Thang Nguyen 555

Big box stores can’t keep up with the likes of amazing Amazon.

Both categories leverage the economy of scale to earn shares of the retail pie.

Both employ strong-arm tactics, logistic and logic of dis-intermediation.

Both cut down the touchpoint between buyer-seller to a bare minimum (Walmart greeter greets you so their cashiers don’t have to, if there were a human cashier at all- Amazon bought diapers.com and anticipatory shipping patent).

At the bottom feeder, we got Dollar Store which thrived during the Recession.

You want Customer Service, you will have to visit Nordstrom.

Even then, retired Retail people who wear yesterday’s tie will take the time to “chat” with you, maybe throw in a between-you-and-I store promo, just for the experience.

Welcome to the great Reshuffling, since the human card deck has now reached 7 billion and counting

Super Church, Super Computer (Intel is laying off 5,000 of its workers) and Super Statesman (Dennis Rodman).

Hi-tech needs Hi-touch.

As simply as that.

Network efficiency offers convenience, not connection.

People need people (the worst punishment a warden can use is total isolation).

In The Jewish Mind, we read about a story of a local Rabbi who despite zero feedback from a mean farmer, kept at saying Hi, trying to establish that human connection.

Turns out, when he ended up in line to be picked for the gas chamber, that detached farmer was the very Nazi officer who made the call “Left” or “Right”. That eye contact (culminating a life-time attempt at establishing human contact) saved the Rabbi’s dear life.

Big-box retailers will have to

– downsize

– increase its hi-touch in and out of store

– diversify with more service into the mix (Best Buy’s Geek Squad).

When Amazon goes for automation (drone delivery), it’s time for contrarian (people to people service).

There will always be room in the party of 7 billion. You may have to learn a foreign language (Walmart will soon learn to speak Vietnamese just as McDonald is doing) and relearn the lost art of human connection in an age of hyper connection.

In my earlier blog, I tackled the subject of staying ahead of the (horse) race.

In this follow-up blog, I want to explore the theme of being no 2. Yahoo’s no 2, or N Korea’s no 2, all got sacked.

To be great leader, one needs first to be a good follower: one for all, all for one.

The command-control model encourages arm-twisting tactics to stay top dog.

At Lazard Freres, Steve Rattner , aka Car Czar, rubbed shoulders with Felix the top dog, but had a (media) field advantage, enough for Felix to raise hell, which eventually led to Steve’s leaving for his own Quadrangle private equity firm.

Luckily, we got Tech model of collaboration and outsourcing, where talent are respected and used wherever they are found i.e. from fab to factory, from drawing board to assembly line.

It’s about time our understanding of organizational model be adapted to new changes in other fields such as network effect, globalization and sustainability.

One cannot rule the seas and the shores in one fell swoop (Steve Rattner kept filing motion to build an extension of his dock in Vineyard Sound against neighbors and conservationist – just to show money cannot buy everything).

Back to being no 2. Al Gore knew what it’s like to play no 2. He went on to win the Nobel Prize despite terrible set-back in 2000, or his eventual sales of Current TV.

I grew up as the youngest in the family whose siblings were a generation apart.

I have lived the underdog life since day one as no 3.

I work harder (like AVIS). I collaborate (like Sprint did with Clearwire).

I don’t mind at all to be part of the team. I enjoy servant leadership (Jesus feet-washing model).

Someone ought to clear those tables, cheerfully.

Someone ought to stay in the audience to applaud and clap.

Victory is sweet when someone out there sitting in the bleacher sharing it with you.

Be not the lone top dog. Even wolves hunt in pack, and wait patiently for the lead wolf’s signals.

Life is a series of next steps. Someday, it will be your turn. But you must be present to win.

Root for your leader, even in the midst of disagreement. The universe hosts all the planets which rotate in many dimensions, not always top-down or bottom-up.

Restrict not your orientation within just one axle.

He who is in sync with his larger surrounding (universe) will find happiness in the here and now, if not hereafter.

Being a surviving no 3 is far better than a dead no 2.

In a little more than a week, we will see billions of people celebrating the year of the Horse.
Horse race has not been popular in regions where urban centers were over-developed (in South of Los Angeles, the Hollywood race track in Inglewood has just been closed).
No Kentucky Derby here in Vietnam either. Just a tiny Phu-Tho track, pale in comparison.
Fortune was made and lost there in those races.
Apparently, gambling has moved online, leaving the old land-based world behind.
Macao has become a new magnet, a gamblers’ destination.
Neighboring countries like Singapore and Cambodia took notes and came up with their own game plan to lure tourist and gambling dollars.
You may call this another horse race.
So, we got “rat race”, as coined by Westerners, to the top of the totem pole (fame and fortune). We then have horse races to get a windfall (fortune), then we got the arms race, space race when superpowers jockey for supremacy (power).
On a personal level, while racing, we forgot who we are.
We don’t recognize the person staring at us in the mirror any more.
By the time we got to the finishing line of the rat race or horse race, we no longer recognize the winner or losers. All got mud in their faces.
Victory might be sweet for a few, but overall, we all losers to ourselves.
Call it lost dream or lost soul.
We no longer get angry (because anger often times is the flip side of caring, but not getting the expected results) because we have turned apathetic towards our own needs and wants. Like in Don’t Dream It’s Over, “in the paper today, there are tales of war and of waste, but we turn right over to the TV Page”.
But for now, let’s keep on playing the game (of pretense that we will go on living forever etc…), unlike Steve Jobs who once said ” I looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
So the upcoming year of the Horse, once you decided to stay in the race, be that top dog. Always be in training, and be at your best form and top speed. Be that Subject Matter Expert.
Set the pace, raise the standard. Winning and losing, the difference is only an eyelash (MacArthur).
Just remember, it’s lonely at the top. And when you get there, make sure you have a plan B (next year’s goal), or else, like Ted Turner’s dad, who shared with his son about being at a loss when all his set-goals had been achieved “Son, always set your goals high, so you can keep on going. Don’t be like me, who reached all my goals and now, feeling lost”. His Dad committed suicide in a bathtub shortly after.
Happy New Year (of the Horse).

In Requiem our souls merge with Mozart’s for the last time (the piece ends with Amen, sung in unison).
He invited us and included us in his last journey – our journey.
By portraying his mortality, he marked his immortality. Billions have gone down that road, only one can still cry out from the grave.
In loss he has found, in his end, his beginning (T.S. Eliot).
Mozart did think “differently” back then despite the constraint of available media (now we can pre-tape our will, short selling our stocks way into the future etc…).
Music had only evolved up to that time in that form. Neither rap nor jazz of our century.
In his biography, Steve Jobs reminded us of an old story. The King hired an assistant whose sole job was to stay nearby and every once in while, like a parrot, utters “You will die soon”. Memento mori.
The One thing absolute.
From that vantage point looking backward, we can evaluate our options and choices much better.
Will this matter  when we are long gone?
Latest study shows social ethics are on decline and can use some tuning up.
The tyranny of our age is that while the barriers to entry are lowered for start-ups, more businesses failed by sheer statistics. On this side of the digital revolution, we can look back at those post-war years with new lenses. Corporations provided decent wages, stability and a sense of (we now called) false security. The GI Bills helped many families with education, jobs and homes. The Great Society attempt may have yet produced desired results, but at least, Lyndon declared the right war on the home front, and not “the bitch of a war that Asian boys should fight and die for their own”.
Torn between “two lovers”, LBJ rode two horses at one time.
(being from Texas and all). Now, we got Promise Zones declared right in our Los Angeles backyard.
What dilemma great men before me faced. Many screw up big time, but it only recently came to light thanks to those de-classified data.
Mozart saw ahead of the road in spite of his terminal outcome.
Knowing the end is near, he left us with a (master) piece of himself, accepting that the bell was finally told for him.
I pictured in my head a few funerals of loved ones down the road while listening to Mozart’s Requiem. That’s how much impact his music has on me.
And maybe, on second listening, I might see mine and you see yours. It’s not a Hitler’s line, left live, right die, kind of 50/50 choice. It’s nature’s allotment to all of us .
When contemplating mortality, we actually seek immortality; it’s just that, we don’t know how to go about it as Mozart did, with so much grace, and immortalized himself in the process.

When coming across postings about “under-earners”, about the decline of the West (especially in Los Angeles, according to a latest independent commission study) and the rise of the rest etc…I can’t help mulling over how tragic the force of self-sabotage has done to us collectively and individually. We are a nation of “run-away brides” who just couldn’t take those last few steps to the altar (for fear of failure or unknown, or a host of other unsubstantiated phobia).
Then comes the age of big data, of automation and frankly, of accelerated elimination (Blackberry? Kodak?). A lot of us were like those 35-mm cameras with long zoom lens which used to cost an arm and a leg. But, despite their worth at one time, are now completely obsolete. Of no value, and no appreciation whatsoever. Even marketers who once thrived on instincts (knowledge of consumer behavior) will soon be engulfed in a data deluge (watch out what information those Sony armbands can gather and who they can send to).
Orwellian 1984 has arrived 3 decades late, but arriving none the less.
And we are more than willing to take part in and even volunteer to give up our privacy without protest.
After all, we are in uncharted waters. In “Who Owns The Future”, Lanier observes that despite network efficiency, society that it purported to serve comes out short. In other words, a gain here but a loss there.
Technology has always had its own momentum and associated costs, some hidden others more visible (lends new meaning to the phrase “living on the wrong side of the track”). Yes, our lives are better served since the advent of email, internet, world-wide web, social network and mobile apps.
But then, our necks are sore, our eyes need glasses, our spouses grumble, and more people search online porn.
Kids in my old neighborhood hardly play those childhood games I used to play. They are glued to the screen, playing online games and cursing a lot more at the machine (and each other).
Only me, the old analog camera, the walking man, walks on by.
Our function and feature still remain. But they are not as appreciated as once were since form has trumped function. But centuries of classic learning and living should still retain some values. Nouveaux riches can only shop for digital goods, but class they cannot buy. In fact, they have sent their children our way to “buy” what they themselves cannot, at least in their life time. Years of refined taste should come in handy and as a defense against self-sabotage. Walk up that red-carpet, and be not the run-away bride we are not meant to be. America can once again be great (even though the Great Society has been declared now 50 years on), a beacon up on the hill, and a lighthouse at the edge of dark waters. Let the rest rise, but as we all know, economics is only half of the story; for man shall not live by bread alone. What do the wolves of Wall Street buy in a good year?
Arts, that’s right. What’s the last thing they auction up in a bad year? Arts, that’s right.

Every New Year, we set out with a new resolution to trick ourselves.

From eating habit to exercising habit, from improving our interaction with our spouses to improving customer service.

Then the cold front hit us in the face. We immediately have to deal with harsh reality. The more immediate gets more attention than the importance since our responses are based purely on survival instincts: fight or flight.

Still it’s better to set goals and hold ourselves accountable than to lose hope altogether.

Hope has many shades, all of them positive.

It exists even at the bottom (when the Recession hit, the Economic Council was quoted as saying “we were on the brink of disaster”). Yet slowly, we have managed to pull ourselves out of it.

Take the Louisiana oil spill. For a while, that hole didn’t seem to ever get plugged. But it’s now behind us.

I was reading up on Ted Turner’s biography, “Call Me Ted”. He recounted one night hitchhiking in the snow at the Pennsylvania Turnpike, nearly freezing to death. If it were for today, no one would stop and pick him up.

Leadership started there, when he let his crew go ahead with the luggage in their tiny VW Beetle.

Or our late Mandela who could not wait to get out and meet Gordimer, Nobel-prize winner of July People.

They were not into revenge; intead, they nursed a hope that someday, apartheid as a system, would run its course. And sure enough, his hope has become ours.

People act desperately in desperate situation. But then, only the strong stay true in the worst of circumstances.

Gold must be tested by fire.

Back to our new year’s resolution. It’s the same for men everywhere to be tried by fire. Those who have hope, any shade, are the ones who remain. Those who don’t won’t. This should put shredding a few pounds in better perspective. Lose weight not hope.

Seeing KIA Optima at the top of the 2013 Sedan chart wakes me up a bit. My first exposure to KIA brand was when I went shopping for a RAV4. At the time, KIA barely made the nearest contender list.

Something is flowing in the Korean industrial and intellectual might, from Samsung to soap, Optima to “Please Look After Mom”. Start paying attention. Here in Vietnam, Samsung has already shipped out more handsets than the country had done with its established garment sector.

When a country is on fire, there is no stopping. Not even a Japan that can’t say No.

In Herndon and Loudoun County, Virginia,  Lotte, a Korean supermarket chain, sells ethnic foods to the International clientele not too far from the US Capital.

They had after all a great start on Wilshire Boulevard, West of LA where annually there is a Korean Parade, just like Chinese counterpart in San Francisco. They defended their liquor stores in South Central (the LA riot started with Rodney King, whose arrest record had shown a run-in with a Korean store).

I have yet met a big fat Korean person. From the ashes of the Korean war rose a nation to be respected.

Kim-chi and more kim-chi in the diet, and fire in the belly.

Take away: we can do it too. With billions in bail-out, GM is now stabilized, with its new dynamic CEO.

Chrysler is now sold off to FIAT. It will take some time for the two cultures to mesh.

That leaves the field open for more jockeying. First, turn on the fire. Then choose a course to channel the creative energy. Harness it. It takes decades to be subject matter expert. Endure being jeered at and laughed at, the way the Civic used to be (or Yugo for that matter).

If EV is a national strategy, America can nurse some hope. But then, knowing the bantering and bickering, I would bet that any fire would be put out and snuffed out in those debates.

If economy is warfare, then it will take a generation of no less than warriors to win the battle. Fire, aim, ready.

Remarkable! New school of girls-scout cookies.