Assessing the Mindset of the Targeted Audience

When marketing any item toward the masses, one must understand the decision-making process of their targeted audience. Focus on what gains their attention. Observe their attention span and the entire process of their external actions.

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Attention loss feared as high-tech rewires brain

Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, November 15, 2009

In today's fast-paced, multitasking world, it's easy to get hooked on technology that's always online, delivering a steady stream of texts and tweets.

But some mental health experts fear that a growing technology addiction, perhaps accelerated by the popularity of smart phones and social networks, will lead to a breakdown of interpersonal relationships and an increase in attention deficit disorder.

"If our attention span constricts to the point where we can only take information in 140-character sentences, then that doesn't bode too well for our future," said Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of Stanford University's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford University.

"The more we become used to just sound bites and tweets," Aboujaoude said, "the less patient we will be with more complex, more meaningful information. And I do think we might lose the ability to analyze things with any depth and nuance. Like any skill, if you don't use it, you lose it."

Dr. John Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, uses the term "acquired attention deficit disorder" to describe the way technology is rewiring the modern brain.

He noted that reliance on even the simplest programs - such as a spell-checker in a word-processing program or a contact list that memorizes all your phone numbers for you - are short-circuiting the brain's ability to process details.

"My favorite example is when I type the word 'tomorrow,' " Ratey said. "I know spell-check will get it right. It would take 30 milliseconds for me to make sure in my mind. But we depend on that (spell-check). Even when we take the time to write, we don't have the patience to give that a consideration."

To be sure, the digital revolution has increased productivity and opened vast new worlds of information and discourse. Some mental health experts say there's still not enough research to determine whether heavy use of computers, the Internet or video games is an unhealthy condition by itself or merely a symptom of recognized problems such as depression.

['This little appendage' ]

But experts such as Ratey and Aboujaoude say they are already seeing cases that go beyond addiction to the Internet, especially with the growing popularity of portable devices that make it harder to walk away from technology.

The signs are everywhere - college students texting as their professors lecture, pedestrians crossing the street with their heads down checking messages on a BlackBerry, and BART riders reaching furtively into their pockets thinking their iPhone has vibrated - even if it hasn't.

One of the firms generating the biggest buzz in technology, Twitter, caters to short attention spans with its text messages of 140 characters or less. Another new San Francisco company called Particle recently started Robo.to, which offers video updates no longer than four seconds. Pop star Justin Timberlake is the lead investor.

"We are definitely an addicted society," said Dr. Kimberly Young, the founder and director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery of Bradford, Pa., and author of a series of books on Web addiction. "EBay goes down for a day, and everybody has a fit. It's like this little appendage that people have."

It even reaches into the bedroom. In a September survey, 36 percent of the people ages 35 and younger said they often used Facebook or Twitter after having sex. Men were twice as likely to tweet or post status updates after sex.

"It's the new cigarette," said Manish Rathi, co-founder of Retrevo.com, a Sunnyvale consumer electronics shopping site that commissioned the survey.

[Separation anxiety]

Software engineer Jeanine Swatton of Dublin said that when she goes to lunch or dinner with someone, she eats "fairly quickly" to get back to her computer and tends "to check my e-mail messages on my iPhone throughout the meal. Luckily, my friends understand."

Swatton, 37, believes her attention span has shortened.

"If I do not have access to a computer, I will check my iPhone or will have a glass of wine to reduce the anxiety of being away from a computer," she said.

Indeed, technology has elevated the ability to multitask to a higher level. But a study published in August by researchers at Stanford University's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab found multitaskers were more distracted by irrelevant details and didn't do as well as people who completed one job at a time.

Harvard's Ratey, author of the new book "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain," said he fears today's tech-savvy generation is evolving away from the "genetic roots" of humankind, which used to have time for deep contemplation about complex problems without "being bombarded from stimuli from the outside."

"It's a challenge for many kids just to sit silently for a few minutes without moving around, looking for some kind of stimulation," he said. "We need that ability to center ourselves."

"A bigger portion are not learning to be more resilient, and we're going to have a lot of kids who are just not used to the challenges of defeat," he said. "It's just part of society that we're multitasking all the time. We can't stop to think, and if we have to stop and consider something, we get frustrated."

[ Writing habits change ]

Aboujaoude, assistant director of the Stanford School of Medicine's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Clinic, said a few studies indicate a link between excessive Internet use and attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder in children and some adults, which could impair academic performance and social development.

The Internet, though, is only part of "one big virtual addiction," he said.

"One reason that ADD is on the rise is that our attention span is similar to our attention span on Facebook," Aboujaoude said. "Look at language. People are writing the way that they text. Anything complex that takes several paragraphs to develop is information overload at this point.

"I think of it as regressive. I don't think of it as progressive. It's becoming so normalized in our culture, it becomes hard to catch while it's happening."

E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/15/BUNI1AB1G2.DTL

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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In an ultra competitive level, the successful and experienced strategists usually stay focused on the target while avoiding distractions.

Using the Strategic Assessment Process in the Boxing World

There are many ways to assess the opponent's strategic advantage.

• Understanding the history and the rules of the competition
  
• Pinpointing the opponent's arsenal and their history.
• Comparing it with others
  
• Identifying their strengths.
• Determining their weaknesses through a process of elimination
  

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Pacquiao, Cotto camps apply Art of War lessons
By Francis Ochoa
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:12:00 11/07/2009

HOLLYWOOD—Sun Tzu’s philosophy is getting a ringside twist with each passing day leading to the Manny Pacquiao-Miguel Cotto showdown for the WBO welterweight belt on Nov. 14 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

The legendary Chinese military commander, largely credited as the author of the iconic “The Art of War,” has cast—however inadvertently—his influence in the training camp of both marquee fighters.

And where Sun Tzu preaches that if you know the enemy and you know yourself, you can win a thousand battles, Buboy Fernandez, a key member of Pacquiao’s corner and the fighter’s close friend, believes that knowing what the enemy knows and using it against him guarantees victory just as well.

“They said that they’ve studied Manny’s fight against (Juan Manuel) Marquez and they’ve spotted a weakness,” Fernandez said in Filipino. “Well, we’ve watched the tape and we know what weakness they’re talking about and we have a counter for that.”

“It’s still a secret now,” said Fernandez, smiling impishly.

Taking a page from Taoist strategizing that calls on gathering knowledge of the enemy, Team Cotto revealed that it is using flaws it discovered by watching videos of Pacquiao’s last fight against nemesis Marquez to derail the Filipino ring icon, who is eyeing an unprecedented seventh world crown.

Fernandez feels that advantage was just blown away.

During mitts training Friday, Fernandez, chief trainer Freddie Roach and Pacquiao repeatedly went through different strategies to hold the hook-throwing Cotto off his element.

Pacquiao himself had earlier said “knowledge is power,” and that what they’ve learned so far is exactly what they’re preparing for.

/// Knowledge is power. However, know-how is power squared. ... Having the awareness of the composition and its grand settings and the skills to take advantage of the opponent is the key to success. ... Assess the target and its settings. Position yourself quietly with a precision-focused plan and fundamental-based preparation. Influence the opposition with a deceptive blend of direct and indirect methods. This is the way of strategically staging the opposition. ///

“I can say right now that I am 100 percent prepared for this fight,” Pacquiao said.

The fighter from Gen. Santos City was upbeat during training Saturday, unleashing rapid combinations with ferocious tenacity that had Roach asking Pacquiao to “slow down” several times.

During one particular series during mitts training, Roach got tagged in his armor-cushioned body and drew a deep breath.

“I said slow,” said Roach.

“That was slow,” quipped Pacquiao.

When Pacquiao put an end to eight hard rounds of mitts exercises by knocking off Roach’s right mitt, observers milling around the ring couldn’t help but murmur about how Cotto could end up on his back on fight night.

The only guy who wasn’t buying it was Pacquiao.

“I’m not even thinking of knocking him out,” he said during a post-training interview with a television crew and a handful of reporters. “I’m just going to give my best and if a knockout comes, it will be a bonus.”

http://sports.inquirer.net/professional/professional/view/20091107-234876/Pacquiao-Cotto-camps-apply-Art-of-War-lessons

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In Punishing Fashion, Pacquiao Wins 7th Title
Manny Pacquiao, won a highly anticipated fight by technical knockout Saturday, after the bout was stopped in the 12th round at the MGM Grand Garden Arena

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/sports/15fight.html?_r=1&hp


The strategist who knows why and how, will always dominate the strategist who knows what and how.

Developing a Tangible Strategic Model (The Tangible Vision)

To build a tangible strategic model, one must understand the following:

• the definitive goal;
• the competitive position;
• the seasonal cycle of that position;
• the risk that comes with it; and
• the connections that comes from the impact

In our case, we usually transform those listed points into our strategic model that gives the reader a comprehensive overview.

Our strategic overview is consisted of some of the following attributes:

• the current state of the targeted terrain;
• the objective;
• the various risk/benefit scenarios;
• the ranking of value points;
• a tangible representation of the venture; and
• a tangible delineation of its connections to the bigger picture.

The next step is developing an operational plan that supports the strategic model. It is a specific project milestone-based chart that includes the contingencies for capitalizing on certain opportunities and mitigating strategic risks.

Our planning process criteria is based on the complete understanding of the weaknesses and the strengths of the client's operational team while minding the capability of the targeted opposition.

More Quality Intelligence. Less Risks

Most projects accrue more changes in the timeline and costs due to the lack of information transparency. ... Most people possessed the tendency to assume the best circumstance without ever probing for a worst case scenario. ... 

While the quantity of information transparency determines the severity of risk, the quality of specific intelligence determines the effectiveness of the decision-making.

The Bottom Line
In an economy of limited resources, the successful strategy professional must focus on lowering costs and maximizing the profits. The first step is to assess the grand picture of tangibility. 
Ask the following questions:

• How do you assess the grand picture? 
• Does it have general points or specific points? ... 
• Do the specific points contain both technical measures and a cyclical state of tangibility? 

If your grand picture does not have it, your assessment is flawed. .. .

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If you are interested in learning more about our strategic consulting services, please contact us at service [aattt] compass360consulting [ddoott]com

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September 13, 2009
Unboxed
Wall Street’s Math Wizards Forgot a Few Variables
By STEVE LOHR

IN the aftermath of the great meltdown of 2008, Wall Street’s quants have been cast as the financial engineers of profit-driven innovation run amok. They, after all, invented the exotic securities that proved so troublesome.

But the real failure, according to finance experts and economists, was in the quants’ mathematical models of risk that suggested the arcane stuff was safe.

The risk models proved myopic, they say, because they were too simple-minded. They focused mainly on figures like the expected returns and the default risk of financial instruments. What they didn’t sufficiently take into account was human behavior, specifically the potential for widespread panic. When lots of investors got too scared to buy or sell, markets seized up and the models failed.

That failure suggests new frontiers for financial engineering and risk management, including trying to model the mechanics of panic and the patterns of human behavior.

“What wasn’t recognized was the importance of a different species of risk — liquidity risk,” said Stephen Figlewski, a professor of finance at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University. “When trust in counterparties is lost, and markets freeze up so there are no prices,” he said, it “really showed how different the real world was from our models.”

In the future, experts say, models need to be opened up to accommodate more variables and more dimensions of uncertainty.

The drive to measure, model and perhaps even predict waves of group behavior is an emerging field of research that can be applied in fields well beyond finance.

Much of the early work has been done tracking online behavior. The Web provides researchers with vast data sets for tracking the spread of all manner of things — news stories, ideas, videos, music, slang and popular fads — through social networks. That research has potential applications in politics, public health, online advertising and Internet commerce. And it is being done by academics and researchers at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook.

Financial markets, like online communities, are social networks. Researchers are looking at whether the mechanisms and models being developed to explore collective behavior on the Web can be applied to financial markets. A team of six economists, finance experts and computer scientists at Cornell was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue that goal.

“The hope is to take this understanding of contagion and use it as a perspective on how rapid changes of behavior can spread through complex networks at work in financial markets,” explained Jon M. Kleinberg, a computer scientist and social network researcher at Cornell.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Andrew W. Lo, director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering, is taking a different approach to incorporating human behavior into finance. His research focuses on applying insights from disciplines, including evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience, to create a new perspective on how financial markets work, which Mr. Lo calls “the adaptive-markets hypothesis.” It is a departure from the “efficient-market” theory, which asserts that financial markets always get asset prices right given the available information and that people always behave rationally.

Efficient-market theory, of course, has dominated finance and econometric modeling for decades, though it is being sharply questioned in the wake of the financial crisis. “It is not that efficient market theory is wrong, but it’s a very incomplete model,” Mr. Lo said.

Mr. Lo is confident that his adaptive-markets approach can help model and quantify liquidity crises in a way traditional models, with their narrow focus on expected returns and volatility, cannot. “We’re going to see three-dimensional financial modeling and eventually N-dimensional modeling,” he said.

J. Doyne Farmer, a former physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a founder of a quantitative trading firm, finds the behavioral research intriguing but awfully ambitious, especially to build into usable models. Instead, Mr. Farmer, a professor at the interdisciplinary Sante Fe Institute, is doing research on models of markets, institutions and their complex interactions, applying a hybrid discipline called econophysics.

To explain, Mr. Farmer points to the huge buildup of the credit-default-swap market, to a peak of $60 trillion. And in 2006, the average leverage on mortgage securities increased to 16 to 1 (it is now 1.5 to 1). Put the two together, he said, and you have a serious problem.

“You don’t need a model of human psychology to see that there was a danger of impending disaster,” Mr. Farmer observed. “But economists have failed to make models that accurately model such phenomena and adequately address their couplings.”

When a bridge over a river collapses, the engineers who built the bridge have to take responsibility. But typically, critics call for improvement and smarter, better-trained engineers — not fewer of them. The same pattern seems to apply to financial engineers. At M.I.T., the Sloan School of Management is starting a one-year master’s in finance this fall because the field has become too complex to be adequately covered as part of a traditional M.B.A. program, and because of student demand. The new finance program, Mr. Lo noted, had 179 applicants for 25 places.

In the aftermath of the economic crisis, financial engineers, experts say, will probably shift more to risk management and econometric analysis and concentrate less on devising exotic new instruments. Still, the recent efforts by investment banks to create a trading market for “life settlements,” life insurance policies that the ill or elderly sell for cash, suggest that inventive sales people are browsing for new asset classes to securitize, bundle and trade.

“Good or bad, moral or immoral, people are going to make markets and trade via computers, and this is a natural area of financial engineers,” says Emanuel Derman, a professor at Columbia University and a former Wall Street quant.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/13unboxed.html

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The Way of Strategic Assessment:

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few. ..." - Shunryu Suzuki

Everyone's strategic experience is different. Those who have the proper strategic experience, usually assessed the possibilities in a few moments. They know what are the active factors and what are the static factors.  ... 

What does it take to become an ultra-class expert (UCE)?

Following are some of those guidelines that a UCE have always followed:

• Recognizing all of the active variables at play;
• Having the capability to connect one's current objective to the greater picture; and
• Staying focused on the target while being mindfully aware at the grand settings.

Step 1: Understanding The Grand Basics of Strategy

To succeed in life, you must follow the steps of "ready, aim and fire . . . ," not "fire, ready aim . . . "

In competition as in life, one can only be ready, when he or she knows their target. The successful strategist does it by assessing the grand objective and the grand settings that is connected to it. Then he or she positions him or her selves with proper planning and preparation. The final stage is influencing their opposition through the use of directness and indirectness.

Compass Rule: The complete understanding of one's target through the process of assessing, positioning and influencing enables one to "subjugate the predominant paradigm" of the competition.

In future posts, we will talk about the process of assessing, positioning and influencing and the art and science of subjugating the predominant paradigm.

Our Current Project: Strategic Assessment

We are currently working on a book on that focuses on how to apply the Sunzi strategic principles in competing situations. The emphasis of this book is on the process of of strategic assessment.

More details later.

A Strategy View of Positive Thinking

A prominent strategist reminded us of the following: "When a leader builds a plan and if the entire team believes in it (after some collaborative contemplation, cooperative collaboration and adjustments). The plan has good chance of succeeding. ... "

However, the quality of the plan depends greatly on the strategic experience of the individual and his team.

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Barbara Ehrenreich questions positive thinking
Katherine Seligman, Special to The Chronicle
Monday, October 19, 2009

"All I could find were these exhortations to be positive.... Barbara Ehrenreich questions positive thinking.

It was almost 10 years ago that Barbara Ehrenreich, newly diagnosed with breast cancer, discovered a subject that really made her mad: positive thinking.

"When I reached out, all I could find were these exhortations to be positive or cheerful because it will make you better," she said. "It was either smile or die."

She refused to do either, preferring instead to explore what she considers an epidemic of forced cheerfulness. Her just-published book, "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America," is a provocative look at the happiness industry, which she believes is partly responsible for some big bummers, everything from our slide into war to the economic crisis.

Ehrenreich, an activist and writer based in Alexandria, Va., is best known for her work on poverty and the false promises of the American dream, subjects of her bestselling books "Nickel and Dimed" and "Bait and Switch." But in both books, she said, there was the lurking presence of mandatory optimism.

The poor are always told to improve their attitude, she said. While researching "Bait and Switch," she heard laid-off workers advised to be upbeat and positive. Forget blaming fate or the economy and just charge into the next job interview with a smile.

That's when she realized, she said, that positive thinking was more widespread than she'd imagined. It was not only touted as a force against breast cancer, along with cheerful pink ribbons and stuffed bears, it was fundamental in our self-image and national character.

Positive thinking was so pervasive, she said, she found the research lonely at first. "I have never been afraid to go against conventional wisdom, but there didn't seem to be anybody on my side," she said. "When I found a couple of people, it was wonderful. We'd exchange things and share our work. We called ourselves - one of the researchers came up with this - the negateers."

Not that she's a born pessimist. Two years ago, she wrote "Dancing in the Streets, A History of Collective Joy," a book about festival traditions. But Ehrenreich describes herself as a realist, an outlook that comes partly from her scientific training - she has a doctorate in cell biology.

So how did we become so relentlessly positive? She traces the roots to Calvinism brought by white settlers to New England, followed by philosophers who urged reimagining the human condition and rejecting punitive religion. Christian Science advanced the notion that attitude heals. Fast forward to Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking," televangelists preaching a new positive theology and a new academic discipline of positive psychology, which spawned a motivational industry. Together, she says, they send the message that optimism and vigilant control over negativity lead to prosperity and well-being.

There are Happiness Makeovers and an American Happiness Association. The first conference on Happiness and Its Causes convened last year in San Francisco. Collectively, Ehrenreich said, we were so blindsided - or bright-sided - by optimistic thinking that we believed our optimistic president, that Iraq was a threat and we could win an easy war. We didn't see the economic crisis coming and made reckless investments because we thought our economy would prevail, she said.

Role of greed

What about the role of greed?

"I don't rule that out," she said, "but there was a refusal on the part of so many people that bad things can happen. ... No one could raise a hand and say, 'Excuse me, this looks really shaky.' People were fired for saying their bank's subprime exposure could be too high."

Ehrenreich is particularly troubled by the connection between optimistic thinking and health, with little hard science as evidence.

Dacher Keltner, co-director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, dedicated to the study of positive emotions, said he expected the book - which he had not yet read - to be a much-needed review of positive psychology.

"I think this is a necessary critique of a movement that we need to take stock of," said Keltner, whose research focuses on emotion and social interaction.

'Compassion switch'

Keltner said he differentiates between two strains of positive psychology. "My take is that there is an East Coast version, which is pull yourself up by your bootstraps and be optimistic, you'll beat cancer," he said. "The Berkeley version is more, 'Let's turn on the compassion switch and make people think about others and how to cultivate empathy.' "

Ehrenreich said research into positive emotion is valuable. Relentless positive thinking, however, is something from which we must be weaned.

"We're in recovery here," she said. "The alternative is not despair, not depression. The alternative is to look at things as they are. ... Let's look at what's actually going on and see what we can do about things that are making people miserable."

Barbara Ehrenreich will appear 7 p.m. Friday at a Book Passage event at Dominican University, 50 Acacia Ave., San Rafael, and 2 p.m. Saturday at the Commonwealth Club, Cubberly Theatre, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. www.barbaraehrenreich.com.

E-mail Katherine Seligman at datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/19/DD211A4O4C.DTL
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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