EclecticLip

A story caught my eye on July 7, about how IBM has a microchip assembly and testing facility — in Quebec.  (That’s high-cost-of-labour-environment Quebec — not low-cost-of-labour-environment China.)

The reason it’s able to do so, is because of the relentless kaizen (continuous improvement) practised there: they’re able to compete in what should be a largely outsourceable industry, through innovation.  Kaizen was one of the underpinnings of earlier book club selection, The Toyota Way.
 
While innovation won’t insulate you fully from arbitrage of labour prices, I think this example shows that (innovative, high-cost labour) can compete better than most people think, against (non-innovative, low-cost labour) and especially (non-innovative, high-cost labour).  Some excerpts from the article include:

The factory, 75 kilometres east of Montreal, started out in 1972 making Selectric typewriters. It has worked its way up to become IBM’s biggest facility for testing and assembling advanced microchips. Its products go into the planet’s most popular video-game consoles and fastest supercomputers…

“We don’t compete on labour rates, we compete on skill, on innovation, on time to market,” said Mr. Leduc, a veteran from the typewriter days, who was appointed last year to be a part-time adviser to Canada’s National Research Council…

While Canada’s productivity has crept ahead by only about 0.7 per cent a year during the past decade, managers at Bromont say their ability to harness the creativity of their work force has allowed some units to boost productivity by an impressive 10 per cent or more a year… 

“One of the greatest competitive edges a company can give themselves, especially these days, is getting each staff member to see their role in contributing to positive change,” Mr. Reid said. “There’s a massive difference between just doing the job and being a high-performance culture.”

Note: that emphasis there was my editorial contribution. 

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I suspect there’s a valid analogy to be made in the economic sphere.  An economy stocked with a million entrepreneurs, each trying to improve their business’s success, is probably going to do better over time than one where a small group decides what’s to be done and how.  That’s the basic difference between a market economy and a command economy (”central planning” is a case where the aforementioned small group is the government). 

The Koreas provide a great example.  As chronicled in Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, back in the day North Korea was richer; it was the industrial area.  South Korea exported seaweed.  Over a few decades, the South Korean government used a market economy to become unimaginably richer than its northern rival.  (Note: like virtually every other industrialized country, its government supported target industries — a practise known as indirect planning — but it let the homegrown competitors fight it out in the marketplace.)

Pulling back from global economics to the corporate level, I’d bet that — just as South Korea ultimately surpassed North Korea, despite its initial disadvantage — companies where ideas for improvement bubble up from all levels, will tend to enjoy more success, longer, than their “everybody just doing the job” counterparts.

Which sort of goes to the root of the book club.  I see it as a way I can suggest improvements, to help myself and others be that little bit more effective; speaking only for myself, I’ve got a lot of “just doing the job” years to make up for.

It occurred to me that I should create a list of business book club selections, not least because I sometimes forget, myself.  So as of early July 2010, here are the volumes that have been covered.

1. The Geography of Hope
2. Managers not MBA’s
3. The Toyota Way
4. The Tipping Point
5. Do The Right Thing
6. The Millionaire Next Door
7. Crossing the Chasm
8. Cradle to Cradle
9. The Starfish and the Spider
10. Why Your World is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller
11. Thinking in Systems
12. First, Break All The Rules
13. Gut Feelings
14. Energy Shift
15. The Necessary Revolution
16. A Thousand Barrels Per Second
17. Good to Great
18. Getting Things Done
19. The Ecotechnic Future
20. The Responsibility Virus
21. The Halo Effect

Recently finished Daemon and Freedom, Daniel Suarez’ two-part semi-dystopic vision of the future.  I say semi-dystopic because they weren’t all bad news.  Loved them both, for the fact that they informed of the capabilities of computational power today — in a seamless manner that didn’t slow the action of the story.  In this feat, they reminded me of Gore Vidal’s Creation, the master’s bracing tale spanning pretty much the entirety of 5th-century-BC Eurasia.  Which, come to think of it, might be deserving of a re-read, about now…

On the surface, Daemon is a story in the “machine turns on its creator” genre.  Like “2001″.  And “Frankenstein”.  And for that matter, the Bible.    Freedom builds on this to reveal a clash between two competing visions for the future.

More profoundly, the dyad explores how our social/societal structures may change in the coming decades, based on the interplay of our current crises and the capacities of new technology.  All wrapped up in a masterful storyline.  With fiction like that, who needs textbooks? 

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note: Suarez has also given a lecture at the Long Now Foundation, well worth the invested time.  It’s available here.  Most intriguing to me was the idea that in a short time, bots will begin to outnumber humans online.  We won’t be the dominant “species”. 

It seems somehow analogous to the apparent fact that mutual funds outnumber stocks, in the investment sector: the derivative species (bots, mutual funds) ultimately flourishing more than the original species it interacts with (humans, stocks).

(Originally written May 28.  Posted with minor amendments, June 17.) 

Updates have been short the past couple weeks on account of work responsibilities.  Taking a quick scan, Apple recently surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization — meaning Apple’s total value (number of shares x price-per-share) is higher than Microsoft’s.  No doubt many Mac fanatics around the world will get together this weekend to celebrate… the purchase of their iPads.  Oh, and that market cap thing too.

A major rule-of-thumb in business is that the leader in one generation of technology, rarely stays the leader for the next.  (A famous business book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, was written about this.)  Basically, companies with a lot of customers… have to spend a lot of time supporting those customers / dealing with their needs.  As such, they tend to miss out on the Next Big Idea.

Perhaps the most infamous modern example is the Maginot Line, which France built to stop another German invasion.  France was on the winning side of World War I, so they reinvested in the trench-warfare military concept.  The Germans lost, and were therefore open to new ideas.  In the interwar period, military analysts in several countries had written about “blitzkrieg” tactics leading up to World War II, but outside Germany, the world’s militaries largely maintained the trench-based status quo.  After all, from their perspective, the strategies weren’t broke, and didn’t need fixing.  Similar things could be said about US military spending nowadays; stealth bombers and aircraft carriers are ineffectual against terrorists.  What they need is counterterrorism and intelligence units.

Along the above lines, it’s not surprising that Microsoft has entered the “utility” phase of its existence, since computing is moving off the desktop.  Redmond isn’t really a growth story, nor is it doing exciting stuff; it’s living off its existing customer base and has modest growth prospects.  I’ve read that it has 94% of the desk/laptop computer OS market… but only 8% or so, of smartphone OS.  (Indeed, it looks like Google is positioning itself to be the Microsoft of smartphones, with its efforts on the Android OS.)  Microsoft owning a minority share of Facebook reinforces that “utility” perspective: it’s like how phone utility Bell Canada owned Nortel before eventually spinning it off.

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The seeds of Microsoft’s decelerating growth can be spotted in this review of Bill Gates’ predictions from 15 years ago, in his book The Road Ahead.  (I borrowed that tome from the Dow Chemical plant library in Fort Saskatchewan in 1998.  I suppose technology’s tendrils reach into any business, so a prudent plant manager wanted a copy.)

The columnist gave Gates a 2.5 / 8 in terms of predictions.  Admittely, that’s probably better than the rest of us could manage.  The crucial “miss” was that Gates didn’t accurately foresee the internet — perhaps ideologically bound to the desktop model of computing, at which his company was so successful.  The first glimmerings of that came when Microsoft had to go all-out to win the browser war against Netscape. 

Indeed, Microsoft completely underestimated Google, in no small part because the latter had remained a privately-held firm for a relatively long time, and was therefore able to cloak its rising power.  As Sun Tzu put it in his incontestably supreme strategy manual, The Art of War, what Google did was “pretend inferiority and encourage [Microsoft’s] arrogance”.

My comments table got corrupted, so I’ve lost all the (four? five?) comments that once graced the blog’s pages. 
A good lesson on the importance of being earnest about making backups…  a habit I shall hereby undertake. 

(Originally written Dec 2009; posted April 2010)

I ran into one of my old Classical Studies professors at a Starbucks recently.  It was fun catching up; it was sobering to think those days were about twenty years ago.  Back then, Brian Mulroney (!) was Prime Minister and the ground-breaking, subversive, edgy cartoon TV show was The Simpsons.

Smalltalk aside, we discussed the recent Landmark Edition of Herodotus, the Greek historian known variously as “the father of history” and “the father of lies”.  This is because he’s generally reliable (for an ancient historian) on Greek matters — and hilariously unreliable for anything outside of Greece (being, the other 99% of the world).  To his credit, he does tell his readers that he’s just reporting what all these foreign sailors have told him.  Which begs the question of why he spent so much time with foreign sailors. 

Though one line in his Histories suggests that Pheonicians circumnavigated Africa millenia before Europeans, Herodotus is most famous for telling Greek audiences that in India, fox-sized ants would get covered in gold dust while digging their burrows, which the locals would collect with whatever passed for the “Swiffer” of that era.*  But they’d have to be careful, because these ants were so fierce, they would eat camels.  The more mundane reality is that folks in a part of Pakistan have harvested gold dust from the coats of marmots for centuries.  And there is a type of scorpion in that region dumb enough to chase camels.  Ah, the miracle of mistranslation! 

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* this is separate from the Golden Fleece legend.  If the latter has historical roots, it would most likely be the ancient practise of using sheepskin to collect gold dust floating down rivers in the Black Sea area.  (The sheepskin was cheap, available, and renewable, and had lots of surface area with which to catch the particles.)

Joseph Campbell identified the hero’s journey (or in his words, the monomyth) in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about sixty years ago.  One would presume other students of mythology came to much the same conclusion at some point in the past few millenia, but didn’t have the good fortune to live in an era of cheap communications media where their ideas could get widely recognized.

In a sentence, the hero undergoes a three-fold adventure of departure - initiation - return.  The formula was closely followed by the Star Wars and Matrix franchises, and virtually every TV or movie writer I’ve spoken to has brought the hero’s journey up in conversation, unprompted.

Which got me wondering what the heroine’s journey is: most of the above stories are targeted to men.  There’s no Wikipedia entry for the topic, yet.

When I think of the literature-targeted-to-women that I’ve read, the books by Jane Austen jump foremost to mind.  But whereas heroes from Gilgamesh onwards have tried to grow into their destined roles…  Jane Austen’s heroines (at least from Pride and Prejudice and Emma) found husbands.

When speaking with a female writer friend recently, she pointed out that Harlequin Romances are pretty much the world’s best-selling fiction genre; they sell 130 million books per year.  Harlequin the company (a Canadian one, no less!) has six imprints for its female readers, and the Harlequin brand itself includes:

• Harlequin Romance (the flagship line)
• Harlequin American Romance (for small-town readers)
• …and Harlequin NASCAR.  Yes, that’s not a typo.

Whatever the archetypal heroine’s journey is, I’m sure it’s captured somewhere in the Harlequin literary formulae.  And if there are cultures around the world with strongly different heroine mythology-types… once suspects that Harlequin’s cultural juggernaut will supercede those other traditions within decades of entering that particular literary market.

Denis Rancourt has been in the news a fair bit lately.  He’s even been made the editorials, being the subject of a scathing New York Times op-ed.

On the surface, it seems the U of Ottawa physics professor wanted to shake up the teaching methods by announcing at the start of a recent term, that everyone would get A+’s.  Peering more deeply, he seems fiercely determined to rouse students into activism against oppression — a positive thing, surely — but at the expense of teaching what he has been contracted to do.

He even called out Noam Chomsky (!) as a “non-activist intellectual” who “serves to deepen the pathological pacificism of neutralized mainstream movements“.  Mind you, Noam Chomsky never converted a linguistics course into “Introduction to Activism” as Professor Rancourt has apparently done.

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I was reading a book on the Crusades, that jihadist period of European Christendom, to learn more about the events that doomed Asian Christianity.

Basically, Christianity had more adherents across Asia and Africa than in Europe until about the time of the Crusades — meaning that the heretical Jacobites and Nestorians  outnumbered the followers of the orthodox Catholic and Orthodox churches.  Jenkins suggested that the fall of Asian Christianity was due to the emergence of hardline Muslim leaders across Asia who weren’t as tolerant of the other Peoples of the Book (Christians, Jews) as prior leaders had been.  These leaders emerged at a time when the Islamic world was troubled by repeated Christian invasions from the West, and existentially threatened by Mongol invasions from the East.  It appears that when the Khans converted to Islam, they became the most intolerant rulers of all.

But back to the Crusades.  Professor Tyerman’s description of crusade recruiters made me think immediately of modern motivational speakers.  Only, instead of motivating their audiences to sign up for a follow-up course, they were trying to motivate them to pick up arms and travel for several months so that if they survived the trip, they could engage an enemy, on said enemy’s territory, surrounded by said enemy’s allies. 

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On a Boston-bound business… trip.  (What’s a word that begins with “b” and is synonymous with trip?)

Cultural anthropology and other travel notes below:

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