Tag: India

ICT talent in a flat world –

re-post from 2011. This past year, things are getting heated up with “friend-shoring” chip manufacturing with Biden’s visit.

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If it hadn’t been for the slightly warm temperature, the water bottle that bore “QTSP” (Quang Trung Software Park) and the simulcast headsets, I would have thought I was back in 2005 at  a similar conference in Palo Alto. But this was Vietnam.  With speakers and delegates from Malaysia, Thailand, India trying to organize into a ICT block. “We competed with one another too much, selling to each other too much”, said a Thai delegate.

Instead, SEA ICT parks were urged to organize and synergize.

A message well worth noting and worthy of praise.

Except, Thailand just went through a century flood (at the tune of 46 Billion)

and Vietnam ICT college enrolment grew at meager pace of 2% (demands are calling for 12 times that).

I kept hearing the word “disconnect”.

Schools weren’t up to task for mobile, gaming and cloud computing.

Consumers just wanted to “use” technology, no matter where it’s from (mostly likely the West, but outsourced to the East and then repackaged and rebranded).

I worked the crowd, and walked the hallway.

I shook hands and met people at the booths.

I was behind those booths many times while at MCI and Teleglobe.

Now, it’s their turns.

Eye contacts, business cards in hand, and promise to keep in touch.

Right!

I said I was into softskills, not softwares.

They understood immediately.

Quid pro quo.

You teach me some, I teach you some.

We can send foreign teachers of every shade of accent for you to be exposed to.

Of course, at a very low price.

Accents are cheap.

Words are cheap.

Human connection: invaluable.

I lifted one guy’s spirit when I mentioned that companies like RightNow could still command a very high price, having been bought by cash-rich Oracle.

So the young and the younger got along, hand shakes without high fives.

Welcome to Vietnam, Welcome to the flat world.

Let the game begin. Somehow I know those guys behind the booths will turn out very OK, more than they now realize.

I have been there and I know.

They will hit singles and one of them will hit a ball way out of the park.

Just a numbers game.

Just a right mix of pressures, opportunities, collaboration and market demand.

Keep pitching

Keep selling.

Keep inventing.

They’ll come, even if it takes a huge flood to “flush” them out.

Currently wages pressure has turned to demonstration in China.

What are we waiting for? Someone else’s crisis, our opportunity.

Ironically, that double-meaning character was originally Chinese, now came in full circle there.

ICT talent in the flat world. ICT talent in Vietnam. I like it.

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.

Reaping rewards

Image of an old guy spread out on his Harley w/ a cigar in his mouth stuck with me.

To him, that was it. The end game.

Reaping the windfall.

In Seven Habits of Effective People, Steven Covey urges his readers to “begin with the end in mind”.

I guess, in this case, I better learn how to ride the beast.

(you can keep the cigar).

As a society, we are approaching another end-game: that of a Blade Runner Society,

first in the name of telemedicine, then enters cyber state control armed with speech recognition, facial recognition, Caller ID, individualized embedded chips, behavioral search …..to make possible convergence (of service and product brokerage).

A return to Eden. The Holy Grail of SuperMart in the Cloud.  A return to the original Amazon via the online Amazon.  Time saving. Money saving. Energy saving (most eerie when a company in Japan mandates its employees to get the same hair cut, to save energy e.g. hair dryer and water).

Cutting through the chase. No long sales cycle.

Just closing.

The B2B apps watered down version for consumer use.

Touch screen mobile phones, on all phones.

Commerce used to be a person-to-person transaction (begins and ends with a hand shake).

Then, with prosumer movement, we gave birth to a self-help and self-serve society.

Now, we are volunteering our data (and eventually, our medical data) to save ourselves (some counties already have citizens uploaded their personal data like where the bedrooms are, the medical records etc… for first responders’ rapid response).

The arrival of self-revealing society will not be greeted without a fight.

With help from Harrison-Ford– type, heroes of the resistance.

Preferably, French, with his beret and gilet.

Studies have shown that we prefer filling out a form, online or on paper, as opposed to revealing intimate personal details (like Social Security) to strangers. Yet, it’s a stranger who will have access to those data eventually (cyber-verify), be it a naked picture, or our “Likes” on Facebook.

Throughout these pages, I have stage-managed my digital footprints to pre-empt data distortion.

As long as we can still choose, originate and leave out any content then we are still in control. Google 1+ can aggregate our social graph to connect the dots, but it cannot pin down thoughts I chose to leave out, or sites I refused to click on.

The future of privacy belongs to those who choose what not to reveal.

Virtually, we are right back to the gated houses on Long Island. The mansion in Pakistan.

And the New England white fences.

Companies that respect consumer’s secrecy and sacredness win.

To reap future rewards, Harley and Cuban cigars, one needs to respect the man-2-man transaction,

just like it’s been done on the Silk Road. Technology only hastens that which one already chose as modus operandi. No wonder they said emerging countries tend to adopt telemedicine more quickly. India, meanwhile, hastens a national ID project to facilitate banking and social services.

By leapfrogging to the  bio-metric space, India inadvertently is building its cyyber-infrastructure,

like China with its physical one. The things they built were dictated by necessity

as much as availability (of latest tech). We are all in the race to reap the rewards, Blade runner style.

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?”.

Never let go

14 Vietnamese women were found and freed from Baby101, a Taiwanese outfit operated outside of the law in Thailand.

They were paid to be surrogate mothers (artificial insemination or otherwise), whose future babies would be put up for adoption.

Baby, never let me go.

Newsweek has a piece about anonymousUS.org, an organization which seeks to organize “kids who are not all right” and demand access to their records.

In “Never Let Me Go” Ishiguro explores the “human side” of clones (children who are brought up to stay healthy and to eventually become organ donors).

“We ‘let you study arts’ just to see if you had any soul at all”, says the head mistress . It’s “the Island” 2.0.

I realize the technology (for cloning and artificial insemination) is there.

And that once we let the tiger out of the cage, there is no turning back.

Still, I feel sad for the characters in “Never Let Me Go“.

They seek a normal life i.e. romance – in this case triangular one, in vain.

It’s been more than a decade that the top 1% of the world’s richest keeps getting richer, while the bottom billion live on longer (thanks to vaccination and bio-tech discoveries ). This divide will only rush in the next rung of colonization (Upper vs lower rungs): medi-tourism- offshored drug testing- outsourced pregnancy and why not – organ harvesting.  Money can buy anything from nuclear waste to nuclear families.

Sign here. Down payment now, and the rest paid upon delivery (organ donor to baby delivery). First, start with donating the blood. Then, just don’t stop there.

Half a kidney is quite acceptable.

How about your whole kidney.

How about your whole life, since inception.

Test tube babies. Youtube adults. (How about $400 to keep the peace).

Life is difficult, completely. Just never let me go. Hold me like I am (the Only girl – by Rihanna).  Ishiguro portrays a world of tomorrow, where there are only  forced choices – yet like the retired butler in

“the Remains of the Day“, we are reluctant to leave the estate of comfort behind. Gone are the days of laughter under the lantern. Modernity doesn’t ask for permission. It just shows up like a force of tyranny – way past curfew, and not for a cup of tea. It asks us, to set aside Rousseau “social contract” for  a  “biological contract” – surrogate mothering – in the name of progress. What can be done will soon become that which must be done.

 

On becoming

We are diamond in rough cuts.

7 billion of  us. The stats show the costs of raising a child in the US at roughly $200,000.  With educational score cards showing flat line, while other countries are on the up tick (albeit Shanghai focused on rote learning and test preparation), policy makers might have to offshore some departments i.e. sending students to India for math tutoring, for instance. This should reduce school loan a bit.

It might do us some good to have a generation of young people who are globally intelligent (Ask not what the world can do for you…), and know how to exercise and exert soft power . The FT puts the x-President of Brazil and Turkey on the list of top influencers.

Economic standing aside, these leaders know how to position themselves in world affairs. They know the time is now (for the rest to rise).

No one can take the US place at the table. It’s just that the table now accommodates more participants, from G7 to G20 and counting.

On New Year Day, I went shopping. Couldn’t help putting my marketing hat on. Cuban Americans are buying clothing on sales by the bulk. They might be suit-case entrepreneurs (after Christmas is also a good time to travel).

What’s good for the world is linked to what’s good for America (and vice versa).

Certainly it has kept Western Union in the game (money transfer back to Mexico, Philippines and others). Consumption here means production there (and shipping in between). Vietnam shrimp export rises from 1.69 B to 2 B this past year as an example.

We constantly take in new information, brain storm our options and force-rank our choices.

Speed used to be the watch word. It still is. But smart speed (both “aim” and “fire”) – like soft power- is all the more desirable. When head, heart and feet are aligned, we no longer have a rough-cut diamond. We got a priced one that serves a grander purpose.

Instinctively, we in the US know this. That somehow, things will get back to “normal”.

But this time around, we will temper growth with sustainability, strength with wisdom. and fun with respect (raw meat dress, anyone?)

We have grown mature. We have moved further in the scale, toward becoming what we are all along. In crisis, there is opportunity. The phoenix finally emerges out of the ashes to fulfill its destiny, that of true leadership.

VINA MOUSE

Last week, an op-ed in the NYT lamented the death of Disney dream in America.

This week, they signed a multi-million dollar deal to build HappyLand in Long An, Vietnam. The dream doesn’t die. It simply moved offshore. Imagine you can tour both Cu Chi Tunnel and HappyLand in one full sweep.

The new Vietnam seeks to learn not only from neighboring Asian Tigers (Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) but also from America and European Union. Many signed on with Fulbright scholarship for a year at Ivy League Schools (Yale, Harvard, Standford) to “reverse engineer” America’s secret sauce.

Vietnamese young population will have their Sputnik moment at HappyLand.

Build-and-they-will-come model. Modern cities and mindset. Planned economy. No legacy.

America on the other hand is weighed down with pension plan, health plan, and deficit reduction plan.

Every day, a bunch of people turn 65 in America. And not all of them move on to live in country clubs. Some already got condos in Mexico (warmer than Florida). Others to Canada to buy subsidized medicine.

The brave ones traveled as far as India, hence spurring up medical tourism.

I noticed an interesting trend lately: more American are getting work-permits in Australia, perhaps in construction related business. New Frontier.

To think that the Disney dream is fading out is to limit the scope of the argument.

It simply found new disciples elsewhere, in the land far away, whose name was known more for past conflict than future potential.

The change will happen so fast that by the time we emerge from our tour of Cu Chi Tunnel that we see the bright lights of HappyLand with Vina Mouse souvenirs and logo.

What happened in Vietnam stays in Vietnam. And a lot has lately. I hear the fade out music of “It’s a small world after all” somewhere in the background. Time to dream on.

 

churning, down the river

The foreclosure process has still been at work, churning homes back on the market in CA or FL.

Behind the statistics are people bewildered and shattered.

As a nation and the world, we are faced with two choices:

– pretend it never happened, and rush out to shop

– acknowledge that it happened, and rush out to shop.

Kid Rock on American Music Award a few years back sang about his hometown Detroit.

Something about “bringing us to our knees”. I realize that technology and market , when in sync, offer us convenience and low costs. When collided, as in collateral obligation, forces us on our knees.

It makes you feel like you have just been eliminated from being America’s next top model.

Pack your bag, and leave the set. Now!

Do you have some place to go?

Of all the misfortunes  that beset this country e.g. Dot.com burst, 9/11, Katrina and the two wars, lower our confidence a bit: an Ireland with lost pride, China with deep pocket-book, and Russia asking, hey, dance anyone?

First thing first, Covey advises us. A nation, as a people, needs to learn good habits.

Focus on the most important and work everything from that core (rocks first, then pebbles into the jar).

We have put out big and small fires. That leaves us too exhausted to do what’s next and necessary. The rules of law, the checks and balance etc… help protect us from abuse, but not in the realm of economics.

When do we see you hungry and not feed you? Or without a roof over your head and take you in. Rolling down the river.

 

The vase and the Beast

One is auctioned for 85 million (with tax and fee), while the other merged with Newsweek after it was sold for $1.00

After a lifetime of standardization and automation, something is still of value.

Nobody had appreciated Van Goh’s self-portrait or any of his pieces until after he was long gone.

Still, we want maximization, optimization and standardization, pre-reqs for an economy of scale.

What happened to innovation amidst of instead in the absence of chaos?

Google tried 20% time-off for employee’s personal and passionate projects.  May the best idea win.

Then, it resorted to salary increase. Money talks.

How do you quantify an idea, especially a break-through and disruptive one?

Sometimes a whole industry clusters around a breakthrough product e.g. Apple apps.

Why do we listen to music? Because it tapped in different parts of our neuron.

It resonates and brings us back to the time we first “connected” with that tune

(First time, I ever saw your face….).

Time and Life is tapping into this reservoir to urge you “to make that call” since operators are standing by in India to take your orders (Singers and Songwriters).

Something, in this case the vase, which had been tucked in the attic, now sees the light of day (and commands the highest auction price from a caller in China). You can imitate art and artifact, but that one piece testifies to uniqueness, rarity and antiquity.

No standardization, no automation, no reproduction. The only one. The Beauty.

Newsweek has a section called My Turn. That had been before blogging arrived.

Now, the Post, the Beast and Newsweek will join forces. Their turns to synergize and optimize (still can’t beat Huffington Post who also has to join forces with AOL – to leverage existing sales force).

Just don’t resort to standardize in this age of Page-ranking.

We honed in the efficiency model, and ended up missing the forest for the tree.

Luckily, we discovered something of a treasure in the attic, and rediscovered the meaning of value vs price.

I am sure for cheaper vase, the buyer from China could have walked down any street or gone straight to a local factory

where high production, low labor-costs and large profit return are norm. But then, it’s a Made-in-China vase.

I still read Newsweek, if it’s still published. And I wish its new Editor in Chief, Ms Tina Brown better luck this time around.

At least, there is only one Tina Brown, the Beauty who rules the Beast.

Forgetfulness is necessary

In clinical terms: selective memory.

Speak ill not of the dead, for instance.

Auto-biography is another version of selective memory (before actual amnesia).

For me, to see Dow Chemical opens a polymer and acrylic factory in Vietnam, roughly 40 years after Agent Orange got sprayed over the same landscape, is a great example of collective amnesia. Vietnam must be a very forgetful country, or a forgiving and pragmatic one.

Intel, Samsung, Canon all set up shop there. These names are not attached to any controversy we know of.

IBM and Coke got their own black eyes in the past.

But one must move on, travel the globe to seek bed partners never thought possible 40 years ago (I may have repeated what Secretary of State Clinton said in her recent remarks about Vietnam).

The President is in India. I thought I saw in passing his test-driving a nano car.

(In an ironic twist, he is a de facto CEO of GM, checking out a foreign competitor, in this case, Tata).

After India, whose stroke of luck continues after Y2K, the President will take a walk on memory lane: Indonesia, home of volcano and the largest Muslim population on Earth.

One cannot schedule a better get-away from gridlock than this. While things seem to jam up over here, everything explodes over there.

I alluded yesterday about how long it took Detroit to build smaller cars (began with Pinto) . And now, Harley Davidson has made-in-USA parts assembled in India (that way, the nouveaux riche in India and China can join in the chorus of “Born to be wild”. It’s expensive to be wild!

The pendulum finally swings to the opposite : “Small is beautiful” is adopted here in Detroit, and Harley in Mumbai.

“I want to hold your hand”, the Beatles sing. They went to India 40 years ago for R&R. Now the seeds finally took hold here in the West. This time, albeit not reversing “the British invasion“, off shoring to a former British colony via broadband links and Harley parts (tattoo stickers not included).

I wish I can be forgetful on demand. The time calls for it: a healthy dose of amnesia. No context, no frame of reference. Just do it. Do not think too hard and too much. Go with the flow (of information and money).