A Watch, Is a Watch?

I was in a meeting with Dave, a high profile consultant , who was authoritatively sharing his views on how organizations could achieve transformational change by cross pollinating and re-engineering dysfunctional internal teams and phosfluorescently incubate internal organic sources rather than focusing on fungible external ecosystem. He was about to do a deep dive on some of the fundamental go-to-market strategies, when his seemingly innocuous smart watch, which so far had been a passive wrist watcher, beeped. Dave, who had almost don his diving gear and was on verge of deep diving, paused. Immediately he started pacing around the room and did not stop until he had done a couple of laps around the conference table, with his gaze fixated at the watch. While i am used to having business jargons hurled at me from all directions but this sudden circumambulation trick caught me off guard. I watched bemused and was wondering if the consultant was circling back to his earlier point before the deep dive. Was it one of those stuff that “they don’t teach you at Harvard”? The table which now had become the centre of the animated affair appeared to enjoy the rare attention that it was getting. Now that the consultant, who was visibly perturbed by the beeping watch had embarked on enacting his thoughts, I feared that he could, any moment now jump to a conclusion, which could have a detrimental effect on the table , which was at the center of locomotion. However, if instead, he decided to go for the jugular, then I could be neck deep in trouble. Luckily for me, the smart watch stopped beeping. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but rather than dying at the hands of the consultant, I begged him to open his kimono and reveal what was going on.

The cause of the commotion was his smart watch. Apparently his wife had gifted him the watch, costing £5400, which securely perched on his wrist monitors all his movement. If Dave, does not do the mandatory 500 steps, every 1 hour then native app on the watch triggers an alarm. The app then tweets his wife that Dave has been sitting at one place, doing nothing. The threat does not end here, being a part of his connected IoT ecosystem, the watch then cuts off the access to his fridge, bar and scrambles up the TV channels. The only way to escape this was to start doing a jig, whenever the watch beeped.

I looked at this smart watch again, and it did not seem to be humble and innocuous any more. I then looked at my old quartz watch, which far from being smart, could not even beep.

While I watched my watch, Dave’s watch was watching him!