Tag: Brazil

Retreat, retrench and return

40 years on since the last US combat boots pulled out of Vietnam.

Today, Starbucks lady returns, luring passer-by amidst the town square. Senator Kerry is getting his confirmation while a 40-year-old Vietnamese couldn’t tell an American from a Russian.

Vietnam is just a name, like Iraq will be 4 decades from now.

Vietnam today has Vespas (Italy), Mercedes (Germany), Honda (Japan), Kia (Korea), Haier (China) and La Vache qui Rit (France).

I enjoy reading translated literature from all over the world (sometimes direct translation without going through English).

40 years on.

The cyclos used to be common. Now they are relics of the past, confined to tourist districts only.  Machine is replacing muscles.

Then we buy gym memberships to exercise those sedentary muscles.

Talking about machine. News have been trickled in from BRIC nations: clubs from Russia and Brazil were burning (smoke machines for real, not just for special effects). The flip side of prosperity. Just like crime rates have been down  in NYC (people went online instead of walking the streets. 60% search inquiries were porn).

Home alone with hormones.

It’s easy to look at a poverty-stricken nation and make moral judgment (while a convict in developed nations would wear suits-and-tie sitting on the defense side of the bench, trying to deceive the jury just as he had done with thousands before).

40 years of regress and progress (Watergate to Bill Gates).

Good-hearted folks can’t help but see poor ROI the US have spent on arms.

Russia at least refused to play Russian roulette, so instead of pushing ICBM‘s, its leader went private, pushing Pizza (Hut).

We are evolving into a post-hardware era: software and soft power.

Those with thought leadership and social influence rule. And not for long.

Think not of the pyramid model. Instead, it is a kaleidoscope which keeps changing (the good side of this is if we can reinvent ourselves, we can reappear multiple times, like associates in Cirque du Soleil).

I am glad to see Starbucks here. I heard it is also opened in Forbidden City.

If Friedman is right (two nations are least likely to be at war when both have a McDonald) then perhaps Vietnam and China can avert another conflict, over coffee. American quintessential Starbucks coffee.

Fun as motivator

Cyndi Lauper and Sheryl Crow both touched on “wanna-have-fun” theme.

(Girls just want to have fun, All I wanna do).

The upcoming Olympic in Brazil should be a fun place (certainly more than polluted Beijing).

Fun ranks up there as one of the highest motivators.

It’s wired in our fabrics.

Pure fun. Wholesome fun. Grand ball. Sight, sound and scenes.

Smoke machines, sound machines and special effects.

Googlers are seen each year in the Mojave Desert (Burning-Man Festival).

CES in Las Vegas kicks off each year in January.

Kids open their electronic toys Christmas morning. Fun, fun, fun.

“I got this feeling that I am not the only one… .”

Men are fated to toil the ground and tame the beasts.

But after hard times comes harvest times.

In a Korean’s novel (Please Look After Mom) we find a landscape utterly foreign yet familiar. Agrarian culture, with everything done by hand, in transition to a bustling Seoul subway where an aged senile country mom got lost.

Yet, even in this bleakest of portraits, we still find some romance, and occasional laughters.

Fun.

I often found people chuckled in the midst of drinking.

Apparently, there were fun injected into the blood stream besides alcohol.

My friend’s favorite has been Seasons in the Sun. “We had joy we had fun”.

Fun doesn’t belong to but is often associated with youth.

Everyone can and should have some fun. Even at work.

Wait not for Halloween or Valentine.

At Zappos, they set up desks deliberately in the hallway, so co-workers are forced to “bump” into each other. Gone are the cubicles. The wall came tumbling down.

Now, just collaboration, not competition.

Southwest Airlines associates wear shorts and shirts, sing FAA regulations in a way that draws out a smile in each passenger. Fun culture retains great talent.

It adds healthy numbers to the bottom line.

Know the motivators like the back of your hands.

Work them into your HR policy. Practice them at the front line and in the back room.

Then people wouldn’t need to wait for Happy Friday or Happy Hour.

They are happy at work. It boosts up morale and team spirit.

I love to work with workers who are not grumpy. Unless it’s at Disney Animation.

Spending spree

Right about now. If the economy is going to pick up, authorities should push spending. Credit card spending.

Gadgets are out. Electronic devices miniaturized. Skirts cut shorter even when it says Winter Clothes. Victoria Secret pulled Native American outfit from broadcast. Planned controversy or not, we don’t know. We just know that things are back to its normal pace.g. Windows 8,  I-phone 5 release etc…

With Halloween behind us, Veteran Day being celebrated, what else to look forward to besides Turkey and Tree.

We got the calendar seasons, then we got shopping seasons, but for centuries we live with only a few seasons (until they made up Fall and Autumn).

Seasons are good for the Soul. They roll in cyclically, to remind us there is a rhythm of life: hard times and good times.

Unlike compound-interests chart and monthly bills. These come in under a different chart and graph.

We still respond to seasons in awe: autumn foliage, first snow etc..

When something like Sandy screw up our lives, we are at a loss (blaming it on those new voiture in China and Brazil?)

Meanwhile, those with or without money still have to spend. For loved ones and for oneself.

Gotta get those midget gadgets: i-pod and tri-pod.

Who would find out that our taste for music has been the same for decades? or what content women read on airplanes (E-readers).

Something strange has happened  lately, but then nothing strange has happened lately (covert ops but overt affairs etc…)

Banks and retail stores are still into collecting ROI perentages. And we consumers still fall for it, willingly.

We are creatures of habit and of harmony. We put on warm clothes and winter clothes. We feel a warmth in our hearts when we see Christmas decoration  all around us. We  miss that fireplace scene and the gathering of the faithful. We long to belong and to be home (Train, plane and automobile) . We long for rest and comfort.  The world knows this. It will offer a different version of our hopes and dreams. It will instead offer false hope and unreachable dreams. It will in fact give us the opposite of what we hope for. In the race to embrace our dreams, often times, we have to outsmart those who claim themselves to be dream providers, of essentials that we need like homes, health and happiness. We gotta to own the process of attaining them ourselves. When we do, we will be rooted firmly in that which we can call home, that which anchors our restless feet and soul. True happiness lies in the heart of those who feel content and are not in denial of death, the only reality that matters most. So spend, spend, spend. But keep in mind that those gadgets will be obsolete next year. In their places, are successive versions and newer generations. That’s what keeps us awake at night.

Progress has its pain and price to pay. To stay in the game, one needs to constantly pedal forward and uphill.

Again, I admire people who stay up all night out in the cold for a shopping spree phenomenon we call Black Friday.

Just remember to leave those pepper sprays at home this year. Walmart is trying to outsmart the competitors by opening early. Thanksgiving night as a matter of fact, for your 24/7 shopping need.

The Routine

Instinctively, we follow the path of least resistance (park in the shade, grab the nearest item on the shelves…).

Marketers make it their mission to study this, the same way scientists experiment with reflexive rats in the lab.. Nike even filmed the Standford team, trained barefooted, to see the landing and movement of their feet.

Creatures of habits. Social animal.

Maximum connections: 120, to stay meaningful.

Yet, we are now networked at hockey-stick growth chart.  Majority of the world, including what used to be called the Third World, got phones. Can you hear me now!

Mobile payment, mobile banking, mobile TV.

Nomad lifestyle all over again. I blogged about Point A to B.

Louis L’Amour said it best ” the problem with mankind is that we can’t stay put in one place”.

Train and now plane hobos. Air travel used to carry with it social badges: prestige and class (think Pan Am).

The same with the automobile when it first came out. Then the assembly line (yesterdays’ Foxconn) and high-paid manufacturing jobs at Ford, changed all that.

Everything is new, yet nothing is new.

The rich have to (and have always) reinvent the game, find new playground and fence it off to stay exclusive (can you imagine online education for the mass, live streaming from the Ivory Tower of Ivy League schools). It is all happening.

MIT, then Standford. My fair lady, for the world. The rain in Spain doesn’t fall mainly on the plain.

It is common grace (rain on the field of the good and the evil).

Brazil is hosting the next Olympic. Perhaps it is fitting and symbolic that after England, we shift focus to BRIC, with B for Brazil.

Something about growing ethanol down there. About reinventing a country, about female leadership in a vibrant and colourful nation.

Let’s hope that spirit and energy rub off on us, stodgy and austere nations.

I believe our best days have yet been behind us.

We just need to look inward, take an honest inventory and reinvent ourselves. Focus on the essentials and task ourselves with the right things. Ignore the critics. They are always there, taking shots at doers. And above all, believe. We have pulled this off before. Can and will do it again. It’s our good routine. It’s us, intrinsically and uncompromisingly, at our best. As Chris Gardner puts it, “only us can give ourselves legitimacy”.  Routine, but earned routine, not forced.

In the mirror

Among Dylan’s many memorable lines is “you don’t need the weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blow-in”.

Even without the weatherman, we can feel that things are at a boiling point.

Like in the movie “the Network”, people start to open their windows and bell out “I am mad like Hell, and I won’t take it anymore”.

Except this time, instead of opening their windows, they opened Windows and Adbuster, which called for Occupy Wall Street (and McToilet on Wall Street).

A leaderless protest against figure-less forces that have worked against them e.g. commoditization, globalization, or automation.

Their 60’s counterparts wanted to rage against the status quo.

Conversely, “occupiers of Wall Street” just want to have an occupation that pays a little more than “nickel-and-dime”.

The wind is blowin but not in their favor (Andy Rooney has just retired leaving one vacancy for roughly 2 Billion people who recently joined the rank of the Middle Class).

Instead of “Hell No, We won’t go”, they are now yelling “Hell No, PLace To Go”.

India? China? Brazil?

To land a job in  BRIC‘s countries, one needs a crash course in language and culture.

(I resent the author of a recent Economist’s article, ridiculing “poor English” in Vietnam. Cheap shot at best, and colonialistic at worst.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/09/english-vietnam?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/iamenglishteach

Go ahead and try to learn Mandarin).

Employers look for those with soft-skills that couldn’t be outsourced such as critical thinking, communicative and collaborative skill set across the cultures, but also to pay them at blue collar wages (high skill/low cost) since employers themselves are caught in a competitive race to the bottom due to outsourcing, offshoring and now re-shoring. Damn if you do, damn if you don’t.

Currently a jobs bill which runs at $200,000 per job is on the table.

Foreign students said “No thanks” (even when their HB1 visas were extended) and went home after graduation (BlueSeed is trying to dock a ship out in Seattle Waters to go around this rule).

At first, I thought it was because of the wives (who couldn’t find spices in groceries stores) who pressured their expat husbands to return (let’s stay to India and Singapore) – Japanese executives wouldn’t choose to work here in the US for fear of derailing their career tracks – But, I found it’s more of a pull than push force that they chose not to stay around (follow the money i.e. emerging domestic markets).

In “It used to be us”, the author of “The World is Flat” himself is baffled by his own themes (globalization and IT revolution).

Now, even call centers got automated (outsourcing next level, to automation), so high-value representatives can proactively chat with callers.

We are all caught off- guard: a job loss here, a dead-end career there.

Before we know it, we blame it on Wall Street (partly true, but not the whole picture – the same way India’s service industries and China’s manufacturing industries got the blame for our Lost Decade, or the Japanese lean -semiconductor- manufacturing in the 80’s or the Vietnam War for taking the Johnson’s administration’s eyes of the-Great Society).

But the story is more complicated than that. The solution seems to be multi-pronged because the problem is multi-faced.

Jack Ellul already touched on the idolization of “technique” back in the 60’s. Now, techno-fundamentalism is pervasive in every faced of life (what could be digitized, must be digitized – Larry Page was quoted to say : “let’s have a million engineers” to outrank or outPagerank Microsoft’s 25,000 strong army), forcing “human” to reflect and re-think about what it is that makes them marketable (the human touch, emotional intelligence etc….) in the 21st century.

No wonder we feel short-changed (too many of us chasing too few opportunities at the bottom – even high-paying construction jobs are no longer there on this side of the housing bubble). At the top, one will take a CEO job, like at HP, but for only $1.00.

It reminds me of Newsweek which was acquired also for $1.00).

This Halloween we will be in default costumes, that of homeless men and jobless women (carrying huge luggage, or brief case).

It’s time to revisit Native Americans on the occasion of Columbus Day (to press restart).

It’s time to reinvent  the American Dream. We don’t have to look too far, since the cause and the cure for today’s malaise and misery are right there, in the mirror.

I hope they keep the mirror squeaky-clean there at the McDonald on Wall Street for our protestors’ comfort and convenience.

Forced realities

“the Network Effect of Nations”.

Brazil, the “B” in BRIC, is on course to be number 5 by 2014 according to the Economist.

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14845197&source=most_commented

So, it’s not just the International Olympic Committee which noticed Brazil Rising. Nor is it seen only as the  corn basket of the world (When I hear Brazil, immediately popped to mind is “energy”, long before the Ethanol craze). In fact, Brazil doesn’t rely solely on energy exports as Russia or Venezuela. It also caters to tourism, commercialism and world-class sports (in 2016).

With EU and Emerging economies out of the Recession, we will see Network Effect mesh of G-20 : more multi-lateral trading, traveling and telephoning.

One example. What does Banco De Chile have to do with Vietnam? Yet, it has a presence there, and tries to secure markets for its agricultural products (as if Vietnam were not agrarian enough). Nations crisscross exponentially.

The US Navy Commander is visiting his relatives (see Gatsby in China Beach).  President Carter is coming to build

houses  for the Mekong poor (Habitat for Humanity, an organization I support). And French Prime Minister is touring Hue (probably putting 2 and 2 together: Colonial past and Commercial present). And Meet Vietnam will feature Vietnam Minister of Education in San Francisco. And let’s not forget Obama visiting China, where his half-brother was launching a book, having stayed there and married local for quite some time. The Network Effect of Nations!

Technology and people are always ahead of the political process. Deng was seen wearing a cowboy hat when visiting Texas in the late 70’s ( He just reciprocated Nixon’s trip to China where 3000-course meal had been served) . “To get rich is glorious” . Subsequently, we heard similar echo on Wall Street in the 80’s: “Greed is good” .

Information flow used to go from North to South. Now, the global picture has completely changed.

No longer do we see a bi-polar world. And while changes are taking place on the global stage,  “groundswell” is detected online (kids joined in to play games, but pretty soon, will be glancing at headline news, and shopping for “early Black Friday” deals on peer’s recommendation. No wonder Dell cannot sit still, waiting to take “just-in-time” orders.

After all the shopping at the urging of President Bush right after 9/11, Americans are now penny-pinching.  So, it’s President Obama’s turn to give the same speech, this time, to the Chinese, with a BTW,  try our Made-in-USA stuff (SPAM?).

It’s tough to be a Recommender-In-Chief . Even the Vatican can’t seem to get a handle on the new Social media that seem to grow their flocks much faster than Christendom’s. So the Pope invites in the paupers, out of the dorm to the Dome for a  (face-2-face) chat. Where do you click? You mean one doesn’t have to sit down in front of a monitor? Mobile Apps?

At the Olympic in Rio, with a Smart phone, you won’t miss a single soccer score . Are you game? One will never know where the putt is going to be . And it makes the journey all the more exciting. Stay “eyes wide opened” for forced realities. The future doesn’t sleep: it is on steroid. No wonder Emerging economies, especially Brazil, seem to get out from under much more quickly than the rest. Fareed Zakarai coins this “the rise of the rest” in Post American World. He certainly has Brazil in mind.

California Dreaming

TIME spotlights California on its cover this week.

As a country, California would be with the G8 ( between Italy and Brazil, thus displacing BRIC with CRIC  i.e. California, Russia, India and China).

Yet it has no world-class soccer team (despite having in-shored Beckham) just yet. That’s said, it is one of the brownest States in the Union. And it will stand tall, demographically and technologically.

I wrote about the up-trading Taco truck in my earlier blog. TIME also showed a Korean BBQ truck  using Twitter to announce its stops (high-tech high touch).

What surprised me was foreign students’ major in the State: more chose Business and Management over Science, Math and Engineering (exactly what the Chinese need to move up the value chain).

With 13 percent Asian, California has a natural inroad to Asia (just a plane-hop away).

Washington State has also capitalized on its geographic “proximity” to set up strong ties with the East (and sell some apples, Window and Starbucks while at it).

Who wouldn’t want to live in California: paradise and paradox, problems and promises, most congested freeways, yet greenest state. It has a underexploited Modesto and an overexposed Hollywood , clean tech and bio tech; gay and straight.

California is home to dream factories (Disney and Dream Work). So enamoured with the big screen that the State elected actors to be its Governor not once but twice. Its script keeps getting a rewrite even on location (budget cut? well, hold up a knife Governor. “This is a knife” the line last said by Crocodile Dundee on his first visit to the Big Apple). It’s used to be “Go West young man!” Now, it’s keeping going West and follow the sun.

I talked to people in the Orient and they wanted to come and live in California. To them, California is America (especially if they have a free account on Yahoo, own an I-Phone and watch YouTube, all California home-grown, like its wine and raisins). In up scale China, one can find new developments that were modeled after Newport Beach.

“All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray”. If the gubernatorial race is an early indicator of things to come, we are in great shape. After all, anything can happen in a dream, or when we “sit down and pray”. The truth is, my relationship with California has been a dysfunctional one, as is the State.

Despite its high costs of living, California is where you’ll find innovation around the corner, or in the garage .

Californians don’t do attic or basement like East-Coast counterparts. They compose music on wheels (Jewel), produce TV shows on wheels (Jay Leno), and of course, cater tacos on wheels. Year round, they don’t need the bottom half of their jeans (hence the cut off or zip out). This recession and recent gold price peak led a bunch of people to the high mountain, once again, creating a mini Gold Rush, California’s original raison d’etre.

Most listened to is its rush hour traffic report. Least visited is the downtown LA library, before or after the fire. When EReader and Kindle get full adoption, they will turn library into museum .  What’s hip in California (women volleyball, muscle beach) can’t be easily duplicated .  This Wednesday, Google will team up with Lala to help us search for that “California Dreaming” tune. Just a phrase, such as “I walk into a church” can trigger a bot crawl.

Or ” I’ll be back” to pop up the Terminator. It doesn’t hurt to have a Governor with sound bites or once picked up a dumb bell in what remained of  a LA fire.

And the media ate it up: light, camera, action (background lighting, actor, prop and audio). Keep dreaming California.