R "Ray" Wang on constant curation, learning from private networks, finding temporal patterns, and seeing the impact of trends

“I try to understand temporal patterns. I’m looking for things that are repetitive that I’ve missed. If things aren’t repetitive, I try to find out their dependencies that actually create relationships. If it’s truly ad-hoc, I want to know why are these things completely random?”

– Ray Wang

About Ray Wang

R “Ray” Wang is the founder and chairman of the highly regarded tech analyst firm Constellation Research. He is the author of Disrupting Digital Business and most recently Everybody Wants To Rule The World on the future of business. Since 2003, Ray has delivered thousands of live and virtual keynotes at almost every major tech conference, including Salesforce’s Dreamforce, Adobe Summit, IBM, Mobile World Congress, CES, TedX, and sessions at Davos for various clients.

Ray’s the co-host of the prominent enterprise tech and leadership webcast DisrupTV and frequently appears in major media such as The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg and many others.

Website: raywang.org

Blog: Ray Wang

LinkedIn: Ray Wang

Twitter: Ray Wang

Webcast: DisrupTV

Books

• Everybody Wants To Rule The World
• Disrupting Digital Business

What you will learn

• What is the vital difference between push and pull channels (02:55)
• Where to find emerging data value chains (05:38)
• What is the commonwealth of self-interest (06:58)
• Why you have to get good at finding patterns (07:50)
• What are the different kinds of relationships to look for (09:29)
• What is the process from your understanding to communicating so people who think differently would also understand (11:14)
• Why you need metaphor and analogies to convey emotion, imagination and passion (14:32)
• What are three important information trends to keep your eye on (20:22)
• How to assess the validity of a data source (23:42)
• What to do when the signal doesn’t fit the model (24:33)

Episode Resources

• Post-it Notes
• SWOT Analysis
• LISTSERV
• Dion Hinchcliffe

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Ray, it’s awesome to have you on the show.

Ray Wang: Ross, it’s been way too long, I have not had a chance to get down to Australia. I’d love to, but thanks for having me here.

Ross: You are a prime example of someone who thrives on an enormous amount of information, making sense of, amongst many other things, the edge of enterprise tech and where everything is all going. How do you keep on top of massive information?

Ray: You know what it is? It’s constant streams of information. We are constantly looking for data points, but what we’ve gotten really good at is building ontologies, building filters, building ways of framing, and I think that has helped to be able to handle that type of information overload. Every piece of information that comes to me has a purpose, has a time, has a level of urgency. I categorize everything that way when it comes in. If I get an email and it says, Hey, let’s catch up later this weekend; I’ll probably look at that three days later from now. But if it’s something that’s an urgent deal, like, Let’s go? that’s something I’ll take on right away. If I’m reading something about a futuristic trend that’s happening, like space transportation, I’ll follow it away, saying, Hey, this is going to be related to this other research I’m looking at. It’s constant filing, constant curation, and a constantly sensitive understanding of time and urgency.

Ross: So much to dig into what you’ve said already, but part of it is the distinction between the Push and the Pull. As you get a whole bunch of stuff, which is pushed to you, and you got to set up your filters to be able to assess that. The other is the Pull; you’ll go out and find the things which haven’t landed in your inbox. When we start with the Push, how do you filter things which come into you? You’ve said, you’ve got various ways of assessing those as they come in? Is that all in your email? Or through social filters? What are your incoming channels?

Ray: It’s crazy. There are many channels, Ross. Email is still primary for me; the social networks, whether you’re on Twitter, or whether you’re on LinkedIn, are big feeder sources as well. Then it’s all the private chat groups I’m in right now. I’m in a lot of private chat groups, whether they’re on Signal, WeChat, even on private social networks that are going on. I think it’s those signals that are actually proliferating more than anything else, the public social networks are definitely dying, the private networks are actually growing, and it’s much higher quality information. That’s coming from the Push side.
The Pull side is a little bit different. I think the Pull side is if you know what you’re asking for, you know what to curate. It’s so easy to be able to set up the meetings or set up the conversations, but what you’re missing is that level of serendipity, which you used to get, when you could move around, bumped into someone at a conference, bumped into someone on the way to a conference, have that conversation after someone had spoken, that I’m missing, and that’s been a big piece for the last 18 months, that has hampered my ability to get the signals faster.

Ross: In those private channels, how do you get into the right groups? What are the things you’re finding there that you’re not finding in other places?

Ray: Honestly, I think it’s authenticity, like honest conversations, the ability to go deeper with someone about something, the level of context around a problem, understanding where an exception is occurring, I think I get a lot more fidelity out of those private conversations, or the social networks that are more aligned. They might be affinity based on places you’ve worked, they might be roles or job titles, they might be a topic that people are interested in, they might even be geographic, but I think those are playing a much bigger role than they were about five years ago.

Ross: So not so much on the public social networks anymore?

Ray: There are signals there, but it’s so noisy that sometimes it’s not worth the time.

Ross: Coming back to the Pull, how do you go out and find what’s relevant in that sea of information every day?

Ray: For me, I spend a lot of time talking about business transformation, looking at where the trends are headed, looking at technologies, and understanding policy. For that Pull, it’s really your network. The bigger your network, the more likely you can find someone within that network or at least a couple of degrees of separation. Pull for me, let’s say we were talking about a topic like Hey, what’s going to happen with space transportation, space tourism, or let’s figure out what’s happening with the future of transit like autonomous vehicles, I could probably reach out to about 40, 50 people to have that conversation with. I’d set up a meeting; I’d say, Hey, let’s catch up, what are you seeing? What’s going on? Ideally, what would happen is we’d all be part of some similar type of private networks, where someone would just ping and you get a conversation or return back, like the old Listservs.
That’s actually what it’s like in these private networks today. People just add you to a network or they add you to a group. For example, we just had a healthcare summit, we had 40 top CIOs participating, we just set up a Discord server. That’s as simple as that, and you’re done.

Ross: In this case, it’s knowing who is the right person to reach out to, and they’re the ones that’d be able to point you to the right sources, be able to make sense of that. Of course, this is based on some reciprocity. There’s some reason why they’ll agree to take your call. This is part of that building those people networks.

Ray: Commonwealth of self-interest is popping up there somewhere.

Ross: Describe what do you mean by that?

Ray: It’s in everyone’s best interest. In case you have a question, or you want to know something, or whether it’s a job hunt, or whether it’s a tip, or whether something’s coming your way, there’s enough self-interest for you to be wanting to be part of one of those groups. The value exchange is there.

Ross: Yes. People are building these networks of reciprocity.

Ray: Exactly.

Ross: Latent reciprocity in any case.

Ray: You’re paying it forward at some point.

Ross: Y