Thang Nguyen 555

Everything looks like nails. Every jetliner looks like combat. Those satellite images similar to the ones that were supposed to locate the missing Malaysian flight a while ago, now used to shoot down a 777 of the same fleet.

I am flying tonight. Not sure how safe it is going to be (a few folks, either had missed flight ML17, or couldn’t get on, felt quite fortunate).

If only we can afford to stay put in one place. Louis L’Amour once said that the problem with human being was that he could not stay in one place.

Wanderers we are.

Looking for opportunities and troubles.

For love and safety, ironically, out there in the wild?

Cold war reasserts itself, civilian casualties are the results.

Just as CNN starts to show Cold War series (as if it were History Channel), that relics of that same Cold War reincarnate albeit with a death toll of 298, 80 children and infants included.

A Vietnamese mother and her 2 children were on that fateful flight as well. No more “Tiger Mom”, “minority models” etc…

Just ashes back to ashes.

You may think that this is out there  and doesn’t apply to you and me.

But it is very real to families of those 298.

They were AIDS researchers and writer, lovers and debtors. They maybe very much like you and me, longing to be reunited to loved ones on the other end of the flight.

This makes flight delays all the more bearable.

In the coming days, we will see a Lockerbie-type of tribunal court. Someone somewhere will be the sacrificial lamb. And we will all put it behind. Trying to forget. Until another group, with hammer in hand.

Boys with toys, trigger-happy. Let automation take over and “seek to destroy”. God damn “intelligent” machine, made and used by dumb men.

We (our ancestors) created tools (spears) for hunting and (wheels) for gathering.

From tools to technique, we now spend our summer entertaining dollars on Transformers, the sequel.

Yes. We can cut the steps in the production process and supply chain (chop down to minuscule tasks – assembly line – then offshore them – or semi-automate as in prosumering i.e. self-serve culture).

But suddenly, something went terribly wrong! Toyota preempted this when it empowered and encouraged its employees (any rank and file) to stop the assembly line (w/ supervisor’s sign off, of course) to check and correct it (its ignition switches passed muster, but it’s the floor mats that killed the San Diego passengers). Even google un-manned car needs journalists who rode in it and wrote about it.

Luckily, not all human positions are eliminated (lucky for me when I can still play supervisor when I-robot vacuums the house.)

The Wal-Mart cashier-turned-customer-supervisor also does this at self check-out counters.

The more we outsource to machine, the more we need human intervention.

After all, it’s those smart coders that brought us cloud, mobile and big data ( as in  Hadoop).

Let the machine do what it is built to do: crunching the numbers.

And human to exploit the loop holes: cooking the books (CDO)  or predicting where the next outbreak might likely to occur ( flu outbreak).

(this is another topic: the human paradox – on human bondage, as Somerset Maugham put it).

It’s not necessary for me to make the case for human. Let the debate and defense be in the hands of legislation and liturgy.

A person, as a producer or a consumer, is to be valued.

We were at a coffee shop where they handed out beepers for our orders. The beeper did not work after we had paid for our drink.

After some wrangling back and forth, we got our order, brought to the table by a server – when everybody else was getting ready to leave.

What a customer experience!

So much for automation overkill (or mis-application of labor-saving device where labor are still cheap).

Next time, learn to apply the machine where suitable and at leisure, not tech for tech’s sakes.

And remember, human being, like you and I got our pride and priority as well.

We got creativity and survival instinct, relics of hunting gathering days. After all, it’s us who invented the wheel.

Machine can only reproduce other machines in its own likeness. We, on the other hand, got wits, wisdom and weakness. Putting it together, I’d rather chat, argue and love another person of same likeness.

Let the “centennial man” be jealous of our mortality and ask to pull the plug. The abortion and euthanasia century have paved the way for increased automation, and less reliance on the human workers. We got our own life expectancy, expectations and hope. Bondage or bonding, we live and love, leave behind traces of “I once was there” encoded in stanzas, poem and print, music, symbols, drawings, designs and artifacts, statues, blog posts, photos, jokes and videos. There is a robot walks into a bar. He asks the bartender: do you accept bit coins? the bartender says ” sorry, we reserve the right to refuse services to anyone, robots included”. The robot walks away in frustration: “gosh! what’s the big deal! Human being are quite hard to understand?!?” Man can understand machine, but not the other way around. From cavemen to computer men, we finally own up to our humanity when our lives are threatened. Machine can crunch the odds of World Cup, but it’s us who jump in the air (when out team won) by reflex, regardless of race, creed or color of our skin.

Explore with me the concept of Key Performance Indicators as they apply to us, cogs in the wheel.

It’s the 1st of July, act 2 of 2014.

The curtain gets pulled away after half-time to reveal same actors and screen play.

Neither new faces nor new tunes.

In fact, some even died off if the NYT Obituary pages be of any indicator.

Steve Jobs once said “being the richest guy in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me”.

He lived his life with intense purpose and followed through with his passion i.e. the customer experience.

Steve’s KPI.

On the contrary, many people fell into the consuming trap – forever fashion slave, with closets full of never-used or hardly used items.

Victims of planned obsolescence.

Have they even heard of the hedonic treadmill?

Once you reached $750K threshold, everything seems to go downhill from there.

Yet we ignore those personal KPI’s.

Instead, we barely scrape the surface of what it is that makes up a life well-lived (and examined).

The only KPI’s that really matter: children laughter, a grandma visit and an uninvited tune that keeps looping around in our heads.

“If it makes you happy, why the hell are you so sad?”

Miserable mergers make miserable corporate environment. If fact, it’s toxic, with negativity around the water cooler.

Late indicators show 70% employees put in the bare minimum requirement on the job so as not to get fired.

Where is the motivation? The urge to splurge?

We (employers)  managed to off-shore the pollution, the productivity and even the profit (Chinese consumer base).

The result: we suffer postpartum blues, being disconnected from the finished products and the customer experience.

We assemble ignition switches that annihilated our customers instead of accelerating them toward their dreams , as car commercials often boast. The law suits are now piled up at $1 million per death.

From Harvard cheat sheet to GM death switches, we orchestrate an entirely different KPI universe, just like Wall Street dark pools.

Systemically, we are sidelined, like a Congressional Committee and CEO who decline to comment on a fact that everyone has already known.

Instead of being a cog in someone’s wheel, we end up being a cog in a run-away wheel.

It’s time to overhaul. To measure by the real KPI.

What’s revealed and what’s hidden ( by people who protect their personal KPI by cooking the books).

The new Pope starts to do just that.

And GM and the Pentagon (Iraq) – and the new VA.

It’s time to put those to the test – the New York Times test and our grandchildren test i.e. don’t make any decision that you don’t want to see appear on the next day front page and your grandchildren will read about it years from now. Those KPI’s are the ones that pass muster.

In spite of  the euro-centric title (reminds me of Cultural Literacy by Hirsch back in the 80’s), Mr Ferguson managed to zoom out from history to de-construct the rise of the
West (past) versus the rise of the Rest (present).

He picked out some  no-brainers like modern medicine, scientific revolution (which paved the way for the Industrial Revolution) and the rule of law.

Other “soft” features such as competition, work ethic and consumer society (blue jeans in particular), are more transferable.

Mr Ferguson’s devoted considerable space to textile and blue jeans to show wide-spread democratizing effect across the globe. One (anyone) can just buy (consume) a pair of blue jeans, and work hard for the money (work ethic) to buy them.

Consumerism, the tip of capitalism iceberg e.g. pharmaceutical products and I-phones (technology brought about by science) , will find or have found their way into the society near you.

Take China as a case in point.

The new Chinese dream (a resurging civilization in modern times) urges people (Africans included) to trade, to copy, to consume (instead of saving) and to compete on a global scale (Lenovo, Alibaba and Huawei). As of this writing, GM default ignition switches were made in China. Lots of law suits, lots of heads roll.

Work ethic!!!?

The retro movement in America plays to this nostalgic theme: quality things used to be made in heartland America, with Protestant work ethic and rule of law (IP and union law).

But the aging of America and Japan (as shown in Google’s imported talents from all over the world) by default, gives rise to the likes of China, not only for manufacturing and service outsourcing, but also to expand its consumer base. More KFC and Domino pizzas sold, the higher the shareholders’ return.

America (the technological arms of old European civilization and scientific revolution) cannot sustain its own appetite without the rise of the Rest (network effect) . Its economy contracts almost 3 per cent on Q1 this year. The mall turned heated gymnasium by default for senior citizens to “window shop” during the 2014 Polar Vortex months.

Back to Mr Ferguson’s observations. Maybe “civilization” has moved on and found new homes. Just like the Ottoman’s Empire and Chinese Empire before it.

In our online and global society, people cream off what is at the top (first page of search results). TOP of Mind Attention. The rest can be laid to rest. Such as the nature of today’s beast. Short-term memory, short attention span.

I gotta to stop here. No time for Chaucer and the book of Common Prayer. No time for ironing and window shopping. Just enough time to put on a pair of blue jeans and online shopping. Time is the new money. And memory capacity, not just in the laptop or mobile phone, but in our heads, is full. In need of “defragmentalization”. We invented the machine (industrial revolution). Now the machine is reinventing us (screen addiction). Bye for now. Got to rest the weary eyes and aching muscles. Old hardware cannot run on new 24/7 software . Civilization comes and goes. At times it rises in the West, other time, it’s the rise of the Rest.

It is estimated that by 2019, there will be an extra 3-Billion people joining us on the Internet.

Imagine a bell curve, split right in the middle, which is dated 2014.

What will the web look like in 5 years, with that many “faces” friending us?

E-commerce, e stock, e-banking, e-ticket, e-government, e-everything……

Fasten your seat belts, for the ride.

What we now call Big Data, will be “small” by then i.e. more people, bigger network effect.

Whatever product and services, prepare to scale.

It’s a no brainer.

With the majority on wifi, Internet = utility.

Attention span will stretch to the limits (we will adapt to Present Shock).

Our narrative will be buried among billions, all with humble origins, rise and fall and hopefully with a happy ending.

When there is a will, there is a way (Kickstarter).

Our taste will be more refined, to differentiate ourselves (jeans full of holes, in the right places).

We will stretch the Dunbar number (maximum online connections: 150 to 231.)

Our Eden,  Amazon, the online store, not Amazon, the ancient forest.

Our narrative will carry its own seed of immortality, digitally speaking.

God knows who, and how many, years from now, will read this, and think I am so “naive” to have my point of reference at the time of World Cup 2014 with Tweeter, the social medium of that time.

Back in the 70’s, George Lucas did not realize he was making an American classic movie (Star Wars) until it’s inducted into the Smithsonian American Cultural History.

Same with our trail-and-error kickstarts on-line and on this side of the Industrial Revolution.

Let’s face it: with a potential market doubling in 5 years, who wouldn’t get excited.

Just sell deodorants online (International Marketing class I attended was discussing about deodorants for Billions of Chinese armpits).

I hope the sheer size, scale and reach of the Internet will groundswell with innovation and creative services  for those of us who are still alive to reap the benefits.

Only those who sleep-walk through history that will miss this influx of  the Other Half.

Reality and life itself, is one log-on after another, happens outside of you and me. Engage or expire, our new Shakespearean motto.

It’s been defied for 100 years now through modern aviation.

Before that, men lived in cave, in mansion and in quiet desperation.

Chinese naval (abandoned to their regrets)  then British naval might have exerted their influence across the seas, making “the sun never set on the British empire”.
The Wright brothers, by the way, worked out of their own “garage”, out of pure passion and the urge to innovate.

Amelia and Beryl were flying some of those first planes. Women with wings.

It’s hard to imagine a century later, Nigerian girls are still abducted in drove (at least, this time around, drones come to their rescue).

Let’s hope a happy ending to that chapter “out of Africa”.

Japan has invested a lot in R&D (President Obama was greeted by a robot, while Honda has unveiled its latest airplane ).

It refuses to put all the investment eggs into the Chinese basket.

ASEAN countries are now the beneficiaries of this load balancing.

Let’s hope these little tigers rise to the task.

They have no choice. By year-end (2014), China will have overtaken the US to be the number one economy in the world.

With privileges come responsibilities. But as a rule, those who get rich quick, don’t seem to have the modesty or humility that go with good fortune.

In fact, its War college president seemed to have taken a tough stance, counter-punching Defense Sec Chuck Hagel that “if the US wants China to take an antagonistic stance, it will”.

Every century sees a great reshuffling e.g. Ottoman Empire, French and Portuguese, British and American. Empires don’t just come and take things (raw materials).

They will have to build roads and schools, improve health and education to “earn” their privileges.

He who lives in the glass house doesn’t want to throw the first stone.

Copy right infringement and hacking are those unwelcoming stones, conduct unbecoming of a great empire. I know there are gracious and brilliant thinkers out of 1.2  Billion in China.

Let’s hope those folks have some say in the affairs of state, to slow down the runaway train. They tried and failed 25 years ago. Maybe they will succeed this time around. Good for China, good for the world. Naval superiority gave rise to the British empire, aviation to American. It’s ethics, environment and education that mark the upcoming world leader. Whoever it is, will have to earn that top spot

via soft powers, not just by muscling up hardware, like naval or aviation.

Alibaba upcoming IPO has been the talk of the town.  Meanwhile, Amazon is delivering “happiness” even on Sundays, giving the Post Office some extra business.

Korean e-commerce is thriving, saving buyers a ton of money, international shipping accounted. This got Amazon’s attention.

After all, Amazon chief would not give anything to chance, even “drone delivery”.

How about using Google driverless wheels?

Welcome to our 21st century.

Economically and environmentally, we will find a way to thrive and survive leaving our Industrial past way behind ( just as it had before done to our agricultural past).

The new digital divide no longer borders along information rich and information poor societies (the US is not the number one broadband nation. It’s S Korea and Northern European countries).

US land line phones, Detroit auto industry and oil dependence, all represent the old economy (Motorola is pulling out).

The new graduates this year just want to hear commencement speech from “cool” speakers, preferably from Standford over Harvard, online heroes over offline ones.

Companies like Zappos want to do away with job postings, with job titles and with cubicles. It even offers to pay people to leave (if they feel they don’t fit-in).

“Tear down that wall” is their new slogan. Downtown LA, Las Vegas and San Francisco all got renovated with dot.com overspilled revenues (telecom hotels, collocation centers, Twitter offices).

China is in, way back in, 20 some years after Tiananmen Square. They are entering “the age of ambition”. The China Dream (of no pollution, and towns that look like a Swiss village or Newport Beach).

Let the game begin. Everyone wants to put an “e” in front of their titles, as in  eSilicon Valley, sleeps in sleeping bags, codes all night and has the “tech” look (see TED talk speakers – or Tim Cook and the new MSN CEO).

IBM salesman Brooks Brothers look is out. In is the Gap, borderline Banana Republic.

Online is negotiating with offline world, negating and complementing (net neutrality debate).

But what it won’t do is passively let the old status quo dictate what digital natives should think, wear, and sound like.

Nobody is going to “shop til you drop” (off-line world adage). Everybody instead “shops and never stops – 24/7”.

Shoppers sans frontieres. Fiber to the curb and food to the table, all delivered using offline services e.g. post office,  which has consistently lost money.

Online convenience in time for baby boomer’s needs. How would you like your Kindle’s font ? Larger? No problem! As long as Amazon can “deliver happiness in a box”.

For the past two months, our eyes were glued to CNN for the latest on flight ML 370 passengers, for the Korean students on that fateful ferry and now for the abducted Nigerian girls.

In all three incidents, some modes of transportation were involved e.g. plane, boat and trucks .

People also disappeared against their wills, and in the first two incidents, presumably dead. And in all three situations, we got visual coverage e.g. high school students putting on life-supports while joking that they were living out their version of the “Titanic”, or a hostage demand to exchange kidnapped girls for political prisoners (with bearded terrorist leader,  gun on the side, gesturing to the HD video camera, in a Bin Laden 2.0 script).

Luckily for us, the viewing and concerned public, there always are panels of experts to help us “think through” the technical, emotional, and historical angles of the missing cases: from those who had worked with the earlier French plane crash to the Italian cruise accident. We are not asked to think for ourselves. Just sit back, watch the commercials, and the panelists will do the talking (as if two months worth of talks will somehow affect the outcome, which, in the ML 370 case, the wrong search area).

Welcome to this side of social media, smart phones and satellite coverage. There had been missing groups of people in the past, but never, this intensive and involving (multi-national and multi-continental).

Meanwhile, we still see the old public shaming Samurai style when the Vice Principle committed suicide (S Korea).  Despite progress in technology and globalization, primal reflexes are still here: asking the astrologers to find the missing plane, killing oneself as scapegoat, and abducting young girls for trafficking (prisoner exchange was just a noble spin, in an attempt to sugarcoat a barbarian act). Meanwhile, rest of the world had learned about these missing girls for almost 5 weeks. Had it been one girl abducted on an US highway, an Amber alert would have immediately been put out (Washington D.C. had a case in point back in March). As sad as the case, this was Nigeria (I have no qualm with the Nigerian people, since I attended grad school with a few students from that country and we were great friends) and only when it evolves into a news “story” that world conscience starts to weigh in. With each passing moment, the search for the missing girls will be more challenging. That which they could not find (missing air passengers), they insisted on finding. That which they could have found (school girls), they ignored. Missing people (the biblical poor) will always be with us;  it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

There has been a new finding to show that our noses can detect up to a Trillion scents (that’s with a T).

Welcome to Spring allergy season.

At least, it’s returning every year, to draw us to Claritin.

The study put our sense of smell way out of the ball park as compared to our sense of hearing ( hundreds of thousands distinct sound) and our visual sense (millions).

The takeaway: take time out to smell the flowers, since by the time we are dead, we could barely sample a fraction of available scents out there.

I remember the joke about “smellevision”. Yet, glossy scratch-and-sniff pages from Vogue are not far from hitting this bull’s-eyes.

Scientists even venture to speculate that mate selection is largely determined by the “scent of the woman” (ably portrayed by Al Pacino).

Years have passed, yet a bunch of friends can still recall the smoked-barbecue beef on stick by a vendor outside of our neighborhood swimming pool (that’s when we were starving after the exercise).

With K-9 unit, we know that a trained dog is most feared by drug smugglers.

We have yet exploited this finding, since our marketing still relies solely on yesterday’s findings (Audio-Visual, or short as A/V).

As of this edit, researchers at Harvard have just announced a start-up capitalizing on our sense of smell.

It takes no time for industry experts to monetize science and technology latest discoveries.

Tech and techies don’t rest during a recession.

It keeps innovating and surging forward (Moore’s Law and Big Data). China’s Huawei is talking about Cloud and Mobile as if they had operated out of Silicon Valley since day one.

The speed of change.

One example of this is saving money for your child to go to college. What if by the time your child enters college, he or she doesn’t need all the assumed funds ( with online university), or he/she doesn’t want to go to college at all.

Years ago, one would never have thought of  learning Chinese. Today, it’s a reverse. Tomorrow, things might change again, thanks to Google translation. (The Age of Ambition). By then, Google translation might not be the only game in town.

Having touched on just the surface of Sense and Speed, I want to travel back in time to recall my favorite scents e.g. the sizzle of a steak in Hong Kong (Su 83), the great smell of my first child’s shampoo (Johnson Johnson). I wish the speed of time would slow down for those moments, so I can fully appreciate the scents of the time. Remember those 80’s hairspray? Yew! Things have changed quickly, at least, for a certain sector of the economy. Moore’s law and Metcalfe effect! Tech and social. Meanwhile, the contrarian in us wants to enjoy slow-boil broth, as in Pho, instead of instant noodle and microwaved frozen pizza. It is to show we are made of different parts with various built-in speed of adoption: part of us want things to move quickly, while other parts want to cling to comfort and safety.  We have the debate well portrayed by Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen in Papillon.

Our senses are made to function in a physical reality. We cannot smell the ones and the zeros. It will take some convincing for sites like Match.com to leverage this new finding: see my photo, hear my voice, and ……smell my skin????

Flight ML370, 24 odd days into its fateful take-off, is still missing. Round the clock speculating and searching for possible clues. Tech experts and investigators had their hunches. Nations offer their vessels. Loved ones of the missing passengers got shuffled back and forth between Malaysia and Mainland, turning stress into shouts. It’s an international and inconvenient incident in our modern jet age. People travel for work and for pleasure. Some did one after the other (vacationing before getting back to work). No one expects to step into a flying Titanic. Yet it happened before our own eyes. Got our top attention. Bewildered. Empathized. Could have been us. What would we text or tweet. To whom. In that short of a window? WILL OUR WHOLE LIFE FLASH BEFORE US. Regrets? A few. Because we did it our way? Justice? Too late to give or receive it. Love in Pompeii style?. I wonder if acts or words of kindness would make a difference in those last moments. If we have learned to tune out people and focus on the screen, chances are we wouldn’t know where to start ( being kind to strangers in a common bond of humanity). Yet it’s a forced choice at that point. To bid others a gentle goodnight.  Goodnight Malaysia three seven o. Last words from ML370. What would be yours. To whom. Unreserved or edited. Straight from the habits of the heart. Will it be ” I am King of the world”?