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A tribute to Tin Tin

It is holiday time here (the great festival of Diwali will be upon us in couple of days) and I thought i will write a tribute to Tin Tin. This post has been inspired by an article i read recently in the British Airways’s High Life in-flight magazine Nov 2007 issue.

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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Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Updated 16th Nov 2007: Shuchi Grover pointed me to this excellent ideacast on the Harvard site [mp3] about Wikinomics. Thanks Shuchi.

Updated 30th Oct 2007 : Rajesh Kumar joins the conversation with a post on Wikinomics.

I am at our annual customer conference and had the privilege of listening to a fantastic lecture by Dan Tapscott, the best selling author of Wikinomics.

I am of the strong belief that virtual communities are going to be the key to progress in the future. As many of know i have been at the forefront of creating virtual communities within my company. Don Tapscott’s lecture was music to my ears.

He gave some superb examples of collaboration and i am listing the ones that caught my attention:

1. The brilliant example of the Gold miner corp which did the unthinkable for a mining company – posted its geo data online and requested the community to find potential gold mines. This is from Ross Dawson’s Living Networks book (which i haven’t read). Ross has written about the Goldminer example on his blog.

2. He talked about how they used the community to create Doritos ad and the winner was aired during the Superbowl – what an honor for a small time amateur ad maker! The winner was this one about the check out girl [must see video clip]. He played the one that won the contest and the one that he liked the best – the mouse trap. [This is a must-see video clip, please follow the link]

He gave several examples like Flickr Vs. Kodak Photo Gallery, Youtube Vs. MTV, Wikipedia Vs. Brittanica etc. The overall point being that Community approach always wins over the “Content is King” approach personified by the losing companies.

He talked about a 7 point framework that lays out the strategy of the Wikinomics approach. You can read more about these 7 points in the Business Week Wikinomics special series:

1.Peer Innovation and Production
2.Ideagora, a Marketplace for Minds
3.Hack This Product, Please!

4.The New Science of Sharing
5.Opening Up to Collaboration
6.The Global Plant Floor
7.The Wiki Workplace

Overall, the lecture has convinced me to add this book to my to-do list. If any of you have read this book already, please chime in, in the comments section.

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The incredible power of a word – part 2 – why do we swear?

I just covered how words have power over our behavior. Came across a f***ing brilliant article on why we swear [Caution: article Not Safe for Work – NSFW], written recently by Steven Pinker, the man who has made a name for himself by writing insightful tomes about the power of language.

It is a long article that explores the usage of swear words and the hows and whys of it. Per Pinker, the crux of why swear words seem to have such emotional power seems to boil down to how speech cognition occurs in the brain. He says that swear words have both denotations and connotations and these are interpreted by different parts of the brain:

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words’ denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala “lights up”–it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans–when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It’s not just that we don’t have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation.

There in lies the power of the swear word, its ability to provoke an limbic reaction. I was discussing this article with my wife Priya Raju and she made a brilliant point –

She said, it appears that swear words – f***, c**t, s**t etc seems to sound very animal like. Swear words never sound sweet but instead sound very harsh. She pointed to Vilayanur Ramachandran’s Buba/Kiki effect that he describes in his brilliant book – The Emerging Mind.

I was doing some more research on Priya’s point and I landed on this Wired magazine article about Steven Pinker’s latest book – The Stuff of Thought and the article says things confirming Priya’s point:

The experimental psychologist also takes a fresh look at the “poo-poo theory,” which proposes that swearing was actually the first form of language. He points to the fact that brain-damaged patients who lose the power of articulate speech often retain the ability to curse like a sailor. “Since swearing involves clearly more ancient parts of the brain,” Pinker says, “it could be a missing link between animal vocalization and human language.”

Isn’t it amazing how deep a significance some routine thing like swearing has?

Going back to my article, it must be pretty clear, that the term “Contractor”, due to the elaborate rituals surrounding the term, had a lot of negative connotations, there by producing a limbic reaction with a deleterious effect on performance. On the contrary, the term “Partner” had a lot of positive connotations producing a positive limbic reaction with the attendant benefits.

References:

1. Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran’s The Emerging Mind available as a series of lectures both transcript and audio form available at the BBC Site. He uses the Buba/Kike example in this lecture to postulate how language might have originated in contrast to Steven Pinker’s theories.

2. I have added Pinker’s latest book The Stuff of Thought to my to-do list. If any of you have read it, would appreciate a comment.

3. Stroop Effect – a popular psychology phenomenon that demonstrates how color impedes reading cognition.

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The incredible power that a word has over your behavior

Some unsavory developments have happened at the client site where I took up Account Management for the first time in my career in 1996. I have kept in touch with my clients all these years and I got to hear about these developments directly from my clients. I am totally saddened by what happened. Unfortunately due to confidentiality issues, I can’t write more on this.

These conversations put me in nostalgia mode and brought back one of the key learnings that I had from one of my favorite clients – she calls her style “Subtle Leadership”. This post is a tribute to her.

The time I started at this client site, we were all called “contractors”. Now, this isn’t an unusual practice by itself. Even today external consultants are called contractors or vendors or something like that. The practice had evolved to such an extent that the identity cards were color coded and heck even the email address was tagged with a “c” to denote contractor. All contractors were excluded from team outings, many important meetings etc. Contractors were not given name plates to hang outside the cubicle. It wouldn’t be surprising if as a contractor you felt like an outcast.

It is in this milieu, that my favorite client practiced an entirely different approach. She invited all the contractors to all meetings, team meetings, addressed us as partners and treated us almost like any other employee. Guess what, our employees in this group worked harder, were more productive, came up with more creative ideas, jelled with each other as a team better. She invited our suggestions, implemented many of them.

In short, she got the best work out of us “contractors”. She did all this quietly without tooting her own horn – the hallmark of “subtle leadership”. Creating this sense of belonging, camaraderie and using that to drive better performance is one of the biggest lessons I have learnt in my life and I owe this to my client.

Now to the original subject of this post. Think about how one word Contractor vs. Partner makes such a big difference in performance. It is funny why more companies and leaders don’t understand this simple thing. As it is my fancy these days, I looked at the neuroscience of this. In my research I came across the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which postulated that there is a strong connection between language and your ability to think complex thoughts.

It remained a hypothesis and a hotly debated subject amongst scientists untill the discovery of a tribe in South America that speaks the Piraha Language. It turns out that this tribe has no words in their language for numbers greater than two – they simply use one, two and many. When they were adminstered quantitative ability tests as a part of the research they couldn’t handle numbers greater than two effectively.

It has also been shown now that people who can’t speak and hear are able to do better thinking if they have learnt the sign language. Such is the power of a single word – use them wisely. Have you all had any such experiences that demonstrate the power of langauge?

References:
1. Wikpedia entry for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:

2. Wikipedia entry for the Piraha Language

Freebase – Database for world knowledge/data

Through my CTO‘s blog, came across this company called Metaweb and their product – Freebase – a database for world’s data/knowledge. At the outset, it seems similar to Wikipedia and in fact Freebase has used Wikipedia as one its sources to seed its initial set of data. So, what is different about them from Wikipedia, Google Base etc.?

• Much like a content management system, they combine structured and free form data, maintain the association between them and more importantly leverage this to allow search based on both kinds of data. This kind of search can be more targeted.
  • Content types/classes can be defined and instances of these types become the meta-data/structured information. For example, facets of a person/place/thing are stored as structured data.
  • This way of organizing data allows one the ability to perform complex queries on structured data and can be combined with text search on unstructured data – ala content management system
• Freebase also provided APIs that allows applications to tap into this vast amount of data. Looks like this is one place Metaweb plans to monetize.

I did a search on “Gundappa” – my favorite cricket player and it did bring a list of available matches, and with “Gundappa Viswanath” I found the following tags/content types – “Person, Cricket Player, Cricket Bowler, Pro Athlete”. These types allow one to associate meta-data with Gundappa such as his Birth date, type of player etc. Of course, there is also a description/article (unstructured information) on him.

As my CTO has mentioned in his blog, I do think that this kind of “information base” has its own value within an enterprise.

I am amazed at the way the next wave/generation of applications web – based on social tagging, mashing up and information gathering/publishing is coming up. The true benefit is when such information can be mined in ways that allow us to find hidden meaning/purpose within them and then use such meaning to come with appropriate conclusions. From an Enterprise perspective, my General Manager – Dr. Ambuj Goyal has been stating this as “Freeing information and delivering information in the context of business needs” (Please note that I have paraphrased him).

Another interesting technology to look at is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – a way to combine human intelligence to solve a problem. Amazon does have a diverse portfolio and I believe they are one of the “cool” technology companies around, except they do not tout their own coolness!!.