In the words of Ace Frehley – “Shock me: We can come together!”

Summer descends on us, and my “summer job” prevents me from taking the lead on the blog for the next month or so.

But I do hope that only means that YOU take charge of it instead! What ever great ideas or insights you come across, write a comment and they’ll be upgraded to posts while I retreat to being a commentator!

Make nextopia blossom this summer!

The intuitive illustration to this post, connect the dots:

Kiss have opened their concerts with a speaker shouting that line out loud for ages: “You wanted the best, you got the best: The hottest band in the world – Kiss!”

Enter the Expectations society and Generation In-Charge, now it’s not a speaker line, it’s the real thing. If you want the best, you will get the best. Thousands and thousands of Americans know this, having routed Kiss’ North American 2009 Tour by demanding that the band play their local venues.

Never late to adopt new business models, at the beginning of the year, Kiss made the fans their tour managers, announcing that the band will go where enough fans want them to go. And Generation In-Charge acted, by voting, voting, and recruiting fellow voters with widgets. Next step – pre-sale tickets. That is, instead of the old model where tickets are suddenly made known and available to the public soon before the concert, aspiring concert-goers can – of course – line up long before the schedule is set. Fuelled by the alluring almost and the golden expectations, tickets can never be more valuable than before the concert dates and venues are even set!

My guess is, the tour won’t stop in North America: More than 10,000 locations across the globe have already been demanded.

Just another Kiss stunt? Or a new, Expectations society standard for the music industry? Check out eventful.com…

I wanna wear a shirt like Paul’s..:

What do Mark Zuckerberg, Miley Cyrus and Carolina Gynning have in common?

Answer: They have been considered among the most powerful in their fields, without any real previous experience.

Mark Zuckerberg is considered one of the most powerful forces in the business world, the youngest ever ranked by Forbes. He founded facebook at age 20. Still a student, no experience of tycooning whatsoever, wham! he’s the go-to business guy.

Miley Cyrus was one of last year’s highest-paid authors. At age 16, she’s done a TV show and recorded a few hit songs, but has never written a single word, wham! million-dollar author.

Last year, Carolina Gynning was dubbed the most popular TV host in a survey of the Swedish network heads. If you’re not familiar with Ms. Gynning, I can inform that she is not a veteran TV host, the bulk of her TV experience comes from competing in reality soap Big Brother, where she gained massive attention by having more or less televised sex.

It made me think that the yestermillennium expression “get off on the wrong foot” will soon seem Martian. In the Expectations society, nobody cares what foot you got off on, what matters is your next step.

To all people contemplating your future careers – it doesn’t matter where you start, you can’t get off on the wrong foot. There are no bad choices (even having sex in a reality soap can propel you to TV host dominance), only next steps.

I’m on a crazy train right now. Started working on the next book and it’s certainly a ride. Because of it, I totally missed posting something here yesterday, sorry.

Jonas wrote such a great comment that I just have to post it here so that no one misses it /MD:

One man who certainly learned about expectations and the yestermillenium the hard way, is Mike Peters, frontman of The Alarm.

For those of you too young to know, The Alarm was a great rock band in the 80’s and 90’s. If it was only about music, they still would be. We Alarm-fans has always claimed The Alarm to be one of the most underestimated bands in the history of rock’n roll. After the original line-up broke up,  Mike Petes have kept the Alarm-brand, now manned with yestermillenium musicians like James Stevenson (Generation X, The Cult) Craig Adams (Sisters of mercy, The Mission, The Cult)and Steve Grantley (Stiff Little Fingers). Naturally, critics and the audience, being more interested in the next bands, have been non-supportive, at best.

In 2004, a new and unkown punkrockband from Chester, The Poppy Fields, released a new single called 45 RPM. The press as well as the audience fell for the energetic punk-influenced rock and the single rocketed in the british charts.

A few weeks later, the truth was uncovered – The Poppy Fields was a pseudonym for The Alarm and the single was the first from their coming CD; In the poppy fields.

The scam, which even featured a body-double band appearing on the video for the single, was set to prove the point that The Alarm got unfair treatment because they where an yestermillenium band.

Now that’s an experiment for you, Professor Dahlén

For those of you who use Spotify, here’s a link:
spotify:artist:0oQLexIBY9SlMhtbSIPFAO

Rock on!

/Jonas

If you haven’t lived under a rock the last week, you probably already know:

David Letterman (of CBS’s Late Show) is in big trouble. Last Monday night, he made a bad joke about (an old favorite on this blog) Sarah Palin’s daughter.

As any viewer of his show knows, there’s nothing particular about Dave making a bad joke, that’s what he does. The network did not think any more of it, the presses weren’t stopped in the news production anywhere.

That is, until Generation In-Charge spoke up. Before the week was over, firedavidletterman.com had attracted almost 50,000 members and spawned a number of facebook groups demanding he’d be fired.

Before long, Dave went on top of CBS’s, and most newsroom’s agendas. Suddenly, Dave’s joke (and two televised apologies) are headlines everywhere. The google hits keep adding up, passig 12 million any microsecond.

Generation In-Charge succeeded to do the unprecedented twice: first, they made Dave apologize (which the guy has certainly proved not being prone to), and second, they made an old, already dismissed news item, prime-time and headline material.

So, what’s it gonna be? Will YOU fire Dave?

How come people stopped buying cars all of a sudden? Sure, the financial crisis and an econoME in recession, explains a great deal of the slump in car sales. But BNP regressions around 4-6 percent far from explain how car manufacturers have experienced cuts amounting to, in some cases, as much as half the sales of previous years.

The missing link? Expectations. As guest-blogger Jonas reported during his stint, the factor that seems to drive consumer-perceived quality the most is expectations.

What’s wrong with the new cars rolling out from the factories? Nothing. The thing is, what people buy is the car’s future and their expectations about it. Nobody wants a new car, they want the (car’s) future. And even though Volvo’s new cars are perfectly fine, people’s expectations about their future is not.

Related to this, good ol’ guest-blogger Tom gave me a great tip about the (Swedish) blog carwinism.se, which is filled with fun examples of how cars have always – and always will? – be icons of the future, and bearers of our great expectations.

Yesterday’s post made me think of the ongoing debate about anonymity in legal processes. Defence attorneys, especially, seem very keen to use the unfortunate revealing of their clients’ identities as an argument that they cannot be convicted. “S/he’s already been trialed and sentenced by the public by way of their gossiping and speculations!” The web abounds with blogs and fora that speculate about the identities of reported perps, the alluring almost drives people all over the world to guess “that must be him!”, “sounds exactly like her!”.

Voices (particulary lawyer ones) are raised ever more frequently that the spreading of information must be stopped, or the legal system won’t work! Suspects must be allowed complete anonymity. 

Right. And no one must know where the Queen hangs out on her summer vacations… In the world of any, anyone, anywhere, can dig up information about anyone, put two and two together and find out who did it. In the world of any, there ain’t any secrets.

Time to update the judicial system to a system that is not based on the world of the yestermillennium?

Recently, the English court was appaled by the fact that HM The Queen’s summer residence was visible to the naked eye on Google Earth. The British reacted indignantly – The royal family’s summer whereabouts are not supposed to be public information!

It’s just an eenie meenie news item. Still, it says so very much about the world, and about the pace at which it revolves. In the yestermillennium, YOU could decide what should be a secret. In the new millennium, it’s anybody’s secret. Not even a queen can decide what’s to know and what’s not to know for anyone else. In the world of any, putting up signposts, roadblocks, and fences won’t do the trick. Anyone can get there, from anywhere, anytime.

Welcome to the world of any, Lizzie!

I just went through the evaluations of two lectures I gave recently. To be honest, I hate this kind of evaluation forms, filled out directly after the lecture. For one, they say little about the actual value the participants derive from the lecture (that comes, or does not come, later, when the participants go about with their lives). Also, they risk driving us lecturers into smile-suckers (remember that old post about how one can manipulate a lecturer..?)

But this particular evaluation, I do like. The evaluation forms were filled out after two identical lectures, with just one small difference. In the first lecture, I referred to all the stuff being part of my research some year ago. In the second lecture, I referred to the same stuff as being research in progress, will be finished in the coming year.

Do you think the evaluations differ? Could one lecture have been perceived as more useful, though-provoking, fun than the other?

Sometimes, it’s really fun to combine being a lecturer and a researcher…

Yeah, you know how to finish that sentence – fun.

Now more than ever. At least according to a survey a large Swedish newspaper made among students having taken their final exams.

When asked what these aspiring professionals want in their future careers, a whopping 59 percent answered – fun.

Fun ranked way ahead of other means of success and progress, like becoming rich, achieving high status or becoming really good at something.

Surprising? Maybe in the yestermillennium, but hardly in the Expectations society where those entering the labor (there’s a word I’m sure will be outdated, Martian, very soon) market expect that they will be able to work with a lot of different things in a lot of different constellations. Why aspire to be good at something when you can be good at anything, why desire to be rich in the world of any, where you can get hold of anything you want, where space travel is expected to be free of charge in ten years time?

Of course, fun would be all that matters. Of course, people planning their careers in the new millennium will settle for nothing less.

“But is this not just youth talking?” some might ask. “Will they not grow out of it just like the rest of us (yestermillennium folks) have done”?

Google it and compare the answers to a similar survey ten years ago. Take a guess, do you think fun rated way ahead of richness, status, and skills back then? Find out…

And (I love speculating about the future, call me when it’s in…) I’m positive that these people will give the same replies in ten years time.