But what I found more interesting (and disturbing…) is how some of the arguments, specially those ones about the concept of Good Enough Quality Syndrome,  looked so similar to what Ortega y Gasset had written down around 80 years ago in his book The Revolt of teh Masses:

There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the public life of Europe at its present moment. The fact is the accession of the masses to complete social power.

(…)

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.

I have never liked much Ortega’s ideas and books; one of the main reasons is that I had to read and study several of them for my high school history and philosophy classes (that’s what happens when your culture has very few modern philosophers, you always end up having to read the same ones…); and I do not think he is right on most of the pessimistic predictions he included in The Revolt of the Masses.

However, it is a good food for thought to think how some of the advances in communication and information technologies, and new applications such as social network sites, have an effect on the concept oft the masses that Ortega described so negatively in the 30s (remember, that was the decade of the Great Depression, the rise of fascist movements,…), and how his ideas may be an interesting counterpoint to the Smart Mobs theory (but then, of course, Smart Mobs has its own web site, and Revolt of the Masses just a short entry in wikipedia…)

Maybe it’s time to dust my old Ortega’s books, and read them again…

A couple of quotes that specially attracted my attention (emphasis is mine…):

In any case it is often statistically difficult to disentangle the effects of globalization from those of the ongoing forces of skill-biased technical progress, as with computers; structural and demographic changes; and macroeconomic policies.

(…)

Much of the extreme poverty was concentrated in rural areas, and its large decline in the first half of the 1980s is perhaps mainly a result of the spurt in agricultural growth following de-collectivization, egalitarian land reform and readjustment of farm procurement prices – mostly internal factors that had little to do with global integration.

(…)

Issues like globalization, inequality, poverty and social discontent are thus much more complicated than are allowed in the standard accounts about China and India.

The article is quite short, and, although it points some inconsistencies in the standard accounts about China and India, it does not provide any alternative explanation for phenomenons such as the rise in inequality indicators and its relation with globalization.

The point I found more intriguing, however, is the mention of the effects of skill-biased technical progres. In the traditional development accounts, technical progress is always associated to positive effects, but as the author hints, it is possible that technical progress (or some kind of technical progress…) also has a negative effect on equality, since the access to technology and its advantages may be limited by its cost and/or required skills to use it.

There are many efforts to use technology as tool to trigger economic and social progress in the more disadvantaged groups, but I wonder how many of them are really succesful and what are their effect on poverty and inequality indicators…

POST UPDATE: after writing this post, I found a paper about the increasing social fragmentation and inequality in Bangalore. I have not had time to read it in full detail, but the author seems to favor the thesis that globalization increases inequality:

Bangalore’s meteoric rise to a globally integrated location of modern service industries reflects the recent trends of economic globalisation. (…) Its integration into the highly competitive framework of inter-city linkages produces profound processes of urban restructuring creating new disparities and a highly fragmented and polarised urban society. Bangalore is becoming what is called a multiply divided city where both social and geographical barriers are reinforced.

For those that have never visited India, the concept may need some explanation: in Indian cities street names are almost useless: only some of the main roads have recognizable names, and even in those cases there are no signs displaying those names. Smaller streets do not have names, or if they have them, usually add to the confusion (there are whole neighborhoods full of numbered main and cross streets that do not seem to follow any predetermined pattern). If you add the fact that building numbers are almost inexistent, it is almost impossible to find a place only with the street name and number.

The solution is a landmark based address system. Basically, when you give somebody directions on how to get to some place, they are based on a series of landmarks, usually well known building, such as temples, official buildings, shopping centers, or any other specific street features that stand out. Any address is useless unless it includes the corresponding set of landmarks.

The consequence is that the mapping and directions applications that had been developed with the more regular American or European street systems in mind were useless for Indian cities, and they had to adapt to the specifics of Indian street systems and support landmarks. Yahoo Maps implementation is not perfect: it provides landmarks when giving directions from one place to another, but it does not allow you to include a landmark in an address (at least it has not worked for me…); but, with all its limitations, it is a step forward to adapt mapping and GIS systems to local needs

On one side, this is a clear example on how technological solutions have to adapt to local specific conditions, but this development also opens questions about the influence of technology on habits and attitudes: as GPS navigation, mapping software, and related technologies become more popular in countries such as India, will hey change the way addresses and directions are given?, does the inclusion of certain landmarks in a system such as Yahoo Maps say something about the relevance of that specific building?, who determines that a certain building and or site is a landmark?.

I can imagine, in the future, corporations, shopping malls, and other commercial sites paying for the inclusion of their corresponding locations as landmarks, and if that becomes a source of revenue for this type of services, is it possible that landmark based systems are also implemented in mapping services for other places?, and would that change the way we think and model our cities?…

The fact is that in business, as in real life, it seems that we are in desperate need for that big idea that is going to save us all our problems .

I know that today’s is a fast evolving world and  it is very difficult to be aware of all the changes and trends, and it is even more difficult to put aside some quality time to reflect and get some understanding on what do they mean and are the forces behind them.

Ido not expect terribly deep analysis; no need to be a Plato, or a Kant, not even a MacLuhan, no need to write a thesis dissertation to justify any decision or action; but I really would like that people (and specially some of the people that I interact and work with…) took some time to look beyond the prefab and canned big idea of the month.

At the end, those ideas are just like balloons: the bigger and better they look, the more hollow they are…

It’s not the first time that I have had to read one of those (yes, we have also gone through the TQM, six sigma, lean enterprise, you name it,… phases), and one of the things that have always amazed is how these books, regardless of the concepts always look the same:

• Cover: of course, they have hard cover, since, in most cases, companies are going to buy them and give them to their employees, paperback may look too cheap (saving your company out of chaos it’s definitely going to be worth the few extra bucks…)
• Dust jacket: the problem with hard cover is that it tends to be boring (elegant but boring). The solution is the dust jacket: drop some vivid colors, huge font size for the title, and, very important, an allegoric illustration (little people moving big big boxes works great in most of the occasions).
• Title: the book title must be catchy!!. The form adjective+noun+exclamation mark is one of the preferred options. Usually, the title is complemented by a subtitle, including some buzzwords, such as change, capability, deploying, leveraging,….
• Endorsements: on the back side of the dust jacket there must be some praises and endorsements for the authors and the book. A combination of well known business schools (Harvard and/or MIT Sloan are a must…), some CEO, and some business magazine works wonders.
• Text format: once you get into the book content, the first thing hat you notice is that a quite large font size is used (smaller font size is associated to academic books and we don’t wanna look too academic and put off people from buying the book, do we?).
  It is also good to use a combination of Times and Arial (one for text, the other one for cases, for example). Everybody knows how to do that using MSWord, so this trick makes the book closer to the humble reader…
• Graphs and diagrams: some graphs and diagrams are thrown here and there. They do not need to add much to the concepts presented (do we really need to have a diagram of a funnel to understand what the writer(s) mean with the metaphor of an idea funnel?), but they make the content lighter and they can be reused for the course slides (and there’s definitely an expensive course associated to the book, that’s how consultants make money…)
• Cases: the text will describe a couple of important concepts (they do not need to be very complex or innovative), but it has to be full of cases and examples. Here is where you can see the difference in the quality of the consultants that have written the book: the better they are (or the more connections they have) the larger and better known the companies will be. It’s good to have also a couple of mystery cases where the name of the company is changed for confidentiality concerns.
  The cases do not need to add too much to the concepts presented in the book; no deep analysis, no details on the problems faced when implementing the touted techniques and methods, and, most important, no negative examples (we don’t wanna convey the message that this marvelous method may not work in all the cases!).

In summary, this is a perfect example of the medium is the message; it does not really matter that much the contents themselves, but rather the way they are presented. At the end, each one of these management fads is going to last a few months, until a new one gets the attention of our top level management and we have to read yet another one book that solves all the company problems…

PD: I encourage readers to try to guess which was the book I read (I have to admit that I went through most of it in a diagona reading mode)

And today it’s also BlogDay. This year, O should have prepared this a little bit more, but I have not. Preparing your blog list for BlogDay is like preparing your the gift list for Xmas time, you always want to do it in advance, with lots of time to carefully think about what you put in the list, but at the end you end up doing it in a rush in the last minute….

Anyway, this is my list of five blogs for this year:

• Pasta and Vinegar: I don’t know where the name of this blog comes from, but it is a very interesting blog about design and technology and its interaction with space and society. It is in the line of Jan Chipchase’s Future Perfect (which I cannot list it today because I already did last year…)
• Barcelona Photobloggers: BlogDay is about blogs you have discovered lately. Well, since I came back to Barcelona, I’ ve started to get more involved in photoblogging, and I’ve discovered quite a lot of good local photobloggers. Since I cannot list all of them, I link to the blogger’s blog. It is in Spanish, and it includes lots of local interest information, such as photo exhibitions and competitions, but even if you don’t speak much Spanish, take some time to look at the photoblog links to see some of the stuff that local photobloggers are doing….
  (Barcelona Photobloggers is, also, the organization through which, if everything works OK, I’m going to have one of my photos exhibited in a museum. Even if it is only for a few days and as part of a visual projection, it’s a way to start…)
  
• Space and culture: another interesting blog that touches the topic of the interaction between space, culture. society and technology
• Streetpulse: as you can see from some of my latest posts and how this list is evolving, I’m getting more and more interested on urban spaces and street photography. This blog kind of combines both interests.
• Metroblogging in Rio: There’s no Barcelona Metroblog yet (I’m registered to start writing as soon as there are four more bloggers from BCN, but it seems that there is not much interest in metroblogging from Barcelona…), and I think that last year I already listed Bangalore’s, so for the time being, lets read the blog from one of the coolest cities on earth….
  

An this is it for this year.

Happy BlogDay to everybody

Update on august 30: I found in the Internet the map of cities that have been/are being invaded…

… or mailboxes in Bangalore…

As widespread as it is the use of color coding, it remains quite a local thing in many occasions. The meaning and associations attributed to different colors varies a lot in different cultures and societies, so color codes are constantly being invented to be used in specific situations and locations. Some of them may evolve to be fully global, maybe trough a formal standardization process, but in lot of cases they remain local, or are reinterpreted (translated) when moved to different situations and cultural environments….

A small test: what different type of garbage do you think you should throw in each container?, what type of letters would you put in each mailbox? (try to answer the question without reading the small print in the photographs…)

I usually get quite a lot of questions about India when I get back from these trips. India is second only to China on attracting attention of business people and the public in general; but usually, the knowledge about the country and its economical, political, and social conditions is heavily mediated by the media news.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog entry from India about how western media usually approach the economic and social evolution of India in the last years, linked to the growth in IT and IT enabled services, and the stereotypes and cliches that are common in this type of analysis.

The authors description of a typical article about India seems to apply only to the English business oriented media. In Spain, in the last month and a half, there have been only two news bits about India in El País (my preferred local newspaper, and, discounting its political prefernces, a quite reliable source of information). One of them was quite a lengthly article about sati, the ancient practice of widow inmolation in the husband’s funeral pyre. The article headline talked about the survival of this practice in today’s India, and only when you got into the fine print you read that two cases have happened in the last couple of years and, in total, since independence in 1947, about 40 cases have been registered (remember that we are talking about a country with a population of more than 1 billion). The other was a short clip about the election of a woman as the country president, the first one to occupy the highest (but with very little real power) political position since the country independence in 1947.

The common thread of the stereotypical article about Indian economic growth and the Spanish generalist media coverage about India is the focus on what makes the country different, while downplaying any development that may approach it somehow, even if it is just a little bit, to the concept of developed countries.

However, those development and changes exist, and even if they are small steps, the huge size of the Indian population male them very relevant. For example, in terms of technology evolution, the widespread diffusion of mobile phones usage has open lots of possibilities for new applications and use models that very few companies seem to be tapping in (the major exception I know about is the work that Nokia is doing to understand mobile phone usage in developing countries and that Jan Chipchase captures in his blog).

A few years ago, C. K. Prahalad popularized the concept of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Maybe we should also start talking about the Future Innovations at the bottom of the pyramid…