[March 2021, Issue 3] Should We Do Clubhouse Too After All?

Hello, this is Tetsuya Ashida of ACIDHOUSE, INC..

Last weekend I attended a two-day seminar on coaching techniques by Hideto Tomabechi, Japan's leading figure in functional brain science and coaching.

Unusually for a weekend seminar, both days were held in the evening, and the first day had heavy rain, but many people came to the venue.

What Tomabechi teaches was completely aimed at advanced learners, basically assuming you've read and understood his books, but I was able to gain quite essential, deep information.

I'm convinced this knowledge and experience will undoubtedly make my business and life stronger.

"The best, strongest investment is investing in yourself."

Great figures who left their names in history, starting with Benjamin Franklin and Henry Ford, all said so with one voice.

It's said that when shrewd Jewish merchants were caught in a fire, the first thing they carried out was not money or valuables but "books."

Whatever situation you're in, investing in yourself gives the best return.

Now, it's said that working adults in Japan study among the least in the world.

Conversely, just by building a habit of studying properly, you can outsmart the rest of the crowd.

Moreover, since internet technology has developed considerably, the hurdles of cost and time for studying are far lower than in the past.

In business you're always conscious of competitors, but check not only their services and capital but also whether the people running them are constantly studying.

Even if it isn't the case now, there's no doubt that growth in wealth and intellectual level go together.

Also, don't forget to make what you study not "trivia," "superficial," or "armchair theory," but "essential," "long-term," and "practical".

I won't dig into this point in this space, but just as investments include things that bring returns and things that become liabilities, your choices tie directly to your results, so it's something to be careful about.

Should you do Clubhouse?

The audio social network that was the talk of every quarter from around the end of January: Clubhouse.

It feels like things have settled down a bit recently, but at the time I often got asked, "Should we do Clubhouse (as a business measure)?"

My view is "It's better to do it if you can, but you don't particularly have to."

"It's better to do it if you can" means that "trying it out first" is a very important mindset in doing business.

And if you're lucky, you can also gain a "first-mover advantage."

"You don't particularly have to" means that, especially with online tools, by the time they mature through repeated updates they become "something else," so it isn't too late to start then.

It's not exactly "history repeats itself," but it's easy to understand if you imagine the YouTube platform.

In its early stages, YouTube was a place to upload very private videos, and after that it became a place to secretly find illegal content.

Today, video content is distributed as if producing TV programs, and companies use it as one means of conveying information more vividly than their websites.

It took YouTube over ten years to go from its early stages to its current state.

Of course, the environmental factors are completely different now than back then, so I don't know whether Clubhouse will follow a similar trajectory at the same speed as YouTube, but I think that image is fine.

However, as the research result "The digital audio advertising market will be 1.6 billion yen in 2020 and 42 billion yen in 2025 (Digital InFact)" shows, it's a fact that a wave of audio content is coming.

What matters, I think, isn't knowing "whether you should do Clubhouse," but researching questions like these and thinking them through yourself:

Those are the questions worth answering.

The Pareto principle

In business, you're always dealing with people.

If you want to advance your business more advantageously than anyone, it's an absolute must to know and master the many traits that all humans are influenced by at an unconscious level.

Each time, I'll pick up one of those traits and explain it.

This time I'll take up "the Pareto principle".

Also known as the 2:8 rule, it's a very, very popular law of nature.

According to Wikipedia, the Pareto principle is

"a power law discovered by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. It holds that in an economy, most of the total value is produced by a small portion of the elements making up the whole. It is also called the 80:20 rule or the law of variation."

When you observe all kinds of things, you can see that the distribution of the whole divides neatly into 2:8.

In other words, not everything you try leads to results.

Now, both when I worked for a company and after I went independent and had clients, people have sometimes taken it for granted that "everything I do will suddenly become a big hit."

That never happens.

Even if you spend a lot of money and time, refer to lots of success stories, or get great consulting or coaching, most attempts end in failure.

Conversely, if you mobilize every move you have, 20% of them become breakthroughs.

What leads to a big leap is probably about 20% of that 20% (= 4% of the whole).

In baseball practice there are the "100-ball fungo" and "1,000-ball fungo" drills.

It means that if you practice hitting 100 or 1,000 balls, 20% become hits or better, and about 4% become home runs.

In other words, if you want more results, increasing the number of times you step up to the plate is the minimum condition.

By the way, blogs and YouTube too are said to reach the starting line only after you've uploaded 100 or more.

Noteworthy technology news

A DAO-related bill takes a step forward

The content of the article I'm picking up this time won't click at all unless you know about decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), so if you can, please google DAO.

In the digital world, a transformation "from centralized to decentralized" is underway.

For example, a famous decentralized technology is Bitcoin.

Current legal tender is managed by central banks (the FRB in the US, the Bank of Japan in Japan), but Bitcoin has no administrator and is run openly through a technology called blockchain.

Running Bitcoin requires no servers owned by a particular organization and no particular organization's wishes.

Almost everything around us is managed by particular organizations.

Having administrators creates pyramids, and depending on the administrators' ethics, things could become a dystopia.

The spread of "decentralization" holds the potential to curb dystopias caused by administrators' ethics and to create open organizations, and by extension an open society.

I don't know whether "companies without presidents," "companies without addresses," or "companies that don't go through the Legal Affairs Bureau" will increase, but one thing is certain: the scalpel has begun to cut deep into a distorted society that particular rulers can run as they please.

The shift to "decentralized" is a trend that can't be ignored as the digital world becomes native, so I recommend keeping an eye on the news from here on.

Telework is no problem at all even with postal mail

It's already been a year since COVID, which means it's been a full year since telework went mainstream.

During last April's state of emergency, besides "reluctantly going to the office for hanko seals," "reluctantly going to the office to receive postal mail" stood out.

As for hanko, the government and public agencies changed course afterward, leading to the use of cloud groupware and e-contract services, but it's still not unusual for organizations (especially government ones) to keep sending postal mail by the truckload, which is extremely inconvenient.

So what I recommend is the cloud mail-receiving service atena, which our company also uses.

If you "scan the contents" of received mail with one click, you can check the contents right away.

You can discard unneeded mail, and if you save the scanned data to Dropbox or Google Drive, you can achieve paperless management without effort (it's also stored on atena).

The original mail is sent periodically by Letter Pack to an address you specify, and you can also have it forwarded urgently to any place you specify.

*In our company's case, we scan mail from the National Tax Agency, check with our tax accountant via Slack whether the original needs to be sent, and use this forwarding feature if it does.

With this service, it seems you can handle almost all mail management from anywhere in the world.

Also, though it isn't well known, the reverse of atena, "sending postal mail," can also be done in the cloud, and Japan Post officially provides it through a service called Web Letter.

In the first place, I'd like to avoid printing PDFs and mailing them as much as possible by substituting another form with online tools, but... to raise productivity with telework, you need the mindset of combining tools as much as possible so that everything is completed in the cloud alone, like this.

So, by using atena and Web Letter as a set, I think moving postal mail to telework is no problem.

For exactly the same reason, sending and receiving faxes should also move to the cloud, and those using hardware fax machines would do well to switch early to something like Byosoku FAX.

However, in terms of achieving DX (digital transformation), you must not forget that outdated tools like postal mail and fax ultimately need to be abolished.