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Can the U.S. Learn from Indian R&D?

Duke’s Vivek Wadhwa writes in BusinessWeek:
“…India is rapidly becoming a global R&D hub in several industries. Its scientists are doing sophisticated drug discovery for Big Pharma (BusinessWeek.com, 6/10/08). Its engineers are designing key components of jetliners for Boeing (BA) and Airbus; developing next-generation networking equipment for companies like Cisco Systems (CSCO); and building auto bodies, dashboards, and power trains for such vehicle manufacturers as General Motors (GM). Indian companies are also innovating for the Indian marketplace; witness the $2,500 car by Tata Motors (TTM).”
So how are they doing it?
Hint: it’s all about developing your company’s most valuable asset.

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Why India Will Beat China: Transparency Wins!

The Conrad Group’s William Nobrega writes in BusinessWeek:
“The advantage comes in the form of an entrenched and vibrant democracy that will ultimately drive India to outperform China socially and economically. Messy, frustrating, and more often than not agonizingly slow, India’s democracy would seem to be chaotic at the surface.”
India will eventually outclass China because of its property rights, rule of law, and IP protection, says Nobrega.
Meanwhile in the US: we’re busy protecting the flag and burning the constitution…

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Bill Gates and Philanthropy 2.0: shouting for the voiceless

Bill Gates’ greatest achievements lie ahead of him. And this time, he really is going to change the world.
Why? Because he understands that there are some things that just can’t be done by business or the marketplace.
His words:
95 percent — actually, 98 percent — of all medical research is done for rich people. It’s done for baldness, erectile dysfunction, cosmetic surgery. That’s where 98 percent of the researchers are working. …
So the voices of the poor are never heard in this marketplace system. That is, the needs of the poorest, they don’t speak in that prioritization, because they’re not paying for medicines. They can’t.
So today’s prioritization is totally for the richest, for the things that they speak by buying those various medicines for. And so as we take our money, which in total is, compared to the overall market, fairly small, and cause some shift in the favor of malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, to the degree there’s a finite number of scientists in the world, then you could say, OK, there’s a little bit less on baldness.
Because our money is incremental, ideally you’d be growing the pool of scientists, because you have more money, more jobs, more opportunity there. But it is true that the needs of the very richest might get a tiny bit less attention as we cure tuberculosis.
It’s refreshing to hear this from a leader of Gates’ caliber.
Another point of note: Gates doesn’t want incremental innovation and since he knows the current model of medical research isn’t working, he’s ready to change it.
There’s a lot more on this new version of Gates here, here, and here. What I like about it is the fact that Buffet is on board with him, and that between the two of them, they’re going to redefine the meaning of philanthropy.
The Gates Foundation is focused, and rightly so, on health and development.
But there’s just one thing they’ve forgotten: energy.
As Bob Freling says, “Energy is a human right.” The point Freling makes every day is absolutely critical and one Gates needs to understand: “You can’t have X-rays, or crop irrigation, or vaccines, without electricity. And in places like Africa, the only effective way to get that electricity – when you’re off the grid – is solar power.” So the Gates Foundation is going to have to look at energy as well. And the sooner they do, the faster they’ll get there with their other objectives – food security, health care for the poorest of the poor, etc.
I can’t wait to see more billionaires get on the Philanthropy 2.0 bandwagon. What are you waiting for Larry Ellison? And how ’bout getting A.G. Lafley and the P&G open innovation nerds on board as well. Let’s cure malaria instead of whitening teeth. eh?
Go, Bill, Go.

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Active Inertia: Why Good Companies Go Bad

The Economist has just begun a series on “big ideas” in management thinking. These may be the buzzwords of the past, but many of them are worth understanding.
Active Inertia. That’s how successful companies (and governments) lose their way. Here’s how Don Sull explains his idea:
My research suggests that companies fall prey to active inertia—responding to even the most disruptive market shifts by accelerating activities that succeeded in the past. When the world changes, organizations trapped in active inertia do more of the same. A little faster perhaps or tweaked at the margin, but basically the same old same old. Managers often equate inertia with inaction, like the tendency of a billiard ball at rest to remain immobile. But executives in failing companies unleash a flurry of initiatives—indeed they typically work more frenetically than their counterparts at competitors which adapt more effectively. Organizations trapped in active inertia resemble a car with its back wheels stuck in a rut. Managers step on the gas. Rather than escape the rut, they only dig themselves in deeper.
What Sull says is that we get trapped in our assumptions in the following areas:
Strategic frames: What we see when we look at the world, including definition of industry, relevant competitors and how to create value.
Processes: How we do things around here entailing both informal and formal routines.
Resources: Tangible and intangible assets that we control which help us compete, such as brand, technology, real estate, expertise, etc.
Relationships: Established links with external stakeholders including investors, technology partners or distributors
Values: Beliefs that inspire, unify and identify us.
So we just dig a deeper hole.
How do we get out of the mess? It starts with a sense of urgency.
By the way, this idea of active inertia applies at the individual level as well. How many of us go through life doing the same thing over and over?

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Greenwashing is the New Red, White, and Blue

How do you motivate your employees in this, the age of cynicism?
Instead of handing out Chinese-made flag pins to all their employees (yes, this actually happens) companies can start by supporting a few good causes.
The Economist has a nice write-up on companies taking this leap. A few examples:
– IKEA, the world’s largest furniture-maker, joins forces with Rainforest Alliance and WWF to promote forest certification in China by the Forest Stewardship Council
– Marriott International teams up with Conservation International and the Brazilian state of Amazonas to protect a big area of Amazon rainforest.
– Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, set up an ambitious programme in 2005 with the long-term aim of becoming a zero-waste, renewably powered enterprise.
OK. Does this mean that business is finally waking up to do the right thing?

Not exactly.
The real danger with the “greening of business” is hypocrisy, i.e. greenwashing:

So if your business is going to go green (and it should), make sure you don’t do it as a PR stunt.
If you do, your company just might end up here >>

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Humble Pie for Steve Ballmer and Tom Friedman

Two separate public incidents with similar overtones.
Today Steve Ballmer got pelted by a egg-throwing Hungarian nerd:

A few weeks earlier, on Earth Day no less, Tom Friedman gets a pie in the face:

Is this “The Wisdom of the Crowd”?
What I found interesting was the reactions of the “victims.” Ballmer cracked a joke and went on. Friedman took it a bit harder – walking off the stage in a huff.
Apparently, this is nothing new for Microsoft execs. Here’s a bonus clip from 2006:

Still, I don’t think this is funny. Especially in this day and age. What ever happened to old fashioned heckling?

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Viewer-Driven TV Programming – Is PBS serious?

I think it’s a nice gesture that PBS is asking viewers for programming suggestions:
What would your prime time lineup look like? Would you emphasize news and public affairs programming over science and nature content? Would you make changes to existing shows? What kinds of new series and specials would you bring to the public airwaves?
When they meet in Palm Desert, CA, the executives should take a look at the suggestions, but I feel they should talk to each other as well.
Why? Because there are serious limitations to heeding the Wisdom of the Crowd.
I blogged about Nick Carr‘s take on this subject a while back: “What crowds are good for is producing average results that are not subject to the biases and other quirks of human minds.”
The PBS bigwigs have forgotten their mission. (Maybe not, since a lot of them are now Republicans; I have to confess, when I heard about that I was sure we were soon all going to be watching infomercials on PBS 24/7).
So let’s remind them what public television stands for. What’s the brand personality they need to be faithful to?
Seth Godin weighs in on this issue with a brilliant post about the purpose of the New York Times. Same deal for PBS.
So let’s ask: What’s important? What’s true?
Big opportunity for big stories, PBS. Go where the corporate media can’t go:
News, Education, and the Arts. And don’t forget to add “Global Warming” as a new category.
PBS, you knew that once.
Look what happened to Ted Koppel and Nightline. Or David Brinkley’s This Week. I’ll Fly Away. That’s commercial television. PBS, please don’t go there.
One more thing: make sure every show is archived online for viewing over the Internet. All the way back to the very beginning of PBS (including Mr. Rodgers’ Neighborhood). That would be a real public service. Heck, put ’em all on YouTube.
I’m a fan of customer feedback, but I’m a bigger fan of the customer experience.
Don’t mess this up, PBS.

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Ranking Business Gurus: The Librarian’s Dilemma

Tom Davenport has done it again. He’s come up with a list of top business gurus in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

Using the same methodology he used in his book, Tom tells us that things have changed. These are the new Big Idea boys in business.
Why all boys? Because the business world still seems to be sexist? Or maybe the women thinkers aren’t focusing on “selling” their ideas as much? Where’s Dorothy Leonard-Barton? Or Tammy Erickson, for that matter?
The Times has its own list of business gurus.
Accenture still points to the 50 Gurus that Tom Davenport came up for them a few years ago.
God is in the details. The issue I have is that Tom and H.J. have not really taken into account how Google works. They’re measuring quantity, not quality.
In terms of popularity, no one uses Lexis Nexis or the SSCI database, except for academics and librarians. So I’ve got to discount those two components of the guru index.
Let’s get less academic and try to measure who’s really getting attention. (By the way, Tom has a great book on that subject as well).
So to measure real-time popularity, here’s what I propose: let’s measure the influence network for each of these management gurus. Let’s see how far their reach extends in the ecosystem they’ve built with their ideas. Let’s look at who’s linking to them. Let’s look at their site traffic. Let’s compare their ecosystem rankings. Let’s take Google, Yahoo, and the blogs into account.
Stay tuned. We’re going to have some fun using our ecosystem mapping tool.

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Bill Gates’ 2007 Harvard Commencement Address

Inevitably, we want to compare this to Jobs’ speech at Stanford.
I’m going to resist that temptation because I feel that Bill Gates has finally found a vision worthy of his (and Buffet’s) billions. And the irony is he had to look outside Microsoft to get it. Well done, Melinda Gates!
‘For what purpose?” he asks. Shouldn’t our best minds be more dedicated to solving our worst problems? Poverty, Clean Water, Sexism… Gates nails it (except for global warming; I suppose he’s left that to Al Gore).
My take: Harvard is failing us, as are our other institutions of higher learning, because they are not helping students develop an “informed conscience” as Gates calls it. Heck, they’re not even helping students develop an “un-informed conscience”!
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

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Why did Tata buy Range Rover and Jaguar?


Interesting analyses. We are going to see many more such mergers.
India and China are buying up brands.
We are going to see many more such mergers. These are “learning-acquisitions.”
Let’s see what Tata can teach Jaguar, and vice-versa. Value-engineering? Haven’t heard that terms since the 1980s…

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Steel Pulse: Global Warning + EarthJustice


see this >>

Stop Bush’s Forest Giveaway
Idaho contains more unspoiled wild forest than any state outside Alaska, providing the last intact forest habitat for countless fish, wildlife, and plant species. These areas are enjoyed by hunters, anglers, hikers, and all who treasure the backcountry. Yet the Bush administration is making a play in its last days to hand this natural gem over to its friends in the oil, natural gas, timber, and mining industries by weakening the Roadless Area Conservation Rule protections that currently guard it.
The administration’s proposal will open the door to logging millions of pristine acres, risk dangerous toxic contamination from mining, degrade clean fish-bearing streams and important wildlife habitat, and fail to live up to the public’s overwhelming desire to protect all of these areas for future generations.
This forest giveaway could lead to 545 million tons of phosphate being mined on nearly 8,000 unspoiled acres near Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Any increase in phosphate mining would worsen the already serious problem of selenium poisoning in local streams and aquifers. Selenium is an extremely dangerous contaminant known to cause birth defects, which bio-accumulates in the food web — persisting for centuries after entering the environment.
Six million acres of wild forest or a toxic waste dump? The choice should be clear to any American who values our natural treasures and takes their responsibility to future generations seriously.
Stand up for this glorious and irreplaceable wild forest! Let the Bush administration know that you are against removing Roadless Rule protections for the forests of Idaho. And hurry! The administration is only accepting public comments until April 7th.
Go deh >>

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Rice Revolution Ahead?

From the NYTimes >>
“Rising prices and a growing fear of scarcity have prompted some of the world’s largest rice producers to announce drastic limits on the amount of rice they export.”
And The Economist >>
I remember when Indira Gandhi was kicked out of office when the price of onions got too high. And rice is the staple food of most of Asia… It’s all about the price of rice.
And then there’s Marie Antoinette who, it turns out, did not say: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” (let ’em eat cake)…

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Earth Hour

More fun facts:
The average American produces about 20 tons of the major greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) every year. That might sound like a lot — and Americans do have among the biggest carbon footprints in the world — but the entire world emits around 27 billion tons of CO2 each year, through transportation, electricity use, deforestation.
So now we have Earth Hour.
Let’s rearrange the deck chairs…

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Chinese Democracy: Patriotic Education


The Economist story Welcome to the Olympics states:
“Resenting criticism of its handling of unrest in Tibet, China wages a gruesome propaganda offensive…”
“Meng Jianzhu, China’s most senior police official, also toured Lhasa on March 23rd and 24th. His words were not encouraging. Monasteries, he said, should step up “patriotic education”—ie, a much resented government-led campaign that requires monks to state their rejection of the Dalai Lama, who is hugely revered in Tibet.”
Patriotic Education? Sounds a bit like our Republicans…
Nice.
Read this report as well: “Trashing the Beijing Road”

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As the Earth Lay Dying…

Here are three stories I came across in the last week or so:
1. Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace – “The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations — and coming up dry.”
Here’s my explanation. Apparently this kind of thing happens up and down the Pacific coast of California.
2. Why are thousands of bats dying in New York? – “Bats in New York and Vermont are mysteriously dying off by the thousands, often with a white ring of fungus around their noses, and scient ists in hazmat suits are crawling into dank caves to find out why.”
3. Massive ice shelf collapsing off Antarctica – “Scientists are citing ‘rapid climate change in a fast-warming region of Antarctica’ as the cause of an initial collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf. The damage got started at the end of February when an iceberg dropped off and triggered the “runaway disintegration” of a 160-square-mile portion of the 5,282-square-mile shelf.”
Why is it that we’re still sitting here doing nothing?
I’m amazed at companies like Exxon Mobil – they still try to shirk their responsibility for the damage they cause…
And here’s a story about the Japanese whalers – they’re ready to kill Moby Dick!
Wait, there’s more >>
Please pass the popcorn.

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The Ghost of Tiananmen: China, Tibet and the Olympics


When I was a kid in India, one of the fondest memories I have is of a family vacation in the foothills of the Himalayas – eating at a tiny Tibetan roadside dhaba, being fed tons of cho-cho-momo and heaping piles of noodles. The food was great, but what struck me was the poor Indian peasant family sitting across from me eating their fill as well. Why? because the food was so cheap and so good that everyone could afford to eat well. I’ve never forgotten that day.
The family that ran the dhaba were refugees from Tibet, and I was fascinated by the store, the food, and the way they used an abacus to add up the transactions as they happened. That day I became a believer in a free Tibet.
I wrote earlier about China’s country branding issues and the upcoming Olympics.
I’ve also written about how to measure democracy with the “Journalists-in-Jail Index.”
And now we have pictures of the Chinese government beating up on Tibetans splashed across the pages of every major newspaper and magazine.
And don’t forget YouTube:

Here we go again.
This time Chinese officials are blaming the Dalai Lama for the violence. Give me a break. They’ve even got an army of bloggers and hackers working the media sites posting “pro-chinese” accounts all over the place.
Bush, of course, is silent. He knows that China’s in Tibet for the uranium.
I get a feeling the sponsors of the Olympics are in for a rough ride. Here are the brands which stand to get a black eye:
Coca-Cola
McDonalds
General Electric
Visa
Johnson and Johnson
Kodak
Samsung
Panasonic
Atos Origin
Lenovo
ManuLife
Omega
And let’s not forget the Olympic brand itself. This could do it in completely!
Stay tuned and sign a petition>>
UPDATE: More video >>

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Video: Ricardo Semler’s Open-Capitalism

I’ve been following Ricardo Semler for many years now.
In 1993, in a fit of madness I slipped a copy of Maverick into the hands of Riley Bechtel – thinking as I did at the time, that this is the only way to get Bechtel to re-engineer itself. Of course I was a little too naive…
Today I don’t think I could work at Semco because I’d rather work for myself. But if I had to get a corporate job again (heaven forbid) I’d choose Semco.
Question: when are they opening a “Semco-proper” office in the US? You can check Semco’s company history here.
Anyway, the revolution has happened and it was televised. Here’s what to expect:


And definitely check this out >> (Journeyman Pictures doesn’t understand YouTube – hence the “Embedding disabled by request”)
Open-capitalism is thriving at Semco, and one of these days, it will show up in your industry. What strikes me though is the fact that this model can be used in non-profits, in government (are you listening, Barack Obama?) and even in the fields without hope – like education. Apparently Bill Gates’ foundation is keeping close tabs on Semler’s schooling experiment.

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Online Brand Monitoring: A survey of marketspace analytics vendors and why they fall short

From GE to Target, from IBM to Best Buy, companies of all stripes and sizes are struggling to quantify the effects of Web 2.0 on their companies. What are the blogs saying? Are they positive or negative? What’s happening on Second Life? Where are our customers congregating? Who are the influencers in the marketspace?
The result of this anxiety is a new booming business in “marketspace analytics”—companies that profess to track your brand over time and alert you to news (bad or good) in real time.
Given some of the new findings about buzz in the blogosphere (positive online buzz for cars and trucks doesn’t necessarily translate to volume sales) you have to ask, are they wasting their time?
My take on this is somewhat biased. I view all of these brand monitoring products as the online equivalent of the traditional press-clipping tracking function the PR companies used to cling to as a way to justify their existence.
That said, online brand building is a critical competence for today’s marketer. What matters is not online buzz which is a temporary spike in attention, but what that buzz does to your position in your online ecosystem.
Your competitive position in your ecosystem determines your destiny:
• How do you and your competitors compare in terms of return on marketing investments and relative share of the ecosystem?
• How are the leaders making money, and what is their approach in the ecosystem?
• What is the full potential of your business position in the ecosystem?
• How big is your marketspace—the size of the ecosystem you want to compete in?
• Which parts of the ecosystem are growing fastest?
• Where are you gaining or losing share in the ecosystem or sub-ecosystems you compete in?
• What capabilities are creating a competitive advantage for you in the ecosystem?
• Which capabilities need to be strengthened or acquired to help you compete in the ecosystem?
Because we couldn’t find anything to help us with these questions, we decided to build it ourselves. That’s how our Ecosystem Intelligence™ service came into existence:
(i) to help measure a company’s position in the ecosystem(s) it competes in, and
(ii) to help improve that position in the marketspace over time
Now let’s check out some of the competing brand monitoring vendors:
Biz360: provides customer opinion measurement from thousands of expert and consumer product review websites, shopping sites, blogs and message boards
Cymfony: rated highly by the tech analysts, they claim to “quantify your amount of coverage as well as get expert qualitative interpretation of how effectively your message is being picked up in traditional and social media.”
Skygrid: a search tool that sifts through hundreds of web and mainstream media to show you just one thing: whether the balance of the news on a public company is good or bad, and how the “mood” is changing.
BrandIntel: collects, processes and analyzes online consumer content and applies human analysis to the results in context.
Factiva: monitors your competitors, customers, and industry, with in-depth research and company financial data reports.
MotiveQuest: “sees” the “peaks of passion” in online conversations to understand customer motivations. Again, a combination of proprietary software and human analysts to explore what drives customer behavior.
Nielsen Buzzmetrics: measures consumer-generated media to help companies understand consumer needs, reactions and issues. They use a data-warehouse approach to index customer sentiment.
Scout Labs: allows users to track brands and reactions to those brands. In essence, the company helps companies make sense of positive and negative brand sentiment in blogs, user generated videos, and images.
Umbria: analyzes social media—including blogs, message boards, Usenet, and product review sites. Umbria also adds human insights to their data reports.
And there you have it, all variations on the press-clipping theme.
And unfortunately most companies (including the ones above) don’t get it.
It’s not about tracking buzz, it’s about starting a conversation.
Seth Godin gets it.

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Online Buzz Bubble-Popper: Positive reviews don’t necessarily mean more sales

Positive online buzz for cars and trucks doesn’t necessarily translate to volume sales, period.
Here’s the story in AdAge: “What Web Buzz Does for Car Sales: Not Much”
Turns out that BrandIntel has been monitoring 450,000 comments over the past year. Comments made by “enthusiasts” in consumer discussion forums on auto-information sites such as Edmunds.com, newspaper and magazine sites, and blogs.
Let’s look at the print/paper analogy. This is the equivalent counting the number of press-clippings in the trade mags. As a measure of PR efficacy of getting stories published, it worked great. As an indicator of sales, it didn’t.
What matters in print and online is the credibility of the messenger and the size of the audience. A story in Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ or the NY Times may have a dramatic impact compared to the same story in your local rag.
Online, credibility and audience-size still matter, but so does findability. How easy is the story to find? Does it come up high in Google and to a lesser extent Yahoo? If there is buzz, is the buzz on a hub or a backwater site? Is it getting attention or play through links from other noteworthy sites?
How does one measure that? There is a way – ecosystem relevance – which measures the position and rank of a site within its industry/category ecosystem.

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Marketing in a Downturn

Seth Godin writes about “marketing in a recession” :
The challenge for marketers is to figure out how to change the story they are living so that their customers can change the story they tell themselves. What you make, where you make it, who makes it, how it’s priced and sold and … it all adds up to a perception. If you change these elements the story will change too.
His point is that Starbucks becomes the indulgence of someone who has just traded down to a small rental apartment. Gone are the days of $4.00 coffee just for the heck of it.
I think Starbucks is busy changing their story. They’re trying to be a new, upscale McDonald’s – rapidly working to add in a “drive-in have a happy meal” component to their business model. The trouble is in the demographics. Bill Tancer at TIME tells us that “the Big Mac customer base has remained relatively stable, while Starbucks’ coffee-drinkers have diversified. It used to be that Starbucks attracted customers from a small, elite segment of the country; now, its visitors pervade many more segments across America.”
From my own observations at the local Target, I see far more customer buying ICEEs rather than Starbucks coffees. This is the “threat of substitution” that is always around the corner, no matter how good your product is. Seems like the days of mass-luxury are over.
So where does retail find its consumer, er, citizen? Turns out they’re not citizens at all – you’ve got to sell overseas. India and China are experiencing a huge boom in luxury, thanks to an explosion in middle class prosperity. The fortune is in the middle and the bottom of the pyramid.
And if you can’t reach those consumers? I wrote about that in an earlier post about advertising in a recession.

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Jeffrey Immelt: India versus China – Trust is a Global Issue for GE

I was talking to Bill Dunk this morning, and we got to the topic of trust as an issue in global business.
I told him I’d seen a video in which Jeff Immelt said something to the effect that in China the concept of win-win is an issue, whereas India is much better at partnerships.
Immediately, Bill dug up this article for me – an interview with Nani Beccalli-Falco, GE International’s chief executive.
From the article:
This is a difficult challenge and it is one that Beccalli-Falco speaks of with surprising candour. He talks of the problems of striking deals in China, where, he says, the values of equity and fairness implied in the West’s ‘win/win’ approach to business are replaced by a more naked self-interest. “In China, they have a tendency to think ‘win for China, OK for you’,” he says. “It makes forming partnerships difficult.”
If you want to get a global perspective on business, you must subscribe (for free) to Bill Dunk’s Global Province >>
And yes, I finally dug up the video:

Watch Immelt’s interview with Rajat Gupta, and listen carefully as Immelt talks about India versus China – right at the very end of the video:
“China has a hard time with win-win. That’s a problem over the long term.India’s much better. There’s a much better sense that India can be a real ally…”
Wow.
China’s got the Olympics this summer… wonder if they’ll let anyone else win a medal…