UK Editor at ContentNext
David Rowan’s 10 Tips For Facing The Future
January 28, 2010
This morning, another encounter with David Rowan, UK editor of the Wired magazine I have read avidly since 1995 – in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre.
Rowan gave a futuristic and open-minded pep talk to kick off the Creative & New Media Collaboration event.
His 10 takeaway rules for businesses in the present that also want to be in the future…
- Expect disruption as the norm (keep evolving. you can’t not watch what the teenagers are doing).
- Collaborate, don’t go it alone (Heathrow air-traffic-control is working with split-second coordination experts McLaren F1 to make its airport more efficient, so you’ll know exactly when your luggage is coming through and exactly when a place will take off).
- Think service, not product.
- Be useful, to engage us (KLM launched KLM Africa Club community site to enable customers to share their own travel tips).
- Evangelise your brand loyalists.
- Free works (riffing on his editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s thesis)
- Don’t think locally, think globally.
- Be cross-discipline (read widely, follow people from widely differing fields).
- Think service (see: Zappos.com)
- Don’t wait too long.
