Tag: Charlie Rose

Out with the self check-out!

Albertson is your store. No wonder you just walked in, took the items, and walked out (after paying the machines).

http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/officehours/2011/jul/12/albertsons-will-take-self-checkout-lanes-out-stores-doesnt-affect-area-albertsons-stores/

I still remember having lunch at Woolworth, or stopping at full-serve  stations back East.

“coffee refill?” ” oil check?” We are heading toward a self-serve nation (or as in a recent feature in the WSJ, a Retail applicant outsourced his job search to an online resume service in India. The service uses automated software that sent his resumes to, among other things, adult entertainment companies.)

Back to customer service.

Not only customers bring friends, they are also an important part in the feedback loop (for future product development and marketing).

Face time is important. And productive face time is expensive.

Even in our hyper-connected world, people are still isolated and lonely.

The neighborhoods have changed. Old friends have moved on.

So we bowl and golf alone.

We time shift, LinkedIn with people who start their days when we end ours.

The last thing a tired worker needs is to argue with or be harassed by a machine “put your item in the bin”? I thought I did (I found out there was a scale underneath, so leave your bag there, not on the floor).

Meanwhile, I-phones, cosmetic items and travel kits are sold via vending machines.

I can understand the necessity of acquiring these in a hurry, let’s say in an airport.

But neighborhood groceries should foster a sense of community, where we look someone in the eyes, or start a quick conversation (weather, news event, or just venting).

On Charlie Rose, Stephanopoulos said when he interviewed people, he observed their silence, their non-verbal communication.

We still walk around inside our bodies. And we will send our signals via facial muscles and body gestures.

This means we still need a person on the receiving end to decode.

Yes, it’s expensive. But, it’s worth it.

Nordstrom and Four Seasons know this.

Giving people what they want, how they want it. While technology enhances efficiency, a customer-centric organization always wins and keep its customers. Maybe, I should skip the automated resume-blasting company.

Why relying on poor salesmanship to sell me, when I can do it better and save money. Out with the mechanistic transaction (we already got Amazon), and in with “Hi, how is your day?”.

Load-lightening with clouds

Load balancing, redundancy, follow-the-sun operation centers etc..

to be topped up by cloud.

We did that with business phones (Centrex), and mainframes.

More than a third of North American phones are now smart phones, with computational power not unlike earlier version of our desktops. When Turing and Shannon conceived a  “thinking machine”, they were just happy if it could make basic calculations.

Now, we interact with machine on such a regular basis that our language shows: down time, ramp-up time, recharge, warm up, another run at it, press reset, in the loop, boost up, and vent. (In Freedom, Franzen’s character even referred to freedom as “choosing your own apps and features”).

If there were a place for us to unload what’s in our head (let’s say to an external hard drive or upload to the cloud), we probably would, to lighten the ‘things we carried”. Over the years, we put on weight, but also stored millions of bits of information in our brains.

Random facts. Some connect. Others lay dormant but someday, will be recalled with the right stimuli.

For instance, when I read about an amputee who got thrown out of a NY amusement park ride to his death, I got a chill in the back of my head. My daughter works at a theme park.

So I would hate to hear any accident on theme park ride.

In The Greater Journey, his latest book about American in Paris, David McCullough said that what he had chosen to leave out was more important than what’s in the book.

In life, we cannot afford to “defragment” our memories i.e. to make them more compact hence more room for new facts.

Yet, even with all the “heaviness” that weight us down over the years (and it seems there were a lot of bad news lately), we barely used up a few per cents of our brain capacity.

I read about an “Afropreneur” today (a librarian’s child-turned-philanthropist who wanted to supply Africa with books and more books). I happened to be on a summer tour in W Africa with similar mission years ago. So I can once again relate to his narrative and cause.

In our open-source and open-border ecosystem, we need an open mind.

When it comes to knowledge, the more you share, the more you acquire.

Again, McCullough told Charlie Rose that in the process of researching for his book, he learned more (by plunging in).

Learning by doing. It’s a loop. Half-baked knowledge is a dangerous thing, Ivory Tower is already full of “analysts” and “thinkers”.

All the world’s knowledge, once stored in the Library of Congress now accessible to all (instead of just to congressional aides in SE D.C.). So are MIT open courses.

Load-lightening or not, we learn more if we acted more.

I did not learn from the Art of War. I learned more from my broken arm after three months of Kung Fu. Call me a wimp. But I have survived thus far. The best battle is one you don’t engage (or get drawn in). I guess, in that vein, you won’t see me strapped in one of those devilish rides any time soon. There is a fine line between foolishness and bravery. And it’s a personal call. That’s what memories do for us: to keep us alert and alive.

My Japanese tutors

Ishiguro, Fukuyama, Kawasaki and Murakami. I read Ishiguro in bed, watched Fukuyama on Charlie Rose, watch Kawasaki interview on his latest book Enchantment and dream on with characters in Murukami’s novels.

Multi-media tutors. They might look Asian, but speak and write perfect English. Best of both worlds. Like Singapore or Hongkong.

Ishiguro penned beautiful prose and plot, that even Amazon’s founder must admit, the Remains of the Day was one of his favorites. In Never Let Me Go, the author portrays a love triangle out of the most unlikely of circumstances (among the donors of organs, our sci-fi characters). The mood and textures were so alluring. These supposedly “sub-humans” ‘ were made available as spare parts. “We let you experiment with arts to prove you had souls at all”

(and if they could demonstrate that they were in love, they might get a deferral – like college graduates who got their student loan deferred).

On to Fukuyama. who banked on the End of History (or marking) on the creation of Democratic Institutions e.g. those of the United States of America.

(a wiki check showed his family was in State College, PA “We Are”).

He answered Charlie Rose succinctly, and never missed a beat (about Arab Spring etc..).

Quite a professor, deserving his Standford upgrade.

Then on to the Enchanter. The smile in the eyes says it all.

He kept mentioning Charles Branson, of Virgin group, who stooped down and shined his shoes to win him over (to Virgin frequent flyer). To Guy, one needs to live as if there would always be a tomorrow (in contrast to what Fukuyama commented about America ” who has partied as if there were no tomorrow for the past thirty years”).

Reciprocity rules the universe. So is Karma. We saw that first-hand last Sunday with Bin Laden.

Murukami’s world is dreamy, with male characters who struggle with his own sexual and social identity (Murukami himself is a long-distance runner and writer. I wonder if his next novel would be about the Boston Marathon tragedy, as he once worked on the Tokyo’s rail cultish subject).

Murukami blends romance, cultism and eschatology in one fell swoop in 1Q84, his blended best.

By mentioning these accomplished authors, I am hoping the Asian gene pool rub off on the  second third generation of Vietnamese American. And I hope to live to watch one of my own on Charlie Rose, commanding public attention and admiration. It doesn’t matter where you came from and how humble (or horrible) the circumstances surrounding your beginning (in America). The only thing that matters is where you end up, in this case, undeniable success of my Japanese tutors.

Powerful women

World’s oldest woman. 115 years old. Oldest man, from Japan, 116 years old. Life expectancy in 1900 was 47.

World population has increased drastically. (Bio tech century). At the nano level, we can detect early symptoms of all sorts of disease (nano pharma).

Ironically, as the West is more aware of health issues and is taking preventive measures (diet, exercise and environmental retrofit), China with a huge population has to shallow the consequences of rapid industrialization , urbanization, obesity and pollution.

Asked on ABC News why Chinese children are much fatter than early generation, Ms Lee replied “because of China’s increased milk consumption.”

Charlie Rose asked Yang Lan, coined Chinese Oprah, about her agenda. The reply: capacity-building and to realize a civil society.

I believe she will see it realized. After all, she commands 200 million viewers each show (compared to O’s 7 million).

BTW, she was among the speakers at Fortune 2010 Most Powerful Women conference. Being in Media, and being a woman in today’s China , she signed up with Creative Artist in Hollywood which helped land interviews such as Charlie Rose’s and a piece in Fast Company. In Vietnam, I heard a story that all three powerful media owners are females who got their start as receptionists of a hotel on Saigon’s main tourist hub.

Our 21 st century produces not only media moguls, powerful women as heads of state (see portraits here

http://www.csmonitor.com/CSM-Photo-Galleries/In-Pictures/Current-women-heads-of-state )

but also longer life (TIME Nov 15 documents a larger percentage of women making electronic purchase decision as well as watching NFL football).

In marketing, we calculate CLV (customer lifetime value). These numbers will only grow larger in both breath and depth. Who would have thought cell phone penetration as now is.. First, the voice call.

Then come the apps. The village ladies in India and Africa could walk for miles as mobile pay phones to make a small profit on each call. To them, it’s nothing, compare to whatever they have carried on their heads for centuries. Once every one has a mobile phone, these early adopters will have moved on to owning a coke stand then a beauty salon.

Three cheers for technology and globalization but also, for  women progress, for in Ms Yang Lan’s words, capacity-building to realize the Chinese dream. Amelia Earhart would have been proud. She would have been 116 years of age today.

 

Deer facing headlights

WSJ most read article is “Why people can’t make decision” (see my other blog, “buy-in behaviors”).

I also found another article that reinforces this period of indecision: companies are saving the money they borrowed at bank’s low rates, thus fail to spur the economy.

Why would people borrow money at low rates, then sit on them? Companies need leadership (i.e. doing the right thing as opposed to “doing the thing right”). They forgot a biblical story about stewardship.

The post- WW generation are now in leadership position. Ambivalence is the norm (don’t blame them, after Vietnam and Watergate).

Right now, both parties are blaming each other for the ailing and failing economy.

And we in turn blame ourselves.

Self-recrimination paralyzes us, resulting in indecision. In short, deer facing approaching headlights.

Charlie Rose series on how the brain works, shows the frontal part of the brain, when damaged, causes moral lapses.

Our economic system got injured and is now in recovery (not as desired, but to be expected).

Any movement helps.

As long as the deer starts moving, and wakes up from its trance.

The stats indicated that it was a 18-month long recession. But it feels like decades.

The last recession, coincided with the dot.com burst, gave rise to Web 2.0 (whose contributors had a lot of time in their hand for Wikipedia and YouTube).

This time,  it shouldn’t be an exception. Something good will come out.

If you saw the recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines.

With help from emergency crew (near SF), she was cut loose, and immediately swam in circle to show gratitude and joy. Very moving story of giving and receiving.

We can learn a lesson from the animal kingdom to enhance our humanity. We should wake up sooner than a deer facing oncoming traffic! Go against our natural reflex to survive and thrive. Keep moving. Let not gravity and inertia win the day.

 

A girl walks into a bar…

We all need a “third place” (neither home nor office) to let our hair down.

It used to be Cheers-like place “where everybody knows your name“.

And lately, it’s been Starbucks, which struck a yuppie nerve (male and female).

With the lingering recession, I suspect that jokes will have to start with “a girl walks into a Starbucks…” or

“a Mr Mom walks into a MacDonald…”

for both men and women share equal stress load during hard times. Except that women are more prone to explore

and share with one another their feelings, much more than men. I noticed a string of suicide by men, taking with them

their families, children included. The American dream had turned nightmare for some. We were more confident

to overspend money which was not ours than we do this side of “green sprouts” with money which is ours.  There lies the paradox:

economic activities are powered by collective trust and confidence, and slow down in their absence.

I saw the Verizon‘s CEO interview on Charlie Rose last night. He came across  astute and ambassadorial: “it’s getting back to the quality of the network”…(can you hear me now?).  I came away with higher appreciation for the smart phone category. And I couldn’t help agree more with Charlie’s last word ” wonder if the US will put more emphasis on tech adoption as some other countries did , so its citizens can take advantage of the network effect“.

We will learn to communicate in ways we have yet known how (from the early days of gossip news at the boat docks, and in the bars, to today’s instant tweet). I told you, we all need a third place, the place where everybody knows your name, where they can see what you are up to and maybe, share a laugh: “a girl walks into a bar, she demands to buy that TV behind the bar. Bartender replies, “No, can’t sell”. She asks “why not” Then the next day, same thing, except this time, she brings cash, lots of them. “I still want to buy that TV there behind the bar” Mam, can’t sell it to you. Why not? Well, for one, it’s not a TV. It’s a microwave.”