Noise Between Stations

Category: Humans

An approach for working in China: Economics

Given the destructive human rights situation in China, how do we decide to interact with companies there? I don’t think no action is a choice; the sheer amount of influence the Western world and China exerts on each other through commerce alone makes it impossible for any one person or company to remain unaffected.

Free marketers like the Cato Institute argue that “America should not play the dangerous game of pitting human rights activists against free traders. American prosperity and global prosperity are better served by open markets than by well-intended economic sanctions.” But this does nothing to address the human rights problems, and we know that ‘all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.‘

And there’s no doubt we should be careful about it, as even seemingly innocuous efforts like Yahoo!’s can draw undesirable attention.

One option is to exert pressure politically. The U.S. government is already doing this to a limited extent. But given we cooperated much less with the communist Soviet Union and apartheid-ridden South Africa, it’s surprising we cooperate so much with communist, oppressive China. Politicians could use this issue in order to embarrass opponents for their cow-towing China-friendly behavior, but given the reflexivity of the dollar that’s a long shot. A subtle variation on this would be to embarrass anyone not willing to reduce our debt because it’s handing control of our economy to Asia, which in turn will give us more leverage with Asia on issues like human rights.

7/17/2005
If China was a company, would you work for it?
In all the hoo-hah about China’s economy we almost never hear of the human rights situation there anymore. The reason is not that the situation has vastly improved, in fact it’s compared to South Africa’s apartheid. I’m reminded of economic bubbles past when big money clouded our view of everything behind it.

Human Rights Watch still knows what’s up. Their backgrounder on China is disturbing, and includes…
- Widespread official corruption
- China prohibits independent domestic human rights organizations and bars entry to international human rights organizations
- The official cover-up of the SARS epidemic in Beijing
- Institutional pressures on the police to extort confessions through beatings and torture
- Chinese authorities employing increasingly sophisticated technology to limit public and private expression
- One of the largest AIDS epidemics in the world
- Employers routinely ignore minimum wage requirements and fail to implement required health and safety measures
- A government ban on independent trade unions
- Forced evictions of hundreds of thousands of residents in order to build new developments
- The crackdown on terrorism in Xinjiang has been characterized by systematic human rights violations including arbitrary arrests, closed trials, and extensive use of the death penalty
- The Chinese leadership continues to limit Tibetan religious and cultural expression and seeks to curtail the Dalai Lama’s political and religious influence in all Tibetan areas
- Chinese officials curb the growth of religious belief and its expression in practice through a series of laws and regulations
- The shortage of women and girls in rural areas has led to the kidnapping and selling of females as wives or prostitutes
- In 2004, as it had in the past, China suspended its dialogue with the U.S. in retaliation for the American sponsorship of a resolution condemning its human rights record
Most of the companies I’ve worked for have refused to work for one company or another, citing objections to the harm done by, for example, tobacco, alchohol or the defense industry. So I have to ask, if China was a company, would you work for it?
7/11/2005
The New Heroes

The New Heroes tells the dramatic stories of 14 daring people from all corners of the globe who, against all odds, are successfully alleviating poverty and illness, combating unemployment and violence, and bringing education, light, opportunity and freedom to poor and marginalized people around the world.

Also known as “social entrepreneurs,” they develop innovations that bring life-changing tools and resources to people desperate for viable solutions. What is possible? You’d be surprised. Take a journey into a world where people take action to make a big difference.

The show will include a profile of KickStart whom I wrote about recently. Hosted by Robert Redford, the series airs on PBS stations Tuesdays, June 28 and July 5, 2005.

6/27/2005
Edge competencies

I’ve been thinking about how organizations today are more distributed and decentralized, relying on the performance at the interface to the customer. Compared to core competencies that power the creation of new products and live deep within the company, most companies have one or more particular capabilities that live at the fringes where organizations exert their last influence over performance before the consumer takes over. I’m starting to collectively refer to these capabilities as edge competencies (yes it’s a little jargony, but core capabilities probably was as well back in 1990).

For example, Coca-Cola’s core competency is the manufacture and distribution of nonalcoholic beverages, and their edge competency is how they create brands through marketing campaigns.

T-Mobileâ€™s core competency is building telecommunications infrastructure, and their edge competency is the design of each customer-facing service.

The concept becomes interesting when you think about how executives crafting the organization’s strategy must align with one or two particular project teams doing tactical work (incidentally, I think the dichotomy of strategic and tactical is less useful in these situations, since the importance of edge project work can have deep importance to the organization).

There should also be a feedback loop between core competencies and edge competencies, so that customers are both informed and have a voice in crafting an organization’s work.

More to come…

Update: More is here… I’ve expanded this idea into an essay and renamed it Strategic Delivery Points to avoid any confusing comparisons between it and core competencies. Enjoy.

6/14/2005
Business, design and class

This New York Times app allows you to determine your class based on your occupation, education, income and wealth.

It looks like a “management analyst” is three times classier than a designer. Let’s ponder that and how business designers should be positioned to exert influence in organizations.

6/8/2005
Google buys Dodgeball (yay!)

Google has acquired Dodgeball, a neato mobile social networking app. It was co-founded and developed by my friend and former mentee Alex, so I’m thrilled for him. Congratulations Alex!

5/12/2005
Avoiding toxic co-workers

Diego has two worthwhile posts on avoiding assholes at work, using Richard Branson’s reality show as an example:

Sir Branson took an innovative approach to the asshole problem by donning Scooby-Doo-ish makeup and mask before picking up would-be contestants from the airport in a London taxi cab. Disguised as an arthritic old cabbie, Branson was able to observe these would-be Trumps interacting with a â€œlittleâ€ person, a situation which is to an asshole what buried truffles are to a pig â€“ an invitation to root around and generally make a boor of oneâ€™s self. Not surprisingly, three contestants showed their true colors in short order, and Branson kicked two of them off. A strong cultural statement, eh?

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on inept managers today. They get there either because

Sometimes a supervisor promotes a lame manager because he figures the manager is unlikely to unseat him. “They don’t want to have subordinates on a lower rung of the ladder who might soon step over them,” says Angelo Calvello, a principal at a financial firm in Chicago. “Normally, a boob has got a boob for a boss.”

or

Organizational psychologist Gary Hayes says organizations flattened starting in the 1970s, when layers of management were removed in the name of organizational efficiency. But “a very large number of companies after that really stopped rewarding management skills,” he says. As a result, “people get promoted because they have a technical skill that gets found out and recognized early on and that becomes the horse they ride into town,” he says.

4/20/2005
Orpheus-style leadership
This book review reminded me of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra…

…which has forged a successful recording and performance career without the need of a conductor. Their group is not leaderless, members are keen to emphasize; rather, the leadership role shifts among them within a performance and even within a piece. Echoing Peter Drucker, the author writes, â€œThe Orpheus approach may be the harbinger of leadership trends to come in the business world.â€

I love this example of putting power in the hands of the people doing the work, yet I’m still a little skeptical about how much your average classical musician wants to be on the board and schmooze with rich patrons to keep the endowment funded. Still, I’d like to experiment with the model in businss environments, especially in employee-owned companies.

The Orpheus Process is built on eight principles:
1. Put power in the hands of the people doing the work.
2. Encourage individual responsibility for product and quality.
3. Create clarity of roles.
4. Foster horizontal teamwork.
5. Share and rotate leadership.
6. Learn to listen, learn to talk.
7. Seek consensus (and build creative systems that favor consensus).
8. Dedicate passionately to your mission.
4/11/2005
HP taking lessons from Apple?

HP bought Snapfish, but I think the comparison to Yahoo/Flickr is less interesting than a comparison to Apple. Apple enhanced hardware by adding software and services (iTunes -> Music Store), lengthening the value chain and creating an integrated system that makes it easy for people to buy what they want. It’s also a razor/blades situation. HP is doing the same thing, connecting their cameras to a service to printers and supplies.

3/23/2005
The Wisdom of Crowds: cognition problems

More notes from James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds…

As an example of solving cognition problems, he discusses decision markets like The Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), which has generally outperformed election polls. Over time, they are also less volatile than polls, changing less dramatically to new information. The IEM is not big or diverse, involving only about 800 people, mostly men from Iowa. It and the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) work well without much — or any — money at stake. David Pennock found that ‘status and reputation proved incentive enough to encourage serious investment of time and energy in what is, after all, a game.’

Bees in a hive send out scouts who return and do a waggle dance to indicate the quality of nectar they’ve found. The dance attracts a certain number of forager bees according to how intense the dance is. It’s a natural way to distribute the hive’s resources across finding opportunities and pursuing them. The bees scout and explore simultaneously rather than scout, analyze and act.

Overly-homogenous groups, even smart ones, are less able to find good solutions over time than more diverse groups, even if the latter’s overall intelligence is lower. James G. March, an organizational theorist, said that groups that are too much alike find it hard to keep learning, because each member brings less and less new information to the group, and ‘they spend too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring.’ Irving Janis found homogeneous groups are more susceptible to groupthink. Soloman Asch found individuals will deny what they believe is the truth in order to confer with a group (although this is easy to rectify).

Expertise is, in many contexts, overrated. Expertise can be narrowly focused, as Herbert Simon found in his study of chess players. Experts’ judgments are often not consistent with other experts’ judgments , and experts aren’t good at judging the accuracy of their own judgments (exceptions were bridge players and weather forecasters). Wharton professor J. Scott Armstrong’s ‘seer-sucker theory’: ‘No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.‘

3/20/2005
The Wisdom of Crowds: Intro
James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds is the best book I’ve read in a while. In it he forwards a compelling thesis:

If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest that group’s decision will, over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual no matter how smart or well-informed he is.

This strikes me as a useful tool in the business design toolbox, where constant collaboration with people with a diversity of opinions and from multiple disciplines raises the quality of work.

He addresses three kinds of problems:
- Cognition problems, that have or will have definitive solutions
- Coordination problems, that require members of a group to figure out how to coordinate their behavior with each other
- Cooperation problems, that involve the challenge of getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together
And he identifies four conditions that characterize wise crowds:
1. diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts)
2. independence (people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them)
3. decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge)
4. aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into collective decisions)
The rest of the book is dedicated to telling stories that illustrate and explain the above four conditions. More in future posts…
3/12/2005
Creating change by creating leaders
Imagine a consulting organization that not only provided advice, but guided clients through the changes recommended. Imagine further that the client learned and was transformed by being challenged to quickly assume the place of the consultants.

Imagine how much more effective the consultants’ advice would be in the long term if they emphasized qualities like
- Self-knowledge
- Craftsmanship
- Tenacity
- Teamwork
- Leadership
- The ability to go beyond self-imposed limitations
- Acceptance of responsibility
- Self-reliance
That’s what Outward Bound does. They take you out into the wilderness and show you a plethora of new skills, everything from navigating dangerous white water rapids in a raft to campsite cooking for 30. The next day you’re not only expected to do these things, but to also lead your peers through them. It’s deliberately very hard, and forces people to step up and achieve more than they could before, and become more comfortable as leaders. It seems to me this is a great model for consultants to use when the goal is to create lasting change.
2/5/2005
NYC First Friday, Nov 5

The next social meeting of First Fridays in NYC for the User Experience Design community will be Nov 5, 6:30 at
Hell
59 Gansevoort St at Washington St (Meatpacking District)
(Between 12th & 13th Streets, West of 9th Avenue/Hudson Street)
212-727-1666
Subway: A,C,E and 1239 to 14th Street or L to 8th Ave

I’ll miss it unfortunately, have a G&T for me.

11/3/2004
Customer culture and company value

The recent legal scandal involving four insurance companies in the U.S. caused them to lose $4 Billion of shareholder value in 2 days and now one chief executive. Having worked in one of those companies, and for others who are similar, I’d say a deep, underlying cause is a severe lack of empathic concern for the customer. There are many levels of hierarchy and bureaucracy between workers and customers than breeds insensitivity, and eventually greed.

Those of us who care about helping companies improve their products and organizations should absorb this lesson and teach it as a morality tale. Bad companies get punished, not just by the law but also by the stock market. In the longer run sales will suffer as wary customers punish them by taking business elsewhere.

Being customer-centered leads to better products and to better companies.

Update: And Marsh has to lay off 3,000 people as a result. Very sad.

Another Update: And several Marsh board members are losing their seats.

10/25/2004
MBA class experience
I attended an MBA class last night at New York University’s Stern School of Business. I was both interested in the topic of the class and as an observer of the professor’s teaching style and MBA students in general. I noticed:
- Students were predictably clean cut. Diverse ethnically as you’d expect in New York or in a good MBA program, but in many ways not very diverse.
- They served free coffee in the classroom.
- Each student had a little nameplate they carry with them and position in front of their seat, like at the United Nations.
- I pulled out my laptop to take notes and looked around to notice not a single other person with a laptop (the room did offer sufficient electrical outlets, ethernet jacks, and wi-fi). This could be explained in several ways, such as the idea-heavy rather than fact-heavy nature of the lecture. But it surprised me; I thought all the hip, well-to-do kids would be doing everything digitally.
Update: David reports that students are explicitly asked not to use laptops in the classroom, a guideline he feels is vital to the educational experience.
10/13/2004