Googlewhack

A googlewhack is a word or phrase which when googled results in the reporting back of just a single link. Recently two googlewhacks got killed: coelcavnth sharpner and rarebitnutters. What killed these two quite delightful googlewhacks is the fact that the Economist mentioned them in an article. Lo and behold, google these phrases today and multiple links are reported back. Mostly of articles talking about them. To my mind this is a good example of the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty,a principle that came to us first from the annals of quantum physics.The principle simply stated is that an event can never be observed without changing the event itself. At a personal level, the Heisenberg Principle came to my mind when an old friend opined about this blog as being my effort to impress an ex-girl friend - a continuing labor of love, so to speak, While my objective is simply my own education and edification. And hopefully the entertainment of all my friends. Simple lesson to be derived out of all this is to fine-tune your communication to account for the Heisenberg Principle as an archer accounts for the wind.

PS: If anyone of you discover a new googlewhack please do let me now. I will endeavor to kill it by publicizing it on this blog.

The Great Gatsby Curve and the Dying of the American Dream

Timothy Noah, journalist and blogger suggests in his recently published book - "The Great Divergence"- that growing income disparity may be the most seminal change in the US over the past couple of generations. He writes that the world's richest nation has gone from one that viewed "the prospect of growing inequality to be unacceptably antidemocratic" to one that's economically beginning to "resemble a banana republic". Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist, in his book "The Price of Inequality" points out that, at $90 billion, the combined wealth of the six Walton family heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune is equivalent to the entire bottom 30% of Americans. Even more damning is evidence found by Miles Corak,a University of Ottawa economist. Corak studied income levels across generations within families in a set of developed countries and plotted the classical measure of income equality, the Gini coefficient against a factor which measured income mobility across generations that he termed Inter-generational Earnings Elasticity. The result is, what in some economic circles, is called the Great Gatsby Curve. The import of the Great Gatsby Curve, put in simple terms, is that as income inequality increases in a society the chances of the next generation of poor remaining poor increases. And over the last two decades income inequality has increased to be the highest in the US among the rich countries. The dream of achieving a better life than one's parent is fundamental to the American identity and rising income inequality is striking at the very roots of American society. How will this great society respond to this challenge? Will it let the American dream die? Will the 1% who are the rich realize that they too will be hurt when inequality spirals into economic dysfunction for the whole society and let the politicians they control take the needed drastic measures? Will the poor rise and take control of their own destinies? These are questions the answers to which will shape the 21st century for the US. What about the rest of the world? While income inequality is also rising in the rich societies of Western Europe the effect is not as fundamental because in the ethos and cultures of these societies upward mobility is not as fundamental a concept as it is in the US. Further many of these countries are welfare states that cushion the psychological impact of inequality (the societal impact of the welfare state crumbles in many of this country is likely to be of much greater consequence but that is another story). In many Asian and African countries GINI coefficient will be way beyond what it is in the US. But this is not a new phenomenon in our societies and the entire cultural and social edifice is built around concepts that make inequality palatable to the poor and keeps them quiescent. Opium for the masses and all that. But as the 21st century takes the information revolution down to the masses, revolt will simmer. The Arab Spring was the simmering up of this revolt in highly repressed societies. China is no less repressed but an economic miracle that has lifted huge numbers up the economic ladder, keeps the lid on the simmer among it's poor. But how long before the lid blows off? And what about incredible India? Among the world's more open societies with one of the world's highest GINI coefficient, India is an outlier. The openness of its society does not repress the simmer and it is more and more evident every passing day. Reminds me of the conditions described in VS Naipaul's book from over a decade go "A Million Mutinies Now". To Naipaul the ferment he saw was creative and foretold the forging of a great society. Is the ferment still creative or has it soured into destruction? Is the openness of Indian society allow the ferment to cause structural changes which will launch India into a new trajectory? Will the rich in India perceive the opportunity they have to lead in the creation of a great society? Will our politicians learn to get out of the way? Answers to these questions, I believe, will shape India in the 21st century.

"Life is much shorter"

Brevity is the soul of wit. But is short sweet? The other day spied a short guy wearing a T shirt that said "Life is much shorter". Self-deprecation is definitely smart. Smarter than carrying a Napoleonic chip on one's shoulder. Otherwise it can prove harmful,even fatal. Like this thug who used to carry a small gun and was blessed with a small wee wee. Went to the shrink to get rid of his inferiority complex. Shrink caught on to the fundamental cause - the wee wee. Told him to lose the small gun and carry a big one. Next day on the streets was a brawl. Our man usually quick on the draw was slow with his new, unfamiliar gun. Upshot was that Shorty's life was cut much shorter.

Leadership without leaders

A couple of years ago I was in a meeting with worthies from the corporate world discussing the setting up of a leadership institute. I nearly fell off the chair when one of them suggested that a leadership institute must have strewn around one-man stages from which future leaders can declaim to followers! Must not blame the worthies though. We have all been fed a notion of leadership that derives from the culture of the army. A culture that of necessity practices top down leadership. But in this 24x7, deeply networked world isn't the notion of leaders and followers so yesterday? We need leadership not leaders. We need leadership from everyone not just the few who like standing on podiums to declaim. Because leadership is about having the ability to nurture a vision and communicate it. Leadership is about keeping it simple in complex situations. Leadership is about seeking to enable others. Leadership is many things and all of them are not to be sought in a few but in all. As a closing thought wouldn't a leadership institute flourish if it positioned leadership as a quality to be promoted in everybody rather than the bailiwick of the few? Why am I not surprised when I find that the worthies mentioned in paragraph one are today in deepening trouble as business people and managers?

The Burning Platform

"A man working on an oil platform in the North Sea was awakened suddenly one night by an explosion. Amidst the chaos, he made his way to the edge of the platform. As a plume of fire billowed behind him, he decided to jump from the burning platform even though jumping is a risky option for the following reasons: It was a 150-foot drop from the platform to the water. There is debris and burning oil on the surface of the water. If the jump into the 40°F water did not kill him, he would die of exposure within 15 minutes. Luckily, the man survived the jump and hauled aboard a rescue boat shortly thereafter. When asked why he jumped, he replied, “Better probable death than certain death.” The point is the literally “burning” platform caused the radical change in his behavior." The above apocryphal story is supposed to be the beginning of the "burning platform" paradigm in business. When Stephen Elop took over a troubled Nokia he wrote a "burning platform" memo to exhort Nokia to abandon the old certainties and jump into the freezing waters of the new and unknown. Nokia has since than jumped but it is not yet clear whether it will sink or swim. I earn a living in the discipline of marketing. I suspect that the discipline of marketing in India is facing a burning platform moment. An entire generation of marketers and advertising people have grown up targeting the X generation. They learnt every trick in the book to master the art of feeding the unending appetite of the X generation for self-aggrandizement, status-seeking and the catering to the senses. However given the bulge in India's demographics, the market is today dominated by the next generation of consumers - known as Generation Y in some circles and the Millenials- in the others. Not only does this generation move to a different beat (at Aqumena, the marketing consultancy of which I am a founder partner, we are working on an insight paper on Gen Y which we hope to soon put on the Aqumena blog - http://aqumena.blogspot.com) they are overturning the notion of mass media - 20th century marketing's most important tool and hand-maiden -as well as being actively suspicious of marketing and advertising. The result is a burning platform issue for marketers and their partners - the market researchers, the advertising agencies, the PR guys et al.I am seeing that some have jumped and are flailing about in the water. Some are on the edge, pondering whether to jump. But the strange thing is that are a whole lot who do not even acknowledge that the platform is burning. Watching them would have been funny if it was not so tragic. Sometimes it makes me wonder whether there are some other much large, much deeper platforms burning, unnoticed,under our feet. Democracy? Capitalism? India?

Can anyone succeed in a failing world?

The period from 900 to 200 BCE is called the Axial Age. This was the period of the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jermiah, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mancius and Euripedes. It is in the Axial Age that humanity discovered it's deepest truths. Alas these truths then lead to the perversity that are the religions of the world. While the truth is that every individual is indestructible because he is the microcosm of everything that existed, does exist and will exist, most religious practice is about seeking salvation for the self. Truth is that seeking success for the self is pointless because the self is already the embodiment of supreme success. The Human Project is about the creation of a successful world. Those who connive, trample, ignore, corrupt and slight to achieve the delusion of success, succeed only in besmirching the mirror in which they will one day, worn out by their misdirected endeavours, seek their self. The simple truth is we are all in it together. When the devil takes the hindmost, it is all of us who are cast into hell. You might think it would be very burdensome to be bothered about the success of everything and everyone around us. Au contraire. On those very rare moments that my being grasps the eternal truths, all worries about the rat race and the Joneses fall away and I soar as the magnitude of the Human Project comes into view. So much to do! So little to worry about!