There are many parallels in industries and industry sectors.

That is why you find that common branding across so many kinds of things. The customer for one product is the customer for another seemingly unrelated product. Once the customer builds trust in a brand they are likely to extend their consumption of the brand to other products. That is why you see Calvin Klein perfumes and Calvin Klein underwear – different genres of product, but similar customer profiles.

As with branding so too can the problems of one industry be seen in other industries. Equally you can see the struggle of management to solve problems crossing the boundaries from one economic culture to another.

Perhaps the biggest single problem in the world today is the global financial crisis. This is exemplified by what has happened in the banking sector in the US and the UK (and how it plays out in public can be seen in the riots in Greece and in Iceland).

The challenges for the banking sector are particularly multiplied by those things that have been responsible for the incredible growth during the last dozen or more years. That growth came about particularly because of globalization. Globalization was made possible by digitisation. It started with financial data being consolidated into small compressed files and sent round the world using digital telecommunications. It morphed into the development of highly complex algorithms to calculate risk in order to create derivatives - essentially bets on a particular industry sector behaving in a certain predetermined way.

One of the things that I find fascinating is the almost predictable regularity with which the powers that be (members of governments, CEOs of banks and industry, etc) when faced with a challenge that requires a bold response, make decisions that soon thereafter are found to be 180 degrees wrong. Not slightly wrong, but utterly and totally the wrong decision. (Look at this analysis on CNN of government response to the financial meltdown; written by Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz. It totally validates the point.)

I believe that the same holds true for many businesses – and in particular those industries that act together through industry associations.

It seems that when put in the position of being able to exert power authoritatively via an industry group there is a tendency to act in a conservative and low risk manner. That often means taking advice from legal counsel to ensure that a strategy is bullet-proof: i.e no one will sue, the organization will be protected, no one will be hurt, etc…. The amazing thing is that it seems that the ingredients of failure are directly proportional to the slavish desire to minimize risk.

At a macro level we only have to look at what is happening in Gaza. The current Israeli government is about to face an election. The leadership of the opposition is a hard line conservative (Netanyahu). The government has been losing ground. They take a hard line with the Palestinians who have been extremely provocative. The intention appeared to be a desire to produce a result of the population re-electing the incumbents for being tough operators. However, as a direct result of having used weapons like white phosphorous, the government, the IDF, and Israelis of all political persuasions are now having to deal with international condemnation of these policies, which takes up the incumbents time and distracts them from the forthcoming election. It could be seen as being a case of unforseen consequences, that no one could have expected. However, I believe that this scenario was actually totally foreseeable and predictable.

There is a similar aspect of predictability to the actions of the content industry over some years.

They have wanted to shut down illegal file sharing for years ago. As a result they developed an aggressive strategy to identify and sue ordinary folk who were proven to have offered content within P2P networks. The intent of the naming and shaming – and then suing strategy – was to discourage “pirates” in the strongest possible terms.

The industry particularly wanted to shut down Pirate Bay (one of the largest indexing sites in the world for P2P content). The results of the suing of consumers (in the US) was that there was a lot of media coverage of mothers and children who were on welfare being brought to court. It looked like the poor were being kicked by the rich, regardless of the wrongness of what they were doing.

And when stories in the media appeared of Pirate Bay being raided, a generation that was not aware of the brand name, suddenly knew where they could download content for free. Pirate Bay simply moved its servers to a new location. Then the data came out: P2P actually increased. Many people (including us) see the increase being a direct result of media coverage in which the most memorable thing was the Pirate Bay brand.

In other words, the more attention we give a meme, the stronger it becomes. Whether we vilify terrorism or p2p the reality is that they will become stronger as a direct and measurable result.

Think  of the‘70’s –  Who was I who said,“But I didnt inhale”….

In independent research, my colleague, Tom Koltai, has been interviewing people who offer content via P2P networks to try to identify trends in the sector. This research project has been underway for three months now and some of the early data that is being uncovered, we believe, will be of great interest to the content industry and to people generally. (We will be issuing a report once we have sufficient data to be able to deduce that the trends we are seeing are indicative of something important and not just random aberrant behaviour).

However, what we are also interested in is the proposition that in the era of digital communications, the decisions required to create beneficial outcomes for both business and community (what Stiglitz calls “social returns”) require a fundamental shift in thinking, and an understanding of how to qualify the problems rather than just quantifying them.

We are, after all, in unprecedented times.