Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best. It also enables you to draw a blueprint for what it takes to get extraordinary things done. You can share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation here.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession, to drive peak performance.
All The World’s A Store.
This is an article that combines nostalgia, brilliant storytelling and evokes vivid images of the past and the future of retail. It also incorporates references and quotes that lend authenticity and research-based insights, while presenting the author’s viewpoint on topics such as shopping, fashion, and future trends.
Emilia Petrarca traces back an article in the history by Kennedy Fraser, who predicted the effect of technology on retail. She goes on to reiterate her point about the social effects and impact of shopping and how the retail store will evolve with the advent of AI and other technologies.
With the increasing need for human connection, will the retail of tomorrow be hybrid retail-resaurants -reSTOREraunts? A place where people want to meet, chat, eat, shop and hang out? Lots to think about.
Read the entire article here.
Effective CMO: Telstra’s Brent Smart.
Anna Hamill, Senior Editor at WARC, speaks with Brent Smart, CMO of Telstra, on the importance and definition of ‘marketing effectiveness’ in his dictionary. The conversation has some compelling concepts and thoughts on what marketing must do for brands and the potential business impact it can create for any firm.
Brent goes on to discuss his philosophy on how to build marketing effectiveness and the craft of brand building, and shares many valuable insights on the topic. Here are some key highlights from the conversation:
“I think marketing effectiveness is pretty simple. It means is your marketing delivering a commercial impact.”
“More creative is more effective.”
“I think when you work in a low involvement category, marketing and creativity can make a massive difference in terms of the level of involvement and the level of engagement that people can have.”
“We were spending about 80 per cent of our budget on all that trading and performance work and only about 20 per cent on brand building. So we've changed that. We're closer to 50-50 now.”
“We look at marketing's ability to drive new connection revenue.”
“You really have to build a model that not only captures the brand's impact right now this quarter, but also captures that longer-term benefit that the brand is growing. So we've built a sophisticated market mix model that lets us capture that.”
“Combine AI with human creativity, how that can lead to some really interesting experiences for customers.”
You can also listen to this episode on:
Beginning Your Career? Choose Who You Work With.
If you are an intern, a college student, or somebody at the early phase of your career, there are many thoughts( not advice) in this video from Naval Ravikant on what it takes to craft a successful career journey. In fact, if you are working and at any stage of your career, middle or senior level, many words of wisdom are worth their weight in gold.
Here are some quotes from the conversation that can trigger your thoughts about this topic:
“Earn with your mind, not with your time.”
“Life is full of compounding. Like every little decision you make, (each one of them) adds up to bigger and bigger decisions.”
“The most brilliant artistic driven people that I've ever met don't think of themselves as I'm an engineer or I'm a coder or I'm an industrial designer or I'm an electrical engineer, they'll just pick up whatever skill is needed to create those things. And in this age of AI, that's easier than ever.”
“AI can generate anything you want, but that means the world is going to be full of average, and then eventually people will get tired of average.”
“I don't think in this age of specialization, it's worth covering your weaknesses. The way you cover your weaknesses is by allying with other people who have who are very strong in those areas.”
Just click on the above link and watch the video.
Why You Must Avoid Being Transactional.
One common theme that emerges from what Emilia, Brent Smart, and Naval highlight is the need to avoid the trap of becoming transactional in everything we do.
With technology, many business processes and workflows are getting rewired and refined. What was once a chore can now be done quite easily in less time with less effort. If we were retailers in a past era, we would have needed to have a heightened sense of sensitivity, such as observing, sensing, listening, and feeling about what customers think and do. But today, technology has replaced many of these human functions in retail, and therefore, retailers look for signals from devices and technologies to make decisions. The core human faculties of having a connection, feeling and belonging are rapidly depleting in the craft of retailing. Similarly, if we were in marketing, brands have a meaning and a story to tell. It allows people to have a die-hard affinity for brands that they swear by and therefore buy. Hence, as a marketer, the design, creative, and communication needs a distinct language to speak and connect with them. However, with the advancement of technology, including AI and creative automation, this is becoming increasingly commoditized. We tend to see more of the same for brands, and often, most of them look undifferentiated. Brent Smart puts it beautifully as the ‘cost of dull’. Its cost is no ‘life or mystery or intrigue’ in a brand to connect with customers. It moves into the zone of a transactional relationship between brands and consumers, becoming a buy-and-pay relationship. Finally, if you work in a company, most people who work with you have access to the same technology, information, and data. You see a sea of sameness in how people get work done - a task is assigned, technology acts as an enabler, and tasks are completed. Work has the potential to get done in less time, as opposed to how it was done previously. But, since it is far easier to do things today, there is not enough attention to detail and application of the mind. Hence, rework and time to complete work have surprisingly increased despite technological advancements. It’s the transactional nature of how things get managed and done at work, without deep involvement, which leads to unproductivity and wastage of resources.
In all of these, ‘intuition’, ‘ knowledge’, ‘ empathy’ and ‘expertise’ are things that can never be replaced by technology. When you are transactional, many of these don’t get developed and refined continuously. You need to develop your own LLMs(Life Learning Models), which operate on top of LLMs(Large Language Models). This can make a big difference to how you contextualize a problem, connect and interact with people whom you will continue to work with every day, using ambient technologies. If you are transactional, your personal LLMs(Life Learning Models) don’t get better with time and will start to stagnate. This has a higher decay rate, and soon you become a slave of a slew of 'signals’ from technology, which will be no different from what others will also receive. How you collect, synthesise, and interpret information will be commoditised and will be no different from other people working with you. Hence, being transactional will create ‘human clones’ with no distinct advantage, with the threat of you being outdated and becoming replaceable.
To avoid being transactional, learn to receive, process and decode human language on top of machine language.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
The need for human connection will only increase with the proliferation of technologies.
It will be imperative in the future to combine AI with human creativity.
AI accelerates the average. Don’t embrace ‘averageness’.