BRIC
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In the end of A Christmas Holiday, our Somerset Maugham‘s character went back to his middle-class comfort zone but quite aware of his “plastic” existence. This was right after he had spent a week in Paris, meeting Lydia, a Russian gypsy whose suffering life was nothing Charlie had ever imagined. I couldn’t help think of…
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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…
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On NYT‘s Op-Ed‘s Pages, I found a piece “Asians are too smart for their own good”. The author brought up a historical parallel between Jews’s admission at Ivy League schools back then, and Asian‘s now. She neglected another important parallel: Japanese-American got put in internment camps not too long ago. With BRIC‘s second generation, growing up in America,…
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The Distributed Model has enabled the Rise of the Rest. Capital, talent and market flow where the chips may fall. Apple courting China, China Africa, Japan Rest of Asia etc… Everyone is out on the dancing floor. Dance anyone? The combinations are endless. Permutation and exponential. Hard and soft powers, hard and soft currencies. Exert that…
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When Henry Ford first put together 2 and 2 (wheels) to make 4 (wheels), he was probably laughed at. Then his policy to increase worker’s wages, so they could afford buying the very same cars they had helped assembled was probably viewed as radical. Today, the same thing with Nissan Leaf‘s buyer’s incentive, and Diamond-Lane…
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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…
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Organizations go through many life cycles before winding down, or absorbed in a M&A. Here in Vietnam, fluidity is the word that describes the dynamics of organization. Like organism that evolves with its environment, organization here often bends and changes beyond recognition. We know the solution is embedded in the problem. Yet we need to…
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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…
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Get back to your roots. Eliminate waste and accessories. Differentiate and make it relevant. Actually, 555 is just a self-branding attempt, after a cigarette a friend of mine used to smoke. I had to attach a numeric code to differentiate (sticky and trans-cultural) my Yahoo log-on ID. Now we hear of 999 plan etc… It’s hard…
Thang Nguyen 555 