Of Warmth, Of Coldness - Oslo Chronicles

I had so much fun in the long dark winters last year. A novelty I had never experienced before. People used to come up to me, and say winters in Sweden (or Scandinavia) were long, harsh and depressing, and totally got to them, but my response was, how great this nation must be, with half the year in utter darkness and coldness, still managed to do really well for themselves. It all seemed very inspiring to me .... the fighting spirit, the resolve, seeing people going to work 6 o clock in the morning, through the snow clad roads. I also went to take the language classes 7:30 in the morning in complete darkness in December/January, fighting the harsh weather, but enjoying the flurries of snow as well at the same time. Snowflakes and the crystals they formed, with little light around, shone in a way that the silver would shy away from competition.

The excitement of my first winter in the Nordics had a context and background to it. I had always lived in hot countries. Summers in my part of the world, were close to how the hell will burn. It is something to be scared of, ... to not to look forward to. The temperature ranged from 40 to 50+ degrees C. Winters were moderately cold, that too as dry and piercing as it could get, without much rains, much snow. Had never seen snow actually falling. The winter last year, I was in for a treat.

Little did I know, a greater treat awaited me still....the real pleasures and beauties were yet to come... with the turn of the calendar year, in came the spring. From desert sands to heavenly beautiful spring, stark contrast it was. Never did I see so much beauty in life. I was stunned. Shocked. Immovable.

Not just the sun, the warmth, and the beauty around it all, but the days never seemed to end in summer. Longevity of life, of spirit, of light. Ah, ... what you wouldn't do to always have those days in life, every signal day of it. Summers in this part of the world are not to get weary of but something to celebrate ... to look forward to, so much so, to take the days off, not to avoid the heat waves mind you but to actually go out and to breathe, and bathe and absorb all that you can while it still lasts. It's the time of the year to hold dear ones dearer and closer ... in the open, and enjoy the greatest and simplest pleasures of life, of warmth.

It is after those delightful and heavenly summers, I dread winters that my heart almost sinks with the thought of it. It hasn't really begun yet, but the leaves already left their trees, and the winds gush and whistle, and it stays dark till 7:30. Cold weather is limiting, restrictive ... and rude. The snow has become all too common. What once fascinated me, thrilled me, are the greatest hassles of my way now. I feel the burden upon me, .. the stress, the anxiety, and the tension that every dark period brings with it. Dark nights do not excite me anymore; they pose to test my courage, my spirit.

Out my window, I see the city lights, painted well with the glowing and shining spots on the black canvas. But how far and long could a man survive the darkness and coldness, who all his life had abundance of light and warmth. How callously we took for granted all the great things we had had, and longed for whatever we hadn’t had.

Romantized notions and ideals have hefty price to pay. Such are love affairs, and their logical endings.

Ideal Seminar as I would like to have it

I have been attending seminars both literature and case, for 6 months now. If I were to comment on an ideal seminar I would say, an ideal seminar would be characterized by intellectual debates, quality discussions on topics related to all things Innovation. The type of discussion where, if not all, most of the students or participants would have gone through the related or the assignment literature/material or the case. They would have taken the time out to reflect on the problems, and the possible (not right or wrong) solutions.

In my opinion, attending the seminar physically should not be equated to actually having participated in one. I can tell from experience that many participants who attend seminar take away very little from them. The spirit of the seminar should be the expression of personal thoughts, inferences from the literature, and the insights from the case. Diverse opinions, different lenses and approaches to look at the same problem, and sharing it with the rest of the class.

Practically the discussion is lead wherever the dominate speaker wants to take it, who may be professing the right opinion, or not so right opinion. The moderator’s role, who is well-versed with the topic under discussion, and who would have seen a lot of discussions like these before, should be to steer the discussion to the right course again, if it digressed. Many a time, I’ve observed that the discussions go on and on, frequently off the main topic, and without indicating an emerging understanding or conclusion.

The literature suggested in Module A is varied, deep and touches upon all important aspects of the innovation dynamics. Honestly, I could only focus on our module, Managing Innovation within Firms, and could hardly even skim the other areas, which by the way, are very important as well to completely understand the dynamics of innovation.

I’d like to mention here another point, that all the themes in the Module A were very important to understand, and in this short period of time that we were given, it was next to impossible to read all articles. So we focused on our theme, and relied on the presentation of other groups to understand and grasps the concepts. Unfortunately, I felt the presentations were not enough for understanding each theme in due detail. Not every group was good at teaching, and explaining what they had learned from the literature. Participants should be at ease, communicative, as if they were teaching or sharing their knowledge with other participants, not stress because they had to present something in front of the class. Through these presentations, you could get a holistic idea, but the varied arguments and theories are only to be read. There are no substitutes for that. One thing I was thinking about was that, if could try an old method, of getting an executive summary of each article, so that we at least know what each article talked about. But then I guess, that’s too old school.

The reason I am doing this course is that, I find it quite interesting, and that I have rather limited knowledge of the field. All I knew before was from my practical experience, where I was tasked to manage the idea generation and screening procedure. The method itself was procedural, so after the procedure or the process had been defined, there wasn’t much innovative there to define or to do. The interesting thing next was to set up an innovation lab, which would allow all the employees of the company to spend some of their time there (20%) and work on any idea or product they’d want to work on. They’d be provided with a dummy (not real, but close to the real data) data to work and base their innovations on.

As for the theories on the topic, frankly speaking, I am finding it hard to come to grips with the already assigned theories. As we go along, get acquainted with more theories and models in the study of innovation management, I am sure I would have more thoughts on what more theories we could consult from during this course or seminars.

The Secret

The Secret, is a very interesting book. I am not saying that I agree to all what it is saying, but quite intriguing nonetheless. You could also watch the movie, at http://www.thesecret.tv/ 

Watch the first 20 minutes here.

The Post American World

The Post American World, is quite thought provoking book. This book comes highly recommended, if you do not have the patience to read through the book, or can't get hold of one, you would still have the option of watching a very interesting talk. Enjoy !!

The World is Flat

However, in the book - The World is Flat, Freidman doesn't talk so nicely about Pakistan towards the end, I would still recommend this book to everyone.

I also quite liked his talk on YouTube,

 

in which he talks about the top 10 flatterners. I am saving myself all the hard work of typing the top 10 flatners, and copying the text from the Wikipedia articles on The World is flat.

 

Ten flatteners

Friedman defines ten "flatteners" that he sees as leveling the global playing field:

• #1: Collapse of Berlin Wall--11/'89: The event not only symbolized the end of the Cold war, it allowed people from other side of the wall to join the economic mainstream. (11/09/1989)
• #2: Netscape: Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by 'early adopters and geeks' to something that made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to ninety-five-year olds. (8/9/1995). The digitization that took place meant that everyday occurrences such as words, files, films, music and pictures could be accessed and manipulated on a computer screen by all people across the world.
• #3: Workflow software: The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a "crude foundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration."
• #4: Open sourcing: Communities uploading and collaborating on online projects. Examples include open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia. Friedman considers the phenomenon "the most disruptive force of all."
• #5: Outsourcing: Friedman argues that outsourcing has allowed companies to split service and manufacturing activities into components which can be subcontracted and performed in the most efficient, cost-effective way.
• #6: Offshoring: The internal relocation of a company's manufacturing or other processes to a foreign land in order to take advantage of less costly operations there. China's entrance in the WTO allowed for greater competition in the playing field. Now countries such as Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil must compete against China and each other to have businesses offshore to them.
• #7: Supply chaining: Friedman compares the modern retail supply chain to a river, and points to Wal-Mart as the best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping.
• #8: Insourcing: Friedman uses UPS as a prime example for insourcing, in which the company's employees perform services--beyond shipping--for another company. For example, UPS repairs Toshiba computers on behalf of Toshiba. The work is done at the UPS hub, by UPS employees.
• #9: In-forming: Google and other search engines are the prime example. "Never before in the history of the planet have so many people-on their own-had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people", writes Friedman. The growth of search engines is tremendous; for example take Google, in which Friedman states that it is "now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago".
• #10: "The Steroids": Personal digital devices like mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

The Human Potential

I just watched Malcolm Gladwell's video  Capitalizing on Human Potential ,

 

 

which talks about the barriers many people face in achieving their full potential—it's about attitude, economics, and logistics rather than talent or genes—and to look at how we can continue to lift those barriers through meaningful work.

Full text, taken from the BNET website  is:

Malcolm Gladwell: I wanted to talk about a very simple, but I think powerful idea to help us think about how to help others and also about the kind of work that you do and it's a concept called capitalization and it was as far as I know invented by a very brilliant scientist named James Flynn and it's used to describe human potential. It's used to describe the idea of what percentage of people of human potential in a given community is successfully capitalized. In other words what percentage of people who are capable of achieving something actually end up achieving that thing. Why is this discussion of capitalization so important? We'll I think there's a number of reasons, but the first is I think that when we look at individuals or groups who achieve something, we have a tendency to interpret their achievement in terms of their talents, in terms of their innatability and we don't think about their achievements in terms of their capitalization. We don't think about the effect of economics or stupidity or attitudes on achievement. We tend to think about things just in terms of this of innatability. But in fact, using the capitalization mindset is a far better way of understanding why great achievements happen. You know I'm a runner and for years as a kid I was poised like all runners. Completely with marvel and obsess over the extraordinary success of Kenyan distance runners. The Kenyans completely dominate distance running and have done so for twenty years to a level that's absolutely unbelievable. In a given year there might be fifteen of the top twenty five times in the 10,000-meters might be all Kenyans, tiny little country in East Africa. And the easy common explanation for that is to say, well they must have some kind innate advantage over the rest of us. It must be some genetic thing going on with Kenyans that makes them run faster than the rest of us, right? That's what we all say, we don't think twice about it. What about capitalization, though. I read an article recently from a -- which quoted Alberto Salazar, the great American marathoner who pointed out that in the country of Kenya, a place with a population about the size of California, there are a million -- one million 12 to 17 year old boys who run between 10 to 12 miles a week -- a day rather. That is an extraordinary number. An absolutely incredible number. And what that says is that Kenya has done an extraordinary job of transmitting this very beautiful notion to their population, which is that if were are willing as a community to go out there and work and run day in, day out, we can achieve extraordinary things. Nothing to do with innatability, nothing to do with some special gene, it has to do with getting a million kids to wake up every morning at six o'clock and go and run 10 or 12 miles. Now what's our capitalization when it comes to distance running. Well, we know that our capitalization when it comes to football, something that we are obsessed with maybe as low as 16%, right? What does that suggest our cap rate is for distance running, is it 1%, is it point five percent? Are there more than ten thousand kids of that in our country who get up every morning and run 10 to 12 miles a day? When you understand the idea of capitalization you have an insight into why that extraordinary achievement happens. Now there's a reason I brought up this discussion of capitalization today in this room because I thought it would be a concept that was very familiar to all of you. Because think about those three barriers to capitalization again: Logistical, economic and attitude, you know, right? I think that they're very familiar to all of you and they are because they are ideas that lie behind the work that much of you do. What's the business model of Salesforce.com? It's a capitalization model. It says that we can use the Internet to bring -- to allow people to lift barriers, economic and logistical barriers to allow people in various parts of the world to engage in meaningful work, right? It says that we can use this wonderful thing called the Internet to build a tool that allows somebody in the farthest corner of Southern India to engage in work as meaningful as someone in San Jose. All of you are in the capitalization business. You have been working with this beautiful model that shows us how we can unleash human potential.

Business Innovation Matters

I just stumbled upon a presentation, Business Innovation Matters, and really liked it, and thought you might as well find it interesting.

Here's the link, Enjoy !!!

Business Model Innovation Matters

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: osterwalder alex)

 

And that's not it, you would find other very interesting presentation on the similar themes.