Tag: California

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.

 

Load balancing

A few years back, we got headlines like “women made strides with Nobel prizes“.

And I remember hearing our shared winner of Economics said she studied ways which societies managed to share work load,

from fisheries to farming. I assumed she was trying to crack the “non-zero sum” code, or something similar to

Network Theory (how we are most affected by “weaker ties”, a few degrees of separation away from us).

The speed of microprocessors has ushered in nothing short of an information/knowledge revolution.

Essentially, each of us serves as a “node” in our social connectedness.

Back in my sales days, we treated these “nodes” as “sales leads” or “warm calls”.

Whether their influence is positive or negative, they influence nevertheless.

( I remembered for instance one real estate guy who did not like watermelon with seeds, or my former boss who enjoys yoga and sushi).

Our social memory, only to be referred to or occasionally resurfaced as our own, idiocy or idiosyncrasy, constantly gets its supply from myriads of stimuli (new book title, another  headline, latest franchise movie like Fast and Furious or Friday the 13th).

Back to our headline. When I grew up, I admired names like Marie Curie and Marilyn Monroe (I did know that one was French, and the other American, and how far apart they were, spectrum wise: science vs the arts).

Now, I remember Avon and Ebay former CEO’s  (now HP’s).

And I remember my mom, the greatest multi-tasker I have ever known: teacher, mother, wife, cook and great relative to a very large extended family. She managed it all, earning her French teaching credential during that colonial era, to eventually pass away gracefully in a West Virginian nursing home. Her secret: putting herself last. Servant leadership.

Teaching load, laundry load, and household-budget. Women are better at multi-tasking than men (Maria Shriver, one of the Kennedys, was caught on tape yapping away on a cell phone, against CA law). Microprocessing speed and fat pipe will only accelerate the process (of helping women make greater strides, in all spheres).

I would add telecommuting as a great enhancer of load balancing. And a quiet Maytag also helps.

Next studies on collaboration should incorporate machines into the mix. Imagine how fast it could have been had those first Honeywell computers (actually appliances) been sold well. It still doesn’t lessen the burden of a traveling executive, male or female. But then, that’s where out social networking comes in to complete the transformation of the Third Wave, which has swept away both Marie Curie and Marilyn Monroe, leaving only Madame Secretary in its wake (as of this edit, it’s now J. Kerry).

Red lanterns

There is a story on BBC news about an Indian engineer who complains that he only married thrice:

“why would the Muslims have all the wives, and me, a Hindu, cannot have multiple marriages” he vented his apparent frustration.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8224746.stm

Truth be told, he was confirmed to have been married at least six times, concurrently.

This reminds me of a joke . It goes like this.

Three guys battling around. First guy says ” my girl got a very nice crooked tooth” (in Asia, esp. VN, one crooked tooth is considered exotic and rare).

The second guy chimes in “mine got them on both sides”.

The third guy instinctively refuses to lose face “you guys know what, mine have a whole jaw like that”.

I call this misplaced competition.

Sure, It’s the survival of the fittest. So nature lends itself to competition in the process of natural selection.

But competition knows no bound. During the 80’s, cheerleader’s mom went way out of bound to ensure her child’s admission.

My first daughter went to a lot of cheer-leading competitions in S California, so I know the sacrifice and commitment

parents made to their child’s team.

With hip hop, my child learns the value of team work,  hard work  and their place in the larger scheme of things.

We keep hearing for days now how Senator Kennedy was able to reach across the aisle to make sure work get done.

I am sure the Last Lion wanted to win, but he also knew the other side had the same thing in mind.

The art of negotiation is to sell to yourself and your position.

How much compromise are you willing to make? When to hold, and when to fold.

And most of all, to resist the urge to sacrifice all the hard work in the heat of the moment: I win, you lose.

All or nothing. Chances are… you might have the last word, but you may not win. If anything, it’s your girl who ends up with  crooked teeth by the mouthful.

 

Apple in my eyes

 

Everybody loves a winner.

Today’s is Apple, starts with the “A” in the alphabet.

Not bad for a college drop-out who then learned calligraphy, hung out with “evangelist” Kawasaki, forced out then came back to the tune of billions. He embodied the “I” in I-phone.

I remember my first encounter with personal computers, and of course, it was a Mac.

Silicon Valley back in the early 80’s was brimming with S Asian programmers;  the Vietnamese-American community were working 2 or 3 shifts a day as assemblers (before the offshore trend).

You got to have a garage: garage band, garage sale, and start-up in garage. It’s cool to be in a garage, although it was meant for cars.

In California, you don’t freeze to death by sleeping in a garage, unlike in the cold Winter of the Northeast. Thus, it allows for start-up mindset and venture capitalist, risk takers, trend setters or just drifters.

You definitely find yourself there, because to go further West (young man), you will have to fly to Hawaii.

The best you can do is driving North, through Red Wood, onto Portland and Seattle.

Meanwhile, South of SF is sufficed.

It will keep you busy “coding” for a while.

What Steve Jobs brought to the business world is his signature turtle neck and a little bit of rebellious streak.

Meanwhile, he doesn’t mind to surround himself with the likes of Kawasaki, long before having an Asian partner becomes a hip (Yahoo, YouTube).

People of the Valley are not only Californians, but also tribal members of the Tech world. You don’t talk shop, you talk Tech. You are not the Man, you’re the Burning Man.

I remember attending a speech by Armstrong when he became CEO of AT&T. And having been at various start-ups

such as MCI and Teligent, I had a nagging feeling that you could not fake “coolness”.  In other words, you cannot be both the old IBM (blue suit) and the new new thing (like Apple). The elephant cannot walk.  Sure enough, after some “reality checks”, IBM sold off the hardware division to Lenovo to pursue the higher margin world of convergence and Cloud, while AT&T back then sold off NCR and other assets.

I admired the crowd Apple stores were able to draw in.

Apple takes it to the mass, at a boutique level, and bridges the gap between high-tech and high touch.

It’s been a long way since 1976 garage days. A lot of Chinese take-outs, brainstorming and risk taking.

It’s really tough to be number 1. Now the hard part is to stay King of the Hill. Apple in the post-Jobs era. Gotta Think Different this time.