Mike Saunders — Entrepreneur, Digital Crusader, Author

It is what's involved, and another great guest. I have been looking forward to speaking to this gentleman, purely because I think he's gonna be able to answer some of the questions that I have. And who am I speaking about? It is Mike Saunders. His recent book called Human-Centric Technology Fails Unless It Means Something To Someone. Hello, Mike, how are you doing? - I'm good, thanks, and yourself? - Yeah, I can't complain, you know. We carry on, we're doing what we love, so that's always a good thing. Mike, let's start out, you currently own a company, and run a company called DigitLab, if I'm not mistaken. - That is correct. - All right, so tell me, I'll have to find out a little bit more about my guests, and get a little bit of insight into who they are, and what led them to where they are at this current moment in time. So tell me a bit about Mike. Give me some history, born, bred, where, and how did you get into this whole digital side of things? - Yeah, sure. So I'm a Durban boy, born and bred. Still sort of based here in Durban. And pre-COVID spent most of my life traveling around the world to see clients, and spent a lot of my time in Johannesburg because of that as well. And just being, to be honest, really, really lucky to be able to do what I do.

And that is is that our business is all about helping businesses transform their businesses into a digital age, to take a lot of their innovation cycles and their marketing cycles, and move them into the digital arena. So that sounds very fancy, but essentially what we do is we help businesses outsource their innovation cycles, and we help businesses outsource their digital marketing, so that we can help them kind of succeed in that space on their terms. So that's kind of our work and-- - You make it sound so easy, this whole digital marketing thing. (laughing) Then we get onto the social media and the importance of that. And I sort of sit and go, all right, I don't know about this fourth industrial revolution thing. But anyway, we might be able to touch on some of that a little later on, but before we get there, this is not your first book. - No, it's not. You got another two prior to this, I believe, the five-year mark and something called Renown. - That's correct, yes. - Okay, so obviously that wasn't enough. What led to human-centric? (laughing) - Sure, so I'll take you through the journey. So what happened was a couple of years ago, my mentors and the team that kind of supported me as a consultant in the industry, they turned around to me and said, so when's your next book?

You've got to be writing, you need to be putting stuff out there. And along that same line, I had been thinking to myself that I wanted to kind of upgrade the level of content that I was producing in the market around kind of the things that I had in my mind. And I said to these consultants, I said to them, the problem that I have is that the book I want to write isn't the book that I think everybody is expecting from me. So at the point I'd spent five, six years in the digital industry, we had built a good reputation, we had executed some really great projects, we had some good flagship things that were taking place. And people were looking at this brand, this personal brand of Mike Saunders and kind of going, this digital expert, we'll listen to what he has next. But I didn't really feel that at the time I had anything new to contribute to the digital conversation. I had done a lot of reading, picked up on a lot of things that were going on, but I didn't feel like there was a new element that I was able to bring to the industry. And so, but what I was excited about doing was writing about my entrepreneurial journey. I'd been in the business just over five years at the time. And I just loved being an entrepreneur and I loved all of the stuff that came with it.

And I really felt that I wanted to be able to share my story to encourage people to become entrepreneurs and to realize that it's just such a beautiful opportunity to be a part of something so great. And so I wrote "The Five Year Mark" as literally like a review of my first five years in business and the things that I'd learned, the mistakes that I'd made, it was quite raw. And even reading back on it now, I kind of think to myself, "She's, did you really just put all of that out there?" But yeah, I did and it's published and it's out there. So that was what that was about. And it was really a personal project. It wasn't built and written for anything else. I personally believe I got more out of it than anyone ever will in that case. And then the bug bit, I thought it would be one book and that would be me, but I just really enjoyed the process and I loved what it was. And so a lot of people have been asking me about personal brand and how to build a personal brand in the digital world. And so I wrote "Renowned" as an answer to that question to be able to help people take their personal brand and to build something in the online space. And there was always a view to building a course off the back of it as well, which the first kind of project of that hasn't quite kicked off yet, but we're still in the process of getting that right.

And then I met Tracy at Tracy McDonald Publishers and sort of shared these two self published books that I'd put together and shared the story of them. And I said to her, I think I'm ready to talk about something in the digital space. Because what I'd seen was that I had a viewpoint on technology around this idea of it needing to be human centric. And I'd built a framework over the last 10 years to sort of see that coming. And I was starting to find the words to bring something new into this digital industry. At that point, it wasn't so much about self publishing, but I really felt like I finally had something to say in the industry that people are expecting me to speak that will add to the industry. And I want to get this as far and wide as possible. And so I signed a publishing deal with Tracy McDonald and the rest, as they say, is history. We wrote the book last year and released it a week before lockdown. - Okay, I'm also laughing a little bit because what has amazed me over time is how many people's stories start off with in terms of them being authors, start off with I met Tracy McDonald. Because she seems like a force of nature. And a lot of people have said to me, I should write a book.

And I'm like, there is no way, all right? Because just looking at the amount of work that has to go into it, I don't think I could do that. What I'm trying to get done, and I do speak to a lot of people about this, is get Tracy onto the show. So I can talk to her a bit about what she's done. 'Cause I think she's done some amazing, amazing things. So Human Centric, you said released just before lockdown, which I suppose was probably a bit of a blessing and a curse at the same time. - Yeah, so it definitely created a lot more energy around the topic in that case. But there was a moment where I kind of had this epiphany that in sort of mid April, sitting in my little home office here, realizing that there are 600 to 1,000 books scattered all over the country and no one can get to them because they're all locked. They're all behind lock and key. And so you've put all this energy into launching a book and then no one can go out and find it. So it's been an interesting journey from my side in how do we continue that conversation and keep that conversation up while the stores are no longer available. And I always find it amazing that like how many people chose not to buy the digital version, but rather to wait until the stores were open to go and buy the physical book.

I found that really, really fascinating. - It is one of those strange things though, because I'm a voracious reader, I love reading. And to me, there's always been something special about having an actual physical book in your hand. But that being said, I mean, I live with my Kindle because I can just carry so much more with me. Otherwise I just look like a bit of an eccentric weirdo. But Mike, we need to continue a little bit with this and talk more about the book and the fourth industrial revolution. We'll do so when we come back. This is what's involved, my special guest is Mike Saunders, author of Human Centric. And we're back with Mike Saunders talking about the book Human Centric. Part of your title of the book is Building Successful Businesses in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I was privileged enough last year, I got invited to the Singularity U conference and this whole fourth industrial revolution, everybody's talking about it. And lately I was turning to somebody and they went, listen, there's no such thing as this fourth industrial revolution is coming. It's here, we're in the thick of it. So don't stand there waiting for it. Is that your experience? - Yeah, so I jostled with the idea of using the term fourth industrial revolution in my book because it's now become quite a central piece of it.

And I had to kind of accept that the whole of humanity right now talks about this era that we're in that is confusing people and shifting the way we do business and life as the fourth industrial revolution. So I'm not a particular fan of the concept. Like conceptually, I think that we're already there. I don't think that, I think it's a natural progression of where technology is taking us. And I don't necessarily think it's gonna be around long enough with the pace in which technology changes for us to kind of adapt to it ready to make the next change. I think we need better skill sets as human beings and as businesses to kind of adapt and evolve with this technology structure. If every time a new piece of technology changes, we call it a new revolution, we're gonna be in a new revolution every year. But the truth of this fourth industrial revolution is that technology creates this augmented base in our lives, which has now become synonymous with our future. It's not gonna just be a part of the fourth industrial revolution. It's gonna be a part of everything else that comes into the future because we've become so reliant on it. And yes, we're definitely in it at the moment, whether people want to accept that or not.

And so it's not a futurist conversation. It's a business tactical strategic conversation. It's a human life conversation. Parents are having to make decisions in this technologically driven digital world that we live in. So yeah, that's kind of like the best summary I could give you about my feelings in this regard. - It is amazing. And then of course, sir, we had COVID coming along and suddenly I think the pace of change accelerated dramatically because in order for us to continue doing anything really, we had to look at the online side of things. If I take myself, for example, in terms of radio, I was very much a bums in seats kind of guy. It's much better if it's done live and I need to have somebody that I look across the table at. And well, that got changed to me very, very quickly. And I've had to adapt to it. I don't think I'm quite there yet. I still hanker for live radio, but we're doing what we can. One of the things that impressed me is right at the beginning of the book in your intro, you talk about waking up and it's Father's Day and you were going out and you were going to go and have breakfast and the way that you wrote that. Because often we talk, we hear about this concept of a tech disruption.

I mean, I've chatted to a bunch of youngsters and they're all like, we are disruptors. And I'm thinking, okay, not sure what that means. But it was sort of a bit of a foreign concept to me. And then the way you laid it out in that intro, I certainly was saying to myself, yeah, yeah, now that makes sense. Because I think a lot of the stuff we know are starting to take for granted. Talk me through that little bit of an intro. - Yeah, sure. So, you know, this happens all the time. I won't take you through the exact intro because I think it was a couple of pages long and it was my best stab at creative writing. But I think that the thing that I, the way that I sort of explain it to people just like this is that what got me into this digital space was exactly that moment that I shared in the beginning of that. Was I woke up one morning and I used to think that I was this like nerdy, geeky, technology-driven digital guy. Because I did podcasting and I did, instead of listening to the radio and I watched YouTube instead of TV. And like there were these things that were embedded in my life that I thought were very disruptive. And we talked about these young people with this disruptive mentality.

And I'll turn around and I'll look and I'm sitting with a group of friends who are listening to the same podcasts. We're talking about what podcasts we're listening to as opposed to what radio stations, TV. We're talking about check out the latest YouTube video. These are becoming everyday conversations. And this is now 10 years ago. And then I realized that I like, I download apps at every second minute because I love applications. But I realized that we all do that. And so what I thought was making me disruptive was actually just a replication of what was taking place in the world already. And that what I thought was making me technologically advanced was actually the same for everybody. Just maybe on a different volume or a different scale. And I think that's the thing that creeps up on us. Do you live in the digital world? So many people say, oh, I'm not technologically driven. I couldn't live with this technology. So how reliant are you on your email? Oh, I couldn't live without my email. But that's a piece of technology. That's become like, it's a piece of technology that has come so redundant in our lives to the point that we cannot live without it. But it's still a piece of technology and we would not see it as technology because it's become the norm for us.

- Yeah, and I mean, as I was reading through that, there was just so many things when I looked at my life as somebody that has passed the 50 year mark a couple of years past, and I was thinking, I always say to people, I'm not very tech savvy. And then I was looking at what I do on a daily basis. And I'm like, hang on though. This is all stuff that I'm using as part of my reality. And that was sort of quite amazing to me. One of the things though that I question, and you hear a lot of people talking about this, is us being in the middle of the fourth industrial revolution, the rise of the robots, AI, machine learning, that they're gonna take away all our jobs and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's one side of it. But what I've discovered and felt over the last little while, which brings me to the title of your book, is that despite the technology, we seem to be hankering to become more human. What do you think about that? - So, yeah, this is that sort of epiphany moment that I had when that kind of spurred me to write this book in the first place. I'm gonna use an analogy for you to try and explain this in the best way. Big wave surfers who surf these monstrous plus sort of 10-foot waves, okay?

They, when that sport started, the surfers didn't know or weren't capable of being able to mount that wave themselves. So they used to use jet skis as the means in which to pull them up onto the wave. And once they were surfing the wave, the jet ski would then move out the way and then they would continue to surf. And so if we look at this, this is the analogy that I'm giving you is how technology has helped a human being experience something that makes them feel more alive, more human, and do something that they're capable of, but they just don't know it yet. Because then you fast forward a year or two and now big wave surfers know how to mount those waves themselves. And they no longer need the jet skis. And the jet skis are only in the water to help them from a safety point of view in that regard. And so what you found is that technology became the crutch that allowed people to step into a new environment that made them feel more human. But then over time, people then get to a point where they no longer need the technology in order to be able to continue that process. And I think that this is what people miss. People see technology as that replacement of human beings. But actually, there's an opportunity here to be able to say, but what really at the end of the day is technology taking away from us as humans?

Is it possible that the majority of what we're concerned about are the things that we see as our norm? But actually, if machines could do those things for us, we would be able to have more human, we would be able to spend our energy and time and resources on more human experiences. You know, if you could automate your business from nine to five, what would you do with that time? You'd probably spend it with family. You'd probably spend it with people that you love and feel more human because of it. But at the same time, you'd probably do other projects because no human being can just not work for the rest of their lives because we're built and geared to find joy and satisfaction in being able to do work. So we would go out and be more productive. We'd create better efficiencies in our economy because we've got this automated function that generates our wealth or our income. And it allows us now to be able to focus on something else that can contribute back to society in a more meaningful way. So we would not stay idle as human beings. History has shown us that every single time we face technology that threatened to replace us, we have not become idle and sat around and did nothing and have been replaced.

We have found new ways to be human. - Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I think that's a fantastic analogy to use. My special guest is Mike Saunders, author of Human Centric. And we're talking about technology. And as part of the title of the book says, technology fails unless it means something to someone. We'll be back, chatting more to Mike in just a bit. And we're back. My guest is Mike Saunders, author of Human Centric. So Mike, the purpose behind the book then, because you talk about some very, very interesting bits and pieces in the book. You talk about which we touched on the digital disruption. You talk about being human centric, ideation, things like that. Is this book designed as a handbook for entrepreneurs or people wanting to sort of understand technology more? - Yeah, I think what settled in my mind about what I was trying to do here is help people with a framework that would be easy to understand and easy to apply in any aspect of their lives. But the truth is I'm a businessman and an entrepreneur and a marketer. And so it has a large leaning towards those areas of my life. And, but like you can apply this framework across the board in almost any facet that you're looking into.

But I've successfully been applying this framework to my client challenges on an ongoing basis for the last six or seven years. And I've seen it bear really, really great fruit. And so the purpose of this book is really to create, firstly to take away the mystery of technology and to help people understand that this is actually about human beings. And the great news about that is that we're all human beings. So we all have something that we can lean into as a base of understanding. It's no longer as scary as asking yourself what the next internet of things is when you don't even know what the internet of things is. So there's this, what I hope is there's this freedom in understanding how to succeed in a technological world because success is gonna come out of being human. And what does that mean? And how do we build businesses with a human mindset but with a technology tool set? - Okay, now, as people are now listening to this particular broadcast, I know there's a couple of people who are in business currently who are either what they call solar pioneers or whatever the case may be. And they're going, all right, Mike, that's all good and well, but where do we start? What do we need to do?

Can we have a look at some of the things that businesses should be looking at? Do you have stories about businesses that missed the mark entirely? - Yeah, lots of them. And some of them are ones that are loaded as technological giants. But they've had moments where they've missed the mark completely. So I think if I start, and I started in this mindset, so Blackberry dominated the mobile market. And then iPhone suddenly comes about with a less technologically advanced phone. If you looked at that phone, our phone 2G, and you looked at it in comparison to every other mobile device on the market at that time, you would never have said that it would do what it did to the market. Because it was running 2G when everybody was running 3G. It didn't have the same infrastructure. It wasn't built into business email infrastructures like Exchange and all of those sorts of things. It just didn't have the technology to succeed. But Apple did something that nobody else thought about, and that was they created an app store that allowed people to customize which applications they could have on their phone in which they couldn't. And they created an ecosystem that you could belong to that made your life better and easier to be in this technology world.

And that's what that phone did. And that's why the iPhone succeeded and became the biggest technological advancement for mankind from that perspective, and did what Blackberry could never do. Because Blackberry were so focused on being on the edge of technology all the time, while Apple chose to be on the edge of the user experience all the time. And that moment, that epiphany, is what makes Apple the success in the story over Blackberry. So in every single case that I've seen, it's when you lose sight of the human beings that are using the technology, you lose your traction in the business world. And we share a couple of those case studies. We look at, everybody lauds Uber as this really big technological invention. And yes, the app was. But the business model is flawed. The business itself takes strain. And there's many problems with it. And they've primarily built around this thing that they have not thought about the human being infrastructure and stakeholders that surround that industry well enough to be able to let them be a viable solution that people won't fight against. - Yeah, and particularly in this country, I mean, that clearly wasn't thought through. But Mike, back to the question about people that are listening that may be in their businesses.

And my passion with this show is the small to medium business, because I firmly believe that the more entrepreneurs, the more business owners we can get into this economy of ours, the better for all of us long-term. - I'm with you. - Where would we start? What would we do? I mean, if I look at myself, if I look at brand David Watts or brand Watts involved, when I started out with all of this, it was like, oh, social media, got to be on social media, have to do this. And I went down so many rabbit holes there. Then it was, but hang on, you're not on LinkedIn. You need to be on LinkedIn. Okay, but now you need to do some advertising. Don't worry about traditional forms of advertising. Online is the way to go. And I was, and to a large degree still am, feeling like I'm drowning in all of this stuff that needs to be done. Where do we start? - So I think the first thing is to understand that if you're going to succeed in this space, you need to be consistently exploring it. And that's in the books you read, the articles that you digest, the news you listen to, just how you expose yourself into that world. But you need to find a way to filter that information. And that's the biggest challenge that we have in an information overload economy that we're in, is that we find that it's difficult to filter that information.

And so what I speak about in the book is this idea that we need to filter information based on the context in which we live and the context in which our customers live. We need to filter that information based on the relationships that we have with, that we have, that our customers have, and that technology has with us. And then we need to filter based on the intelligence. Understanding that knowledge and power is moved to different people. It's not housed in the same place. It's accessible in different ways. And it can be shared and manipulated in multiple different ways very easily because of the technology that we're in. And so I use this exploration process of context relationship intelligence. But I think the most meaningful thing that's come out of this book that I think small businesses and startups and entrepreneurs really need to take cognizance to is that to build a great business in a digital world is quite simple. All you need to do is build something that people need or that they want, or that is built around the way in which they interact. And if you can get a couple of those things all in play, then you've got a big win. So when you look at needs, I use the Maslow hierarchy, and you talk about deficiency needs and promotional needs.

And the deficiency needs are all the things that we need to have in our lives in order to feel like we're just human. In other words, we need them to feel satisfied. And then there's these promotional side needs, which help us make us feel more like we're adding value to this life. And if you take a look at the security industry in South Africa, the reason it exists is because it speaks to a deficiency need of safety. If I don't have security in my life, I seek it out and need to have it in there in order to feel satisfied. My base need of satisfaction has to be met as a human being. And so if you build a business into an industry or you build a product that's built around deficiency or promotional needs, then you end up with something really valuable. But then on top of that, if you can build something into convenience, now I'm a person who pays a lot just to have life be more convenient. But this idea of what human beings want, convenience is one of them, efficiency is the other, and entertainment is the other. And we look at some of the biggest media companies in the world at the moment, all digitally driven media companies that provide entertainment. And so that's the needs and the wants.

And then finally, I can unpack sort of pieces of this, but it's quite a big topic to unpack in one go. But if we look at how people build cities and towns and how they plan them out, they plan them around human interaction. They bring in various different aspects of religion and community and being able to connect with each other in restaurants. And they bring all of this stuff together to facilitate human interaction because they understand that the more human interaction you can facilitate and encourage from the people who stay in your town, the happier those people will be and the more your town or city will grow and be economically functioning. And so if you look at the themes around that and around how cities are built, you can apply that into the technology world and you can realize that the reason that Facebook has done so well is because it creates a city-like environment of interaction inside a digital world. And so we can connect in that space in many different ways and hold value. And so your product or your business model that you're wanting to launch into this fourth industrial revolution has to speak to something in those lines. Our needs are once all the way in which we interact.

And if we handle that well and we build as much of that into our product as possible, the chances of our success become so much greater. - Fantastic stuff. And I mean, when you talk about making this and this is obviously the crux of the book is this human centric model of a business. It does give people a lot of pause for thought because very often you go into a business and you don't think about those things that you've just talked about. We are running out of time. And I need to talk more to you. So when we come back, we're gonna wrap it up with Mike Saunders, author of "Human Centric." This is "What's Involved." And we're back with Mike Saunders, author of "Human Centric." So Mike, as I said just before the break-in, there's so much to talk about. This is a great book. It's very, very well written. And you can sense the humanity in it. So as we wrap up our chat today, tell me, where do you see us going in terms of technology, et cetera, et cetera? Because I know, to me, it's very much a double-edged sword. If I have a look at social media and the kind of anger and frustration and all of those things that are now being allowed to be exercised on social media, sometimes I'll sit and look at it and I'm absolutely horrified.

And yet it has a power for such great good as well. I don't believe it's a case of the technology, but it's a case of what we as human beings are doing. So where do you see us going? - Yeah, so I think we live in such an interesting time when it comes to the social media conversation and how people interact with technologies. You know, your normal cycles of things is that as new innovations develop and start to impact our lifestyles and our economies, there's very little regulation because people haven't been able to regulate it. They don't know what they're regulating. They don't know what humanity looks like, what society looks like with this new technology. And I think one of the biggest challenges that we're facing now is that the world is dealing with this high volume of information, this incredible discrepancy between truth and fake news, this kind of the personalized information conversations. And there's so many big conversations that have now erupted into our technological world and in our society that have become out of these new technologies that are no longer new, but are so entrenched in our lives. And so I feel like we're entering into a phase of accountability and regulation that is gonna be, what comes off the back of this is gonna be really interesting in terms of how that impacts the way in which we utilize and gain control over these technologies again.

But I think that if we look at technology as a whole, the, what's kind of driven technology is the power of processing and this little processor chip that gets more and more powerful and eventually the more powerful that gets the more you can do with technology and it kind of continues to grow at this exponential rate. And at some point, it's gonna hit this point where we start to flatline and we reach kind of the pinnacle of like how much we can push in the processor. But what I've been reading and what I really do agree with is that technology is not just a processor conversation, the power of technology and the future development of that technology is a biology conversation. It's a, there's so many other conversations that are at play that are now starting to develop in the, so biometrics is bringing in new opportunities and there's a whole new space that is gonna be impacted by technology in ways that we've never seen before. And so I just think that that rate of innovation, that rate, that cycle of change that we've been seeing in say the computer processing world and on the internet is now gonna start hitting healthcare systems, it's gonna hit the way in which we grow plants, agriculture, that the pace is just gonna pick up and the exponential rate is gonna grow and it's just gonna shift around into the various different places as a plateaus in some and it moves in others.

We need to kind of accept the fact that this rate of change is part of our lives and that it will continue to shift every aspect of our lives. But as it becomes more mature, we're gonna find society grappling with how we regulate and govern this material because you can't leave this stuff unchecked and people are starting to see that and they're feeling the consequence of it and it's creating an impetus to deal with it. - Okay, yeah, and I agree. The thing is it's not all doom and gloom though and I think that part of the message of the book is that humanity and being more human is where we ultimately are headed to. - Yeah, yeah. And I think that's what's so exciting about this and that's why I play in this technology spaces and why everybody pushes through regardless of the challenges that we face is because we know that technology brings with it the promise of a better life. But we're all just trying to figure out what that better life looks like and how do we take the good and kind of mitigate the bad as much as possible. It's a beautiful picture that we're busy building as a human race and I'm excited to kind of see how it all unpacks. - Wonderful stuff. Well, a good place to start in my opinion is to get hold of Mike's book, Human-Centric Technology Fails Unless It Means Something to Someone.

Mike, the book now available in all good bookstores, is it available online as well? - It is available online, so it's on Amazon. There are a couple of online bookstores in South Africa that you can access as well, but that'll be the physical copy and it is all in all the bookstores around South Africa as well. - Fantastic stuff. If somebody wants to get hold of you and Digitlab and go, okay, listen, I heard this whole thing. It's too complicated, I need help. Where do they go? - So one place to start is micsonders.com and just drop me a line there. The other place to start would be digitlab.ca.za. Either one of those are good starting points. You're gonna find me either way. And yeah, that's our job as consultants and as executors in the digital space is to help people with exactly this. - Wonderful stuff. And that wraps it up for this particular chat. Mike Saunders, author of Human-Centric. Do yourself a favor, not only human-centric, but the five-year mark and renown is something I would also recommend getting your hands on. Specifically, human-centric gives you a whole structure and a whole framework. And it certainly does make you think, Mike, thank you so much for taking the time out and having a chat to us.

- Such a pleasure, thanks for having me. - There we go, that was my special guest, Mike Saunders. So if you wanna find out more, micsonders.com. We'll be back in just a bit.