2019 was an eventful year; we saw an impeachment trial, big fines levied on tech companies; the unprecedented amount of CEO shake-ups, and the on-going saga of the US-China trade war. These are the things that we saw in the news almost daily, and it drowned out some of the other news that would require coverage. Tom Whitwell publishes a yearly list of things he learnt and recently published his 2019 list; as I was reading all the articles I realized, I missed all of the things he learnt, which led me to my blog post.

The ones that drew my attention the most were:

• #7 three private companies have fallen victim to ‘deep fake’ audio fraud – The fact that companies have fallen victim to deep fake audios are quite concerning in my world. Deep fake is an emerging risk and companies need to investigate protocols and controls to put into place, not to mention training for companies to discern or detect deep fakes.
• #19 Google and Facebook lost $100 million between them to one scammer – It’s concerning when big tech companies like Google and Facebook has fallen preyed to fake invoices, not a nominal amount, but 100 MILLION (yes, all caps). This might be less than 1% of total revenue. However, it highlights that cyber awareness is crucial and the companies first defense.
• #20 Teenagers with acne get higher marks, are more likely to complete college and, if female, eventually get paid more than people without teenage acne – Mhmmmm, this one is interesting…. I may have to conduct my own research on some of my friends that have acne to validate if they are getting paid more than me 🙂
• #23 in the 1990s, it seems the US forgot how to make a critical component of some nuclear warheads – It’s hilarious to think the biggest employer in the US forgot how to make a critical component of a nuclear warhead…. Make sure you document everything!!!!! use this report as a driving force for your companies.
• #28 Fashion++ is a Facebook-funded computer vision project that looks at a photo of your outfit and suggests ‘minimal edits for outfit improvement’ like tucking in a shirt or removing an accessory – Facebook getting into fashion advice scares me for the reason that: A) They are analyzing your picture and every part of your body, this is a perfect way to train their AI to know you and can pick you out on a street with thousands of people, all they need is access to a CCTV camera… Maybe, after they train their model, they can sell their model to the US government to monitor it’s citizens , which is against the law  FYI. But, that did not stop them……. Be worried!
• #30 No babies born in Britain in 2016 were named Nigel – No babies in Britain named Nigel……Immigrants are definitely taking over LOL.
• #34 28% of people like the smell of (their own) urine after eating asparagus – 28% of people like the smell of their own urine after eating asparagus? that’s just wrong, but if you are in that 28%, all the luck to you.
• #35 AliBaba is investing $15m to research Chinese dialects, hoping to improve the performance of their voice recognition systems – Sure…………… very skeptical of AliBaba and their ties to the government. This just allows them to create amazing tech to use by the government.
• #41 Disco, a Japanese high tech manufacturing company, has introduced an internal billing and payment system, where every cost is charged back to workers. Renting a conference room costs $100. “People really cut back on useless meetings,” says one staffer – Now, that is what I call innovation and efficiency

Below is the full list of 52 things Tom learnt in 2019.

1. Each year humanity produces 1,000 times more transistors than grains of rice and wheat combined. [Mark P Mills]
2. The maths of queuing are absolutely brutal and counter-intuitive. [John D Cook]
3. Emojis are starting to appear in evidence in court cases, and lawyers are worried: “When emoji symbols are strung together, we don’t have a reliable way of interpreting their meaning.” (In 2017, an Israeli judge had to decide if one emoji-filled message constituted a verbal contract) [Eric Goldman]
4. Harbinger customers are customers who buy products that tend to fail. They group together, forming harbinger zip codes. If households in those zip codes buy a product, it is likely to fail. If they back a political candidate, they are likely to lose the election. [Simester, Tucker & Yang]
5. Baijiu is the world’s most popular spirit, with 10bn litres sold each year, almost entirely in China. The second most popular spirit in the world is vodka, with just 5bn litres sold. [Feyi Fawehinmi]
6. A Python script, an Instagram account and quite a bit of free time can get you free meals in New York City. [Chris Buetti]
7. At least three private companies have fallen victim to ‘deep fake’ audio fraud. In each case, a computerised voice clone of the company CEO “called a senior financial officer to request an urgent money transfer.” [Kaveh Waddell, Jennifer A. Kingson]
8. Drunk shopping could be a $45bn /year industry, and only 6% of people regret their drunk purchases. [Zachary Crockett]
9. Placebos are so effective that placebo placebos work: A pain cream with no active ingredients worked even when not used by the patient. Just owning the cream was enough to reduce pain. [Victoria Wai-lanYeung]
10. Since the 1960s, British motorways have been deliberately designed by computer as series of long curves, rather than straight lines. This is done for both safety (less hypnotic) and aesthetic (“sculpture on an exciting, grand scale”) reasons. [Joe Moran]
11. Between 1880 and 1916, Ireland had its own timezone, which was 25m 21s behind Greenwich Mean Time. After the Easter Rising, the House of Commons in London introduced GMT in Ireland and abolished Dublin Mean Time [Elena Goukassian]
12. Drug names are changing: X and Z names (Prozac, Seroxat) are giving way to names ending in O or A (Natesto, Qsymia) which are more appealing to speakers of Romance languages in Europe and South America. [Pascaline Faure]
13. The UK male suicide rate is the lowest since accurate records began in 1981. [Office for National Statistics]
14. The goal of walking 10,000 steps per day may have originated when a Japanese pedometer manufacturer noticed that the 万 symbol (which means 10,000) looks a little like someone walking. The actual health merits of that number ‘have never been validated by research.’ [Amanda Mull]
15. People hate asking sensitive questions. However, it turns out that people don’t hate being asked sensitive questions. So talking around difficult questions in research interviews is a waste of time and money. [Hart, VanEpps, Schweitzer]
16. The Korean Police force includes five labradors who are clones of ‘Quinn’, a bomb-sniffing dog who found fame after finding a missing girl’s body in a 2007 kidnapping. [Kim Tong-hyung]
17. As mobile phones became mainstream in the US in the early 1990s, the murder rate fell sharply. Street drug dealing became less popular, so gang-related turf wars were less common. (Other factors were also involved, obviously.) [Alexis C. Madrigal]
18. Mechanical devices to cheat your phone pedometer (for health insurance fraud or vanity) are now all over AliExpress. [Matthew Brennan]
19. In 2017 Google and Facebook lost $100 million between them to one scammer who sent them fake invoices. [Jeff John Roberts] [found by TomBot*]
20. Teenagers with acne get higher marks, are more likely to complete college and, if female, eventually get paid more than people without teenage acne. [Hugo M. Mialon & Erik T. Nesson]
21. 72% of classical musicians have taken beta blockers for performance anxiety. [Composed]
22. Black women in the United States die in childbirth at roughly the same rate as women in Mongolia. [Annie Lowrey]
23. Sometime in the 1990s, it seems the US forgot how to make a critical component of some nuclear warheads. [Nick Baumann]
24. “Mushrooms and truffles are fungi, more closely related to humans than they are to plants.” [Lynne Peskoe-Yang]
25. In the US Northwest, rain can damage the fruit on cherry trees. So helicopter pilots are paid to fly over the orchards, using their downdraft to dry the fruit as it ripens. For the pilots, it’s a risky but potentially profitable job. [Maria Langer]
26. Gravitricity is a Scottish startup planning to store energy by lifting huge weights up a disused mine shaft when electricity is cheap, dropping them down to generate power when it is expensive. Using a 12,000 tonne weight (roughly the weight of the Eiffel tower), it should be half as expensive as equivalent lithium ion battery. [Jillian Ambrose]
27. Spotify pays by the song. Two three minute songs are twice as profitable as one six minute song. So songs are getting shorter. [Dan Kopf]
28. Fashion++ is a Facebook-funded computer vision project that looks at a photo of your outfit and suggests ‘minimal edits for outfit improvement’ like tucking in a shirt or removing an accessory. [Wei-Lin Hsiao & co] (In 2019, Fluxx helped launch Vogue Business.)
29. Three million students at US schools don’t have the internet at home. [Michael Melia & co]
30. No babies born in Britain in 2016 were named Nigel. [Jonathan Ore] (Correction: Robert Colvile, who broke the original story, points out that there could have been one or two Nigels in 2016 — the ONS only reports names with three or more examples)
31. Using machine learning, researchers can now predict how likely an individual is to be involve in a car accident by looking at the image of their home address on Google Street View. [Kinga Kita-Wojciechowska]
32. In 2018, the Nigerian government spent more on subsidies for petrol than on health, education, or defence. [Andrew S Nevin]
33. According to WaterAid research, women spend 97 billion hours a year looking for a safe place to go to the loo. That equals 46 million working years, which is the same workforce as Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world. [Caroline Criado Perez via Tanya Gold]
34. 28% of people like the smell of (their own) urine after eating asparagus.[Rolf Degen]
35. AliBaba is investing $15m to research Chinese dialects, hoping to improve the performance of their voice recognition systems. [Emma Lee]
36. At least half of the effort of most AI projects goes on data labelling, and that’s often done in rural Indian villages. [Anand Murali]
37. Worldwide, growth in the fragrance industry is lagging behind cosmetics and skincare products. Why? ‘You can’t smell a selfie’. [Andrea Felsted and Sarah Halzack]
38. CD sales still make up 78% of music revenue in Japan (compared with less than 30% in the UK). Japanese pop fans have been encouraged to buy multiple copies of their favourite releases to win rewards (buy 2,000 copies, win a night at a hot spring with your favourite star). One 32 year-old fan was charged with illegally dumping 585 copies of a CD on the side of a mountain. [Mark Mulligan] [found by TomBot*]
39. Two disgruntled game developers wrote a script to generate and release identical but differently-named slot machine apps (sample names: Deer Antler Spray Slots, 3D Ravioli Slots). Eventually, the slot machine apps earned them $50,000. [Alex Schwartz & Ziba Scott]
40. 80% of prisoners released late 2018 in a presidential pardon have opted to return to Kinshasa’s infamous Makala jail due to lack of means to live. [Olivier Kalume]
41. Disco, a Japanese high tech manufacturing company, has introduced an internal billing and payment system, where every cost is charged back to workers. Renting a conference room costs $100. “People really cut back on useless meetings,” says one staffer. [Yuji Nakamura & Yuki Furukawa]
42. A man who bought the personalised number plate NULL has received over $12,000 of parking fines, because the system records ‘NULL’ when no numberplate has been recorded. [Jack Morse]
43. The islands of Orkney generate 120% of their energy needs using wind and solar. However, 57% of homes in Orkney are in fuel poverty, where a household spends more than 10% of income on fuel. [Chris Silver] (This year I worked briefly with Community Energy Scotland on a project with Energy Systems Catapult)
44. Some blind people can understand speech that is almost three times faster than the fastest speech sighted people can understand. They can use speech synthesisers set at at 800 words per minute (conversational speech is 120–150 wpm). Research suggests that a section of the brain that normally responds to light is re-mapped in blind people to process sound. [Austin Hicks & R Douglas Fields]
45. SpottedRisk is a disgrace insurance company built on data: “Firstborns are at slightly higher risk of disgrace, as are those… who’ve suffered recent breakups — until the passage of time sends the bereft partner back down the ‘risk-decay curve.’” [Boris Kachka]
46. SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) is a rare syndrome where otherwise healthy, high-functioning people are unable to remember events from their own life. There is also an exhausting syndrome called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, where people can remember precise details about every single day of their life. [Palumbo & Alain]
47. “Polling by phone has become very expensive, as the number of Americans willing to respond to unexpected or unknown callers has dropped. In the mid-to-late-20th century response rates were as high as 70%… [falling to] a mere 6% of the people it tried to survey in 2018.” [The Economist]
48. In 2012, only one sports team (Manchester United) was worth more than $2bn. Today, there are 52 sports teams worth more than $2bn. [Kurt Badenhausen]
49. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were invented by a cleaner at a Frito-Lay factory. He’s now VP of multicultural sales for PepsiCo America. [Zachary Crockett]
50. Six reluctant Chinese hitmen who hired each other to carry out a murder went to jail when their outsourcing scheme collapsed. [Eric Cheung]
51. Fast fashion is hitting the wiping rags businesses, because some clothing is just too badly made to be sold as rags. [Adam Minter] (In January, Fluxx worked with Fibretrace to develop new ways to make the circular economy work in fashion.)
52. Asking ‘What questions do you have for me?’ can be dramatically more effective than ‘Any questions?’ at the end of a talk. (Many more good tips in this thread. [Jacqueline Antonovich]

The above list was originally posted on Tom’s medium blog

Innovation is necessary to stay competitive in today’s market as a company and as an individual. I have heard of many promising innovations or transformations undertaken by organizations and departments that end up in failure. The reason for failure? Adoption, the vision did not resonate, people did not understand, it didn’t stick, and many more. This guide is to get to the root of why your big idea did not stick with people and how to get people to generate innovative ideas.

1.    Communicate a compelling narrative about the vision: Let’s say a department or organization communicates the following vision: “We will grow our company by being innovative and adding value to consumers.” What’s wrong with this statement? Nothing. However, we need to effectively tell a story about how the vision resonates with the individual’s cause and how it effectively adds value. The organization’s vision is something the individual should feel strongly about that he or she will forego the competitor organizations’ salary to be part of the journey to create something amazing. Facebook, for example, has done a great job of communicating their vision and mission. Facebook’s mission is “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” People use Facebook “to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.” Facebook continuously innovates and makes strategic acquisitions to further this vision. Anyone I have met at Facebook believes in and connects with the vision that they work countless hours and defend the company through troubled times. If you want people to be innovative and bring their organizations to success during transformations, it is imperative that you clearly and effectively communicate that vision and align it to their personal mission.

2.    Foster trust: To try new things you need to have an environment where an individual feels empowered to speak up, try new things, raise their hand and ask for help. We do so with the confidence that our boss or colleagues will be there to support us. Let me quote Brene Brown: “Trust is the stacking and layering of small moments and reciprocal vulnerability over time.” When trust is not built we often feel forced to lie, hide mistakes, act as if we know how to do something (when we really don’t know), and fail to admit that we need help out of fear of humiliation, reprisal or finding ourselves on the shortlist of a layoff. American Airlines is a perfect [bad] example where the employees did not have the trust of their teams to feel empowered to do what is right and speak up while a passenger was being dragged out of the plane like an animal. Trust is when an individual shows up to work and can be his or her authentic self and feel empowered. His/her managers provide support and continuously have open conversations about elevating people versus improving the numbers or walking around and trying to catch you doing something your not supposed to.

3.    Have worthy rivals: Simply said, your rivals will show you where your weaknesses lie. You cannot be your best self or bring innovative ideas forward if you think you are the best and avoid being in situations where you are challenged. This leads you to accept the status quo and be crushed by your rivals. It is crucial to have a worthwhile rival to keep you on your toes and force you to confront your weaknesses so that you can address them and elevate yourself. You might be someone’s rival right now and that person may be putting in the hard work to address his or her weaknesses. Innovation requires a healthy dose of rivalry to generate innovative thinking and ideas.

4.    Have flexibility to pivot – Not all ideas are a success. You need to have the flexibility to change direction when you feel the value is no longer there. If the environment has incentives that measure success on outputs, you will not have great ideas. You will have compliance to meet those numbers. The environment should be such that it allows you to blow up your idea before someone else does. Companies demonstrate this by continuously blowing up their business before the market does, even when they were at their peak. Netflix did this by blowing its idea of delivering DVDs by mail to streaming, and Apple did this by entering the personal computing space. These companies did not go down the same path. They realized that, despite having a good idea, they needed to pivot to a better idea that will generate more value. Yes, it will be hard, but this is why you need to ensure the vision is communicated effectively and trust is embedded within your teams to handle the stress this is going to bring.

5.    Have the courage to lead: Leading may sound easy but it is far from it. Leadership is a lifestyle. It is thankless and solitary. You do not become a leader by attending an offsite or company event. You need to invest in the growth of others. Results are not immediate and you will often feel like no progress was made. You will need to continuously show up and lead others to see that vision. Lead at the front of change and practice extreme ownership.

6.    Live with a growth mindset: Nothing is a failure; it’s just an option that did not work at that time. Failure gives us time to re-group and apply new thinking to a problem. Innovation is hard, especially when it is so broad that many will not see the value early on. But going through this you will learn and incrementally get better at putting the best, innovative idea forward. Many leaders will share how many times they failed, but they just figured out that they need to keep trying a different approach if they believe in their mission. Always see things from a different perspective and change the narrative to yourself. Many departments have audacious goals and many cannot see the benefit of how they will get there. All they happen to see are the failures and the insanity around the ideas. But if we were to change our perspectives, we’d be forced to think broader and challenge ourselves, perhaps gain technology fluency, participate in something world-class and get a free education while we’re at it.

I’m mindful that the list I outline here is not exhaustive. But at least it’s something to start with when it comes to creating a culture where you are empowering people to be innovative.

This post was inspired by Simon Sinek.