If you liked “Who moved my cheese”, you would probably enjoy “Our Iceberg Is Melting” as well. The author’s explain how change can be effected in an organization via the story of a group of penguins that is forced to relocate because their current iceberg of residence is melting. The story is about how a group of “leader” penguins determine if relocation is needed, and once the answer is determined to be a YES, form a team to come up with the plan to effect the change – which includes selling the need for the change (relocation) to larger penguin population, forming sub-teams to figure out the new location and associated logistics, motivating the teams on a constant basis to not lose focus and then aiding in the relocation. Once this is done the first time, the need to keep moving and find stable iceberg on a constant basis is enforced into the population, implying that the only thing that is constant is change itself.I did not feel that there was anything particularly eye-opening/new insights with respect to “Change Management” itself. It involves the typical –

1. Leaders need to determine if the particular change is actually needed. Collect and analyze appropriate data before buying into it
2. Once you think it is needed, form an appropriate team that can look at the facts and come up with a plan to effect the change
3. Lead (and do not necessarily coerce) the team to come up with the plan. Prod the teams at appropriate times to keep them focused at the task at hand. (This can be delegated as needed).
4. Next is the important task of selling the change to general population or team(s) affected. Change is always tough to digest and the purpose needs to be explained in a manner that appeals and makes sense to the population. If necessary dispose “change agents” to specific populations to communicate the change on a constant basis in a consistent manner.
5. Once there is buy-in from the general population, then the change needs to be effected by appropriate teams. All the while, the need for the change and the pain associated with it may have to be explained/re-enforced multiple times.
6. Of course, you would have to constantly evaluate how the plan is going and make adjustments as needed (not mentioned in the book)
7. Finally, prepare the population for future change(s)

Of course, there will be variations to the above process depending on the organization.

There were 2 important lessons related to “Change Management” that was re-enforced for me from this book. It is a very tentative/shy and inquisitive but not a leader penguin that determines something is wrong in the environment they are living and that iceberg in fact could be melting. The shy penguin brings this information up to one of the leader penguins that is known to be receptive to new information and does not pooh-pooh them. Here is what I got out of it –

1. One (and leaders in particular) has to have their eyes and ears open to suggestions from anyone in the organization.
2. If you feel that change is needed and is not in a position to affect it directly, understand the organization hierarchy, culture and personalities and use it as necessary to percolate information/data up the management chain. Always go with data that can be digested in an easy manner by the leaders which is easier said that done.

Ganesh

Just finished reading Khaled Hosseini ‘s second novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. While reading the book, I could not help but compare this novel with the author’s first novel “The Kite Runner” – which I thought was glorious. I understand that the comparison may not be fair, but it is inevitable.

Writing (or some would say prose) in this one, just like the author’s first novel is first rate. There is *much* more sadness in this novel and very few light-hearted/humorous moments though. There are some really heart warming and gut wrenching moments throughout the novel.

The story is about these 2 women in Afghanistan – Mariam and Laila and how their lives become intertwined inextricably. The story tracks their life through the modern history of Afghanistan – starting with the fall of Zahir Shah to the times when Afghanistan is freed from the reigns of Taliban. It vividly captures the indignity, both physical and mental, that women had to endure during vicious times in Afghanistan.

There are not too many twists in this novel and it is very linearly written in terms of chronology. It takes half the novel before the 2 heroines get to interact and from then on it is one incident after another where they have to endure various degrees of pain – both mental and physical. Towards the end, the kindness that Mariam extends towards Laila is enormous.

I think it is primarily a story of survival – what the human soul is willing to endure during inhumane times – how the mind starts to give in and tolerate vicious treatment , perhaps temporarily just to pull through, but always with the hope that things will get better – if not for themselves at least for their children. As much as the two women’s dignity and self-esteem is forcibly snatched, they seem to accept what fate has dealt to them, perhaps just to survive another day. But their core beliefs and humaneness still remains intact.

Compared to KiteRunner, I felt that the tightness in terms of plot was missing in this novel. I wished there was an alternate way that Mariam’s choice towards the end could have been handled or maybe it was just my wishful thinking.

Just as in KiteRunner, the ending was extremely poignant especially Laila’s visit to Mariam’s childhood home. Laila coming back to Afghanistan to start an orphanage and give back to her country, even though her country had not given her much except perhaps some positive childhood memories was a fitting end to the novel.

Through Laila’s father and Tariq – Laila’s lover, the author has managed to not paint a broad stroke that all men were evil during the vicious times in Afghanistan. Thus as much as the novel is about the two women and their survival spirit and the tribulations they undergo primarily at the hands of men, through these two men (Laila’s father and Tariq), the author has shown that one can maintain his/her sense of decency even if one is afforded the luxury to not exercise it.

Ganesh

It is James McGregor’s absorbing account of his tenure in China as Dow Jones’s China boss. I am fascinated by China and its rapid rise and I have been wanting to read this book for a while now. The book is littered with insights about China and its culture. I picked out some of insights that intrigued me the most in the first chapter:

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?

I am not a big reader of fiction. I can certainly count on my fingers the number of fiction that I have finished start to finish in one shot – within a 24 hour period. Kite Runner, a New York Times Bestseller by Khaled Hosseini is one such novel.

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.

Chris Anderson made a superb presentation about his concept of Long Tail at our customer conference 2 weeks ago. Before i talk about his presentation, i want to give you all a few pointers to pick up this concept. I strongly believe that all management professionals must understand the Long Tail because it has deep implications for everyone. If you already know about the concept you can skip the following section and go to the next section.

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.

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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.