Hi guys and ladies. So happy to see that. That there’s not just a lot of old guys like me in the audience. Super cool. And I’m really happy to be here because this is kind of where it all started to me. I love your industry. I love the printing press. I love paper, I love all that. But something happened in my life and sometime around the autumn of ’93 this picture was taken. It’s from a place called in Malmo. I think some of you might know of it. And that’s another one … another distinctive story about how old we are getting.

So, they guys surround me here. I was to teacher sitting in the middle there and everyone around me, they were trained professionals, there were architects, archeologists, librarians, and they came to to learn about what we back then called data. It’s kind of different than the data we are talking about today, so it was a databases and we actually did some mechanic with the hard drives and stuff like that. And around this time the web started to happen. Do you guys remember that? Around ’93 when the web came along? It was so cool to be the teacher because there were 87 websites in the whole world when this picture was taken. So I could basically move into the classroom with a full web on a floppy disk.

I was the mister know it all. I was the king of the web. I knew everything there was to know about digital at that time, until one morning when Marcus, the guy over there in the middle, where is he, there he is. He called me over to his computer and he pointed to his screen and he said, “What is this site? We haven’t talked about this.” And it was something brand new. It was a site called Justin’s links to the underground and he was later known as the first personal blogger. He talked about how he hated school and his parents were awful, and he didn’t get to cuddle enough with his girlfriend and it was totally unheard of the web.

And to me that was kind of a defining moment because, I mean, I used to be the know it all. I used to be the one who got it all figured out and suddenly one of my students have seen something before I have. And from that moment on, I live by the general idea of not knowing better, but knowing different. And I think that is in the capacity I’m standing here today. I don’t know your business better than anyone of you do, but I might know something a little bit different. And that goes back to what happened next. So in ’94 I became a consultant for Aftonbladet, but then this is basically my brainchild. I set up the first Aftonbladet site in ’94 and those were good days, right? Because the circulation of the printed Aftonbladet, it was also going up. So everyone was just happy go lucky, you know, the Internet is such a good thing and the newspaper industry just embraced it and loved it.

Then this guy came along. Do you know who he is? Does anyone remember him? He’s called Philip Meyer and he wrote this book about the vanishing newspaper in 2004, and he basically said that the last reader recycles the last printed paper in 2040 and he’s an academic. So he said in April 2040 to be more exact. And this just freaked the mind. I mean everyone in the industry were just totally mind blown by this fact that print might be go away. But we all know that didn’t happen. Philip Meyer has updated his predictions many times since, but we’ve also redefined what print is. So two weeks ago this story broke… It should be playing… Let’s try this again. Let’s see… That’s just weird.

Okay, so what’s going on here is 3D printing of human heart. So they took human cells, stem cells and proteins, and ketones and so forth, and they actually printed a human heart. A small human heart, it’s the size of a rabbit heart, but still they could print a human heart.

So that is one thing that’s probably affecting you guys, how printing is being redefined. Another thing that of course changes your life is how we work with this thing. So this is a picture I took outside here just an hour ago, where we could clearly see some of you guys sitting around having a conversation with one of your clients. And of course you use computers to do all this.

So, to answer the question how the media landscape is changing, I think you have a lot of those answers already. You can feel it on an everyday basis. So what I want to do is to kind of twist it around to make sure that we can adapt and have the model and a method to adapt to what is happening out there, and how it’s changing and maybe, maybe move out of this room together with the shared knowledge that the Internet is probably one of our best friends and one of our best opportunities. And I must confess, I love this shit, right? I love what I’m doing. I love being the digital guy working with large old companies like ASA and Volvo and Maersk and so forth. But there are also backsides to what digital is doing to our society. We see that on an everyday basis.

So let’s begin there and see if you guys can have a conversation with each other. So this is a picture, this is a tweet that was sent out in January 2018. It shows a little bit about what’s happening, not just in the media landscape, but in the landscape at all, right? So that’s the hockey team, that’s the junior hockey team from Canada after winning a gold medal. I think we can all recognize what’s going on here, but let’s have a conversation about it. So lean over to your neighbor, two and two, three and three, and try to answer these two questions. What’s going on here and how does it make you feel? I’m going to give you 30 seconds, a minutes, have a conversation. What’s going on here? How does it make you feel? Go…

Okay. Okay. That’s your time…You’re going to be able to continue to have lots of conversations during the day. I have to break you up right now, but great energy in the room. Thank you so much for leaning in on the questions. So, I’m not going to be able to ask every one of you how you feel, but I could kind of tell from the first reaction when you saw this picture, that some of you felt like it looks kind of silly, right? It looks kind of sad, right? And when I dig into this with people, they usually say that, “Well, that’s not how you’re supposed to celebrate the gold medal.” Right? You should, you know, celebrate as a team and be together and, and, and then I say, okay, well maybe… “You mean more like this?” I say, and they say, “Yes, that’s how you should celebrate.”

Now the thing is these guys, 16, seven years old, they have celebrated like this as well. They do that too. We’re so inclined to in terms of digital, say that it’s either or something totally has changed, but maybe not. Right? And we grieve as we’ve always done to, right? The poor Swedes who didn’t win that one. It’s horrible. But if we look into this picture again and try to answer the question, what’s going on here? I’ve asked…I’ve actually asked three of the guys, “What were you doing here?” And what do you think was the first thing they did when they got that moment on the bench? Mom. Yes, right? They sent the text message to mom and dad thanking them for carrying the bags for 18 years. Now, that’s not so horrible anymore, is it? Right?

And the second thing they did was to reach out to the fans and the guy on this bench who has the fewest fans aggregated in social media, has just over 3 million fans. The one who has the most has more than 7.5 million fans. So the second thing was of course to reach out to the fans and say, “Well thank you for carrying my bag.” And again, it’s not awful anymore. It’s super social. It’s something that enables us to be human, to reach out and say thank you for your support. That goes on too. That is also what’s happening here. And if I show this picture to a millennial and I asked them, “How do you feel about this?” What do you think they say?

They’re going to say, “This makes me furious. This makes me so angry.” Not because of what’s happening on the bench, but the fact that a reporter thought it was a good idea to take that picture, put that headline on it, and send it out on Twitter to have people rage about it. This is manipulation and it goes on all the time, and it’s so human for all of us to, to take the first instinct, right? And to react on what we see because we’re not brought up like this, right? This is something that looks kind of unusual to us and directly we move over to a bad place and we say, “This can’t be good because it doesn’t look like it did when I were young.” And that is manipulation. And of course that happens all the time.

I’m going to do some manipulation here, right? I’m going to give you my point of view and then you’re going to have to work on that, right? It’s something that happens out there. And the reason for this is supernatural, right? It’s about the comfy couch, right? We try to take everything that happens in the world and put it into our frame of comfortable knowledge, right? What we know and what we understand and what put us in the position that we have today. And then when things start to change around it gets hard for us. And I would like for us now to spend some time, I’m not going to ask you to leave the comfort zone, but just for a while peek into the exploration zone and forget everything that you used to know about our things and how they work. And I…what happens when you peek into that exploration zone, is that you’re going to start realizing the opportunities.

And I’m going to give you one example of that. Again, I think this crowd recognized them, right? Abba. Abba was the first Swedish music wonder, right? They, they wrote this music, they produced the records, they sold them all over the world, and a whole industry blossomed beneath them. That was the first Swedish music wonder. You can draw a straight line from Abba to Avicii, and it all makes sense. Then the second Swedish music wonder happened and it was this, the pirate bay. Where we could download the music for free from those guys, and of course they hated it because it broke the business model, it broke everything. And they said, “Throw them in jail, take them offline, do whatever it takes to stop this thing.” And we threw the guys in jail, but we didn’t stop the thing. It’s still up.

But if we know music, the first Swedish music wonder, and we know technology, the second Swedish music wonder. What is going to be the third Swedish music wonder? Spotify, of course, it’s as easy as that, right? That is realizing the opportunities to take what you know, add something new that is happening and then push forward. The beauty that the word realized is that it has three meanings. The first one is to become aware of something. The second meaning of realize is to make it, turn it into a course to do something, right? And the third thing is to actually do something. That’s the third meaning of realize.

So the simple framework that I’m going to try to give you now is to look around, understand, and do. And let’s begin again with a look around. That’s what you did here, right? That’s looking around having a conversation, maybe changing your attitude to what’s going on, but we need to do this all the time. So, some of you probably have teenage kids, right? And you hate selfies. Yes, there are bad selfies, but if we look at the core of what a selfie is, we are going to find that Vincent van Gogh’s most expensive paintings are selfies, and Frida Kahlo built her whole career on selfies. And every one of you have been, been tasked to draw a selfie in school, right? A self portrait. Because that is something fundamental in how we build our personality. This is just the new, the selfie is the new way to do it. And as soon as we figured out the technology about taking pictures, the second picture ever taken was a selfie. As soon as we managed the technology, we flipped the camera around and took an image of ourselves.

Another way to look at attitude is to try and put it in a historic perspective. So today we talk a lot about the face down generation and mobile zombies and so forth. But this one, right? Maybe it’s the context and not the technology. Maybe it’s the context, I would even argue that we are more social here because anthropologists say that 85% of the time that we stare down to that screen, there’s a human being on the other side. That wasn’t the case back then. So, and we can look at statistics, we can see how even though people today is embracing the Internet and in some domains we have a hundred percent penetration. But what’s the most important thing about the attitude is that it takes training.

So I’m going to give you one more task now. You’re going to lean over to friend again and have a conversation about this picture. Some context. It got 360,000 shares on Facebook. 360,000 people shared this image on Facebook and everyone was furious about what was going on. Here’s the picture. It’s Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, right? You see the kids on the front row and the beautiful painting of Rembrandt in the back, totally ignored by the kids. Now here’s the task for you guys. Have a conversation but this time you need to think positive. You’re only going to get 30 seconds to find as many positive explanations as you can to what is going on here. Go. 30 seconds, go…

Okay…that’s 30 seconds. And of course, the reason for decreasing the time is that as you practice this, you just going to get better and better at it. So in the end we’re going to be down to three seconds conversations. Now you probably figure it out. What is going on here? Do some shout outs. Just give me…

Searching information.

Searching information, yes.

Sharing information

Sharing information.

Sending pictures.

Sending pictures, yes.

Rembrandt report

Rembrandt, no, no, that’s not positive. That’s not positive. You’re on the bench. Anything else?

Could they be doing some exercises?

Yes, they’re doing some exercises. Is there a visual cue in the picture that led you in that direction? Is there somethings, no, no.

Paper.

The paper in the laps of those kids, you never see that, right?

They could be using Kahoot.

Yeah. They could be doing Kahoot. Yes, but they got a task from the teacher on paper and that’s what you can see in the lap of those kids and then they’re working together to discover more about Rembrandt. And the really cool thing about this picture is that I was at a study tour to that museum when I was an eighth grader, and I can promise you those kids know more about Rembrandt when they leave than I did when I left. And I, I will challenge you to argue that fact. Now, what we just did here was that we see something that 360,000 people responded negatively to. You lean over to your friend and you have a conversation. You dig into what’s going on here. In this specific case, you put yourself in a positive mindset, you need to find the positives. That is super powerful. You can use this the other way around as well. If you see something that you think, you know, this is the best thing since sliced bread, grab a friend, have a conversation and say what could be the bad sides here? What could be the, what could be the negatives? Makes sense. Super simple. You need to do it all the time and the reason you need to do is to understand what you see and make some sense out of it.

And I’m going to give you some examples of things that we need to understand. So for instance, we need to understand robotization. I follow 100 digital trends and I just picked a few of them that I think could be, you know, resonate well with this crowd. And the first one is about robotization. And then I’m going to give you this.

How many of you have tried to solve the Rubik’s cube? Raise your hand. Okay, how many have solved the cube? Raise your hand. Okay. Telling. This guy does it in 47 seconds…4.7 seconds, sorry, 4.7 seconds…4.7 seconds, and he’s such an idol, right? You can really see how everyone just is so impressed by what Feliks did. 4.7 seconds, Guinness record fastest human being to solve the cube. And we might think that is amazing and that’s as fast as it can get.

But no, maybe not. One more time, just to make sure that you get it. 0.4 seconds. And then someone says, “Well that is cheating because it’s not human beings anymore.” But who built the robot? Two guys did. They had three weeks, they spent $75 and this is what they came up with. And they say we can, we can do this much faster than 0.4 seconds, but the plastic in the cube is gonna melt, right? So that is the limit for the Rubik’s cube.

And when we see something like this and we see human beings doing this, we need to start thinking about, well, what’s up for us? All right, well what are we going to do? And maybe this is the answer. You see what he’s doing, right? So, he’s solving three cubes at the same time as his juggling with them. And this is arguably the absolute least efficient way to solve the Rubik’s cube. It’s hard to find something more inefficient than this. But what happened instead? Well, it turned into entertainment, right? So I think in whatever we do, we need to start looking for those added values. We can’t just be efficient and prize worthy and, and you know, that the sheep just want to do what we do. We need to find other ways to add value. Maybe this is far fetched, but the recent to show examples that is way out of your ordinary domain is to make sure that you move into that exploration zone, right? You shouldn’t get stuck in, in thinking about all the problems.

Something that is probably closer to you guys then, is this, right? How we talked about, how we talking about mixed reality and VR, and usually it’s about this, this was the Christmas gift of the year in Sweden three years ago and no one really uses it. But then this happened. What do you think is going on here? This is central park in Manhattan late Friday evening. What’s going on? It’s Pokemon. Yes, right. It’s not some celebrity in the middle of central park. It’s one of those artificial animals that you can catch in your phone. Catch ’em all, Pokemon. I think it was a Pikachu or something and everyone on Manhattan got absolutely crazy going there to try and catch that Pokemon.

One more example. This is, this is the power of augmented reality. It’s Pokemon inside the White House at the briefing about ISIS, one of the most important issues in society today and one of the professional reporters is spending his time trying to catch ’em all. It’s not your dinner table with your lousy teenagers who don’t pay attention to you. It’s the White House. I think we need to realize the power of this, right? Especially since artificial reality is all about blending the physical world and the digital world and we’ve seen some horrible examples from, from your domains, right? From your industry with Aftonbladet, Targa and so forth. But things are changing now, right? Things are changing rapidly and you probably know that there is this thing called Snapchat, right? It’s an application that every one of you who have kids, you probably hate it, because the kids use it and you don’t understand it. We could do some weird things with Snapchat. It’s, it’s about blending reality, a lot of the filters that they have. So keep that in mind, all the goofy things that every kid in Sweden does on their phone.

And then we have this, we have something actually useful that no kid know about. It’s an application called Photomath. It’s been around since 2012 and what you can do with that application is you can just scan any math problem and it’s going to solve it for you, even if it’s handwritten, right? Look at this. You just, you just point your phone over a handwritten math problem and you’d get the solution. They’d been around since 2012 and basically no kid know about it.

A month ago, Snapchat opened up their platform to other applications. And just to give you a brief overview, this is what it’s all about. Okay. So when Snapchat opens up their platform for other applications, of course Photomath is there, right? And suddenly every kid will know about Photomath. Every kid will get used to actually blending something in the physical world with something from the digital world and make use of it. And this is where you guys come in. This is where you really need to start, understand what’s going on out there and what’s happening.

I’m going to give you one more example to make sure that we think about this the right way. And it’s, it’s about autonomous vehicles. And I do this crazy thing every morning I post a video, five minutes about something that I think is interesting, and a couple of weeks ago, there was this joke floating around on the web. It said, “Have you ever thought about the fact that if self driving cars become a norm, when people get heart attacks, it won’t cause accidents, people will just arrive to the destination and sit there until somebody notice.” Okay, so I did a five minute story about this joke where I said, “Is this really what we need to think about?”

So have a conversation now with your neighbor and try to find out all the better things that the self driving car is going to do when you have a heart attack in it. Makes sense? Have the conversation, go…

Okay. Okay, thank you. You’re so good at talking. You’re going to have such a great day, such a great day. Let’s do that shout out thing again. What are the things that the car will do?

Drive to the hospital.

Drive to the hospital. Yes. Better.

Find a heart starter.

Yes, it’s got, of course it knows where there’s a heart starter, so it’s going to go there instead of all the way to the hospital. Yes. Anything else?

Yes. The electrical chair. Yes, of course. The electrical chair. Yes, okay, so it’s going to go to a heart starter. Is someone else going to go to the heart starter?

Doctor

Yes, of course. The car knows that there’s a doctor around, and it just takes command of the car that the doctor is in and redirects him to the heart starter as well. We can go on, and on, and on about this, but the thing is you probably not going to be in your car when you have a heart attack, because all the devices around you have keep the tab of you, right. And they know that right now you’re living really unhealthy. You gained weight, you don’t sleep enough, you don’t move enough. So of course it’s going to tell that to the car. The system around you is going to have a conversation with the car and say this guy is in trouble, right? We need to fix this. So the next time you move into your self driving car, and you say, “Take me to McDonald’s”, the car is going to go, uh-uh (negative), not going to do that, right? And you’re going to end up at, at Holy Greens or something instead to have that salad.

We can play with these thoughts. The thing, the most important thing for everyone in this room is to play with those ideas. Right then to see where it’s where it’s gonna land. Because I talk about self driving cars with all my customers, we’d lift hands and with, with ASSA ABLOY and so forth. And for every customer we can find the touch point, we can find a position where the self driving car is going to effect them. And in your case, for instance, with all the physical stuff that comes out of your printers, they need to go somewhere, right? So logistics is going to change and self driving cars is probably going to be in the epicenter of that change some way or another. You need to figure it out.

But moving beyond tech, I mean as I said, I have 100 friends we could go on forever. We also need to understand people, and I’m just going to give you one example. Here we go.

You’ve probably seen something like that, right? She’s 11 months old. She can’t even stand on her feet yet, but she’s already mastering the device. So on some level it’s better designed than her own body. And she of course gets lots of ideas of how the world works teached by the digital world. I mean she just used to, I mean she never seen something like this, right. If she wants to watch the children show, she doesn’t spend five minutes in front of this first, she just hits a button, and the children’s show is there. And that raises some questions of your digital presence, of course. I mean if you, if you, are less good in the digital space than everything else that she moves around with, you’re going to lose her. But it also means something in the physical space.

Let’s see if you recognize this sound. (dial up) Oh, that’s loud. And we’re finally online, remember those days? Yeah. Not a good thing. It’s not a good thing because even if we know today that we need to be constantly online, and we are, we have an idea that the digital space is, is somewhere else, right? It’s something we go to. I mean, I think everyone in this room is probably guilty of some time referring to this as the real world, right? This is the real world, IRL, in real life. And the other thing is something else, that’s not gonna fly with someone like Iris. And it’s not just an 11 month baby girl. Everyone who has gotten this, this digital understanding under her skin is gonna raise new questions, right? And have new demands. And if you want to employ someone like Iris, you need to understand that. If you want to sell to someone like Iris, you need to understand that it’s absolutely crucial to make sure that everything fits together.

And we have a hard time understanding business today. I mean, just as an example, we all know that we can, we can buy clothes and records online, but right now you can actually go to hushhush.com, and you can order a Boeing business jet for $67 million, pay with a credit card, have it delivered overnight with a hassle free return of 14 days. No friction is accepted out there. Everything needs to be absolutely frictionless. And the way to move into that domain is to understand that we need to do right.

I’m just going to give you not sure if you, if you’re into motor racing, but this is the 1950 Indianapolis 500. It’s the, it’s the fastest car race in the world at that time, 1950. And this is a pit stop. Look at the speed. [inaudible 00:33:06] Why is it faster today? Lean over to your neighbor. Quick conversation. Why is it faster today? 69 years later. Talk to each other.

Okay. Yes, that’s a reference point. Here is what the pit stop looked like 2013, a couple of years later. And if you blink, you’re gonna miss it. So, eyes on the screen now, look at this.

You probably came up with a million of good reasons why it’s faster today. Everything from tools to competition to teamwork and so forth, but the main reason that it’s faster today is that they haven’t been sitting down for 69 years thinking about how to make it faster, right? They do, they do, and they do, and they do. So for, this is one of the Formula One teams. They do this for three hours, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, every race weekend, and all summer, just to practice and to explore it. To make sure that they do at 1% better every year. Right? That’s one thing, but the second thing is to explore, to do something totally different, and to sometimes make a mistake.

This is an excellent quote from Thomas Watson, Jr, one of the CEOs of IBM, he said, “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate, but we’re so afraid of making mistakes.” We don’t need to be, right? There is an excellent model that we can use. This is the 21st century risk analysis. When you have an idea of something that you want to try out that might be a mistake, then lower the cost, think minimal viable product. What’s the smallest thing you can do to see if this is a good idea and then before you do it, ask yourself two questions. If I fail, will someone die or will someone get fired? And if it’s the first one, then please don’t do that, right? If you end up on the second one, you can go back into your organization and you can say, well we need to understand we need to do more of this. We need to be brave and we need to find comfort in the fact that we need to change.

Of course, there is one more thing that we need to understand and it’s about this. Do you guys recognize that? [inaudible 00:36:26] Every culture have their own, right. This is the English one and Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Hispanica, here’s the French one, here’s the German one. Everyone has one of those and every one of those traditional and encyclopedias, they have gone digital, they’ve moved to pdf and they moved to CD Rom and they moved online and they’re behind that pay wall usually. But anyway, they’ve moved and they’ve gone digital and everyone of them have basically lost the fight to these guys. And it’s not because they’re free and accessible, it’s because they are built by everyone.

Wikipedia is constructed by every one of us and if there’s something that digital changes, if there’s something that digital truly effects in every single industry, even in yours, it’s the fact that we need to understand the power of building a platform and working together with our users. And you have a sweet spot because you have hardware as well. But everything else within your organization, logistics, distribution, customer support, sales, everything is being challenged by the fact that digital forces us to do together with our users.

And now you look a little bit like that. That’s an excellent place to start. But what I want you guys to, to work with during the days here and going forward is the exploration. So you make sure that that’s not where you explore. That’s a bad place. It’s probably, that’s probably the only place that’s worse to explore, but instead understand that the general ideas about looking around, talking to each other, having positive conversations, looking for the opportunities, understand what’s going on and then do, do, do, do as much as you possibly can.

And it’s an old story because this guy said it, right? Aristotle. He said, “What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.” And the good thing is you don’t have to do it yourself, right? You have this power of this network group and you can do this together.

I’m available for you afterwards online. Just reach out and let’s have a conversation. Thank you so much for your time, thank you.

‘How is the Media Landscape Changing?” – presentation by Joakim Jardenberg.
Download the presentation here.