“We can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal” – John F. Kennedy

I have a fetish for bridges! I have been puzzled by it myself: whether its those small structures across our very own Cooum , the Thiru.Vi. Ka bridge across Adyar or the Napier Bridge near the Madras University or the Howrah Bridge in Kolkata or the Laxman Jhula in Rishikesh or the Blackfriars bridge across the Thames or the San Franscisco Golden Gate. Recall the movie the ‘Bridge over the River Kwai’ or the TV ad zooming in on the magnificient Tower Bridge of London?! Bridges have me all excited and thrilled. For a long-time I thought this was a fascination promoted by TV and Cinema.

Until I came across this book by Ivo Andric titled the “Bridge over the Drina” It is a fantastic book and clearly ranks as one of the greatest pieces of world literature. Over a period of 300 years, the destiny of the town and the individuals and communities living near the river Drina get inextricably interwoven with the history of the bridge. The bridge becomes a metaphor for the life around it. Andric’s masterpiece documents the unities and challenges between ethnicities and faiths, Bosnians, Serbs, Jews, Muslim and Christians and their relationship with the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. The bridge is a silent witness to the history of Europe over centuries.

Cut to the chase. I turn to the contemporary developments across the world including our country. It seems as if some storms are causing bridges to break down and the chasms widening. There seems to be a growing passion for hate! Horror of horrors. Why would anyone want to have a passion for hate? Nicholas Fraser in his book ‘The Voice of Modern Hatred’ sets out the contours of this problem in Europe. This is truly a global problem. Hate is like a ‘malignant tumour’. Young innocent minds have been poisoned to dislike entire cultures through the sustenance of stereotypes. This is because increasingly one can notice a gross distortion in the way entire cultures, communities and identities are being represented especially in the electronic media mainly because of the violence of terrorists. There are other kinds of institutions and organizations too that indulge in violence but that is a separate subject.

I find myself very concerned with the manner in which society and media creates ideas and images of groups of people and their impact. These images to cite a few often take the form of ‘Muslims’ versus ‘Hindus’, ‘Maharashtrians’ versus ‘north Indians’, ‘Hindus’ versus ‘Christian’, ‘Dalits’ versus ‘upper-castes’, ‘Sunni’ versus ‘Shiah’ , ‘Sinhala’ versus ‘Tamil’ and ‘Christianity’ versus ‘Islam.’ The stereotypes and caricatures of ‘us’ and ‘them’ seem to be on the increase. The blame game as to who is responsible for what mess goes on endlessly.

In this madness, where are innocent, peace-loving people to go? Whom can they turn to for solace? Most sober people have adopted the posture of “Forgive them, O’Lord for they know not what they do!” The less said about the political class the better. Of course, there are always exceptions among them. What about the intellectuals? We are reminded of the ‘Prophet of Gloom’ in the form of Samuel P. Huntington who is (in)famous for his theory of the ‘clash of civilizations.’  His theory of clashes found its practitioners in the person of those hawks who promoted the invasion of Iraq and the ‘war-on-terror’ with all its attendant disastrous consequences. Such hawks made the world a more dangerous place. As for me, I draw solace from my favourite subject ‘history’ which would indeed judge these hawks and their global disciples very unkindly.

History is a great teacher. The problem with us is that we are poor students of this subject. The common refrain is that our teachers made this subject boring for us. Alas, if life were to accept such excuses, then everything would be a cakewalk. We would have often heard that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. I would like to add repeat it at a huge cost to themselves and everybody. I wonder why anybody in their right mind would want to incur these costs. My friends and colleagues often ask me ‘what is the solution to all this? I wonder when an individual falls mentally ill, we escort him/her to a shrink. When a whole society falls sick, what do we do? Which physician knows how to treat ‘collective schizophrenia’? As I write this, there has been terrorist violence in Delhi and attacks on Christians in Orissa and Karnataka.

We are now faced with an epidemic of hate of sorts. Those who believe in religion say that these are signs that the world is coming to an end. Yet others attribute the problem to primordial sentiments and say that it has always been that way and will continue to remain that way. I refuse to buy any of these arguments. I firmly believe that human beings are capable of acting in their self and collective interest in a positive and enlightened manner.

There is still hope for and in reason. I believe that rationality can still play a role in the face of the madness of hate. I believe that millions of people are puppets on a string, or pawns in a chessboard or gullible creatures following the pied piper. It is the ability of ‘vested interests’ (the list is long depending on the context)  to elicit consent from the people to their being manipulated. There is adequate proof in historical studies that masses get easily and unknowingly misled through a set of motives different from what is in their interest. And that is indeed what is happening in this world. If there was no perception of threat to each other’s community, several politicians would be called upon to deliver on issues of bread and butter which are far more difficult than pitting one group against the other. This is true of the East and West, North and South, whether its of India or the rest of the Globe. Distraction by peddling hate is a favourite form of politics for those who are desperate for power. We have all seen in contemporary politics, the love for power. We need to show ourselves the power of love!

Now that the picture is clear, what can individuals do? To start with, we can borrow Nancy Reagan’s famous slogan “Just Say No” to hate. To prejudice. To disunity.

We can then build bridges. Bridges of Love. We can all do it small ways.  Begin with our neighbours and colleagues – do we in the first place know who they are? Do they have families and children like ours? Take an active interest in their well-being. Move beyond that to the residential area or the street or the locality in which we live. Can we build bonds of trust and oneness? As Kennedy rightly argues are we not all faced with the same challenges? We wake up, go to work, fend for our families, return take care of our near and dear ones. We all have children about whose welfare we are worried about. We all have elders who in the sunset of their lives need our company as much as we need their blessings and counsel. There are plenty of interstices and intersections where these bridges can be built. We just have to think creatively about it. Festivals, Ceremonies, Family occasions, Music, Movies and so much more are unexplored arenas of building a sense of togetherness among individuals and communities. Can the effort of an individual in this matter? Certainly. Drops make the ocean. Its better to light a candle than to curse the darkness!

The challenge before us is to build bridges -across time and space; across castes, communities, religions, races, languages and not to miss gender. We need these bridges badly. There will always be naysayers. The villains. The troublemakers. Is it not noteworthy that during war, bridges are the first structures to be destroyed to prevent the movement of people and supplies? To those who believe in a God, (s)he made us such: different from each other. Varied and Diverse. Tomes have also been written on the ‘unity of existence’ that brings together all these differences. There is no religion that by itself preaches hate - that religions can be used to create tensions is a different matter. I believe that the ties that bind people with one another are sacred. Let no one undo those bonds of togetherness.

It is the bridges that connect us all. I for one am a die-hard romantic. Its high time that all peace-loving people resisted the stereotypes promoted by the media and thought beyond them. I raise a toast to several friends, colleagues and the ‘common man’ who have rejected these caricatures. I was brought up on the staple of ‘Enlightenment’ with the firm belief of a ‘common humanity.’ I believe friendship and love will prevail. I think we need to take ‘bridge-building’ more seriously than ever before. We have to work at it.

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1. [P10-11] While the West in built on a guilt-based foundation where eternal damnation or sinning curbs bad behavior, China is built on a Shame-based foundation. It is the fear of exposure and resultant shame that is a problem. So Chinese can do anything as long as they don’t get caught. China has adopted the civil law philosophy of Japan and Germany, unlike India which has adopted the common law philosophy of the UK and USA.

2. [P15] McGregor talks of how Hong Kong has been surpassed by mainland China and quotes a chinese proverb “Fu Bu Guo San Dai” meaning “Wealth can’t last more than 3 generations”.

At the end of every chapter McGregor gives a neat summary of the insights in what he calls the Little Red Book of Business that serves an excellent summary of that chapter.

McGregor goes onto give a brief but well written synopsis on China’s history to explain why Chinese are extraordinarily suspicious of foreigners.

Morgan Stanley’s Debacle: The next chapter [Chapter 2] discusses the audacious marriage of Morgan Stanley and the Chinese government controlled China Construction Bank to create China’s first investment bank which ultimately unravels after years of struggles between the 2 partners thanks to the clash between western and chinese styles. The chapter is summed up nicely with a chinese proverb “Tong Chuang Yi Meng” meaning “Two people sleeping in the same bed having different dreams”. But interestingly, Morgan Stanley though badly bruised and battered by the joint venture, laughed all the way to the bank with a 50% share of Chinese IPOs.

Corruption is Endemic: Chapter 3 chronicles the spectacular rise and the equally spectacular fall of a peasant turned wheeler dealer. Indians will find eery similarities with the descriptions of endemic corruption involving the police, military, smuggling nexus with graft from the businessmen to get preferential treatment. McGregor also gives some recipes for succeeding in China without selling your soul - emulate GE by training Chinese executives at their famed crotonville center. Or create opportunities for Chinese to work in your company for temporary periods to learn. It all seems to boil down to Know How. This is the biggest thing the Chinese are looking for. If you can give that to them you can succeed without having to be corrupt.

Click the continue-reading link below for more insights from the book.

Beating Xinhua: Chapter 4 McGregor talks about how he emerged victorious from the fight of his life - Xinhua (the state news agency) which wanted to take over Dow Jones’s business with new regulations. He enlisted the support of Reuters which was the other major player in China. Working in tandem they got the support of the US Government and parts of China’s bureaucracy that were opposed to the Xinhua regulations because it hindered China’s entry into WTO - a prized goal for China.

McDonnell Douglas’s Flight of Fancy: Chapter 5 discusses McDonnell Douglas’s ill-fated joint venture in China to manufacture MD-80s. The initiative was led by Gareth Chang who became a China Expert eventhough he left China as a 6 year old. I see parallels to this, when an Indian IT engineer becomes the India offshoring expert at our client sites with the only qualification being the Indian origin. This chapter ends with a telling conclusion “A final lesson is that basing your business on special deals from the Chinese government is foolhardy. The Chinese Government offers special deals because you have something they want, not because they want to help build your business. Unless there are clear and competitive commercial underpinnings, you will lose, no matter what the government has promised.”

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Hunts: Chapter 6 covers how Rupert Murdoch established a successful presence in China in partnership with Liu Chongle, a chinese media entrepreneur. But what caught my attention is the inspiring story of Hu Shuli’s rise in the Chinese Media with her fearless investigative reporting magazine Caijing. Caijing mainly covers financial news but also jumped into the SARS epidemic by reporting the real state of affairs much to the chagrin of Chinese officials. I am reminded of India’s own fearless Tehelka.com.

Telecom Juggernaut: Chapter 7 is dedicated to the Chinese Telecom industry which has made dizzying progress by leveraging foreign technology and assets to build a state of the art telecom infrastructure with the Government firmly in charge. In just 10years starting 1993, a whopping 500 million phonelines were added. While the monopoly buildout was going on customers had to wait for months to get a phone line and had to pay hundreds of dollars in bribes (Sounds familiar to our BSNL story,right?). Into this quagmire, UTStarcom steps in, a startup founded by Chinese American entrepreneurs, with a Fixed Wireless technology which proves to be enormously cheap and signs up customers at a rapid clip forcing the government to not interfere with UT Starcom much to the dismay of the telecom ministry which was intent on destroying UTStarcom to retain the monopoly. In India, a similar fixed wireless technology is used by Airtel, Tata Indicom and Reliance to offer landlines competing with BSNL People in India are switching to the private phones in droves.

Another interesting tidbit - “Chinese love to point out that they invented porcelain, silk, eyeglasses, paper, the printing press, and gunpowder. They were eating with sanitary chopsticks for 1000 years while Europeans reaching into common bowls with dirty hands. But the crush of politically driven information and thought control, and Confucian traditions, have left China today a place where the people are capable of incremental innovation, but not innovativebreakthroughs. Breakthrough ideas come from the West.”. I see this as sort of similar to India - for any meaningful pride we have to point back to the Vedas where supposedly (mainly supported by conjectures) everything that has been discovered or invented or to be invented is present and today’s India is mostly a workforce for the West without any major indigenous breakthroughs.

The final chapter 8 is a broad sweep of coverage. First up - China’s first American MBA introduced by a consortium in 1993. By contrast India’s IIMs have existed for a long time.

Second, some key business and management issues of which there are two that I found interesting.

1. Rote Rules: Chinese students are among the best. But they learn under a system self-deprecatingly called ‘Tianyoshi Jiaoyu” or “stuffed dick-style education”. Essentially they learn by rote which prepares them mainly to be led and not lead. Sounds very similar to the Indian education system where rote rules.

2. China is Queue-less: Nobody waits in line in China - at banks, on buses, everybody elbows to the front. Same thing happens in business by rapidly diversifying into anything and everything to make money fast which is the overriding goal. This has resulted in a situation where the average life of a company is 5 years or less.

McGregor then covers 3 management styles from 3 different companies to show what is working - a husband-wife pair that runs a real estate business using a combo of western and chinese principles, a beverage company Wahaha that is run using the benevolent dictator model which works very well in China and lastly Lenovo - the IBM-Lenovo joint venture which has a blended team of IBM managers and Lenovo managers working together in what is being seen as the prototype of the future
Chinese company.

Overall McGregor has covered almost every topic that is connected with doing business in China. Because he uses colorful characters as protagonists and their stories, it makes for a surprisingly fast read considering the dry subject matter.

I’d strongly recommend reading this book if you are interested in China.

While McGregor comes across as fairly unbiased, I would be curious to know whether a Chinese would agree with his observations?

Can anyone recommend another business book on China written by a Mainlander?

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I am not good at writing reviews and this is certainly not an attempt at doing that. I am hoping that the few sentences I have written here will motivate someone to pick up this wonderful novel and have it tug at your emotions like it did for me.

The story is told by Amir and traces his life starting from his childhood memories and incidents with his friend Hasan in Kabul, who also happens to be his servant’s son, his interactions with his benevolent father who is tough with him and his father’s best friend Rahim Khan, him migrating to America, marrying his love and eventually visiting Kabul in what can be termed as an act of redemption and then coming back to America with perhaps his peace of mind.

There are a few unexpected twists in the story within which the author has managed to weave a thread of friendship, loyalty, paternal affection, love, revenge and redemption all in one story. The story is wonderfully interwoven with the modern history of Afghanistan, starting just before the end of Zahir Shah’s era to the time when America declared its war on terrorism. The author uses a lot of Afghan words that adds to the earthiness of the story.

There are points in the story that made me almost cry and others that made me smile a bit. There are a few mullah Naseerudin jokes too!! I just finished reading the book 30 minutes back and still have the glorious after taste of having read a great novel. Hard to believe this is Khaled Hosseini’s first novel.

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The Long Tail Concept
As a subscriber of the Wired magazine, i chanced upon the article that Chris Anderson wrote in Oct 2004 which talked about the Long tail concept for the first time. It didn’t hit me the first time i read it. Almost 6 months later, i came across Joe Kraus’s blog post about Long tail and his explanations and the charts he published made me really understand the concept. Make sure to read the powerpoint slides he has attached to his blog post as well. [In case you didn't know Joe Kraus is the founder of Jotspot, now part of Google. Also note that some of stats he quotes about Amazon, Netflix etc were later revised making the long tail sales of Amazon/Netflix not as stark as these charts show.] To be sure, Long tail is just a new way of looking at what Pareto pointed out long ago about winner-take-all-power- law distributions. While Pareto focused on the head of the curve, Chris Anderson, has brilliantly pointed the whole world at the tail of the curve - hence the term, Long Tail.

Long Tail Presentation titled “The Economics of Abundance”

Chris Anderson gave a great presentation. Compared to Dan Tapscott’s earlier presentation, this was less entertaining. But Chris covered his ideas extremely well. I found a version of his presentation on Slideshare and i have embedded it below.

| View | Upload your own

The main idea he was presenting was that the whole internet revolution has given us the abundance (Amazon can
list as many books as there are available) as opposed to the scarcity we have faced (Barnes & Noble has only a limited
shelf space for books). He made the point that we need a whole new mindset to manage in the world of abundance. If you
look at slide #22 (next few slides give more contrasts) in the above presentation - in the scarcity dominated world, we need
to think about ROI whereas in the Abundance dominated world, we can figure out the ROI later because it is very cheap to experiment. I could personally identify with it. When we started our internal blogging, I had no idea about the ROI and when
i looked at the cost of running a blog server (we use the open source Wordpress), it was so tiny that i realized ROI doesn’t matter.
So i went ahead and now it is a raging phenomenon within the company pulling in 3 million page views a month. If you want a
public example, look at how Guy Kawasaki started Truemors with just $12,000. With that type of costs, it is just much easier to experiment and figure out than write a
big business plan and run after VCs for investments.

The Long Tail Book Ever since I came across the concept, i have been following Chris Anderson’s long tail blog and bought the book as soon as it came out more than a year ago. The book definitely lived up to my expectations.
The Long Tail book has a lot more examples and they all serve to reinforce the idea better. The book explains the 3 forces that are driving the long tail

1. Democratize Production - how digital video cameras, blogs, pod casts etc have put the power of production in the hands
of the masses. He calls them “Producers”. 2. Democratize Distribution - How Amazon, Netflix, iTunes are able to create a vast distribution channel for niche content. He calls them “Aggregators”. 3. Connect Supply & Demand - how Google, blogs, recommendation lists etc are helping connect supply and demand. He calls them “Filters”. He devotes a chapter each of the 3
forces and explains them in detail with lots of examples.

In sum, Anderson shows how the culture has shifted from the water cooler talk - “did you watch the <popular sitcom> episode last night” forcing us all to be in sync with each other to a culture driven by individual needs, desires and tastes.

Win a copy of the Long tail book

Now to the contest. Just after Chris Anderson’s presentation i was talking to my colleague and he was debating me on how
the Long Tail doesn’t apply to software development outsourcing companies like the one i work for? I disagreed with that assertion, of course. So here is the contest - the best response to the question - how does the Long Tail affect software development outsourcing companies? wins a copy of the Long Tail book - I have a spare copy to give away.

Notes & References:
1. I wrote an article titled “Egocasting” on ITOTD. For some reason, unbeknownst to me, i failed to mention the Long Tail concept even though i encountered it before writing this article. I have recently amended the article. It will give you a good idea on how the power is shifting in the media world.

2. Rashmi Sinha expresses her contrarian views on the Long tail concept. In my view, she has just explained how the internet accelerates and accentuates power law effects. In fact, i would argue that her Slideshare business is actually a long tail business.

3. Tim Wu of Slate slams the Long Tail with his article titled “The Wrong Tail”

4. The long tail post i did a while ago.

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As a child i have derived endless hours of fun reading the Tin Tin comics and I am sure many of you have done as well. Priya Raju is a great fan of Tin Tin and she now has the entire collection in her possession. We have been reading the series again and we are amazed that we are able to enjoy the series even at this ripe old age [Okay, that is me, Priya Raju is still very young :)]. To us, it shows the timelessness of this series.

Through the magazine article [Sorry the article is not online], i learnt a few things that i didn’t know before:

1. George Remi, better known as Herge, the author of the series, never travelled outside his country Belgium. All that he wrote about the various countries that Tin Tin visited was from the detailed research he did. Amazing isn’t it? It is hard to believe that all the vivid details he presents are entirely from research.

2. Herge included some self-portraits in crowd scenes in the series. Myself and Priya Raju had some great fun looking through the series and trying to find Herge in the crowd scenes.

3. Tin Tin series has sold 200 million copies in 50 languages so far.

4. Tin Tin is partly based on Herge’s brother Paul Remi.

5. The 24th book Tin Tin and Alph Art was left unfinished after Herge’s death in 1983.

6. Tin Tin has no love interest and only cries twice in the whole series.

7. Though Tin Tin is an ace reporter he submits a story only once in the entire series and seems to have no editor or deadlines!

The article also said that Tin Tin in Congo has come in for some criticism due to its insensitive portrayal of Africans. I have read Tin Tin in Congo and I would have to agree on this point. Maybe we can allow for a few blemishes in this otherwise delightful series, right?

I had written about this earlier - why did Captain Haddock use all those funny sounding curse words and not real ones? The Haddock page in the Wikipedia comes to the rescue - see the Expletives section.

Happy Diwali to all of you that celebrate it! And if you have a young child, buy a copy of Tin Tin and gift it to your child or better still read it with your child. Fun guaranteed.

Notes:

1. A-Z List of Captain Haddock’s curses.

2. If you want to play the game we played - find Herge’s self portrait in the crowd scenes and you need help, try this site [Warning: Spoilers].

3. Lots of Tin Tin related info at this site including a world map with markers for the locations of the Tin Tin adventures.

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