People, places, technology, and such

On top of setting up my web site, there’s some other stuff that has kept me away from blogging in the last few days. Among other things, I have had the pleasure of reading one of these business books written by a group of consultants, describing yet another method to get your company out of chaos, that has become the latest fad in top level management meetings all over the corporation I work for (and I guess that in many other corporations).

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)

I’ve been back to Bangalore for a couple of weeks on a business trip.

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…

A couple of weeks ago, I caught TV program on deslocalization. I guess that the term sounds quite strange in English , but in French, and also in Spanish, it has become quite a common word to refer to the process of migration of (more or less skilled) jobs from developed to developing countries.

Obviously, since the term has been coined in countries that, supposedly, are loosing jobs in this process (and where labor unions are quite powerful), it has a very negative connotation. Even the word itself shows this connotation: deslocalization seems to suggest that work is being moved out of a location, a place, to somewhere in hyperspace, rather than what is really happening: being moved from one location to another. Relocalization sounds like a more exact term to describe the concept, but this term would probably not have the same impact…

Going back to the program, I got interested because they were showing some images of Bangalore, including some places, streets and shopping malls, that I had visited several times while we were living there, but the fact is that, in terms of contents, it was not very good. It abounded in the image of jobs being steeled from the developed countries, while, at the same time, the traditional values of the destination countries is also lost. It focused, mostly, on call centers, so there were also the typical topics of English accent training classes and the hard job of spending 8 hours a day answering customer calls.

In particular, there was this portion where they showed how some call center employees went to the mall to do some shopping of western items after receiving their monthly salary. The funny (or maybe sad) part is that they made that sound as something wrong: why should people from a third world country spend their hard earned money in western items such as cell phones or jeans?.

The fact is that there were lots of underlying cliches on which are the expectations, needs and values of social groups in developing countries, and, using a very superficial analysis, the conclusion was that deslocalization was bad both for the source and the destination countries. I guess that the intention was to justify the opposition to the whole phenomenon not only on the basis of job losses but also on the supposedly perverse effect on the culture and way of living in the destination countries.

The effects of deslocalization, offshoring, job migration, or however you want to call it… are much more complex, deep (and unsettling?) that what a TV program can show in little less than one hour, and you cannot expect that a deep social analysis on those effects will keep general public’s attention, but simplification should not mean just jumping into cliched conclusions…

When the program was shown I was also reading India’s New Middle Class by Leela Fernandes, and, although offshoring is not the main topic of the book, it describes and explains the causes for lots of the consuming habits changes in the new middle class in India, and their complex relation to the success of India as one of the destinations for high technology enabled jobs. (Unluckily, I forgot the book, when I had read more than three quarters of its content, in an airport loungue…)