Between Worlds

For bestselling author Tim Sanders, the biggest problem with the game of sales today is that it has become less like playing Pong, and more like a round of Halo. Selling in the 21st century is incredibly challenging. Sales professionals face multiple decision makers, layers of product complexity, and cloud based competitors. For Tim, the key to being a true sales driven organisation, is to build on the innovation that deal-focused teamwork can unlock. In his words, a quality sale is a thousand problems solved. Catching up in Las Vegas, we discussed why creative brainstorming doesn’t work, the essential habit of conscious collaboration, and why leaders need to think like designers when it comes to creating emotional experiences for customers, partners and employees.

Harper Reed is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on data and digital innovation. He served as the CTO of Obama’s re-election campaign and was also one of the founders of Threadless.com. His latest company, Modest, inc, was recently acquired by Paypal, where he is now working to figure out the future of commerce. Over dinner at Soho House in Chicago, we talked about digital bias and the stubborn persistence of paper, why technology is best used as a force multiplier of people power, the quantification of marketing and how smarter tools replace the need for experts, reactionary interfaces and why retailers are afraid of their customers, why iTunes credit is more meaningful to kids than cash, the power of ‘undo’ in e-commerce, and the link between local infrastructure and global innovation.

Technology and science may seem the natural enemies of magic, but for Marco Tempest, who describes himself as a cyber-illusionist, they are his daily tools of trade. Magicians have a long history of deploying advanced technology to be ahead of the reality curve in order to fool their audiences. For Marco, that means experimenting with motion tracking, drones, augmented and virtual reality, projection mapping, gaze tracking, robotics and AI. When I visited him in his New York workshop, we spoke about the art of telling stories about the near future, open source collaboration, sandboxing emerging technologies, engineering interactivity and how the world’s magicians have kept a secret private archive of their tricks and what that might mean for crafting the future of experiences.

Art and fashion maven Hikari Yokoyama, is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the intersection of the art world and technology. A curator and art consultant, she was part of the founding team at online auction house Paddle8, the news platform Art Observed, and in her advisory business, connects artists with brands like Audi and Miu Miu. Over coffee in London, we spoke about the impact of globalisation on collecting, the evolving relationship between art and luxury brands, the death of art movements and how, in a digital age, the way we consume images is changing.

Luke Williams is the Executive Director of Entrepreneurship and the founder of the W.R. Berkley Innovation Lab at NYU Stern. He is also a fellow Australian. We met some years ago when we were both speaking at a digital conference in Norway where he was talking about his book, Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business. Having previous worked at frog design, Luke is also a profilic inventor, with over 30 US patents and more than 100 products to his name. Catching up over coffee in the lobby of the new Edition Hotel in NYC, we chatted about the challenges of leading disruptive innovation, the dangers of aspiring innovators trying to mimic the personality traits of Steve Jobs, and why every company should be building a portfolio of unconventional ideas.

Sean Bonner is someone that defies easy classification. His Twitter account describes him as a ‘misanthropologist’, while his LinkedIn profile simply states that he ‘ likes working on things that empower people to take care of themselves.’ As the co-founder and global director of Safecast (an open global sensor network currently monitoring radiation levels in Japan), that is probably an understatement. We caught up at Intelligentsia Coffee, which in case you don’t frequent Silverlake or are not a certified LA hipster, turns out to be ground zero for both. With Sean’s geiger counter flashing insouciantly on the table between us, we chatted about citizen science, crowdsourcing invention, neo-minimalism, hacker spaces and the emergence of a maker ecosystem in LA. Then he told me about these secret tech insider mailing lists that if you don’t know about, you are unlikely to ever be invited to join.

I met up with Christian Hernandez at his offices located at Second Home, the eclectic co-working space that has become ground zero for all things creative and entrepreneurial in London. Christian is the managing partner, and co-founder of White Star Capital, one of Europe’s leading venture capitalists. He previously held senior roles at Facebook, Google and Microsoft and started his career in technology at MicroStrategy, a start-up he joined prior to its 1999 IPO. We spoke about the explosive growth of the London startup scene, the cultural and commercial challenges of launching Facebook in Europe, the evolution of data as an asset, backing machine intelligence startups, and new potential applications of computer vision and big data from printing lost keys to disrupting the health market.

Maria Konnikova is the New York Times bestselling author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, a brilliant book that draws on the adventures of the fictional detective to illustrate the power of observation and critical thinking. Her latest book, The Confidence Game, explores the flipside of detection, and why humans are so hardwired to believe in con artists and those that would exploit our trust. Over breakfast in New York, we spoke about the differences between the way Holmes and Watson see the world, the art of building a memory attic, and how con artists are so adept at manipulating people’s belief systems. Of course, none of these things might strike you as shocking if you had chanced upon her first ever book, written in Russian. It was five pages long and, she assures me, had something to do with trolls.

I’ve hung out with Jack Myers in a bunch of strange places, from Mexico City to Oslo, and even on the outskirts of Las Vegas. He is one of the most original thinkers in the media space, and for many years, has provided the data and insights that US brands, agencies and content providers based their planning on. Jack is the author of four books including Reconnecting with Customers: Building Brands and Profits in The Relationship Age and Hooked Up Generation. He has been nominated for both an Academy Award and an Emmy Award for the documentary "Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream." Catching up in New York, we spoke about the changing media patterns, the potential of emotion sensing technology, and his next book, The Future of Men: Masculinity in the Twenty-First Century.

When I was growing up, my parents despaired about my refusal to open a book. They sought out doctors and teachers, convinced I had some kind of learning disability. Finally, someone worked out that the problem was not reading, but rather what they were giving me to read: I was bored with the picture books. Taking a personalized approach to teaching kids to read has long been a challenge for traditional educators, but is now within reach with new technologies like LightSail Education, an award winning literacy platform for K-12. I spoke with its founder and CEO, Gideon Stein, about how data and adaptive learning is changing the classroom, and why literacy, even in this digital age, remains a foundational skill.