Tag: tech and multi-cultural marketing

globalize, empathize and digitize

It’s Kitchen God day in Asia.

Super Bowl weekend here in Miami.

And the DOW is down across the board.

Oh when the Saints oh marching in….

People were guessing, just like Mr Watson, that maybe the world can make use of a few computers, or move to digitization perhaps 15-20% of current load. Well “you’ve got news”: when e-government and e-MR digitization finished their conversion, we will be in for a surprise: perhaps more than 50%-80% current work load will get digitized (the more service-oriented the economy, the higher the percentage).

At this rate, we will be tutored by online English and Math in-pat teachers (as opposed to expats).

Pepsi decided against participating in the Super Bowl, a move which signifies the fork on the road: the online world now commands huge Corporate dollars traditionally allocated to the big Three over the past six decades.

New Orléans will celebrate, no matter what. Just showing up this Sunday has already been more than a boost for this Katrina-ridden town.

Next weekend, more than a billion and a half will celebrate the year of the Tiger.

On top of that, we got Valentine and President Day here in the US.

A warm spot in the midst of uncertain news and unwelcome weather.

Hold it: Defense, defense, defense.

For three hours this Sunday, I will join in and try to forget all bad news.

And I trust that our Kitchen God will bring full report Upstairs.

In Asia, we got our priorities right: food comes first. It brings harmony and social cohesiveness.

You eat soup, not Campbell, but from a huge common broth (Pho).  It’s up to you to throw in your basil leaves.

But on a cold evening, the context which gave rise to the Noodle King in Japan, there is nothing comes close to a shared bowl of Pho with friends.

New Orleans also knows how to celebrate, to put emphasis on food and drink (French Quarter). No wonder the Colonial theme pervades, both Hanoi and New Orleans : the coffee and pastries. Bon Vivant. After all, the French are now factoring in Happiness into their GDP equation, to count what really counts, according to their worldview.

I can empathize with that. After all, I learned my conjugation charts and early childhood songs, deciphering on the map where Lyons,  and Marseilles were. I know in this globalized world, we evolve, and borrow brilliance. We might try to solve one problem and end up generating a host of others.

The French got their shares. So have we. But this Sunday, some of their descendants will march and cheer. And I “want to be in that number, Oh when the Saints are marching in.” Today and tomorrow, Best Buy will sell a lot of HDTV‘s. Build it (digitizing), they will come. Still cheaper than going down there (or stuck in a snow storm with canceled flights), secure tail-gate parking, get to the stadium and not even sure you could get that kind of close-up views.

If you put TV and computer screen time together, we are on the way to be couch-potato nation. That’s one thing the world has in common, World Cup or Super Bowl, besides Katrina-size disasters.

 

Random Rock

The rock that almost killed, now on-hold like Haitian orphans waiting for a permanent home.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_space_rock_dispute

The tenant doctor turned around to see the spot where he could have seated and said “I guess it’s not my time”.

Some decades ago, I lined up to see another important piece back from the Moon.

I remember clearly being fascinated by space science, and how people could do the impossible.

At the time, I remember how impressed I was with the US as well.

Fast forward 40 years later, we witness more progress on earth than in space.

It’s OK. The focus just happens to be downward. As in the lead story. Now it’s time for ownership dispute.

Especially around Washington DC, where there are an army of lawyers and law experts.

The difference between the Random rock and Moon rock is that the later was a part of a planned mission, thus

indisputable about who it belongs to.

But both tell us that we don’t live on a Lonely Planet.

That there are other entities who we may run into every once in a while. Like a social network invitation from a stranger.

Welcome!

We are believers in Web 2.0.

And the mash-up network effect.

Maybe, out of this seemingly randomness comes something unplanned but effectual.

They said it’s not our first-degree connections who influence us the most. It’s the 2nd or 3rd whom we haven’t met.

Take Facebook for instance. The lonely Harvard guy went online to list all the available dates on campus, now sitting on an ever expanded empire,

with apps to share video, arts, film clips and blogs.

My life has been so enriched by his sudden loneliness. Like a random rock that drops in on a weekend night on campus. It’s cold and lonely.

But who says it’s not productive or even world-changing. As long as you are not hit by it, the least it can do is to serve as a wake-up call. That’s life could be quite random, despite our best laid-out plans.

People with a BIG heart!

That’s what the father of that dying girl said about American Medical Evacuation (private jet), among them Dr Phuoc Le.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#35171116

That’s what I call leadership: do what is necessary, what is important and pay the price, including unintended consequences.

If it’s easy, it wouldn’t need leadership.

The White House did step in at the last-minute to resume Military airlift or even better, sending Army doctors in-country.

M*A*S*H style.

We are living in a post-Davos world. By that, I mean, nations used to be well-regarded due to the size of the bomb or the bank .

Now, we have moved on to the Commons and spheres of influence: thought leadership and intellectual capital.

Climate, energy, disaster relief, innovation and collaboration. Stuff that we see huge companies advocate on TV these days (Intel, IBM and GE. By the way, it’s John Travolta who flew his plane to Haiti to bring relief supplies. The entertainment industry seems to have acted with their feet and fund).

In The Empathic Civilization, Rifkin argues that we have built a connected society which enables empathy at an unprecedented scale, yet in doing so, we have depleted so much energy . There lies the tension between empathy and entropy (depletion of resources). Compassion fatigue. Burning out.

Just a few days ago, Governor Christ of Florida announced that the State is officially recovering from the downturn. Then the next day, he said he needed more money to accommodate Haitian refugees because of  Florida proximity to the disaster area.

One day we were ready for empathy (idealism). The next, entropy (pragmatism).

People with a big heart! Yet with shrinking wallet ( Madoff emptied it all out).

Again, we will look back to 2010 as the turning point in human progress: to tell the story at Grammy (Album of the Year), and to tell the story of a Post-Davos world i.e. global powers has since been consisted of bomb, buck and big heart (hard and soft power).

Reflections on connections

The medium (social network) resembles Amazon software source code (we recommend to you these people, read their profiles).

You have to open a personal account like you would at Harmony.com, and boom, you start the handshakes : “Hello, my name is…”.

Personal branding 2.0. Except, when it comes to cross-cultural connection, the First and Last names in Vietnamese are in reverse.

With one or two middle names in the mix, good luck at finding your high school friends. I couldn’t. We met again in the late 80’s.

But I can’t find him on LinkedIn.

Anyhow, LinkedIn has made it as a serious site for professionals to keep in contact, keep each other updated . It is like an elevator that takes

you up to the roof top to join an exclusive party in progress.

There are a variety of personality in life, and online.

Some just show up for the event. Others want to get the most out of it.

For me, I enjoy being exposed to links that I otherwise would miss.

It’s as if through my old and new acquaintances, I have a window to a whole new world (without leaving my desktop).

And not to mention Connections of connections.

The network effect.

At some point, we will be “connection-overloaded”. Like an old teacher at a reunion, who can recognize an old student’s face but cannot recall his name.

But one thing is for sure: we will never be alone again, professionally. There will always be someone out there who needs to hire and fire, to explore an opportunity or recruit a candidate. Or stumble upon an aha moment. And most beautiful of all, when there is a shared event (9/11 or Haiti), we grieve together, as human family should.

No matter how you want to stratify this, at the core, we all want the same thing: building an enduring personal brand, in an increasingly globalized world. Competition gave way to collaboration. And the industrial mind-set is so passe in this Post-industrial age (cloud computing and mobile computing) that if we refused to change, it would be like riding a horse carriage, reading under a lantern. Ford and Edison have done well with or without the buy-in of the Amish.

For my 300 Linked- in friends, you are my Amish family. Interacting locally (on LinkedIn), while living globally. That way, I won’t be like a sales colleague who was caught staring at the office phone and said, “it doesn’t ring”. Well, pick it up and call someone. Anyone. You are in sales. And not at an in-bound call center.

And in this Web 2.0 environment, Google them first before making that call. And be sure to first Google yourself, to see it in the eyes of the beholder.

 

Stop offshroring!?!

The President’s first State of the Union address did touch on protectionism, when he encouraged

exporting and keeping jobs in-country.

He made mentions of BRIC countries who seemed to “never sleep” until they become number 2 (without the eye patch!).

We are living in freaky economic times i.e. on the cusp of some tectonic shifts.

Not sure we are ready for them. Before the 80’s, ATT would not allow any device to attach to their network until the Carter phone decision,

which gave birth to MCI and the rest.

Similar incumbent mentality is now experienced across the board: instead of exploit time, we simply do time (in CA, many even serve time, and soon get outsourced by the budget-creative governor).

It’s less painful on this side of the financial melt down, but “devastation still continues” (a Trillion dollar price tag).

Meanwhile, innovation knows no border. Crowd-sourcing Peugeot have come up with a dozen impressive cars of the future, while Ford can barely get permission to roll out its European Fiesta version here at home (highest price tag among cars in its class).

It’s time to invent, invest and improve every process, offshoring included.

Hardship and hard times will pass.

That’s what medals are for: bravery in face of danger.

Lately, there hasn’t been that many medals pin on anybody’s chest. Just hand-cuffs on Madoff-and-company’s wrists.

The President touched on that “erosion of trust” theme a couple of times. To trust and believe in the dream again, we need instant amnesia.

I broke my arm on my first month of Hapkido. Luckily, I was in Junior high at the time. Young body heals more quickly.

In the span of time, the US of America is relatively “junior” as compared to other major civilizations. Perhaps young bones will recover just in time for the next

boom. I hope it’s boom, not bubble.

Graduation-Cremation

It’s an inspirational story. Got her BA the day before her 100th birthday, then died.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100127/ap_on_re_us/us_centenarian_degree

She encouraged people to read, saying that it opens doors to many things in life.

I hope I-tablet (along with Kindle and Reader) will help speed things along:

reading on train, plane and automobile.

Obscure authors will get the recognition they deserve.

Our journey is a shared journey of creatures who empathize with one another,

seeing the world as others would.

I just viewed a slide show promoting “work and travel for a summer in the US” targeting Vietnamese students.

It will take some convincing for these youngsters to drop everything, and enter a world which is very demanding:

speed of execution, quality of workmanship, self-promoting, communication-overload and low-paid blue-collar entry-level jobs (probationary and in this case, seasonal).

But it is a start. Like anything else, there is the rise and fall even for dominant players (Toyota and J&J recall of products, Tiger and Conan, SAAB and McNealy).

I encourage young minds to exploit their full potential and through risk-taking, learn about themselves. Take the computer as an analogy:

I have yet learned how to fully exploit (and Google Pack will give me more apps) existing storage capacity of my desktop.

Same with our brain power (partly exploited by time of death).

And the woman in the story is just another inspiring story of what a person, a century-old woman, can do.

Learning to learn.

Then died an educated person.

Reading someone’s  writing is like being invited into his/her inner world.

Unlike watching a play or movie, reading gives you more control, because, like the Web, it gives back the control

to the click of the mouse (or touch of the key pad).

Go I-Pad. We have come a long way since axes, arrows, anti-bodies. Let’s turn swords into social networks, eliminating into collaborating with the competition. The world will be better off with non-zero sum arrangement. When you can see from others’ point of view, it’s the beginning of collaboration. Our heroine woman, God bless her soul, certainly promoted that. And her being featured on Yahoo News etc… goes on to testify that her learning has certainly become our lesson.

Amuse ourselves to the next level

Neil Postman didn’t see the rise of game online when he penned “Amuse ourselves to death”.

But he was on to something worth discussing: we are heading toward becoming a couch-potato nation

or in China, Internet-addict camp.

When Chinese kids get sent to these internet addict camps, we witness another unintended consequence of our high-tech living.

This puts Mr Watson in the early days of IBM to shame. He said the world market could use a few, but no more than a dozen machines.

Nobody could foresee the fall-below-the-line price of the chip, maybe except for Gordon Moore who predicted the doubling of chip speed every 18 months.

My kid watches her cartoon on Hulu. Asked why she didn’t want to watch it on TV. She said on broadband, she could watch it when she wanted it.

This kid even wants control, and not waits for a scheduled time by the network.

I will have to put a cooking alarm clock next to her desk just to limit her screen time.

Or let her “amuse herself to the next level”, the highest of which is at the Internet addict camp. Long way from Florida. And she will have to speak Chinese to

understand guard’s command. Maybe it’s not a bad idea, the unintended consequence of it all: internet addicts from the West get sent to Chinese internet-addict camps,

thus picking up a foreign language.

Neil Postman built his premise on the 4-hour average  (TV watching). Now it’s 5 hours, not counting the many hours online.

No wonder advertising appears in most unlikely places: pop up (download wait), stand-on (beer aisle), stare at while in a moving elevator or taxi cab.

We are living on New York minutes, even if we are  not physically there. Because New York is now more than a New Year countdown. It’s every day’s ticking, a state of mind. No more Crocodile Dundee coming to New York.

New York is now in Dundee’ Australian back waters. Hello, hello, hello…..

Luckily, we have a built-in alarm clock : it’s our bladder. Nature break. Machines will have to wait. Human will survive and be adaptive. Continuous re-invention.

To the next level of distraction and anesthesia.

Santa-style Stat

Census 2010 is here. On dog sled. Who says officials in the US don’t accept bribe? In this case, it is just local hospitality, with no money change hands in “bridge-to-no-where” land.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100125/us_nm/us_usa_census_alaska;_ylt=AqrEHFW.ZyzdJOFyTZ4JEYwXIr0F;_ylu=X3oDMTM5dmhlZ2V2BGFzc2V0A25tLzIwMTAwMTI1L3VzX3VzYV9jZW5zdXNfYWxhc2thBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDNgRwb3MDNgRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA3VzY2Vuc3VzdG9zdA–

The US is roughly 300 million strong, plus and minus Haitians who are still arriving.

Brain-gain.

Tax-base and voting redistricting.

In Orange County Little Saigon, we have young Vietnamese Americans running for office.

The same in Northern California and Houston, TX.

I call this Golden Triangle: top three most populated clusters of Viet Americans.

The upcoming Census results will show a very different portrait of America: more graying, yet greener at the same time. The heavily taxed middle (Sandwich generation) will have to carry the two baskets just like Vietnamese fruit vendors (with the bounce in each step).

One comment was heard on CNN yesterday on GPS “what are we going to do? keep borrowing from China to help Haiti?”

No further comment on that one.

It says it all: America, debt-laden, yet beacon of light to the world.

US leadership should mean that it serves as a catalyst, but then it passes it on to France, UK, Australia, Canada, and Nordic States.

BRIC nations are also arriving. Let them take their shares of the leadership in world affairs. They might like it.

Anyone who has volunteered their time, or donated to a cause, can testify that giving affirms the goodness in us all.

That we are people with wills, heads and hearts.

Hollywood and Wall Street have mistaken benevolence for weakness (not too quick, says Travolta who is sending a plane). Let’s assume Best of Intentions in each of us, until proven otherwise. We have done this instinctively without realizing. Then when it comes to bigger picture, we start rationalizing (keeping our house in order, but ignoring societal ills). I understand during this hard time, each man is out for his own. Can’t wait for the pendulum to swing back, so I can hear the music once again. Food, drink are on the house (corporate subsidy).  Then we are back to our social grace. It must be good to be in the bean-counting business these days. The Quants rule. At least, for the Director of the Census Bureau, on his first field visit in a decade.

Our dichotomy

Abundance or shortage? Keynes or Milton Friedman? The quants rule? Human beings are selfish or empathic? what is the optimal point for happiness?

Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the Union, yet ranked the Happiest. New York City crime rates are at the lowest in decades.

South Korea, always at war, yet always connected.

And forget what you think you know about China i.e. traditional, passive-aggressive (all these may still be true with interior China). At least, their nouveaux riche haven’t behaved as counterparts in the US (Vegas limo and strip club): they bought Lenovo and Hummers.

Since the New Year, we heard that celebrities have been arrested almost every other week (Denver, West Virginia).

Fear of success.

And then, the real 17+% unemployed in the US, fear of failure? Sedated and in need of Shock treatments.

The age of adjusted expectations. Self-correcting amidst progress and plenty.

Fast toaster (Subway). Bullet train. Slow bureaucracy.

One advertising slogan “I hate to wait” came to mind.

Cultures and companies proceed at different speeds.

Search and rescue teams are now leaving Haiti. Their time and mission has come to an end.

Mid-term relief organizations now take ober. Then long-term sustained development NGOs will stay the course

piling on top of the 10,000 counterparts who had already been there before the quake.

News organizations such as CNN and CBS have stepped up to the plate, proving themselves worthy of our attention.

But then, where were they during the Iranian post-election showdown? Twitter ruled back then and there.

So we go back to our dichotomy of Command/control vs consumer/citizenry movement, Keynesian vs Milton, and

whether human nature are empathic or dog-eat-dog ? The Net is neutral. It blinks and waits for our clicks.

No wonder teens are into Vampires, a state of not living, yet not vanishing. Perfect commentary about our current state of ambivalence.

Poor surviving but wounded Haitians! I could not finish the evening news yesterday. Maybe we are empathic creatures after all.

 

Have you ever seen the Rain (bow)

Despite a lot of sunshine, in California, when it rains it pours.

Yet, photographer did not fail to snap a picture of a rainbow

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Calif-Storms/ss/events/us/101409califstorms#photoViewer=/100120/480/448ac9a2ced64a438dd5ecb4c958e984

Payback for all the dry months, the fire, and the smog.

The State got enough on its plate: budget concern, gay marriage repeal, and now this.

Best of wishes to the newly appointed LA City Business Czar, whose job is to create jobs.

We need common sense, courage and commitment to get ourselves over the hurdles.

Collectively, we have let ourselves go unchecked. Now, it’s payback time before we can see Rainbow.

Some contractors even owed $5 Billion in US  back taxes.

That’s a lot of schooling for little ones.

I stand corrected in earlier blog. Former President Clinton was here (Palm Beach) last night at a fund-raising dinner.

So he wasn’t around this morning to experience first hand the Haiti aftershock. Supplies are now slowly but surely delivered to those who needed them most. Mr Clinton even praised Coca Cola for bringing in water bottles.  Good corporate citizenry. I got a Coke and a sandwich when first landed in Subic Bay.

Last month, Warren Buffett even held up a bottle while sitting next to Bill Gates at Columbia Business School. One needs to believe in one’s product, its usefulness and lasting impact.

Pepsi is not giving up just yet. It wants to develop genuine healthy and nutritious products to beat Coke on this front. Bring it on. After giving NGOs some head start, for-profit companies slowly return to Haiti.

I felt privileged today when shopping for a nail clipper. I was able to get it at a store. Wonder if it’s that easy in Haiti.

But then, Rainbow is free for all, from the Malibu stars to the Santa Monica homeless. All I want to do, is have some fun, until the sun comes up, from Santa Monica boulevard.