Mapping Strategy

The Sun Never Sets... on the Orange County Register

The English language has, arguably speaking, been one of Great Britain's most prolific and resilient exports. Now it has become the basis for a new kind of international trade. That, along with cost pressures and reliable networks made the following virtually inevitable.

An Indian company will take over copy editing duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.

Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.

Mindworks' Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides "high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms ... using top-end journalistic and design talent in India."

Substituting 'z's for the new copy editors' instinctual 's's in words like 'institutionalized' won't be enough. As the saying goes: Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language. Perhaps more so with the other former colonies.

It will be interesting to see how they separate pure copy editing from tasks like fact-checking, local context, style and cultural nuance -- a lesson Dell and others learned the hard way, as faraway call center personnel (perfectly nice and perfectly competent) just didn't 'click' with their U.S. callers for a host of subtle reasons.

One demographic irony: in the not-so-distant future, the Indians may lose out to the Mexicans for the OC's outsourcing contract.

Predicting Armageddon

Sadly, In light of this, this seems undervalued [emphasis added].

"If Iran continues its nuclear weapons programme, we will attack it," said [Deputy Prime Minister] Shaul Mofaz... "Other options are disappearing. The sanctions are not effective. There will be no alternative but to attack Iran in order to stop the Iranian nuclear programme."

One thing notable about this graphic is how little reaction there has been to this news. To my reading (and I've followed this closely the last several years) it marks a significant step up in rhetoric by the top echelons of the Israeli government. The second thing I find remarkable is how the market has trended steadily upwards over the past four months or so.

This is but one of many 'quarterly' prediction markets Intrade has been running on an airstrike on Iran. All of them, obviously (at least so far) have rewarded the skeptics, however most have trended downward as the market close approached. This one isn't doing that.

I'm of two minds on how much stock to put in this market. (Sorry, pun intended).

On the one hand, military missions are, or at least ought to be, closely guarded secrets. And this would be no ordinary military mission. It is truly existential. Sure a few thousand people might be privvy to some kind of knowledge or direct insight into what was going on, but I doubt any of them would risk being shot in order to make a little extra on the side. So, on that basis, this has many of the characteristics of silly/failed markets in things like papal elections and supreme court nominations.

On the other hand, this is not as surprising as a terrorist attack (a dumb thing in which to make highly specific markets IMHO, even though there are many related indicators that might be useful).

Most nations don't want to go to war. (Iran may be an exception, but we're talking here about an attack on them, not by them). Most nations 'do the (diplomatic) dance'. They do relatively rote, predictable things in the lead-up to any conflict. And those things tend to follow patterns that are not random.

They may not be easily predictable, but there is information out there, held by people not constrained by an oath of secrecy, that is meaningful in discerning whether this will go down or not. Sadly, if I were to bet on it (and I don't -- at least not on real money markets) I would have to say that this market is way undervalued.

UPDATE (July 1, 2008): Almost a month after I first made this post, the trend continues (see below). Despite Israeli moves that make such a strike seem more likely (whether for real or for bluff we can't know), the market hasn't had a very high 'beta' (volatility). This despite (or perhaps because of) significantly higher trading volumes in June. A good summary of recent events around this can be found here.

Overt Airstrike on Iran on or before Dec. 31, 2008

Next They'll Ban Thinking...

I find this item in today's WSJ both puzzling and ridiculous
[emphasis added]:

Television's late-night talk-show hosts are set to return to the airwaves next week, but their jokes will pretty much have to write themselves.

After sitting out the first two months of the Hollywood writers' strike, the hosts have agreed, under pressure from their network bosses, to go back to work. But members of the Writers Guild of America -- including the folks who supply the hosts with most of their laugh lines -- are still out on picket lines this week, and no new rounds of negotiations are scheduled...

The guild's strike rules are extremely broad and vague, prohibiting the late-night talk-show hosts, most of whom are guild members, from doing anything that constitutes "writing services." That means the hosts are technically forbidden from writing and performing the traditional opening monologue, plotting out sketches in advance, or creating fictional characters that would perform on the shows...

With all due respect to writers trying to make a living (and I can empathize because, in another sphere of my life, I am one) this is silly beyond comprehension. 

In the brave new Internet world of tens of millions of bloggers toiling for free (some of them reasonably clever, informative and funny) there's little to stop a late-night host from initiating an open contest for the best monologue or character for each night's show.

If no money changes hands, is it the same as crossing the picket line and hiring 'scabs'? What if a third party did the same thing and the host just happened to browse the website? Is finding and printing a volunteer monologue the same as writing? And what is writing, anyway, if not thinking? On what basis do they propose to control that? (Much less justifying their attempts to do so.)

There's nothing like trying to restrict the fundamentally unrestrictable to show how little power the Guild -- and other fluid, information- and creativity-based enterprises -- wield in this new paradigm. The article continues:

anything traditionally written by writers -- David Letterman's "Top Ten List," for example... [would be] unacceptable...

When a rule implies that replacing "anything traditionally done by [fill-in-the-blank*] would be unacceptable", we have approached the very definition of reactionary anti-innovation.

*E.g., as a though exercise, try substituting "typists", "file clerks", "telephone switchboard operators", "blacksmiths" or "horse-and-buggy drivers". Does the following sound Orwellian to anyone else?

Since much of the "writing" on these shows consists of generating ideas for skits and segments, which are loosely scripted and then partially improvised on air, producers say it is unclear how much forethought is technically permissible. [!!]

Then again, maybe someone 'gets it' after all:

Other ideas being batted around by producers that they believe don't violate strike rules include man-on-the street and audience interviews [and] clips from YouTube and other video Web sites...

Better be careful lest the YouTube characters display written words... that would be writing.

Rehearsing Like a Pit Crew

At a talk I gave last year, I put forward the idea that management teams seldom get a chance to rehearse or practice. When they do have the opportunity, very few outside the military are inclined to do so together--systematically war-gaming (even role-playing) comprehensive, integrated team approaches to a range of possible scenarios.

The habit of handling issues as they come up is a bad one... and yet it still has a strange hold in the boardroom where playing out hypothetical situations can seem a waste of time. Despite numerous examples of high-performance teams that spend the majority of their time rehearsing and practicing, the reality is that very few management teams do the same.

In the talk, I drew a contrast between management teams and other kinds of high-performance, high-stakes teams such as military squads, SWAT units, orchestras and other musical groups, sports teams... and Formula One pit crews.

And so it was with that in mind that an article in today's Wall Street Journal caught my eye: "A Hospital Races to Learn Lessons of Ferrari Pit Stop" (subscription required; emphasis added):

Britain's largest children's hospital has revamped its patient handoff techniques by copying the choreographed pit stops of Italy's Formula One Ferrari racing team... The challenge of moving a patient to another unit, or to a new team during a shift change, is an old one... A 2005 study found that nearly 70% of preventable hospital mishaps occurred because of communication problems, and other studies have shown that at least half of such breakdowns occur during handoffs...

In early 2005, [two doctors] traveled to Ferrari's headquarters... played a video of a hospital handover and described the process in pictures. The Ferrari man wasn't impressed. "In fact, he was amazed" at how clumsy and informal the hospital handover process appeared to be...

In that meeting, [the Ferrari man] described how each member of the Ferrari crew is required to do a specific job, in a specific sequence, and usually in silence. By contrast, he noted, the hospital handover was often chaotic. Several conversations between nurses and doctors went on at once. Meanwhile, different members of the team disconnected or reconnected equipment to a patient, but in no particular order.

In a Formula One race, the "lollipop man" with a paddle ushers the car in and signals the driver when it's safe to go. But in the hospital setting, it wasn't always clear who was in charge. Though the anesthesiologist had nominal responsibility to take the lead during a handover, sometimes the surgeon assumed that role -- or no one at all.

The crew at Ferrari trained for the worst contingencies. "If [a driver] comes in five laps early because it's raining and he wants wet-weather tires, [the pit crew is] prepared"... The hospital team dealt with problems as they came up...

Back in London, [the doctors] began to incorporate Ferrari's lessons... After the changes, the average number of technical errors per handover fell 42% and "information handover omissions" fell 49%. It also took slightly less time to execute each handover, though, unlike the Ferrari team, the doctors weren't trying to speed up their process.

Supporting a Good Cause

I'm making a one-time plea to regular (and irregular!) readers of this blog to consider supporting the Dana Farber Cancer Institute's Barr program in innovative cancer research in tribute to my late brother and only sibling and my run at the Boston Marathon next Monday. He would have turned 40 last month. He had no risk factors for leukemia when it struck him last year at age 38.

I've met some of these scientists and they're amazing - doing world-class work on fundamental genetics across the length and breadth of the dreadful disease called cancer. If you or someone you know hasn't been touched by it, chances are high that that won't last. We will all benefit from the knowledge they are creating. Thank you. We return to our regular program.

Cancer Research - Limits and Hopes

I didn’t intend to be away from blogging for this long (three weeks). The day of my last post, I was with my brother at the hospital when he received the definitive version of the news we’d been anticipating:

You don’t have long. Days, probably. Maybe a week or two. Go home. Rest. Pray. Enjoy your family. Finalize your affairs.

He had a few good days there, breaking dietary restrictions he’d endured these past seven months of chemotherapy and immunosuppression, telling stories, living life. Then he began to slip. His wife, their daughter and I sat vigil through hospice care: four days and three long nights. He passed peacefully in his own bed, shortly after sunrise, Friday the 14th of October, surrounded by family: as it should be. Thirty-nine years young: as it should not.

To say that business has taken a backseat this month (and frankly, this year) would be the understatement of all time. But the mental gears grind on. This whole ordeal has caused me to reflect on the many ways in which medical science is amazing... but still limited.

In February, my brother was a healthy guy with a great life just coming into bloom. That changed in less than a week. In early March, he came home from a business trip, feeling a little tired. (Who doesn't?) The next day he felt like he had a cold. (It's March, so what?) The day after that he felt he had the flu but made it in to work anyway to give an important presentation. (Wouldn't we all?.) He told me it went well. Nobody remembers what it was about.

The day after that he felt like it might be a bad case of the flu. He went out to clear his driveway anyway. (How bad could it be?) That night his wife got worried and took him to the emergency room, thinking it might be meningitis. Good thing she did. Within hours he was in chemo. They told us he wouldn’t have lasted another 48 hours without it.

Because of medical science and my sister-in-law’s vigilance, my brother lived seven months after that awful diagnosis of Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia. A young teacher at my daughter’s school missed that diagnostic window, earlier this year. She died within days.

My brother received the best care available – of that I am absolutely certain. Yet it was not enough. The beast that slew him remains thoroughly untamed. Nevertheless, it’s exciting (albeit a little sad for us), to realize that new treatments are coming down the pipeline all the time. My brother missed a new, promising clinical trial by a little less than a month.

In hopes that it not be so for others, I will be running the Boston Marathon next April in support of the Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I’ve met some of these folks. They are amazing: doing cutting edge stuff that (it’s not too presumptuous to say), has and continues to have a fundamental global impact on the understanding and treatment of all kinds of cancers.

All of the proceeds from my run go directly to the research program. (The marathon part is staffed by volunteers.) You can donate on-line here. Please think about giving generously and passing this along to friends and colleagues in your network. As my brother’s case illustrates all too well, no one is immune...

Betting (Against) Global Warming

Apologies for the dearth of posts recently. We've been told that the chances of my brother's leukemia allowing him to make it to October are extremely slim. Those are odds we're happy to take, though the odds window could close altogether this weekend with new test results.

On a happier note, this is interesting:

Two climate change sceptics, who believe the dangers of global warming are overstated, have put their money where their mouth is and bet $10,000 that the planet will cool over the next decade.

Blank Keyboards: Innovation in 'Commodity' Markets

About fifteen years ago, I was hired by a major U.S.-based computer keyboard manufacturer to consult on the prospects for that industry and recommend potential strategies for them in it. Tough assignment. Even then it was obvious that it was a commodity business in the extreme, (over 100 manufacturers globally - most of them in Asia.) Their manufacturing cost  alone was several multiples of the offering price of their up-and-coming competitors.

Nonetheless, our research showed tantalizingly quirky little customer preferences (e.g., around style and feel), everywhere we looked. Everyone had an opinion. After all, keyboards are an incredibly intimate, high-use product for many knowledge workers, not unlike phones in that regard. (To paraphrase David Byrne: same as it ever was... look where my hand was.) Satisfying any one of those desires offered the possibility for a niche play. In aggregate, who knew?

We did not have the benefit at the time of having seen the rise of cell phones as consumer fashion statements. Heck, we didn't even have the benefit of having seen cell phones get popular. My client never made the niche play, preferring instead to slash costs by sending their manufacturing offshore. But I always remembered the niche potential of that study. Thus, I note with interest and amusement this innovation - a computer keyboard with no labels... not unlike a piano. Innovation in plain sight. Cool.

Daniel Guermeur, chief executive of Austin-based Metadot Corp... says he first came up with the idea for a blank keyboard while attending Stanford University in 1989. It was there that the French native noticed others typing much faster than he was. "I was an OK typist but I was slowing down when I looked at the special characters," said Guermeur, 41. "One day I said, 'If I could just improve my typing I could be much more efficient.'" Two years ago, he built a prototype to test his hypothesis that a blank keyboard would force him to become a better typist. After many people asked him where he bought it, he decided to start making them commercially... A popular observation: Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a normal keyboard and either strip off the markings or give it a quick coat of spray paint? "You could do it," Guermeur concedes, "but it's a pain in the butt to do that, a major pain. Also the paint would wear off eventually." It might seem a gimmick, but Guermeur maintains Das Keyboard is an invention rooted in logic. "If you look at a piano, it doesn't have notes on the keys, it's blank," he says. "Writing letters seems like a good help but actually it's not. It's counterintuitive, actually."

UPDATE: This innovation runs in precisely the opposite direction.

Drucker the Great

There is nobody like Peter Drucker - his every word infused with deep wisdom and intelligence. This wide-ranging interview produced by WBUR is a must-listen... despite the interviewers constantly trying to 'spin' his views into a narrow current political context.

Guest Appearance Tomorrow

I'm honored to have a  featured piece in tomorrow's newsletter from Tom Barnett and the New Rule Sets Project. The topic: global connectivity, resilience, transparency, copyright and a bunch of other stuff. Check it out (pdf).

UPDATE: Original link has moved. Full text of the piece follows below:

Google: Shrinking the Gap With Connectivity

On June 30th, the front page of the Wall Street Journal carried the headline: "For Soaring Google, Next Act Won't Be as Easy as the First", noting that the “official ambition” of the juggernaut Internet search company is, “to search all of the world's information”. Period.

Not just the text. Not just the freely available digital stuff or that to be found in clean, safe, orderly parts of the world. All information. Period. Ambitious? The term is scarcely strong enough. “Megalomaniacal/visionary” might be more appropriate. Yet just today, the company is reporting a 4X surge in quarterly profit on a doubling of revenue. Google is no dot.com flash in the pan. Just the opposite, in fact. The Wall Street Journal characterizes “Google's mission [as] a long-term one”, quoting CEO, Eric Schmidt as saying: “It will take… 300 years to organize all of the world's information.”

Here’s our goal, the CEO says, in effect. It will take ten generations. Are you with us? That kind of talk gets most CEOs a one way trip to the asylum. Three hundred years ago, George Washington’s mother wasn’t even born yet. Yet investors are absolutely on board. The price of a Google share is up more than 60% this year… and it’s only July.

Lest this begin to sound like a stock analyst’s report, here’s the big thought for readers of this newsletter: substitute “the Core”, or “free market, Western, capitalistic rule sets” for Google and the headline reads just as well. “For Soaring Core, Next Act Won’t Be as Easy as the First”. Indeed. We’d all prefer thirty years to fill the Gap. Realistically, it may take three hundred. As Tom likes to say though, the end point is a worthy one; we’re at an inflection point in history; turning back isn’t an option. Google’s stock price soars. So does demand for immigration to the Old Core. Legal or not, this is the place to be. The man on the street instinctively knows that both trains are going somewhere good. Surely there’s enough momentum to hook a few more cars on the back.

But here’s the kicker: both trains are going to the same place. My kids can’t remember when searching for information meant a trip to the library and hours in front of the card catalog. I can’t remember the time when visiting Berlin or Tokyo was inconceivable.

Making the dark corners of the Internet, and the larger information universe transparent and easily searchable, (i.e., Google’s challenge) is analogous to what’s involved in closing the Gap and enabling the four flows—the movement of people, money, energy and security. Even as they differ—the virtual and the physical; Google and the Core—there is much in each to inform the other. On the issue security alone, the struggle between order and chaos is richly interwoven between the two. How does one fight a smart, unseen, adaptable enemy force, (e.g., of hackers, virus writers and spammers) conjoined only by a rootless nihilism?

In my technology-oriented scenario-based consulting to Fortune 100 firms, it’s been obvious for nearly a decade that firewalls, (physical or virtual) simply aren’t enough. Nor are the efforts of any one organization. The only lasting solution is to promulgate rule sets in which it’s both possible and attractive for the bad hackers to get real jobs—to join the ‘core’ within the Core—even as we shrink their refuge. The same is true of the brainwashed ‘hackers’ bent on destroying our real-space networks, (e.g., subways).

In both cases too, pitched battles over control of critical assets (e.g., energy and people in the real world; movies, music, books and other works in the virtual one), will increase in intensity as the stakes become apparent to power-hungry holdouts. Their numbers are dwindling, but I still occasionally encounter the ‘throwback’ CEO whose capricious, dictatorial, management style and lust for personal perks have crushed dissent, creativity and morale among employees. More often than not, such organizations—insulated from competition for one reason or another—are unable to respond when those barriers suddenly come down. (e.g., regulatory boundary drops, new innovation springs up, etc.)

The leaders of such fiefdoms know that the game will eventually be up, but they don’t care. In such corporate cultures, it’s hard to escape the echoes, however faint, of Kim Jong-il and Saddam Hussein. Everything appears orderly inside—as long as the pace and vibrancy of a thriving world outside are not held up for comparison. One of Google’s current challenges is convincing content companies (e.g., television producers and networks) to allow Google to search their content. The pitch: you’ll be better off if more people can see what you have to offer. If they find it, the argument goes, they will buy, and everyone will be better off. eBay is the proof in the pudding. Millions of garages and basements were completely ‘off-line’ until it came along. Now they are, in a sense, transparent: open for commerce. Easy search and the flow of information equals tremendous value released—just as it does for people, money, energy and security.

Content companies, (i.e., studios, publishing houses, record labels) sitting on digital assets are understandably wary. Theirs are not dusty basements, but going commercial concerns, threatened in the short term by too much openness. Opening up to the new means giving up something tangible— risking the stability of old business model, even if it’s not thriving as much as it used to. The Silicon Valley lessons of transparency and fluidity are starting to be understood at a gut level outside the technology industry, but it’s still hard for many to make that cognitive leap. Microsoft offered a decent but not exceptional operating system independent of IBM’s PC and it took off—90% market share. Apple bound its operating system to a single platform and got 10% share. Oops. The open-source software movement, exemplified by Linux, has become the ultimate borderless, fluid creation, achieving respectability and major market share at the expense of traditional closed-shop software development efforts in just a few years. Oops.

There are also analogies and crossovers between the virtual and physical worlds in the battles over rule sets. For example, what is the meaning of copyright? How is it to be expressed and enforced in a transparent, ubiquitously networked world (at least the Old Core)? My clients in the publishing and media industries have been wrestling with this one for over a decade. The answers are only beginning to dawn. Digital rights management technology offers a partial answer, but it’s hardly the only one. Similarly, in the larger “meatspace” world, what do terms like ‘citizenship’ mean (national, corporate or otherwise) as Core rule sets expand and the movement of people, money and ideas become more fluid? Writer Neal Stephenson may have been on to something with his vision of voluntarily affiliation under the authority of non-geographic ‘tribes’. Millions of freelance contractors may be on to something too, but that’s a story for another day.

Beyond the visionary analogies, the corporate and the geopolitical worlds come together directly on many of these challenges right now. Google's recent compromises on its service in China (i.e., blocking searches for words like 'democracy' and 'freedom') highlight the problem of penetrability. Copyright holders seeking business in China have the opposite problem: excess fluidity. In both cases, the highest hurdles are legal, political and cultural. In other words: rule sets. Across the Gap, of course, the potential problems are even worse. If Google didn't know that before, it knows that now.

Both Google and the Old Core agree on a worldview that says greater openness and transparency begets emergent order: big, beautiful and thriving. That order is bounded by basic rule sets, but its outcomes are unpredictable—out of anyone's direct control. Too many that looks messy and disturbing, but it works. Human potential is allowed to flourish. Value is created. That’s at odds with a kind of Gap logic that operates on both a national and a corporate level, (think of the ‘throwback’ CEO). It says that order (small, parochial, balkanized) can only exist with opaqueness. Close the doors. Seal the borders. Lock up the content. Protect the franchise. That's fine as a stalling action. It is the sad, selfish, even fiduciary responsibility of many. But it's against the tide of history.

I'm taking the long view. Despite its recent challenges, I'm betting on Google, transparency and the Core. I remain an optimist, even if I don’t get to see it. Even if it takes 300 years. George Washington’s mother would have smiled.