Clash of cultures

Wired editor, and author of The Long Tail, Chris Anderson has an interesting post on his blog: Who needs a CIO? The broader issues he raises are ones that I’ve written about several times over the last couple of years – which is to say, the completely different worldviews of the younger generation who’ve never known an unconnected world (and so are native to a sharing, flat, non-hierarchical culture) and the older generation who are more traditional in their outlook.

Some of Chris’s comments are particularly relevant, particularly if you substitute ‘managers’ or ‘government’ for CIO:

CIOs, it turns out, are mostly business people who have been given the thankless job of keeping the lights on, IT wise. And the best way to ensure that they stay on is to change as little as possible.

That puts many CIOs in the position of not being the technology innovator in their company, but rather the dead weight keeping the real technology innovators–employees who want to use the tools increasingly available on the wide-open Web to help them do their jobs better–from taking matters into their own hands

and

The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying “No”, not “What if…”

and a quote from CIO Magazine:

CIOs don’t seem to care all that much about the needs and desires of the next wave of workers, who come from Gen Y and are also referred to as Millenials. The gestalt of the Millenials (a.k.a., the “I’m special” generation) is that they grew up with a boundless sense of self-importance, always have had the Internet, love to share digital content, need to be constantly challenged, want high-level responsibilities immediately, expect a work-life balance with telecommuting options, and will go around IT practices and policies without hesitation. The old-school CIOs I spoke with seemed both annoyed with their audacity and mildly interested in what this new wave of employees could deliver in the IT department.

How should management change to utilize these new attitudes and skill sets? Government? Education?

Cold War wisdom

I was rewatching The Fog of War last night. It’s a truly great documentary; I was first introduced to it by my ex-girlfriend, when her department (IDSS @ NTU) watched it, and I tagged along with her.

It’s my opinion that, with its emphasis on the need for accurate statistics and research, its coverage of different leadership styles, and its awareness of the moral consequences and externalities of our decisions, it should be required viewing for MBA students. However, professors and some fellow MBA students who did watch it couldn’t see what I meant. (Of course, MBA students often have a weak sense of morals and ethics).

Anyway, watching it again last night, I still think that the 11 lessons drawn from the film are worth quoting here:

1. Empathize with your enemy.
2. Rationality will not save us.
3. There’s something beyond one’s self.
4. Maximize efficiency.
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
6. Get the data.
7. Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
10. Never say never.
11. You can’t change human nature.

I was also motivated to do more research on the other side – not from Vietnam, but the Soviets (the film of course covers the Cuban Missile Crisis). The quote from Nikita Krushchev about pulling on the knots of war showed that he had a command of imagery, so I wondered what else he might have had to say. Wikiquote has a number of quotations, and I think these are still worth bearing in mind (which is not to say that I necessarily agree with them!):

• “Politicians are the same the world over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river”.
• “Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder”.
• “Support by United States rulers is rather in the nature of the support that the rope gives to a hanged man”.
• “Life is short. Live it up”.
• “The press is our chief ideological weapon”.
• “Historians are the most powerful and dangerous members of any society. They must be watched carefully… They can spoil everything”.

Early warning signs

If I recall correctly, in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, one character comments that the first warning of widespread wildlife death was the vanishing of the owls.

I’m reminded of that by this story in the IHT: all across the United States, bees are vanishing. I heard something about this on the BBC World Service last week, and was motivated to look for further stories just because it’s so strange, but at that time there wasn’t anything else. Reading the IHT article, though, it’s an eyeopener: like most people, probably, I had thought that bees were pretty static. It turns out that hives are driven around the country, chasing contracts; the stress and exhaustion this causes may be a factor in the die-off – but no-one is sure.

It strikes me that this may be another indicator that our current global system of food production, dependent as it is on petro-fertilisers, and maximising efficient use of land and animals to the point of exhaustion, is unsustainable. The spread of bird flu is another – politicians keep blaming it on migratory birds, but all of the articles I read about it seem to indicate that factory farming is a much more likely transmission vector.

How long can this intensive food production continue? And what what can we do to prepare for the day when we find that it can’t?

It’s a wonderful world

Inspired by Niti’s latest post, here’s my world map. I think I’ve done this once before, but this time I’ve only included countries where I’ve walked around and spoken to people, not stopovers:

create your own visited countries map

Speaking of which, I saw an article in the IHT yesterday about Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. While I was applying for my MBA, my plan B for staying in Asia was to train as an English teacher. I did some reading up on conditions in the countries in the region, and Cambodia didn’t sound fun, to say the least – there were warnings of violence, crime, shootings in the streets… Well, that was 2003, this is 2007, and things have changed: Phnom Penh is now the “next Prague”, where the young go to reinvent themselves. Guess I need to get there while I (if no-one else) still think of myself as young…

Reboot

OK, so I took the blog down for a few days while I thought about where to take it. I’ve given it a new look, and reorganised the blogroll. The categories list was getting too unwieldy and it wasn’t used much anyway, so that’s gone. You can still get at them via the new ‘Tag Cloud’ page, though. The archive list may or may not come back, I haven’t decided yet.

As for the new direction, the new subtitle should give you a hint – at least, it will if you’ve read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash! A lot of the themes I’m interested in at the moment are encapsulated in that book, so it will certainly do for the moment as a hook to hang the theme on. I’m also going to be a bit less concerned with being ‘proper’: not so much to boost traffic, but to just acknowledge that we live in a bizarre, grown-up world full of all kinds of things….

Comments on the new look would be welcome – I’m not sure how permanent it will be…

Las Vegas welcomes the Pig

This article in the IHT describes how the casinos in Las Vegas are targetting Asian – and specifically Chinese – money. Chinese New Year celebrations (this year being the Year of the Pig) are being laid on, Chinese motifs and lucky numbers are being incorporated into the casino displays, and Feng Shui is being used to modify the design of the buildings.

All of which raises the question: how will Singapore’s casinos differentiate themselves? Guess we have to wait and see…

Long Tail: UK vs Taiwan

Wired editor Chris Andersen blogs a very interesting piece about his book The Long Tail. It’s already been incredibly influential, of course, and it seems that it’s now a best-seller in China. That doesn’t surprise me, of course: the Chinese are so super-driven to make money that I expect to see novel applications of the theory being implemented very soon!

What really caught my eye, though, was this:

The book has also sold more than 50,000 copies in Taiwan (cover below), which is really an astounding number (I think it actually sold more there than in the UK).

What on earth? What explanation can there be for Taiwan showing more interest in this than the whole of the UK? And what does this say about Britain today?

Creating passionate users

OK, this is my last MBA post.

The title is a tribute to Kathy Sierra’s blog, which is well worth subscribing to. It’s also a sentiment that should be burned into the mind of anyone marketing a product or service. There’s so much competition, and consumers have so many options, that the specific features of your offering just aren’t going to be enough to really cut it. To move from “OK” to “WOW, great!!!” in your customers’ minds, you need to engage them: to offer something more, to make the experience of dealing with you so remarkably great that they’ll not just stick with you but act as your unpaid salesforce.

Is it really too much to suggest that this applies to MBAs as much as to any other service?

Just before I went to Thailand, I attended an event organised by Nanyang Business School, to celebrate their reaching #67 in the Financial Times MBA Index. Well, congratulations are due, I’m sure their team worked hard to get this, and they would want to celebrate.

As soon as I arrived, I went to collect my name tag. They’d got my name wrong. Not just the usual “We’re going to write your name in the Chinese style, regardless of which race or culture you actually belong to“; I’ve long since gotten used to that! No, on this occasion, my name was completely jumbled up on the tag, in a manner I haven’t actually seen before. I mentioned this to the person from the NBS office who’d given me the tag. She just shrugged, and said “That’s how it is in our records”.

Well, thank you for caring. It became obvious that as far as she was concerned, that’s how it had come out of the printer, and she wasn’t going to worry about it. In the end, I took a blank tag and hand-wrote my name on it.

So: two years of almost daily interaction. Tens of thousands of my dollars spent. ‘ve acted as a recruiter for them in Singapore and China on several occasions. And they still can’t get my name right. This person knew perfectly well that this wasn’t how I like to be addressed, and could have done something about it. In fact, this must happen on a regular basis with their students, and any one of the staff could have said, “you know, maybe we should fix our records so that it can handle complexity a bit better”.

Whatever. I did get a lot out of my MBA. I did have good times, and meet good people. But, looking at it overall, I still sometimes find myself wondering if it was the right thing to do. I wish I’d gone to that event, and left feeling energized and enthusiastic, rather than that I was just another database entry.