Tag: Lenovo

All by ourselves

In the 70’s, the Me decade, we heard “All by myself” a lot on the radio.

Now, it’s the age of collaboration. All by ourselves.

Whiteboarding, synergy and M&A.

Nokia, Sony and Dell. All are taking the back seat.

Players we did not see coming are now in the field: Haier, Acer and Lenovo.

Users we did not know, can now afford buying our products e.g. I-phone 5s in Vietnam.

Dictators we thought couldn’t stand a chance, now sit in defiance of UN inspectors (Syria).

All by ourselves: APEC and TPP. NATO and UN Security Council.

Multi-polar world. Multi-tasking organization and multi-party lock jam.

It’s not that we can’t find good leaders. We weren’t prepared and planned for today’s contingencies.

Obama, once an Editor of Harvard Law Journal, just wanted to consult Congress on the War Powers Act.

In doing so, he exhibits the best of Constitutional compliance, yet entangled in “what if” scenarios, and  missed out a chance to be a great world leader.

All by himself.

Now people are speculating about Gates returning to Microsoft.

Must be hard the second time around (it would be the equivalent of Tom Hanks in Big, asking his x girl friend to go back and do it again).

He can be a figure-head, presiding over a round table of talents snatched up from competitors since the year of 2000.

Bill Gates is not needed for his prescient. After all, he missed seeing the Internet the first time around.

He can however humbly play the collaborator and coordinator role.

All by ourselves.

Or he can shut the door, and sing his heart out, like Bridget Jones, “All by myself”, all the while, envying Steve Jobs, in life as in death. Can you imagine a book and a movie on Gates? I’d rather read and see one about his partner in Idea Man – the one and only Paul Allen, rehearsing with the Stones in his private world-class yacht. The Stones don’t do “All by myself”.

 

Start-ups vs instutional memories

Vincent Cerf is a case in point.

He is perhaps the oldest employee at young Google. Before that, a lifer at MCI.

But you need someone who has been there, done that. Who could connect the dots (or see them at all).

Start-ups got money and the juice.

Most of, start-ups got the goods and the guts to make it happen.

Then when things fly, ROI positive and dividends paid out, things get complicated and dull.

Start-up phase is giving ways to institutionalizing process.

This is where precedent comes into play. Where expertise and wisdom are in demand.

The White House employs a few Senior Advisors for this very function.

Lately, news has a ring of the familiar: Saturday Evening Post gone, then Saturday Post Office closed.

Instagram is taking over where it used to be My Space. Dell has outlived its just-in-time idea.

And HP is HP (could have become another Lenovo).

At least we recognize the telecom bubble (Enron and AOL). So this time, someone like Vincent is needed to give wise counsel.

To see ahead of the curve. To go through the check list of that which quacks like a duck.

We need a healthy dose of self-disruption. A life unexamined is not worth living. The same with companies, and start-ups.

In the absence of wise counsel, institutions perish.

What  you don’t need is a historian (who will do a post-mortem). What you do need is someone from the inside who was from the outside, and whose comments you might not like, but desperately needed. Someone with some institutional memories to serve up a healthy dose of “you might want to take a look at this”, ” I wouldn’t do it if I were you”. They might be that embodiment and personification of the impersonal beast we call institution. In each system, we need a living and breathing wise one to serve as a speed bump. Or that they can work from the future backward, to pre-mortem a project and visualize certain death to save it.

It’s a good IKEA

A billion+  prospects. Wow!

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china-ikea25-2009aug25,0,3900096,full.story

IKEA in China. More  a  theme park then a show room.

They try, they buy.

Today it’s the A/C and ambience.

Tomorrow, it will be CHIKEA everywhere (not only the font, but spelling change as well!).

One thing China does well is to mass-produce these household items on the scale hard to compete with.

But IKEA will keep reinventing itself, tossing in a satin pillow here and a straw basket there to create the right look and feel for the place. After all the construction “bad” loans comes interior decoration.

China, a hyper power of consumerism. The force of the unleashing wallet.

By 2020, we can expect a new generation of male child, mostly over fed and under exercised (due to the proliferation of automobiles and computer gaming) all want to start their own Alibaba or Baidu.

IKEA would then have to move up the value chain to accommodate Hummer drivers and Lenovo users (or suffer the fate of Sears, whose catalogue was first, just as IKEA’s now the most printed).

It made so much sense to see the Chinese bid for Unoco 76 gas and once failed, they hit the Safari trail in search for oil.

Young overseas Chinese workers will come home with a wealth of knowledge, having been exposed to the latest and greatest from abroad. While at home, their counterparts are still seen napping at the IKEA’s A/C theme parks.

Either the world is coming to China, or China will go out to the world. The Olympic is just a start. Central Casting is on a

look out for a new bad guy to play the role of   X as  “made in X” .

Back in the late 70’s, we used to laugh at “made in Japan” automobiles (remember the Datsun?)

I vote for the Made-in-China solar panels though.

They are quick to smell money-making opportunities. Either that or they will have to ship their workers overseas, as they did with trucks and cars during the pre-Olympic months to “clear out” the smog in Beijing.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention. Solar panel, at this time, is a good IKEA.