our biological neurons, just the way neural implants do today, and put our brains on the Internet, make us smarter, provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system. And so, we will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence.

So over time, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate, and that’s basically what we mean by the singularity. When you get out to 2045, we’ll have multiplied the overall intelligence of the human/machine civilization a billionfold, and that’s such a profound transformation that we call it a singularity.

Read the full interview here

Also look out for the film about to be released Transendent Man

Why stay at a hotel?

By

[lang_en]balong_back_view.jpg

If you could rent this for the same price with friendly service….

From the Financial Times this weekend:

“On a trip to Italy last July, I stayed at a hotel in Tuscany called Castello del Nero. Opened in 2006, it has featured in many best hotel lists around the world. I was visiting with my family (as a journalist on a complimentary stay) and was dumbfounded. Slow, forgetful service combined with unsatisfactory food left me wondering how the industry had reached a point whereby it could charge €500 a night for a hotel that was sub-standard – aside from the excellent spa. I was told some of the lapses were because of a departing chef. The trouble is, with the luxury hotel industry entering difficult times, there will be few opportunities for such excuses.

Next year will probably see a tough, consumer-led reappraisal of the market. Interestingly, early signs of this shakedown can be seen in the generally robust market for private villa rentals”

Read the full article here[/lang_en]

Forbrugertilliden er i bund

By

[lang_da]Fire ud af 10 EU borgere mener, at de er i fare for at blive syge af den mad, de spiser. Faktisk mener de, at risikoen for helbredsskader fra fødevarer er væsentlig større end risikoen for at komme til skade ved overfald eller terroristangreb. Generelt er der overordnet enighed om, at fødevarer er væsentligt mindre sunde i dag, end de var for 40 år siden.

Forbrugertillid bliver et dyrebart aktiv, som der skal værnes om – opnår man det, er det til gengæld rigtig mange penge værd.

Det stiller igen Foodservice branchen over for nogle skarpe valg.

For på den ene side vil man være fristet til – eller måske endda nødt til – at kompensere for de stigende råvarepriser ved at bruge industrialiserede produkter i højere og højere grad – men det er på sin vis også begyndelsen på enden; for dermed bliver branchen, som ellers i manges øjne har nydt større forbrugertillid end de producenter der fremstiller industrialiserede produkter, pludselig slået i hartkorn med netop dem.

USA og Tyskland er allerede langt med lovgivning om varedeklarationer på restaurationsmad, og andre lande forventes at følge efter. Det bliver også nødvendigt; for efterhånden som råvare priserne stiger, bliver det mere og mere fristende at forsøge at snyde på den ene eller den anden måde. Den seneste skandale med mælkepulver i Kina bliver nok ikke den sidste at den slags, vi kommer til at opleve.[/lang_da]

Food Service Summit 2008

By

[lang_da]Buffet on the lake.jpg

De absolutte megatrends i restaurantverdenen er fortsat ‘tid, tillid, sundhed og emotioner’, så umiddelbart var der intet nyt under solen, da der blev præsenteret trends på årets foodservice konference i Zurich. Men under overfladen er der alligevel skift og nuancer, som er interessante nok til at få et par ord med på vejen.

Vi har i rigtig lang tid opfattet restaurationslivet som noget, der er forbundet med ‘at gå ud’ – og sådan har det også været hidtil. Men restaurationsverdenen i dag lever ikke af, at vi ‘går ud’. Den er der, fordi vi hele tiden er ude, og det er noget andet. Den moderne, urbane livsstil handler om, at vi tilbringer mere tid væk fra hjemmet end nogen sinde tidligere.

Den tendens kommer tydeligst til udtryk, når man ser på, hvad det er for sektorer, der oplever den hurtigste vækst, og her ligger ‘travel’ højst med en vækst på 12,3 pct. fra 2006 til 2007, mens f.eks. ‘quick service’ ligger på 9,2 pct. og catering på kun 5,8 pct. i samme periode.

Samtidig har trafikknudepunkter udviklet sig til nutidens shopping centre og ‘food court’. Hovedbanegården i Rom er et fint eksempel på sådan en udvikling, hvilket vi tidligere har beskrevet her i bladet, men nu er desuden St. Pancras, London, Berlin Hauptbahnhoof og Marseille kommet til. I en travl hverdag er det nemmere at fortage sine indkøb på vej til og fra toget.

Også lufthavne undergår i disse år en rivende udvikling. Her har man hidtil været vant til at se næsten det samme udvalg i selve lufthavnen og såmænd også fra lufthavn til lufthavn. Men besøger man Heathrows nye Terminal 5, London, vil man se, at den nu er eksponent for noget af det smarteste og hotteste i både foodservice og detailhandel.

Trafikknudepunkterne er blevet de nye ’high street locations’.[/lang_da]