Social Net - Working Or Not?

by 
CrazyLazy

Social Networking is changing the entire world, at least at the present moment.


It is really amazing to witness how easy it has become to touch people digitally  - either by commenting on status messages or just by putting a thumbs up on their photos, videos or blogs. It’s simple, it’s quick and it’s free and hence addictive. It’s hip for teenagers in search of quick adult identity. It’s a wonderful buddy for a traveler who wants to reconnect to familiar circles transcending challenges of time zones.
It runs on the mobile phone allowing anybody to just press a button and share a personal moment. It also emulates a group discussion forum where all comments are made public to a group of friends and their friends and even further to friends’ friends. So an intelligent quip can draw a reaction in the form of a ‘like’ or a comment and it can cascade even further into a longish thread if the group-force desires to take it that far.
The language is free from any bar and can be interspersed with emoticons capturing any specific moods. If we like comparing this with that of emails and SMS then this is perhaps positioned in between. While email has to follow grammar and spelling and text messaging does not have to abide by any such rules but just exist as phonetically functional and economically zip-locked, the social networking language can range from copy-pasted anything to original writings.
So the disposition is pretty much open for a friendly interaction. Most popular amongst the social networking sites are Facebook, MySpace, Orkut and Twitter which have successfully diverted and transformed most of the email traffic from Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail to themselves. However the best part of sites like Facebook is that friends can be searched by names and ‘friend requests’ can be sent to strangers whose email addresses are not known. This is phenomenally exciting for teenagers, the twilight aged and even those in between who want to to search for friends and who  are avidly waiting to exchange gratifications, thereby exponentially increasing their friend lists.
But some statistics are really astonishing. Would we believe that more than 767,063 people like the profile of Paris Hilton for any other reason than just drooling at her photos? Likewise, it’s also true that some of the friend requests come to us with similar curiosities written all over.

 Virtually Yours …


This is changing the social behavior of people living in cities, who having gone through a phase of independent workaholic loneliness and boredom are now finding the appearance of red notifications on their Facebook dashboard caring and comforting. With the economy slowing down, the salaries getting cut, the increments becoming infinitesimally small and the superiors complaining far more than ever before, it is generally quite depressing to wade through each and every work week before finally reaching the shores of our planned weekend getaways. Such weekend consumption sprees are stimulating since those are supposed to be the best ways of getting entertained and also quickly prompting us to putting check-marks on our weekend planners. These check- marks are of immense value when we are in a circle of friends or colleagues in real life or in the surreal circle of Facebook friends.
A lot goes into our prior planning and online research in discovering those links which offer ‘more for less’, thus paying us back in pure currency- denominated satisfaction. But the check- marks do not end those stories. That job gets accomplished only after those getaway photos are shared on social networking sites amongst friends and their gratifying comments and likes are received against most of them. It is similar to a salesman sending a survey questionnaire to a buyer for rating a product or a service just sold and then waiting in expectation for a superlative feedback. And if that happens, then our joys shoot through the roofs, bringing in reassuring smiles and reaffirming our justifications of splurging on those very special getaways.
Also for others these become great references to start with their own weekend planning.
As opposed to persons with families, those are single and have been earlier glued to dating sites, have now gradually taken to one of these  social networking sites in search of authentic friendship which their old acquaintances or batch mates can perhaps provide, or just take to it for the sake of variety. Surprisingly for us this form of socializing has become a source of greater entertainment than even watching online flicks. We do not have to dress up for the real parties with friends nor plan for logistics. We just need to deck up our moods to the virtual party beats and glide into a wonderful few moments of comfort and bliss.
Also the face- time between friends and families are decreasing. Same holds true for our verbal communication and story telling skills. Every communication now seems to be filtered and condensed like carefully- worded advertisement punch-lines with goal-driven sales pitches. There was a brief period earlier when urban workforce spending long hours at offices regularly chose colleagues as relationship partners only to justify spending significant time of their relationships on the common convenient street, but of late those are slowly giving way to far greater choices panning a far larger virtual world.
Those who are in their teens today are hardly expected to marry or live with their colleagues. They will perhaps transcend all boundaries of states, nations, languages, religions, institutions and reach out with their hearts to whosoever will give full attention to their virtual identity. On the other hand a more mature group will try to seek their roots and their ties with their past, their families, their religions, their languages, their nations, their states and even their ethnicities. Both these pursuits will have immense passion, traction and excitement while embracing the unknowns. No wonder the erstwhile patrons of newspapers, weeklies and television are shifting their loyalties! Also much pronounced will be our gradually becoming fearlessly articulate in the virtual world and obnoxiously muted in the real one and as communications become asynchronous, more of our real slow analytical thoughts and even deeper introspections reflecting on what and how we eventually articulate. A day may not be far away when a teenager, who may feel shy in confronting a parent, will explain with effortless ease her action in status messages on Facebook, because a virtual medium does not have the ego, ethos, prejudices and hierarchies like real- life individuals.


Must be the next big thing …




The business, currently in need of some steroid shots, has pinned all its hopes on social networking to be the vehicle which will drive industrial revenues in the next few years. It promises to simulate the entire world market on the social networking sites, put gaming console like dashboards on top for the industry captains to monitor and play with, to accelerate the growth of revenues for all industries and finally deliver a panacea for the world which has been thoroughly shaken by the global financial crisis. Does it sound like wishful thinking? Maybe or maybe not. But the truth is that the businesses definitely want it to succeed and deliver on each of the promises. The businesses themselves are prepared to change the way they work currently.  They now predict the demand by analyzing their consumer buying behaviors using Customer Relationship Management systems. Well, these systems can only track buying patterns of existing customers but cannot capture the details for potential future ones. And the latter is far greater in numbers than the former. With social networking, their ambitious plan is to integrate current customers, share profiles in social networking groups, through the friends and their friends’ friends and hence capture data of the future customers. Further they may like to integrate their customer loyalty programs with incentives and reward points for referrals and direct orders from friends who are in their current friend- list. Also social networking sites can be a very reliable places for capturing feedback from friends on products and services sold to them which otherwise are done by sending survey questionnaires. This new approach can provide a much more direct way for business to communicate with their current  and as well as prospective customers and can result in greater customer-satisfaction and probably higher revenues.
Similarly, procurement and recruitment functions can also become more optimized and cheaper as the social networking market grows bigger. After-sales  support can have faster responses and can cost less at the same time if issues are discussed and resolved amongst the customers who are 'friends'.
The businesses are also sensitive of the changing social preferences. They are aware that the consumers, especially the youths, are shifting their attention away from print and electronic media to  more online means and even more to mobile telephony. So their new campaigns have targeted these new-age media. In fact, currently more than 50% social- networking users access it from their mobile phones.
Also the technological advancements, open economies, liberal trade regulations and finally the change in social behaviors of the people have encouraged them to embark upon a humongous plan. They are also aware of the convergence of service providers - for example, internet, wired and wireless telephone, broadband and television which will help the entire initiative.


Economy and politics are inter-connected and hence it may be possible that by implementing social networking, globally large corporations will try to fulfill some of their political agendas as well. Since this is a powerful propaganda-machine, it can be used by government departments, agencies, institutions, and social activists to raise popular support on serious issues as has been in the upheavals in the North African countries and the Middle- East. Though the social- networking throughput is intended for loading sponsor pages with streaming videos and for discussion forums on various merchandise (with the intention introducing direct marketing through friend-chisees and peer-to-peer product support by shopping-friendly mates), the idle bandwidth will still have enough for some free propaganda.


Also post- 9/11, governments have been spending heavily on homeland security, on profiling people, on monitoring mobile calls and on  tracking various financial transactions. Social- networking sites may also fall in line with that agenda. In future, analytics software can start monitoring people like laboratory animals! Privacy, which still remains a dodgy area, can be superficially protective from casual onlookers – however, if somebody needs to really prey into private data, that might not be prevented at all. So users must exercise some restraint in the beginning and also bear in mind the consequences of  misuse. Though privacy and security may not be the same, here we somehow have security preying into privacy. From security perspective a naked man threatens none though from privacy perspective it can still send signals to other perverts.

Before we discuss more on this, let us move to another topic. Here we study the different roles and interactions of entities which comprise the private business enterprise circus and how they all are delicately connected by strings. This will also set the context and throw some ideas about how people will be impacted if this grand plan is implemented like their dream.

Fortunes will differ by Types …


All the people, who we discussed about earlier as friends in social networking, play their role as real-life consumers with varying needs and buying capacities. Let us try to categorize these friends into types.
First are those who in addition, play very important roles as the workforce for business in its various functions like marketing, procurement, production and support services. Let us call them Type I.
Next are kids, teens and young adults who are still students and some of them may have part- time jobs (belong to the age group between 0 - 21 years). Let us call them Type II.
Following in the wakeare the large business owners (Type III) and home makers (Type IV).
Let the small business owners be also classified as Type I.
Assume the self- employed like doctors, lawyers, authors, artists, actors be either Type I or Type III depending on whether they have mediocre earnings or really astronomical ones as celebrities in their respective professions.
There could still be another group of retired individuals who have steady earnings from their past investments in debt instruments or stocks and also from gifts / remittances from children or kin. Let us call them Type V. The following illustrations refer to a few numbers more for helping us to compare qualitatively the income and spending ratios for various types at a rough order of magnitude rather than actually letting us worry about the accuracy of those, which is more of a quantitative exercise and bear no relevance to this discussion.
One, which Type consumes how much? Currently more than 50% of the global consumption for goods and services is by Type II. If we look at the Type IV consumers, mostly women, they consume another 20%. For Type V (considering an aging world population) even a conservative estimate will put that as 10%.
Two, which Type borrows money and pays maximum interest? Globally speaking almost all of Type II who are above 16 years are perhaps in debt. Debt to income ratio or DTI is currently between 0.6 (for Type I) and 0.8 (for Type II, Type V and also for some Type I who are temporarily out of jobs) and in future these ratios are slated to head further north.
Three, which Types are the maximum beneficiaries of business profit? 50% of the world’s profit from private enterprises are earned by 5% people mainly Type III (i.e. large entrepreneurs, private equity owners, investment bankers and CXOs of multinational corporations). Type III comprise mostly of aged bums who seldom support their families (other Type II and Type IV) but like to roam as free discretionary birds looking for ambitious nymphs.
Four, what’re the most pathetic of Types? They are Type I. They are themselves moderate consumers (for example they spend on houses, cars, vacations and debt servicing) but also essentially provide for all their children’s conspicuous needs, education, hi-tech and high octane life styles and their credit card debts (Type II). They may also support Type IV (both if divorced or not) and sometimes Type V (though in western societies those are usually loners). Also, they earn much less compared to the high profits which the Type III earn for themselves (25% - 40% or sometimes quite absurdly high).
A much publicized answer in defense for such high profits is that Type III have the ability to absorb high risks (can absorb losses in revenue and pay penalties in the event of T&C breaches or pay damages when a lawsuit is lost) while for Type I that risk-taking ability is almost nil. The latter, it is argued, are unable to sustain even the slightest irregularities in their incomes and will perhaps break downon hearing of possible pay cuts. But counter arguments could also be that these employees had earned their degrees and diplomas with their own money or by borrowing it while taking the entire risks on themselves. Besides, they constantly bear the risks of losing their jobs at any moment when their performances really dip or their employer desires to lay them off by contriving a verdict from the annual evaluation process. Finally, after 2008, Type I have actually taken pay cuts when the actual quarterly revenues did not meet the ambitious growth targets which somehow are always set at 10% or its multiples but never at anything like 3.79% or 9.07%.  So why should Type I not be considered as risk takers even with their current statuses? Also in the event of losses, Type III not only take recourse to government tax shields and concessions (or bail out packages) but also use contingencies that are already built into their products and services costs as immediate shock absorbers. Besides, their bonuses (which are guaranteed sums per signed contracts) never get slashed even when the revenue targets are not met or the company reports a loss. Their money is always stowed away in offshore funds which are managed by the best fund-managers, thereby hardly allowing that corpus-value to erode. In fact Type III’s corpus only grows and that too at a very rapid rate. They never get poorer whereas Type I does get fleeced in several permutations and combinations.
Let us now look at another possibility of crediting Type III more than Type I with their actual performances on their respective job roles so that we can justify such skewed sharing of payouts. Type I engaged in manufacturing and construction industries are mostly of entry-level employees as well as a few experienced middle-level employees with even less, say 1%, senior level employees. Type I in services industries are also mostly from entry- level with a few supervisors and 1-2 managers. They have set targets and they handle the entire sales and delivery of goods and also provide support services to customers. CXOs are there as the budget approvers and the signatories of all contracts. They attend lunch and dinner meetings with high- profile customers and deliver key- note addresses at town- hall meetings once every quarter. They spend paid vacation with families or partners or significant others. They do not have any downside risks other than being asked to walk out of the job carrying a hefty severance package. All creditors are liabilities to the enterprise but not a single one of them are tied to CXO’s personal assets. For those who are owners amongst Type III, can choose to file under bankruptcy law after transferring all personal assets to other family members or to fictitious accounts. Comparisons of their risk- taking abilities and that of their performances have both failed to clearly justify the reason for such a disproportionate distribution of their incomes. So we can infer that payouts are decided by pure rolling of the dice or luck and most other arguments are fluff.




Now let us examine the quandary of Type I. As employees, they are given targets to stoke the consumerist spirits in potential buyers which also include their own children, spouse and dependants. On the other hand, as consumers, when Type I purchase those products on their credit cards they add up to their liabilities. And quite amusingly, the incentives and bonuses are designed with such clinical delight that Type I can earn those additional perks only to pay for their additional debts on their credit cards or can relinquish those incentives only to see that the debt burdens too got equally reduced. However the only advantages of taking those incentives are seeing the happy faces of their spouses and children with more regularity. That experience is indeed priceless.




What will happen to people by Types if social networking is implemented as the business desires? Type II and Type IV will step on their consumption accelerators with their sights only on the promised future while dreaming that one day Type II will become self employed Type III and Type IV will become the entrepreneur Type I or even the entrepreneur Type III. The harsh realities of the debt traps will perhaps evade their dreamy eyes. If at all there will be somebody to bother about that debt then it could be Type I. But nobody else will care about Type I, since they are such pathetically cautious consumers! And even Type I themselves will de-skin that status when they step into the shoes of enterprise managers! They have to set their eyes on their targets and that’s what they must achieve or else they will be tagged as worse performers, gagged out of their jobs. Social networking will bring in far greater competition amongst Type I workforce for the same jobs. Other small suppliers who are Type I may also join the same race by quoting lower prices. Type I entrepreneurs may even switch roles temporarily with a Type I workers. Again, every year, some Type II will graduate as Type I workforce and compete with the current lot at a much cheaper level. Eventually Type I will be cut from both ends, their expenditures will rise, job security will become low and incomes will shrink!
Let us look at Type V. They will probably pay handsomely for either feeling healthier or looking younger and for goods delivered at their homes (especially medication and homecare). They will have limited buying capacities, almost nil debt-servicing and no financial support from others.
Finally let us look at Type III. Their incomes and bonuses can increase even more since, in the new scenario, the business will achieve far greater revenues as well as profits than their current levels. They are really keen in seeing social networking succeed in a big way as they have envisioned, which will probably catapult them to the safe havens of oligarchy.






People can start behaving bizarrely …

Orchestration is far more difficult in real life than in theory especially when the people involved are politically and demographically disparate. Their propaganda of ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ cities which are in their quintquessential vision statements and roadmaps, rely heavily on social- networking sites to capture and analyze millions of consumer data and translate those into orders. However their party can be spoiled if certain assumptions do not become true.
One, all the analytics which is promised by the technology gurus may not be delivered. The verbal commentaries, one of the most difficult things to be analyzed digitally, could pose serious challenges. And the industries may not buy this beta-version of the ‘panacea’. There may not be a single corporate success story to ride on.
Two, in spite of the industries buying them, their revenues may not increase. The social- networking friends may not buy that many or that often, as had been expected by business. They may ‘like’ yet may not have enough money to buy those. Or their social identities may be fake and may not yield any orders.
Three, the rise of the oligarchs may be opposed by the commoners with whistle blowers like WikiLeaks and other sting operators, within various financial and government agencies, making public some of their confidential and sensitive documents. Hence those friends can turn into real foes.
Four, the disposition of teenagers can suddenly change and they can start to vehemently oppose the gradual transformation of democracies into plutocracies. Unemployment problems may become almost impossible to solve by current government policies.
Five, there may be a revival of interest in art, culture and yoga and people can start rejecting war in every form and also the pretexts that their governments may keep on citing to convince them.
Six, people can start acting ‘unsmart’, drive less cars and use less mobile phones, grow organic crops and return to living simple lives in villages. This may sound too extreme to actually happen but we have never had the opportunity to see the interactions and reactions of such huge numbers of educated people (Facebook alone currently has almost 7% of the world population as its users) connected in real time on a single social platform!


How can they alter the planned outcomes envisioned by business?
One thing for certain is that Type III profits will come down considerably.
Type I may see an upsurge of small entrepreneurs.
Type II, and this can be the real difference from the current trend, will also start earning early as small entrepreneurs Type I (they could choose professions as small organic farmers, manufacturers, teachers, tourist guides, therapists, nurses, social welfare workers, zoo keepers, horticulturists, energy producers from non-conventional sources, manufacturers of eco-friendly automobiles etc. They may join politics too). Their debt burdens may slowly reduce and they may leave hedonism and embrace discipline in their lives.
Type IV may become Type I and join the workforce.
Type III may find women to be more efficient and loyal than their counterparts.
Type V may start thinking about themselves as more capable than just fending for their medical and home- care expenses which can become cheaper because of lower margins being charged on price. More importantly, they can reduce their debt too  and that can perhaps bring back some of those who had earlier deserted them.
Finally our Type I cavaliers would feel much less pressure both from their families as well as their employers. Their debt- serving burden in all likelihood will be lower and their revenue targets at the workplace will definitely be less steep than before, hence, allowing them some opportunities to smile and enjoy life at large :-)






So what’s the conclusion? …




What are the chances of social networking being the socio-economic panacea of twenty-first century?
Frankly speaking, if anyone of us knew the answer, he would have already become a billionaire. In fact, some people think the other way round. Those who have already become billionaires think that they have found out the panacea and it is a matter of time for them to be proven right. We need to wait and see what happens finally! It is a crazy world we live in today and those who are really keen in hitting the bull’s eye must go and see an astrologer or a statistician, and I would rather enjoy life than try to gaze at in the crystal- ball and predict the future of thee world;  its politics and economics which are more complex than the theories which many of the stalwarts in business are hurriedly trying to force-fit.


So what may be the future of social networking?
It has already involved a huge investment to create this infrastructure and even though it is valued at several billions of  dollars, but  it can either succeed or  plummet drastically down if the industries fail to get inebriated enough by its magic.  Business is going hammer-and-tongs with its orchestrated epistemic shots but whether it can cure the global financial crisis nobody can tell. On the social side, regardless of the success or failure, the real friends will eventually be lost for free, similar to the way they were locked into this virtual friendship.


What can remain as a part of it will be the direct marketing chains, loyalists earning reward points or real incentives for references or for solving product support issues. And those people who will be marginalized by analytics will move on from one free online resource to the next one.

*

As the article demonstrates, CrazyLazy is a gifted analyst of society.  

Whenever he sees himself on the side of majority he feels it’s time to start worrying... He does not relish having high hopes about life as long as there is at least one to live with ... He believes that honesty still has its place in people's mind ...now and even later.

Who Moved my Revolution?

by 

Simon van der Wiel

Download an audio recording of Hilary Clinton’s Freedom of Internet Speech.  Or stream in some other internet inspired rebellion manifesto by current day thinkers represented by the likes of Jared Cohen, or visionaries such as Francis Fukuyama . The last named once proudly proclaimed 1989 to be the end of history.  

Close your eyes, forget the context and float away in the reassuring ramble. “Information freedom ... foundation for global progress ... tools in the hands of people for advancement .... deficiencies in the current market for innovation ... harnessing the power of connection technologies ... long term dividends from modest investments in innovation ... flat world ... connected communication ... Web 2.0”

The excessively empty jargon sounds like eerie approximations of McKinsey-speak. One can almost sense the darkened conference room, projectors beaming meaningless charts and data, with superfluous smatterings of inane inconsequential information on the screen.

The more Washington leans towards the Silicon Valley in rather puerile efforts to electronically re-simulate the samizdat operations of the Cold War era, the more the techno-mingled-drivel of such talks echo the colossal ignorance that reverberate across the corporate CEO meetings.

It is of little surprise that the Freedom of Internet speech of Hilary Clinton has been tagged by some alternative media sites with the keyword ‘ignorance’. Not unjustified. Asked about Twitter a few days before the Iranian revolution broke out, the leading lady had responded, “I wouldn’t know a Twitter from a tweeter, but evidently it’s very important.”

If one pauses for a moment of sanity amidst the furious beeps and clicks of a connected concept of cyber utopia, one cannot help but shudder at the thought of the world being liberated by leaders with self confessed unawareness of the very tools they claim to be magic pills.

We see at work the same wishful thinking with belligerent yet bird-brained buzzwords that characterise millions of Senior Management meetings. Only, in this case, the decision makers are people with phenomenal power, with actual ability to influence the world, who have in their hands technologically advanced and extremely interconnected tools that they do not understand. As discussed in another article, an email sent by one such ill advised policymaker to the administrators of a Social Media Tool can actually compromise the freedom and lives of actual dissidents across the world. Scary? It indeed is.

While the phrase ‘Internet Freedom’ is searched more frequently from Washington area than Iran and the fragmented former Soviet Union nations put together, the policy makers are gaga about the new social media avatars of the samizdat press and the Radio Europe movements that supposedly managed to crumble the Berlin Wall, and folded the Iron Curtain into storage rooms of a half remembered past.

Buzzwords – another very corporate phenomenon – raise their noisy heads with the ingratiating yet convincing smiles. The architectural magnificence and geographical prominence of the Great Wall of China lends itself to the creation of misleading metaphors such as Great Firewall. The legions of politicians for whom 1989 is a self proclaimed feather in semi-thinking caps, pronounce aphorisms influenced by another Wall:“As networks spread around the globe, virtual walls are cropping up in places of visible walls.”

Leaders who have smugly fitted  into the political power-works by manipulating the bipolar world prior to 1989 harp that the Iron Curtain has been replaced by “a new information curtain descending across much of the world” where it is claimed that “viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of the day.”

The dangers of such proclamations and the pitfalls of celebrating bloggers as modern day dissidents have been discussed in other articles of the issue, notably by my lovely friend Shruti Rattan. Here I am looking at the unnerving similarity of these declarations with similar decrees in the corporate world – where each and every company of the day is trying to chisel its social networking strategy into a silver bullet with the same chronic short term thinking that is the signature of the industry and, perhaps, the cause of cycles of booms and busts.

In the mid to late 90s, the software world was being steered by senior management made up of experts in third generation languages like COBOL. Simultaneously, there was a lot of excitement about the relatively new Object Oriented Technologies.  There lie in several archives of the industry huge quantities of code written in new generation syntax and semantics, feebly powered by old, procedural design. The platform of coding was changed to imprint the stamp of progress, but the erstwhile experts who engineered the changes often did not have the knowhow to benefit from the features of fourth generation object oriented languages. Enormous systems still chug along on these Jurassic algorithms in the then cutting edge outfit. The result has been a huge waste of money, manpower and efficiency.

In current events, we witness a similar trend in the political scenario. Historical parallels and inviting metaphors can make for great rhetoric, but it is ridculous to base decisions on wordplay and play havoc with the lives of other people.

Reusing the so called best practices of the pre 1989 era, implementing a blanket model that has supposedly worked in remarkably different conditions – along with a bull headed initiative to tweak every innovation into such propaganda are pathetic parallels of the uncommitted world of corporate cubicles.

While the oedipal obstinacy to come out of the cold war parentage while dealing with completely different global situations can be of professional interest to Freudian analysts, basic questions still remain about whether the samizdat offering of leaflets, propaganda, books, photocopies, Radio Europe and so on were actually driving forces behind the fall of communism. There have been arguments that people in GDR were more interested in shows like Miami Vice than in assembling for protests. Was it really the underground photocopiers, or was it the chain of events leading to plummeting oil industry and rising food prices that led to the wall going down in 1989? We are not discussing that here, although it would not be ill-advised to pause and think about it before tweeting propaganda.

In other articles we have pointed out why the current platform of Social Media, with its messy electronic footprints, is far more dangerous for the activist than Samizdat.  We have also dealt with the online version of slacktivists, reverse propaganda and the effect of cheap entertainment triumphing over dissidence. Here I would like to add that millions of connections between millions of people on the internet is a very, very complicated affair. Generalised optimistic jargon filled proclamations about cyber utopia and the messianic merits of the Socially Networked World can be fine for fifteen minutes of spotlight. But, no one can honestly predict the future of such a connected world yet.

The complexity of the electronic mesh that entangles everyone consists of too many parameters. It is prone to the chaotic phenomenon where small changes create immense domino effects. It is impossible to predict which way such a connected world will react to the ripples, through integration or falling to bits.

Till such a time that we can form an informed prediction in this information chaos, it may be a good idea to take the deafening optimistic sound and fury about cyber rebellion with the same cynical nonchalance with which we attend management review meetings.

*

Simon van der Wiel is a fictonal character from Arunabha Sengupta's novel The Best Seller.

Half Dutch, half Irish and brought up in the West Coast, he works for an Indian firm and interacts with Dutch clients.

His blogs dealing with Corporate Circus, some from the novel and some extrapolated from the storyline, can be found at Blog of Simple Simon

The Inglorious By-lane To Innovation in IT

Melinda Turner 

I always thought dumb people were fat. Marcos Alphonso Pedurey was an exception. 

Being a Mexican and working in America is not easy, especially if your work doesn’t involve laundry or smuggling. For other things in life, you can count on racism, hip-hop music, and the Thanksgiving Day, wherein again, for the latter, in effect, you count on the turkey. People used to call him Pedurey, just that. Once though, I had heard an American colleague succinctly call him ‘Peds’, which had made his face wilt and head tilt, out of overt distaste.

To the sane view of a non-encroaching onlooker, he was an affable man with a nose for Pizza, and a few wrinkles emanating from that nose. Legend has it that Pedurey could smell a Pizza in the vicinity, and deduce its variety and toppings.

His fragile face donned black-rimmed spectacles, and if one’s hair could make one rich, he would be a millionaire. Each week he wore a different story on his hair, in as much as the dye could tell, with a finishing always outdoing the brevity of his small face. Most weekdays would see him in a general attire, and on weekends, his fingers would remind him of the beer glass instead of the computer keyboard, letting go of even the thoughts of the latter, let alone the inclination to be useful.

‘Work-life balance’, he would joke sometimes.

“Hey Mela, get ready, we have a client briefing at five” he worked up, his eager eyes lapping up the time on the hour’s hand. “I have booked the conference room – ‘Grand Canyon’”, he sprang. I snapped up the laptop and closed it upon my chest, gathered my pencil whose plight was often underlined by the ills of a deprived graphite, and clutched my notebook-diary – one that had the grocery list tucked in a swish scramble. I ran for the ‘Grand Canyon’, my life now, but not before Pedurey handed me the conference number that began with a ‘866-’ and was interspersed with zeroes as if they were cherries on a cake - the making of a generous vendor. I wasn’t going to memorize it anyways.

I door-crashed ‘Grand Canyon’, and sped to deposit myself on a cushioned seat. It was a huge table, all glass, and inundated with plugs and ports, a neural mess. There was a speaker phone right in the middle, and a conference bridge meant to cater to the vocal services that interject from far and wide in a not-so-solemn communion. I keyed in the numbers, being prompted at adequate intervals to state my name. A minute later, Pedurey joined me, and now, with us counted, there were twenty one people in attendance in the call. They were spread across geographical boundaries, and their accents ranged from the vastly lingual to the overtly shallow. There were teams from Hungary, Costa Rica, Manila, Toronto and Los Angeles. Pedurey and myself were the saving grace, and face, of Houston, Texas.

It was a conference on ‘Innovation, Emerging Technologies And Challenges in the Evolving World 2011’. Now that’s a mouthful, I thought. Especially for the little that we do, or are capable of. In a corporate IT environment, however, you need to remove yourself from the truth. The farther you are, the more blissful is your life. The moderator for the conference was a technocrat named Bruce from LA, a AVP reporting to the Technology Head. When I heard his introduction on the phone, I remembered Bruce Willis, the actor. The psycho-flick ‘Unbreakable’ came rushing in my thoughts, in which Bruce’s acting was as extraordinary as the man himself. I lost myself for a few minutes until the word ‘Innovation’ hit me hard, like a fly-swatter.

There were other Bruces and Bobs in the conference too. In fact, it was Bruce-Bob all over the place. There were guys from Manila who had to their credit jumpstart strategies for innovation, and their Greenwood Development Center was doing a good job we were told. There were regular camps and seminars aimed to bring talent and ideas on board, and the best engineering brains were picked through competitive aptitude tests. Herbert Pantaleon was their SPOC. (The term ‘SPOC’ being a corporate blitzkrieg for what stands for the ‘single point of contact’). He was an able communicator and articulated his dealings on the phone well, which is important in such ghost-infested conferences where a person’s voice is the only disembodied identity. A ‘fat voice’ would mean a voice that would make you think the owner of such a voice is a really overweight woman. There are similar inferences for a ‘haggard voice’, ‘sexy voice’, ‘gruff old moronic voice’, and such. There were other teams from Hungary, that were equally competent, and had long names that I would have put down only for soccer players of Russia, or Ukraine. The Costa Rican teams seemed to be a bunch of energetic creatures, with a certain degree of verve, loafing around with ideas of innovation. I, for once, just stopped short of thinking they might as well one day innovate innovation itself.

The Toronto and Los Angeles teams were suave and dignified, but only until they opened their mouth and spouted ideas. Once they did, they saw innovation in everything, and even legacy systems had scope for migration to emerging platforms. There would be challenges they said, and our customers would be averse to change, but we needed to educate them on what’s good for them. This was another way to tell you’d need to bullshit the Customers, and when you repeat your lies often, they start believing it. If it ends up working, of which there’s the slight chance whether you believe it or not, you can risk believing them too. If it succumbs and decays in a terrible morgue, you can always go back to your life-support system: ‘It was a good learning experience. We will file up our learning in the Shared Knowledge Database, that will help teams across the board derive benefit from this holistic learning repository.’ And then, you would bill the customer again for this documentation effort, as if documenting a failure is the only point where your and their ‘Karmas’ converge.

The Canadian SPOC was one Sarah Pablo, and her sensuous voice was a good hear. I brought images of Sarah Palin, the US presidential candidate who subsequently lost the elections, from whose sexy looks always peeped a dumb mind. Her voice seemed to make up for the shortcomings of her brain during the male dominated conference.

As for the LA guys, they were like James Bond-Steve Jobs duet on ‘innovation’. Technical jargons interlaced with words such as ‘cost-effective’, ‘optimize’, ‘challenges’, ‘customer delight’, ‘state-of-the-art’, ‘innovation hiccups’, ‘emerging trends’ covered most of the conference soundscape. Being an American myself, I understand how stupid we are. We have been trained hard though, to seldom accept that.

Also on the call was the Vice-President (Technology), James Roberts. ‘Our organization’s biggest asset is that we constantly innovate and think creatively to add value to our customers’ businesses. Hence our growth has been vertical’, James asserted. Here’s a secret that blinked inside me – Our CEO was fired by the Board of Directors for sexual harassment of one of his secretaries. Yes, to that effect, the word ‘vertical growth’ sounded more informative than ever before.

Thinking this, the corners of my mouth must have sniffed out a slight smirk. Pedurey was hovering beside me, waiting for his turn to speak. Corporate etiquette requires you to wait for your turn, and then hijack the ideas. The more you wait, and the more you compile the points and ideas given by others and present as your own, and the more adept you are at packaging stuffs in your own words as if to sound genuine, the more easily the waves take you to the shore. Pedurey might have been doing a dirty job, but he was doing it well. Atleast, if nothing, this dirt pays.

James was agog with his penchant for jargons that seemed to be as natural to him as a human yawn was to his listeners. Management terms flew in a jiffy,  attaching them to old universal truths, bottling the oldest wine in sparkling bottles. It was like asking Pussy cat where she had been since there are no direct flights to London from LA, or asking if Baba Black sheep had any wool left in the three bags that was bio-degradable . ‘All of our progress can be attributed to the out-of-box thinking and originality of ideas that our teams have been maintaining consistently’ James professed. Pedurey, for once, as if pricked by a flash of some metaphysical realization, scribbled something vigorously on his lonesome pad. Seeing him, I thought I should scribble something too so that he gets to know I too am serious. I scribbled: ‘Oh bullshit, what crap!’

There was no stopping James. ‘Are you guys able to hear me?’ he floated, to which, like the meek sheep in a herd, everybody thumped their big yes. It gave me shivers and a solemn inkling that more bull and horse and dog shit was on their way. Have my apprehensions in the corporate context ever been far from the truth? Decades of being an insect in this industry helps you distinguish a termite from a leech or a cockroach. Eventually though, you realize there’s nothing to make out. ‘Selling the same product (while protecting quality) at a cheaper price or adding more value (enhancing perceived quality) to product at same price is itself an innovation enabling the corporation to stay ahead of competition . Slashing costs to remain viable is both an art & a science’, James delivered. Pedurey closed his eyes in deep thought, but I think he was a bit tizzy after his sumptuous lunch – which invariably must have been a chicken Burrito the size of a human head.

‘Definition of innovation will never be changed. Neither it is any trick or sleight of hand. It is all about generating new ideas, processes & products to delight the consumer. Pricing is one aspect of it. Innovation in costing is at par for the course. Deliver more at the same price or same at a lesser price’ James dished out, convincingly. Somebody called Victor, or Rictor, or something similar, held out a query: ‘But don’t you think practical-pragmatic ideas and innovation should talk to each other at the same time?’

Pedurey sometimes amazed me with tit-bits of his brilliance, though few and far between. He put the speaker on mute. He made sure, twice, that the red light for the ‘mute on’ button was on. He quickly swivelled on his chair, put both his hands behind his Mexican head, and closed his eyes, deriving a sinister smile from a voice that was still speaking endlessly. “This guy is bull-shitting”, he said, upping his ante. “His definition of innovation is so jargonized, bookish, and clichéd, he might seriously need to work on it  - if only to innovate something out of it, even if it be in parts. O Lord, what crap! Do I have to take all of this in this life?” His frustration gave me a little gooseflesh, but nonetheless, I allowed myself some leeway to spurt out: “The real malady is not the people who can't think new and accept they can't, but the people who are packaging old wine in new bottle, wrapping those up with some random innovation-and-customer-delight-pepper and fizz. New, practical and pragmatic ideas play fast fiddle to such lofty tall-talk and jargons, so much so that one practically loses that faint voice that one set out for and sought, in the din of faked intellectual orgasms.”

Pedurey, for once, threw at me a look of complete acceptance of my words. He looked at the speaker with the voice and said: “I will not say your words are utter nonsense dear sir, but surely, in some part of the world, your craft will come in handy!”

He had made sure the mute was still on.

James, on the other hand, was answering some other query, banging it down with his idealistic pronouncements that comes with sleeping with a management book in hand, and nothing grey where it really matters – ‘Consulting corporates on daily basis, I think I needn't enter into debates on "innovation". A practitioner is bad doesn't mean the practice is bad. You are commenting from your specific experience. I can give numerous examples of innovation working. Those may or may not be path breaking ones, but tiny ideas incorporated into day to day corporate life. Things are not as mechanical as you may think it is. Your response is typical of a "manager" who sets too much store by what he thinks is his "practical experience" , takes pride in "managing the environment" and is allergic to anything having to do with the roots of a specific theory. Innovation is how I have defined and if that is ‘bookish’ I choose to remain so. By the way, if you have some other interpretation, I would be glad to be enlightened.’

I hadn’t heard the other’s query, but I guess he must have made some kind of a reference to his bookish interpretation. James showed some signs of agitation for the first time, and it was understandable.

After an hour of such deliberation, it was time for announcements and soliciting opinions. James announced to the crowd how ‘Innovation Club’ has been in existence for the past two years, making commendable progress in all respects. There were Innovation Days held for different business units, and prizes given for competitions and Tech-cons on innovation. The young and old in the company were coming forward to present their bits of innovation, some getting starry accolades from the customers for ‘optimizing’ their gigantic systems and businesses. In the corporate parlance, when you ‘optimize’ something, it actually means you haven’t made it any easier for the customer, but made it complex to the hilt, confusing him some more. The more they are confused, the more they believe theirs is an optimized system. 

In a twenty-word sentence spoken by James, eleven-and-a-half words were either: innovate, innovation, innovating, and other such parts of speech that takes care to prove the fact wrong, his English right.

“Can each of you take turns to speak on how you feel about our strategic plans on Innovation in Technology that I just outlined? Costa Rica team, you first please” declared James.

Edgar Amanda was the Technology Head from Costa Rica, the headquarters of the Best-shore enterprise. He explained how the idea was really fantastic. He described how each of his team members felt the same, how innovation was in their blood, and how many patents were filed by the Costa Rica Innovation Center each year. It was a rosy-rosy canvas, where even trees and water were in the happy colours orange and red.

Next came Herbert’s turn, and he made the Moon look like the Sun, having its own light and giving life.  Technology lead after technology lead took turns to glorify Innovation in return for instant gratifications, and the act of everyone applauding vocally made an Olympia crop up, just like spectators clapping to a gladiator’s rhythm of advances. Here, clapping was not in vogue, for the vocal chords did more than their best to make it up. Finally it was our turn to succumb to the guile of sycophancy, for all of us were paid as much to be timid observers, lethargic progress-animals, and brilliant sycophants.

It was Pedurey’s turn now, and he put off the mute, bringing the speaker bridge to speak, and his inimitable style ensured a couple of his right-hand fingers were tapping his forehead continuously. But what he said next captured my imagination, like a shock that descends as an abrupt lightning. ‘We are not doing any real innovation. We are fooling people and ourselves. If you talk of real innovation, its got to be just 0.0001%. All the papers, publishing, and articles that we talked about now are bogus, faked, redundant, useless. Real innovations happen at University laboratories, National laboratories, Research Centers of Public sectors, and Government-aided Projects that have a goal at hand. Not in the service and product-based IT industry. Creating a product as per customer requirements, and altering a bit here, a bit there, and then gift-wrapping it is not innovation. As for the service industry, the usage of the word ‘innovation’ should be expunged. Today, its been used, in meetings like this, to a farcical degree.’

James must have been swept off his feet, for he reminded himself something: “I come in a car everyday wherein the wipers clean the windshield, and a GPS-voice tells me where’s the nearest parking spot available in a busy Mall-area. Don’t you think its innovation?”

Pedurey wasn’t apologetic. He was firm, and shot back: “I am commenting from my specific experience, for the mere reason that I refrain from vouching for fields I have not tread, while feigning knowledgeable. You can give it a try too! When a person is in the software industry, he will talk about innovation in software processes and products, and all that happens infront of his eyes for years together - day after day. When he sees the Colossal corporations throw gimmicks and tantrums at customers to whip up profits, give false cost and effort estimates, trumpet whimsical statistics with bogus delivery, patch up craters of inefficiency with a lather of some adulterous dogma, masquerade as brigadiers for process and performance tuning, manipulate audits and auditors to hinge on to some equally lame certifications, cry out with a dogged alarm one fine day to show profits in the quarter-on-quarter results on the balance sheet, and then one evening over a pod-casted coffee-talk a regional-head barks about the ridiculous cost-cutting strategies, then surely there's something more than meets the eye. On top of that, there would invariably be talks on 'innovation', 'intellectual capital', and 'customer delight'! Am not sure what you mean by 'tiny ideas incorporated into day to day corporate life', but that is what the management mouthed after removing toilet papers from the rest-rooms, in what they said, was to "make the company more cost-effective, and more confident to face the challenges of the evolving cost-dynamics"! Innovation is an idol for you. Being privy to years of sinister campaigns amongst some of the biggest corporates, being a worm in the doled-out cans of branded ‘innovation’, it has left me bargaining with the truth. I will not contest your need not to enter into debates on ‘innovation’. I respect that as much as your will. Nor do I have qualms on you sticking to your definition of ‘innovation’. I respect your desire to do so as well, in all earnestness. I only wish one was a little more innovative in trying to accept the real-time scenario at ground-zero, and not be aloof from it in trying to fool oneself, or many less-enlightened souls like me in this huge cosmos. Don't call a spade a spade, done deal! Call it a stick or a baton atleast. Calling it a horse or a rainbow or a shoe-polish is way too off-the-mark!”

There was a stunned pause, painful and pregnant, after which James said: ‘But I can give you a list of the innovations that we have had in the last ten years, by none but our own folks! I can!’ His voice had a thaw and had gravitated to a ultra serious tone, though it seemed, given a chance, he could pounce and grunt vociferously. All the others in the call had fingers on their lips or mute buttons. Silence.

‘Hey James, I have been working in this company for more than ten years now, and if you have all those so-called ‘innovations’ on your list, I am not sure you know what innovation really means. I can only pity you.’

There was more silence, placed as globs of nothing. James was silent too, as was Bruce, the facilitator. After a few minutes, however, Bruce spoke up: ‘I think we need to take this conversation between James and Pedurey offline. I shall work out a meeting between you two, so that we can understand things in greater detail.’ Diplomatic maneuver, I thought.  James, bared on innovation, by now, seemed to be genuinely depressed.  When last heard, his ‘thanks all’ was little more than a docile squeak.

Me and Pedurey both walked out of the conference room. Pedurey was all smiles, unfazed. ‘Follow me’, he quipped. We took the elevator and walked straight to his cubicle, where he undid the screen-saver and turned his laptop for me to view. I could see an official e-mail drafted and kept ready, addressed to his manager and Technology Head. The body of the mail was simple – ‘I would like to resign from the services of this company with immediate effect.’

‘I have decided to go back to my home country, Mexico and continue with my doctorate there. I have got myself a lateral-entry seat for a doctorate on my pet-subject – ‘Artificial Intelligence’ at the highest place of learning in my country – the most sought-after University. I would really want to innovate and invent, and not keep lecturing all my life about how much innovation we all have and see. I want to follow my heart, as a first-grade citizen in my country of birth. You think I have taken the right decision, Melinda?’

‘Yes, you did.’ I said.

We remained speechless for a while and then went for a coffee and a fag.

*

Melinda Turner used to work in IT. She is now a writer who divides her time between Luxembourg, America, and Latin-American countries.

Management Lessons from Tintin

by 
The Wanderer

Tintin is one of the very few comic strips that allured and engaged the readers of all ages and backgrounds. The storyline and backdrop of each adventure exposed the post WW II social, political and geographical movements. 
In a way, this young Belgian journalist took the readers to almost all the continents - From Russia to Syldavia (Balkan), from India to San Theodoros (Latin America) and from Congo to China. Through this fascinating journey, often studded with perilous adventures, Tintin comics always brought smiles and laughter through humor and exposed readers to unventured parts of the world, while also subtly supplying guidelines to deal with practical situations.

While writing ten bullet points for the corporate compass grabbers, I thought of stealing a few screenshots from the examples, figuratively articulated by the creative genius Hergé.

10 keys to success, straight from Tintin comics:

1.     Be a good listener. (politically incorrect joke alert!) ... The reason why deaf people are mostly dumb is obvious! One needs to listen carefully, before getting into action. Partial or rudimentary comprehension may have catastrophic effects on your career!

     2. Be personally nice: The way some corporate managers function, it sometimes becomes hard to keep your composure! However, deal with people with the calm cool voice of reason, dousing your anger later.

 

3.     Respect Social norms: In simpler words, be a Roman while in Rome. It not only increases your acceptability, it does give you an opportunity to taste an alternative lifestyle.

4.       Be brave to fight the deceitful! There is a thin line between courage and stupidity. Yet, sometimes when a herd of insecure incompetent people deter the development, it is necessary to stand up and protest. Try to stretch yourself to the maximum without crossing the said line.

5.       Do not attempt to convince stupid people. They tend to disbelieve your achievements based on their stupendous ignorance and sheer lack of contemplation. This often hurts.

6.      Evaluate all upcoming initiatives. Every initiative has its merits and demerits. Look at both sides before jumping to conclusion.

7.      Comprehend the philosophy behind Management Tools before using them. Management Tools are sometimes products of noble insights. However, applying them mechanically will lead nowhere. Tools are there to reduce the time of execution, not the time and efforts of thinking, as an exercise.

8.       Remember Murphy’s law. Always have backup plans in anticipation of things going wrong. There is no fool proof disaster recovery mechanism in real world.

9.       Not all sincere efforts will bring satisfactory results. Be courteous enough to appreciate the enthusiasm of individuals.

10.   Expect the biggest reward in life for a trivial contribution. Remember, awards are granted when the awarder’s personal propaganda is boosted. The theory of relativity did not get the Nobel for Einstein.

*

The Wanderer is a New York City based financial industry advisor, employed in a multinational management consulting firm. An avid lover of people, art and literature; he has traveled many countries across continents and has worked with professionals of varied nationalities and backgrounds. His spends his unbilled time traveling, reading and writing.