Tag: Amish

Osmotic effect

BlackBerry was blamed for London Summer unrest while tech proponents gave it credits for Arab Spring.

Tech is just out there, with its incremental and osmotic effect.

What society chooses to do with it is entirely different.

There will come a time when we do need to switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, paint our roofs white and use plug-in hybrid vehicles. All 7 billion of us.

I have always been fascinated with the Mormons in UT and the Amish in PA and OH.

They seem to have operated on a different plane.

The osmotic effect stops at their county line. Off-grid.

No stimulus, no response. No Playboy bunnies, only horse and buggy.

Meanwhile, 300 millions Chinese have been lifted out of poverty just as millions of American children are now entering it (boarding the school bus from outside of their motel rooms).

Osmotic effect.

With hooded sweats to cover their faces from London CCTV cameras, mass rioters force us to reconsider the Luddite‘s view. Has everything been too fast and easy?

It’s the difference between real noodle versus instant noodle. Try it to see what I mean.

The broth, slow cooking and osmotic effect. Something still needs time and not rushed into.

Like cleantech adoption.

Kindness of strangers

Years ago, my roommate invited me over for Thanksgiving.

The ride from Penn State to Lancaster was a long but memorable one.

It’s predominantly Amish there. And I remember discussing with his Dad about
“Turning East” by Harvey Cox (the subject I took that summer).

Years have gone by. While Western consciousness has yet turned East, its consumption certainly has.

We are having China Head of State over for a visit while a few years ago, Nobel prize has been awarded to his jailed dissident.

I couldn’t even imagine the scenario myself over cranberry sauce and sweet potato back then.

The take away: season comes and season goes. But the kindness displayed to strangers at that table wasn’t going to fade away that easily. I read somewhere that PA was one of the States in the Union where people tend to stay put (less internal migration).

Harrisburg was having a hard time paying its bills.

I was there, wiring the tiny microphone on Governor Thornburgh to record an interview during the Three-Mile-Island crisis.

Harrisburg was where I first landed in America. Harrisburg was also my last stop upon graduation. My first few months there in the camp, I volunteered to go to court with unaccompanied minors, helping them as an interpreter. All of them

eventually got placed in suitable foster homes, and enjoyed many Thanksgiving dinners in Pennsylvania.

For me, just that one dinner in Amish country. It’s cold by my standard.

Autumn foliage struck me as picture perfect. And the aroma of the bird to be carved stuck with me for a long time.

My roommates went on to do great things (they were graduate students at the time)

such as professorship in Africa and Vermont.

Not once did they laugh at my remedial reading (I read “Catcher in the Rye” etc…. to make up for not attending high school here in the States).

That dinner filled me not only with everything a Lancaster farm had to offer, but also with a critical piece to understand America: the strength of a pilgrim community e.g. barn-raising party, stuck together through thick and thin, sharing gifts from the wild, a tradition brokered by the Native American. Latest studies on human motivation reveals what long been felt: we are most motivated when we seek to help others. The act of kindness might surprise both the giver and receiver.

I observe today that the drinking-water supplier put out front free water for passerby. This act of goodwill I am sure not will not be gone unnoticed. (in fact, lottery ticket vendors stop by every time to fetch a needed drink). Doing good and doing well.

The strength of a nation has always been measured by how it treats its weakest link. not the propaganda on the DoS website. That trip was one of my most memorable  pilgrims in America, of course, with Apple pie for desert.

Reflections on connections

The medium (social network) resembles Amazon software source code (we recommend to you these people, read their profiles).

You have to open a personal account like you would at Harmony.com, and boom, you start the handshakes : “Hello, my name is…”.

Personal branding 2.0. Except, when it comes to cross-cultural connection, the First and Last names in Vietnamese are in reverse.

With one or two middle names in the mix, good luck at finding your high school friends. I couldn’t. We met again in the late 80’s.

But I can’t find him on LinkedIn.

Anyhow, LinkedIn has made it as a serious site for professionals to keep in contact, keep each other updated . It is like an elevator that takes

you up to the roof top to join an exclusive party in progress.

There are a variety of personality in life, and online.

Some just show up for the event. Others want to get the most out of it.

For me, I enjoy being exposed to links that I otherwise would miss.

It’s as if through my old and new acquaintances, I have a window to a whole new world (without leaving my desktop).

And not to mention Connections of connections.

The network effect.

At some point, we will be “connection-overloaded”. Like an old teacher at a reunion, who can recognize an old student’s face but cannot recall his name.

But one thing is for sure: we will never be alone again, professionally. There will always be someone out there who needs to hire and fire, to explore an opportunity or recruit a candidate. Or stumble upon an aha moment. And most beautiful of all, when there is a shared event (9/11 or Haiti), we grieve together, as human family should.

No matter how you want to stratify this, at the core, we all want the same thing: building an enduring personal brand, in an increasingly globalized world. Competition gave way to collaboration. And the industrial mind-set is so passe in this Post-industrial age (cloud computing and mobile computing) that if we refused to change, it would be like riding a horse carriage, reading under a lantern. Ford and Edison have done well with or without the buy-in of the Amish.

For my 300 Linked- in friends, you are my Amish family. Interacting locally (on LinkedIn), while living globally. That way, I won’t be like a sales colleague who was caught staring at the office phone and said, “it doesn’t ring”. Well, pick it up and call someone. Anyone. You are in sales. And not at an in-bound call center.

And in this Web 2.0 environment, Google them first before making that call. And be sure to first Google yourself, to see it in the eyes of the beholder.

 

Long tail

2,000 cars (Nano, by Tata) and $20 per gallon of gas?

HP printer and ink model.

Thin client, thick server.

I got it, I got it!

In the same vein, they should subsidize “Blu-ray” disc player, that way, more of us (late adopters) will get onboard quicker.

Mid-summer! Beach time. But not innocence time.

I notice some teenagers stopped by the Barnes and Nobles Woodstock display table.

To these folks, the Flower generation must have the same appeal as the Amish, i.e. the sub cultures America tolerates.

I notice two Op Ed pieces in NYT recently, which speak about “Meaning of Life”  (Richard Cohen) and “NASA 4 lost decades” by Tom Wolf.

The first piece was about an experiment on life prolonging (by curtailing your diet intake), but the other monkey which ate all he could appear to be happier and more vibrant (who wouldn’t show survivor’s guilt when all your party friends already dead, leaving you the dieting nerd as the last man standing). Joie de vivre!

I struggle a little bit when trying to make sense of the Race in Space. I remember the Regan’s Star War shield.

But as far as trying to “conquer” Space, it’s the stuff for Trekkie.

I can barely be a techie (being in technical sales).

However Wolf’s observation makes sense: if the Sun is to be blowing up at some point, at least for the human species to survive, we need to work on some contingencies, however costly and enduring those commitments might involve.

Maybe the premise isn’t strong enough to sustain itself through various administrations, with their own juxtaposing and opposing priorities.

Right now it’s health care (after the environment whose legislation got through last month).

All of the sudden, nobody seem to remember many of us still suffer the economic downturn, as Paulson put it,

“could have been worse”.  The stimulus itself has disbursed about 10+% as of this writing. Maybe it has a long tail too.

Why don’t GM consider using its bail out money to purchase Tata or Chery (Chinese auto company). We can always get it back in the long run with $20 per gallon of gas. HP did it with its printer sitting next to me as I write this.

 

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