Dr Jacqui Taylor is a Cyberpreneur, a Top 10 Global IoT innovator, a Smart Cities Tsar, a UK Science Diplomat, Professor, Aerospace Engineer…
She has an Honorary Doctorate of Science and a top 10 global Internet of Things innovator she doesn’t just predict the future she engineers it using cutting edge web science research. In this episode, she talks about clarifying and demystifying the future for you and spotlighting the megatrends inspiring you to align your organisation to profit from the Internet of Things.
We explore many different areas in this episode including:
- Working as a strategic advisor to governments inc the UK, China
- Advising central banks and organisations such as Unicef
- How her company Flying Binary positively impacted over 90 countries
- Being involved in the project of building the internet of things – which changes our society and the way we live in the world
- Story of discussion with Sir Tim Berners-Lee creator of the internet
- Jacqui is a Smart City Tzar
- Gen Z and the hugely increasing influence they’re having on the economy – the first generation that has been immersed in the web, whereas the Millennials were ‘adaptives’
- AI, AR, VR, GR and how this will emerge in the next few years
- Robots run her office!
- Oculus
- The future of the cybersecurity industry
- Global education
- The amount of Global cooperation that is happening may surprise you
- Working on the Wikileaks project
- Her talk at Davos earlier this year
- How a young boy she mentored became a millionaire by 11
- Do you realise how high a security risk your thermostat might be?
- The Empathy Economy
- Jacqui’s equation, which is her formula for success she uses every day and why most people have at least one component missing
- World Economic Forum research;the foundation for her CyberSmart entrepreneurs success path. and underpins the Empathy Economy
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Transcript:
Tony Winyard 0:00
exceeding expectations, Episode 60 Do you have concerns on cyber security What are your thoughts on AI, AR, VR, GR and many other things. Our guest this week is Dr. Jacqui Taylor. And it’s an amazing episode we cover so many different areas like how the the Internet of Things came about and she was involved that, and some discussions she had with Sir Tim Berners-Lee the creator of the internet. Her work with the Chinese government, with the British government, in Brexit and and many, many more. So that’s this week’s guest: Dr. Jacqui Taylor. This podcast is all about helping you give better experiences to your customers. And with the aim of helping you get better reviews, referrals, recommendations, and re-bookings. If you do like this podcast, it would be fantastic. If you can leave a review for us on iTunes or one of the other podcast platforms. And why not share the episode with someone who you feel may get some particular value from some of the things discussed in this week’s episode.
In today’s edition of exceeding expectations. I am speaking with Dr. Jacqui Taylor. How are you? Jackie?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 1:21
I’m great today. Good to speak to you, Tony.
Tony Winyard 1:24
Where do we find you today Jacqui?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 1:27
I’m in the UK today. And I’m somewhere not far from London.
Tony Winyard 1:35
Because you certainly get about a bit. You’re in many different locations.
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 1:40
I do. I do. Yes. I’m I’m a hotfoot traveller, and which has been a result of my work for the UK. And I’m also a strategic advisor with the Chinese government. So that means I cover a fair portion of the world.
Tony Winyard 1:57
There’s so many places we could start. So let’s go back to what you’re doing now? How did this all this all come about?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 2:07
I think it’s easier to start at the beginning given where I am now because it’s a cycle. And so I’m, I’m an aerospace engineer and my dissertation built the case of British Aerospace, which is our UK aircraft manufacturer to utilise new jet engine technology. And the purpose for designing that new jet jet plane was to solve noise pollution in our cities. And that actually was about focus on people as people. But ironically, that didn’t lead to an engineering career, because that aircraft was hugely successful Off Plan, as we call it, which means people bought it before we built it ever. And it was a Middle Eastern order. So I was a female lead, and I wasn’t able to work on the project because back in the day, and that was not a done thing and the Middle East could say we won’t have her leading it, and so I wasn’t so I am RMD was a pilot friend of mine. And he said to me, an engineer needs to figure out what is going on in that computing department as it was called in those days. And that was where I went. And I actually, literally, that’s one of the first things I want to talk to you about in terms of what our clients call the programme Zero to Hero. Social. Flying Binary is my company. I’m the CEO and co founder of Flying Binary. And we effectively create a wow experience for our customers because we actually are focused on them. All the technology that we build is for them. And the first component of everything we look at, we have an equation where engineers and the first component we look at is opportunity. So when I had that opportunity arise, it did not look as an opportunity. It came disguised as me having the end of my aerospace career but actually what it allowed me to with some really dedicated other engineers and computer folks at time to roll out a brand new approach across the IT industry called software engineering. And it was it was that that gave me my first break, because I launched my first company on the back of that. And I’ve been unemployable for over 40 years now. So that’s sort of, you know, starting there to today, I’m going to flip straight to today. We build; Flying Binary builds the technology for the Internet of Things, I can explain what that is, but essentially, it’s an engineering challenge. So whilst that opportunity looked very much not like an opportunity, when it happened to me all those years ago, the reality of it was, it actually is a full circle, because now I use every part of that engineering background to do what I do. And in fact, most of the, the employees in my company are engineers. My co founder is an engineer.
Tony Winyard 4:57
And so who typically are your clients then?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 5:01
I’m a strategic advisor to the UK government, which has been a very interesting journey for the last three and a half years, as the UK decided to leave the European Union, and I’m looking at new horizons, and which in the Internet of Things, is a complete change to the way the world works. And essentially, I’m also a strategic advisor to the Chinese government, you couldn’t have, you know, from one end of the spectrum to the other in terms of what I do. And the work that we’ve done in Flying Binary has positively impacted 90 nations across the world as we’ve as we’ve rolled out what we do, but with data and our technology, and positively affected over a third of the world’s population. And essentially what we do is we build the Internet of Things and what that is, is, I don’t know if your listeners will know what it is. So I apologise if I’m sort of going a bit too 101 for those that understand, but the reality of it is
Internet of Things is something that the world has never experienced from a technology point of view, lots of things that we all know and do are as a result of a change in technology that’s changed our technology industry. But the Internet of Things is very different. It actually changes our society, it changes the way we work in the world, it changes the way we live in the world. And so, for me, I done some what I did not understand to be this, but I was informed by Tim Berners-Lee, who built the World Wide Web that we built all our online businesses on that it was fundamental websites. And I said, that’s fabulous. What is that? That website thing? And he said, it’s actually what I was building 20 years ago, at the time, this was 2009. And I want your help to build the next 10. Now, there’s not very often that somebody like that says to you, I need your help. So, I went along and essentially that changed my life. perspective on the way the world works, because on the 12th of March 2009, when Tim hosted us at the Royal Society, it was the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web, but only 18% of was online. So the conversation we’re having today could not have taken place. Because that vision that Tim had 20 years before in CERN, we created the world wide web was yet to be realised. And so the reality of it is the research I’ve done that I did not understand why I thought what I was doing was pursuing a passion of mine, which was to understand how our young people learn. And I had a cohort of 1000 young people in something called Generation Z. So Generation Z if you’re not aware of that cohort of young people are the ages 26 to 16. If any of you are listening, well done for listening and auditory way I know how hard that is. But for you, that’s what we started on our mission in 2009 to be technology to leverage the talents of generations that because as a cohort, there is a very different set of people than have ever inhabited the earth. And, and when we started out in 2009, to do this, this web science, which I didn’t even know what that was. And if you don’t know what it is, it doesn’t matter because Tim made it up. But it’s what we call what we need to do in order to make technology enable what we need. So Tim founded the World Wide Web, because it was his passion to help humanity find its own truth. That’s a very simple way of encapsulating something quite complicated of what he did with the web. And my passion, which is the second part, the second component of the equation. Now I talked to you about opportunity, which often does not come dressed as opportunity as it didn’t for me. I found my passion because I understood this Generation Z cohort that I was working with, I built an IT platform For that GCSE and GC examinations, because they were there was a phenomenon that was going on with me locally that I’d been asked to take a look at, where I realised this was a different group of young people. Now, I probably should have had a clue on that because our son is 26 today, and he is the first part of that cohort of Gen Z he was a very, very different human growing up, he had some amazing abilities, but he didn’t fit. So if you happen to be in a square peg in a round hole, it could well be there’s a really good reason for that. But my passion that having understood these young people in their talent; what Tim had asked us to do in 2009 was how do we build technology? What is the technology? What do we do to get these these young people’s talents to the world? And actually that was my passion because these people are incredible. And, and if you haven’t come across Gen Z, and you have actually or if you haven’t, get onto YouTube, Because Greta Thunberg, who is a passionate young lady who addressed the United Nations at 16, and effectively laid down a very coherent argument backed by science as to why climate change happened and has to be now. She’s Gen Z. So if you haven’t seen Greta speak about the the space we’re in now, I really do ask you to look at that. And so from that, that that is my work today, except it’s moved on it moved on in January. So we may want to cover that next, Tony, I don’t want to keep talking if you’ve got questions, but that is my work to bring technology to be enabler for the talents of us all, to unleash our magic, really.
Tony Winyard 10:44
And so when you say, you know, so you were helping both the British government and the Chinese government as well, and is that in the same capacity in the same sort of way? were you doing very different things for
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 10:54
all very different things. China is a very different world. It was complete… you know, I had no idea, I’d never been to China be first time I was invited by. and China has its own view of the world, it’s very inward looking. And that’s not just because of its philosophy and its culture, it just generally is very inward looking, because it’s a huge place. And in each of the regions I work in a variety of the regions are very, very different. So somebody says, “Oh I’ve been to China”, I think you’ve been to an element of China, how much of China do you know because they’re very, very different regions, and they’ve got some autonomy, but equally the philosophies of a communist regime and the UK regime, very different, you know, again, ends of different ends of the spectrum. But the Chinese actually understand some of the technology that we build. And they came across my work in 2014, while I was working for as an independent ministerial advisor to the UK government, and they took that and they ran with it, and then they completely ran out of steam in 2016 and said, “that doesn’t work, you know?” And I said, very interesting. It doesn’t when you do it like that. So we had, you know, a common discussion and they said, Well, we don’t actually understand what you’re talking about, and how the UK has got the same start point, and we’ve ended up in a different place. So I was appointed for two years to help them work that out. And it’s, it’s all around how does technology need to be deployed to be put in place for us? Because it’s actually about us, it’s about our clients. It’s about the society that we are creating. And so you know, it’s a very different space than what I do in UK which is not driven by the same levers.
Tony Winyard 12:41
And so in in China, is it related in any way to education or not at all?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 12:46
No, not really. And they are looking to effectively… in China. Expand the world’s knowledge about what China can do. And that is very much Chinese perspective. And the reality of it is, that’s, you know, a good goal. But they the one thing that they needed my help with specifically was, they are rebuilding across China, the places where people live. And so they’ve got a massive programme of 600 cities, that they are changing all across China. And that was the thing that wasn’t working. So I’m the world’s first Smart Cities Tzar, if you’ve never heard of Smart Cities, they’re the future, future business hubs of the world. And, and so it depends on which country you’re talking about. And it depends on which part of the country sometimes as to how mature that is, but essentially, whatever you do for your job now, whichever customers you serve, then the Smart City changes across the world for the Internet of Things will change that. So it might be our customer, our central banks, we actually work for the Bank of England, for example. Our customers might be companies like UNICEF, because we have a very much a social direction on what we’re doing. Because our agenda at Flying Binary, if we were to pare it down right to the bottom of it, it’s about inclusion. It started off with the inclusion of Gen Z and unleashing their talents. But actually, the digital changes we have across the world, on average will exclude between 10 and 20% of any population across the world, either by challenge because for whatever reason, they can’t. And that might be an accessibility issue, or by choice, they don’t want to be connected. So the Internet of Things is something they they deliberately avoid. For us that’s not good enough for offline buying me to say well, that’s, you know, we leave them behind. So we have an inclusion agenda very much believe in the diversity agenda that is sweeping across obviously being female. And but the reality for us is the technology if it’s going to enable what we do as humans in the I think it needs to be able to be leveraged by us all. So we have a different 80% of the world, largely, we can do everything I’ve just described. And they as they decide to get on board and online, and do their business online, live their lives online that we find 20% of the world that’s not quite true of. So that has to be treated differently, because those are the people effectively, currently disinherited and may continue to be disinherited by this change of the internet of things that we talked about. And I want to introduce one concept for to frame the things I talked about in terms of how to approach whatever you do as business into this new world. I want to describe, a quite a global level because obviously, I don’t know your listeners and what they do, what their you know, what their passion is and what they spend their time doing and what their ambitions are. But if I was to contrast what I’m talking about now, I call it the Empathy Economy. I launched that concept at Davos 3000 world leaders in January 2019. And that’s in in contrast to the systems that our businesses running today. And the businesses that run today run in a competitive environment. Once technology is connecting us online, and the majority of the world connects online, we just read about 50% of the world that takes advantage of that. Now, it will be a collaborative fabric, not a competitive one. So it’s a fundamental change in the way we do business. And so one of the things that I would say to anybody listening is the empty economy is a change of mindset as well as a change of plan. And I’ve been working with 27,000 CXO since December 2016. Not all same time, but it’s built over to around about October 2018 to actually help them understand what that meant for their organisations for their people. And I’m changing the the whole way in which we approach change with our organisations, and even changing what those organisations do for the instead of things. So it’s a huge, it’s a human change. But it’s a change at a societal level is not just the technology.
Tony Winyard 17:16
And so with all of these, these changes that you were talking about, how do you think it will change things over, say, the next 5-10 years?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 17:25
Well, I think if I type the third part of my equation, which is vision, the vision that inspired me was I could see how I could engineer a future to bring the talents of Generations Z to our web world, but I had absolutely no clue how to do it. So I walked out the room citing that day and my team said, fantastic. Where do we start? And I said, I have no idea. But I do know that that’s what the future holds. Now we are today in 2019 where 40% of the world’s economic power is influenced by Generation Z so in just 10 years, Generations Z, who were 16 at the time that I did this work now at 26 are influencing 40% of economic power. What does that mean? That actually means for most organisations, most businesses and most of our careers, there is a whole cohort of clients and customers that need to be served in a very, very different way. And so for me, it’s about how much of that moves forward. They will they, the social generations, let me just backtrack a little. So I’m Generation X. And so the Baby Boomers which we all know about, Generation X, which followed, then there was Generation Y, which the start of the new cohorts that started to be connected online. Then the Millennials which I expect most of your listeners know about. The Millennials are followed by Generation Z, and the difference between the two is that Generations Z are the first generation that have been immersed on the web. They’ve grown up, they’re completely competent with it. Lots of people call the Millennials, the digital natives, not really, they’re adapted, but Generation Z knew nothing, nothing else. They were effectively they were born the year the web went live in 1993. So by the time I started my work, they were at 16 coming into the end of their early education system and coming into our workforce, 10 years on 40% of our economic power is in their hands. So that’s a massive shift. Now, the bit I need to tell you about is why you know, to properly answer your question, in Davos this year, what I said was, but that’s not where it’s going to stay. Because generation said once their talents are being unleashed across the world, and we’re seeing that transformation I’ve already mentioned greater, but you’ve probably you and your listeners got probably a whole host of people going on Yes. Now you’ve said that, you know, I’ve got customers that. And so I realised that I’ve got to adapt what I do for what people are asking me to do. Gen Alpha. Generation Alpha follow Generation Z, and they’re the children of Millennials. They actually are a fully immersive generation. So I have young people as young as 4 coding in Python, and creating games. My youngest entrepreneur, which I’ve mentored is 11, he made his first £16 million at 11. So they literally rewire our world without any reference to the systems that we we know about, and the way in which we currently serve our customers. So I think that the impact Gen Z have had 40% in that 10 years, Gen Alpha, I know already will be far quicker than that. It won’t take 10 years. In fact, as I say, I’ve got a five year old who will tell you that it will, by the time he’s eight, and the thing about them is that They literally don’t start thinking about what they do from the, from the place that we imagine. So they have a completely different vision for this world. So I do think the acceleration, we talk about the technology, because Gen Alpha will effectively have a first generation that actually leverage the Internet of Things will be much, much quicker. So we’re talking about five years for dramatic changes now, not 10 would be my view. And I know that because we’re building that technology already. Our technology is already nine years in advance of what the world’s doing. And that’s not to mention our research project, which is working on 2400. And they’re actually off in space that lot, my lot are cosmologists and astrophysicists and what have you, they’re doing that piece, but I’m still on planet with what I’m doing. But I already know that, that five years from now, it’ll be a vastly different place.
Tony Winyard 21:56
And so when you were talking about those things that are going to be happening So I presume you’re talking about, you know, a lot of things such as artificial intelligence and all the, you know,
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 22:06
you’re thinking of VR and AR,
Tony Winyard 22:09
VR and AR Yeah,
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 22:11
and it’s robotics, we have robots that run our office because we don’t need people to do jobs that are too menial. You know, some of the robots do those jobs, we have real people to do quite difficult things. And so yes, we’re talking about technology that surrounds us. And most of that technology is already with us, but not necessarily in a connected way. Whereas actually it will be more of an immersive way. So Tony in terms of talking about AR, VR or GR as it’s called the general sort of element of that because it’s all merging together these days. And that is a really good way of looking at it because that next five years is that that immersion experience and Generation Alpha are an immersion generation wherever generations that are a kinesthetic generation. They, they are haptic in the sense that they touch things. And they are not visual learners, they’re not auditory learners, they literally are, you know, they get involved with it their whole bodies involved, whereas Gen Alpha are very much an immersion generation. So everything is an experience of which they’re the centre of and it’s an around them. So something like Oculus if anybody listening as ever experienced Oculus is amazing gaming platform, but you are in the centre of it and you control the entire universe. That is the way generation alpha work. So from a client point of view, and they what they need is something radically different. We’ve we’ve served generations that always until January this year, when everything has moved for us into a generation alpha and space. But there’s Zero to Hero flight mentoring programme that I talked about in the beginning, is all about meeting the needs of the client. Not the need of the company. I mean, obviously, like any company with focused on profit, but we have an amazing ability to generate our own R&D, research and development. So we have long term projects with governments and banks and people like that, that pays a fair amount money. And we we channel most of that into research. So for us, it’s about understanding how we best serve. So if I can bring it into a little bit of realism, what that actually means is anybody who’s listening, if you understand that, perhaps I mean, again, I don’t know the age range if anybody’s listening, but you’ll have come across in work customers who just expect a more personalised way of dealing with things. What we do at Flying Binary is everything we do is a self service model. So the fact that we are it people is actually irrelevant. The technology is the is the bit that we want to slide away and make an immersion experience. And actually, for our users that use our technology, they have it in their hands. They don’t need an army of IT people that possibly have some robots on the back end, they don’t know about what the reality of it is, it’s theirs.
And so they whatever expertise they’ve got, they use it with our tools, and it’s built for humans to do work that it folks would have done, you know, 10 years ago or something like that. And so for us, the Zero to Hero flight management programme came about because people who were prepared to learn new technology, and prepared to explore how you might put it into practice in whatever they’re doing to serve their clients had become the heroes of their companies. And often they’ve ended up on the board. But that’s because we’ve enabled that because our direction is to give them tech tools that were the tech just fades, the tech just gives them exactly what they need to do to to bring their talents to the fore. That’s because we’ve got enough Gen Z, and that’s the way Gen Z work. But it works for all generations. It’s not just, you know, our younger people can use them. And it takes us a little bit longer. And there’s a little bit more, I’m not sure about this, you know, if they refer an older cohort, but the results that they get when they become the domain expert and the technology working for them, they love that. And I think in terms of creating that, while experience for your customers, that’s the thing we’ve done, and that’s the thing we love the most, the fact that they can get on where their second line support, they’re literally making changes with technology for themselves.
Tony Winyard 26:39
Earlier on you talked about education, we’ve been talking about technology and so on. So how is education changing?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 26:47
Well, that’s a really interesting one because we’ve done a lot of very detailed work in education because that’s where I started. So the reason I started this whole thing was to give Generations at a level playing field in their examinations, and effectively ended up building a technology profile platform for them to use when they were 11 every day in the classroom that they could then use a further examination, we get a to grade uplift at GCSE so that when they’re 16, they can usually get two extra grades by this approach. And because the technology works for them, and then when they take their, you know, pre University exams, again, I’m not sure where people are in the world listening. But when they’re 18, usually a one grade uplift on what that gives them as an opportunity to take an entrepreneurial route or to take a further education route into universities. And so for education, our young people particuly our Generation Z, they’re increasingly not going to university because they’re already working in the world, when they’re, you know, not usually as young as five but James’s is a little bit of an exception, not necessarily as young as 11 when they’re inventing something Then, you know, as Tony did, but because they are already experiencing problems in the world that they think will just fix that, because that’s how they think they’re actually doing that. So often times education is still a Victorian linear system where we’re all expected to do the same thing of quite frankly, we have an increase, certainly in the UK and increasing number of young people who after they’re 14, they don’t bother to stay, because they found something else to do, or they just don’t turn up. And so for them, they get them learning from, you know, other places, and not necessarily great places. It depends what they’re looking to do. But they learn as a cohort, they have the, you know, they work with one another, they’re very much that collaborative generation that I talked about, and so often they switched off from school. Now, lots of people still go through the standard education system, but it is now at the place where I’m talking about the Empathy Economy. It’s not going to serve them. It really isn’t going to serve They’re going to need completely different things. So this equation I’ve talked to you about, I’ve given you this sort of opportunity piece, you know, when it comes wrapped in something to you, which might be a stroppy customer, it might be something that’s failed or a career path, that’s ended, have a look at that and see whether, in fact, that’s an opportunity to adapt to this new world. I talked about passion, because actually having something that you passionately believe in that you can, you can move forward with is the key. And then talk about having a vision about how that gets delivered. All those three components of what actually is happening with our young people today in the education system, because those three things which we use every day at Finary Binary, gives you the basis of an entrepreneurial mindset. So a portion of my work, just a few days in a month, or like I just have had 6000 people at the big Excel Exhibition Centre in London. We teach what we call Intrepreneurial Mindset, which means if you don’t happen to have a business right now, lots of those things are actually applicable to you. And if you can serve whoever your client or customer is with those three things, doesn’t matter where you are or what you do, you will be that that hero you will have gone from, I don’t expect your listeners are a zero. But you’ll have gone from something that didn’t serve you, where you are serving in a wider way. And I think the thing about education is, that’s what Gen Z to do it anyway. So we have, you know, Generation Z that are leaving school at 18 now, and are not going on to university, they’re going into a more of an applied education system. And essentially, there’s been maybe between 16 and 18, a debate about whether that serves them either. Our education system really has dramatically got to change.
Tony Winyard 30:50
And some of the things you’re saying now, are you referring more to how things are in the UK or globally?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 30:56
No, I mean, as my Cities Tsar I get a chance to to look at this at a global level, and also I’m a science diplomat for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and one of the things I did was speak at Davos this year about the future of the cybersecurity industry. And it’s given me the opportunity to launch an initiative on behalf of the UK, where this collaborative, Empathy Economy that I’m talking about, has been launched initially with our Commonwealth family as we leave the European Union and we look at a new future, which is delivering the Internet of Things and to working with collaboratively with those nations, and to assist them and to be part of the defeating of global corruption. And now wider and 79 countries wider than the 53 Commonwealth countries now, about the way we will collaborate to this new future. So I see this all over the world. And when I say all over the world, I spent the last three years of 2018 in Russia, I’ve been to Iran. As I said, I’ll be off to the Middle East next. So, the theme of Davos this year was globalisation and the fact that the world is ever more connected. And how does that mean we leverage what we do with technology? And how does that change our society. So at a very deep level and at a very top level, the world is waking up to that 50% of the world online gives us many, many more options to sort of serve the clients or customers that we that we do serve.
Tony Winyard 32:38
And from what you were saying it would seem like, I could have misread this, but it seems that there’s far more cooperation and collaboration going on globally than the media portrays
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 32:51
Well, there you have it, that is such a good point. So one of the things when I say to my team when I worked at the Royal Society in 2009. And they said what we’re gonna do I said, I have no idea. I was one of the 250 Tech City founders. Tech Cities that was the first virtual city on earth that looked at this whole thing, and was the number one digital hub in the world until last year. That actually isn’t a real problem because there’s 250 Tech Cities founders, there’s 220 of us left. But we founded we seeded 5.6 million companies in the UK. So the UK is a very powerful entrepreneurial engine. And as one of the hundred most powerful entrepreneurs in the UK, I’ve been able to be part of that repositioning. And the thing about this whole piece is because we have unlocked the entrepreneurial element of our country, and we’ve had huge success, we now have not just one virtual city we have 33 in the UK it’s quite a small place. But there is an entrepreneurial mindset that exists here. We’re able to help other countries look at that. But the interesting thing for me was what did I do first? Well, the first thing I did, to put this Empathy Economy opportunity to work was I met with a fellow journalist, well I say a fellow journalist, I was not a journalist at the time, who was head of one of the key blogs on the Guardian newspaper. He said, I love your work. I said I love your work. We said we should work together and had a chat. And then we did we worked on something which happened to be the WikiLeaks project. But we told the world a very different storey than all too hard you’ve heard about, and not that work today is generated an entire industry. So from Simon and myself, so I’m just now head of news at Google. And we created a data journalism industry, which is 7 million strong across the world. So we seeded that all of that back in 2014, and you’ll have heard of Panama Papers and Paradise Papers and the Opiate scandal And the fourth one that hasn’t broken yet. But as data journalists as journalists and investigative journalists, really, we’re actually telling the truth to the world, which is creating a new fabric of understanding. And personally in Finary Binary, we have 34 million people that consume those stories, but they consume those stories to help us. So if I need to know about the tsunami in Japan; the tornado in Japan that’s coming over, I actually have, I’m able to connect with people on the ground in Japan and ask them questions about what’s actually going on, because that’s what we’re able to do now. And the thing about journalism is, investigative journalism always sets a context and one of our more powerful journalists and I won’t mention any names said to me, okay, you, you and your it’s going to work like this and Empathy Economy and all of that. How come I given who I am, don’t know the things you do. And I’m actually in the normal, you know, top of the range media. And I said to him, David, I won’t give you any clues as to who it is, David, what do you pay for you? Where do you? Where do you pay for your news? How much do you pay for your news? And he goes, but I’m; I said, I know who you are, but how much do you pay for your news. He said, Well, I get it from my mates and my colleagues. I said, I pay for my news. I pay to support investigative journalists, and mainly pay for news that I disagree with. Journalists I disagree with, there’s a few journalists who I think are amazing. I pay for them as well, but to consume what they write, but most of the payments we make in our company we all have our own budgets for this, is to learn from people who disagree with us to find out what they might know that we ought to investigate. So I think the one of the things I see is a change across the world as millennials have across the world. We’ve lost the opportunity for debate And we’ve become quite homogenous in our views. And no more has that been true since 2016, with the changes, in the democracies in the UK in the US, where we’ve had polarised debates, but they’re not really been debates. We haven’t shared views. We haven’t tried to understand the other side. And so I think that journalism itself unless it’s investigative journalism and unless it’s the data journalism, that is bringing you things like Panama Papers, is not looking at things in a deep enough level. It’s quite superficial. But then, let me give you a stat, in Europe where I work as an Internet of Things leader, just setting up the new agenda for Europe, and 51% of our European population consumed free news. Now, I’d ask your listeners, where do you get your news from? And how much do you pay for it? Because I think it’s a fallacy to expect something that we get for free to be anything other than an opinion that has possibly an agenda behind it that doesn’t agree with ours.
Tony Winyard 38:04
And do you see that changing?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 38:08
Well, certainly as journalists, we aim to change it as investigative journalists, we aim to change it. And I would say that 34 million people across the world that consume what Finary Binary does, which is only one node on those 7 million nodes that are connected across the world, means that there are many people out there that do want to be able to look at the world in a way that you serve them up the story, they’ll make their own mind up. So there’s many ways that that’s actually perpetuating itself across the world. But one of the changes alongside the economic leverage that Generations Z have is that they don’t work as a homogenous cohort, they don’t use that hive mind, the way in which they check things is very different. So the way in which they consume content and what they believe is very different. And so as well as influencing economically they’re actually influencing some of the debate as well. So I think that will see that shift as we go into 2020 more dramatically than we do today.
Tony Winyard 39:06
So for people who are listening are thinking, yeah, actually all of the news I consume is free. And thinking is there an alternative? So what would you say to them? How would they be able to change that?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 39:18
Well, for me, I always say to people, and cast around until you find somebody that resonates with you. The whole thing I’ve described since 2009, is called as web scientists, we call it Web3.0. It’s the web of resonance. So is it something that’s in Web3.0? If it resonates with you, as a human, it is. So start to look at where else you might consume, don’t just go online, look at printed media still look at, you know, apps and what have you, and find the journalists; it’s up to you. I find the journalists that disagree with me because it’s like, what do you think you know that I don’t know. I’d like to understand that. That’s because I’m an investigative journalist and so I’m basically quite nosy. And so it’s like, oh, let me open up a curiosity is a is a great trait to have. But it might work if what you’re going to do is look for news that reinforces your view, you might as well not pay for that because, quite frankly, you could just consume that for free online just find the things that are putting out what could arguably in the fake news arena be called propaganda, which just happen to coincide with your view. But I mean, I went originally back to the sort of the staple national newspapers the respected newspapers, you know, like the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, particularly because another journalist there and periodicals, like The Economist and things like that, where people are actually; they have a large staff of people that literally keep a finger on the pulse. I don’t always agree with them I particularly don’t agree with some of the things they’re doing, but they will allow me to explore things that I wouldn’t normally come across. And so each of our employees has a budget to spend on things like that, because it’s important that we, as an inclusion agenda, see the wider picture. We can’t afford to be too singular and too vertical in our thoughts really.
Tony Winyard 41:18
Jacqui, time is flying by here. What are your thoughts on exceeding expectations?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 41:27
Well, I think that we can all look again, you know, those three elements of the equation I gave you at what we can all do, so starting now, starting tomorrow, and to say, what we bring, our talents that we bring to what we do. And, essentially, that’s one client at a time, that’s one project at a time. That’s one beyond the passion side of things. It might be a particular project you can’t quite get to. So it’s something you’ve got on the back burner that you’re going to keep alive. But I would say that there’s one note of caution that I haven’t mentioned yet. I briefly mentioned I shared at Davos where we move into Gen alpha and all of that. But the reality of the change to Gen Alpha is something else entirely that has happened. So I was speaking about the future of the cyber security industry at Davos. And it was a very short talk I said there wasn’t one and then proceeded to drop a great big rock in the pond about why Generation Z are pointing us to a new opportunity and what Gen Alpha had to say about it. But as a result of having that opportunity to be at Davos and to be now connected as part of the World Economic Forum team, I wanted to give your listeners; while I’ve given a really, hopefully, an exciting and mind opening view of the future. There is one piece that I haven’t yet said, which is really important, which is around the cyber security landscape. And quite frankly, people like me are only 8% of the world that look at this every day. But we largely have no business experience, I’m quite an exception that does what I do. And yet your listeners are of one kind or another are business through and through. And those two things don’t meet. And we have a genuine problem now. Cyber attacks are the second global risk to all our businesses and data fraud is the seventh, and it’s climbing. So from a World Economic Forum research, we’ve literally just got the figures through, and the annual cost of cyber crime is increasing. And so just between 2017 and 18, which is where the research was, the cost increased by 12%, on top of what we already have. So one of the things I wanted to draw attention to all of this is, as we connect our society as we talk about, you know, what we might do to serve and create that more exceptional experience, which I’ve largely spent time talking about, the caveat is, we need to have this in mind. And I just want to give you the top level view from the World Economic Forum. This whole research piece is a really complicated piece of research, but it’s a global view across 141 countries. My work so far, has only covered 90. And the technology risks. The whole technology push that I talked about, is in the top five in every one of those countries, every country sees this as a risk and doesn’t know what to do about it. And the economic impact of that 12% increase across all of those sectors within all of those countries, is huge. And so, even the seven largest economies in the world, which are the US, China, Japan, Germany, UK, France, and India, cyber is the most pressing risk because those are the biggest economies. And those are the ones that cyber criminals are about.
And so what I want to say to to everybody that’s listening is have that in your mind that the figures are increasing. And that means that it becomes all of our perspective. It becomes part of what we all do. And I wanted to bring it a little bit closer to home as well, because from the Internet of Things point of view, I’m sat in my studio here talking to Tony. And I have, I’m just quickly looking at my list here. I have apart from two, three things. I have all of these risks sat within, I don’t know, well within my house, and the home automation that’s happening individually, you know, different devices that we’re bringing home are our biggest risk. The number one risk to our homes are our thermostats and those being hacked. And then second one is our alarm system, both of mine are enabled, obviously ours is slightly different But then the third one is smoke detector all the way through to the top 10 risk and number 10 risk is you’re lighting. So I think one of the things to stay in what we’re all doing about creating exceptional experiences, we must have a mindset that looks to that cyber risk that’s created around whatever we’re doing. Because one of the things I tell you about our customers in that Zero to Hero programme that they say, because they have Flying Binary, who has their back on this one, that’s another reason they say that they’re the hero when they work with us, because actually, some of this stuff is complicated and they have this with us. Now I know this is likely to be I don’t know about yourself, Tony, but for your listeners going huh, What? So I’ve asked my team to pull together these numbers because I just blah, told you everything. But I’ve actually brought together both the business risk and the home risk because we’ve all got our own places we live and we need to think of it at home as well as at work, I’ve given Tony a link that he can share with you. So you can get this and have a look at it. So with everything I’ve painted about, creating that exceptional experience, there is one piece that needs to be almost the caveat, which is around and when we’re doing that are we doing about the risk around cyber and hopefully that gives people something that they can confound their colleagues with. They can talk to their boss about, but also think about how they can help with that. Because the one thing we know about cyber criminals is, community defeats cyber criminals, as we all get what we call cyber smart. And we’re launching a membership around this so that entrepreneurs get access to this information on a regular basis. But as we all get cyber smart, that actually disinherits cyber criminals. And so I think that that’s the key thing that I would say that wraps this whole thing together. And I believe everybody can contribute towards that positively. So we actually have a safer world for us all.
Tony Winyard 48:14
So if people want to get more educated on some of those things you mentioned; they would go to your Flying Binary site, or where would they go to?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 48:22
Well, you see, this is a tricky one because obviously, we don’t want the criminals going there. So I’ve given the download link to you, which obviously goes to your community. For the moment I have a page on Facebook called Cyber Smart Entrepreneurs. And if you connect with me there we’ve also on the download I’ve given you with all the numbers; We’ve got Twitter and LinkedIn and all of those things you can connect with me there. I will be sharing how they can get the wider piece. But in the meantime, I’m putting out this information to everybody. So for example, if you’re an Android phone user and you are not aware of the Joker malware that happened. That is literally raiding your credit card then there’s information on that. We know now we thought there were 200,000 people affected. We know now there’s 470,000 people affected. And I have a whole set of people contacting me saying, Do you know you’re the only person that could tell us what to do to stop the criminals raiding our credit cards, because even our handset providers, our carriers, couldn’t tell us how to switch it off. We have made those things available on our Facebook page of Cyber Smart Entrepreneurs. And then we will be launching something where you can get the deeper dive stuff and get advice that’s specific to your own business. And at the moment, we’re waiting to get beyond Brexit. But we’ll be launching that if not before Christmas, be in the new year, where you’ll be able to get access to that and the criminals won’t.
Tony Winyard 49:55
All those links you mentioned will be in the show notes. So anyone who’s listening that didn’t quite catch that, all of that is in the show notes, which you’ll find below the episode. So if people want to find out more about you, Jacqui, where would they go to?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 50:09
Well, again, in the download I’ve given you I’ve actually got links on there. So you can click on that, and you’ll get my personal accounts, Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook. Would be delighted to connect with anybody and answer any questions? Okay.
Tony Winyard 50:24
And just before we finish you mentioned to me that there was a quotation you quite like. do you want to tell us about that?
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 50:30
Yeah. So for me when we think about; before we had the Flying Binary Zero to Hero programme that was one of our banking customers who said, this is just awesome what you folks do? I’ll just take a couple of minutes to tell Christopher’s storey. So Christopher was one of the people who’s just massively intrigued by what we we’re doing as part of the banking change. And he would haunt my team and he would be having his lunch with them. People are going Who is this guy? I’m like, I don’t know, he’s from somewhere in the bank, but he just loves what you do, and he’s asking a tonne of questions. And one day he sat down. He said, I worked something out. I said, Oh, yes. He said, I’ve worked this out, and everybody around the table went quiet. And they went, say that again. And he said, I’ve realised, and actually, because he’d been immersed in the change that we were doing. And he’d sort of seen what we were doing as an opportunity. He was quite passionate about listening. But he said, there must be something in this that I know, Christopher knows. Because you don’t actually know banking and what I’m doing in this bank. So I have a vision that I can take what you’re doing, and use this entrepreneur mindset. You tell me happens and come up with something. And that led to that company landing £13.6 billion business. So Christoph is not now some backroom guy that nobody knows. And so that came. That’s where the Zero to Hero Flying Binary programme came from because it when people hear about the story they go, wow. And this happened to me. But before that happened before that whole thing came about while we were still digging the trenches for what we do. And in 2015 I believe, a friend of mine; because I I used to keynote with Steve Wozniak- co founder of apple. And a friend of mine in Sweden said, you have to see this, you know, he said, you just have to, and it was Steve Jobs, his Stanford address to the graduates and it’s called on YouTube, “Stay hungry, stay foolish”, and that encapsulates customer service for me, because it’s all about being able to serve, staying hungry to see what you can do and how your talents bring to the fore. And staying foolish when people disregard you or they think you didn’t matter, like Christoph, you just absorb it. You just do what you’re doing on one day. It’s you that comes up with that nugget of gold, that quite frankly, none of my team and nobody else in that bank could have come up with. But because he’d actually applied that equation, and I mentioned, and just pursued it with passion, but he stayed hungry and he stayed foolish and really, for me, if ever I get the experience where it’s like, oh, that didn’t go so well, or that person was really not nice to me. I watch that video. So that to me, is the ultimate sort of customer service quote, Stay Hungry Stay Foolish.
Tony Winyard 53:32
Jacqui, it’s been a pleasure. There was so many more questions I wanted to ask but time just wasn’t on our side so but Yes. Thank you for sharing all of that. And I’m sure a lot of people will be checking out some of the links that you mentioned. And yeah, best of luck with everything that you do.
Dr. Jacqui Taylor 53:51
Thank you, Tony, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you and your community. I’d love to hear if you get any Feedback from this I’d love to hear what everybody’s doing with it, because it’s those changes in that, you know the exceptional, experience that is changing our world and, and welcome to the Empathy Economy, everybody. Thank you, Jacqui.
Tony Winyard 54:17
Next week, Episode 61 is with Trish Springsteen. She is a mentor, a speaker, an author and she is Australia’s leading expert on empowering introverts. So that’s quite an interesting episode next week with Trish Springsteen, a distant cousin of someone you may have heard of. Hope you have a fantastic week, why not share the episode with anyone you know, who may get value from some of the content in this week’s episode, especially the cyber security section, which most people will find some value from. It’d be great if you can leave a review on iTunes or one of the other podcast platforms. Be completely honest to what you feel about the podcast. I’m not asking for it to be five star although that would be fantastic. And hope you have a fantastic week and see you next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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