By Frank J. Diekmann
The 21st century version of spiking a child’s drink with alcohol. “Mind grenades.” A good gauge of whether a team is too large. Paying for stuff that's free. There was that and more to be heard during the recent CUNA Tech/OpSS Council meeting in Las Vegas. Here’s some of what you might have missed (with advance warning it may not be missing you).
Among some of the observations shared by Mike Walsh, founder and CEO of New York-based Tomorrow:
- “I am sick of hearing about Airbnb and Uber. Who would have ever thought someone driving around in a bloody Prius would be the high water mark of 21st century?”
- Walsh said parents are to blame for a new generation that can’t put electronic devices down, because when children misbehave or are crying now their parents immediately hand them an iPad or tablet. “It’s like magic and instantly they stop crying. You feel guilty. It’s like putting scotch in their milk. You know it works, but you wonder what it’s going to do to the kid.”
- Walsh shared a creepy new product breakthrough, noting that the classic doll Barbie now listens to what a child is saying to it. The child’s statements can be recorded, uploaded to the cloud, and measured against responses so that Barbie can respond appropriately. The creepy part? Parents can receive a weekly email of what the child had to say.
- Creepy 2.0: Walsh said one new app tells a person not what time it is, but instead of much time they have left to live.
- Offering the first of what he called “mind grenades,” Walsh recommended that the credit union “recruit the next generation as alpha users, and give them a clean sheet of paper. If they don’t come up with things that shock you, you aren’t listening hard enough. The next time you hire someone fresh out of college, ask what to they find the most strange about the way your teams work and come to decisions.”
- Walsh quoted an executive with Airbnb who said the company doesn’t recruit for technical ability or specific ability, but instead tries to work out during the interview process whether someone is “energized by unknowns.”
- “You’ve got to think small,” said Walsh. “(Amazon CEO) Jeff Bezos says, ‘Keep you teams small enough to be fed with two pizzas. They have to be agile, adaptive and come up with genuinely new ideas.”
- Walsh told credit unions, “The hardest part of the future is trying to determine how we as human beings are going to change. Fundamentally, its all about change. You have ringside seats to one of the most incredible times in history.”
You Say Tomato, I Say What The Heck-o?
Checking into the Cosmopolitan Hotel the very courteous front desk associate pointed out that my ridiculous “resort fee” did include “complimentary Internet access.”
Raise Your Hand If You’re Not Here
There’s been a nasty Catch-22 at work within credit unions for some time, which is that those most in need of the kinds of information you can get at conferences to help grow your operations aren’t there because they haven’t grown to the point where the budget allows for increasingly expensive conference attendance. And if there is one vertical within credit unions that’s an imperative, it’s technology. During the CUNA Tech Council meeting, NCUA’s Wayne Trout, regional information systems officer with NCUA, led a session on the cybersecurity assessment tool now available from the FFIEC. Trout noted that of the 6,000 institutions NCUA insures, roughly 4,000 have less than $100 million in assets. When he asked his audience for a show of hands from those hailing from CUs in that asset category, none were raised.
Frank J. Diekmann is Cooperator in Chief at CUToday.info and can be reached at Frank@CUToday.info or @FrankCUToday.