Crossroads Dispatches

West Meets East on Trust

I'm thinking it's time to do an abbreviated tour of Asia's creative class centers - focusing exclusively on China and India - this winter. Reading Alan Watt's excellent, ultra-concise introduction to Taoist philosophy sealed it in my mind. I've also grown tired of speculating about what India and China might be like by reading alone and inquiring of Indian-Americans and Chinese-Americans without my own first-hand knowledge. (Yes, I've been to Asia but never these two countries. And if you blog from either of these countries, please introduce yourself - evelyn [at] korugroup [dot] com.)

Alan Watts clearly states what I have long been thinking. That is, that although we in the West live in a secular society, there are clearly principles evident in nearly each of our institutions - yes, and this would include business - that reflect long-held philosophies, religious thought and cultural myths whether or not these concepts are still believed today.

The problem is that we have been brought up in a religious and philosophical tradition that, to a great extent, has taught us to mistrust the nature that surrounds us, and to mistrust ourselves as well. We have inherited a doctrine of original sin, which tells us not to be too friendly, and to be very cautious of our own human nature - The Way of the Tao, by Alan Watts

One could fill a book on the myth of the Fall (i.e. Adam and Eve being evicted from their rent-free Paradise) and of the concept of original sin - and its effects on Western society today. But I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader - well, at least for now.

It's fascinating that some cultures have an entirely opposite philosophical history and it begs the question: Does one get a different outcome with a fundamentally different philosophy as the underpinning of your society?

There are two great main currents in traditional Chinese thinking: the Taoist current and the Confucian. Both of them agree on one fundamental principle, and that is that the natural world in which we live, and human nature itself, must be trusted. They would say of a person who cannot trust his own basic nature, "If you cannot trust your own nature, how can you trust your own mistrusting of it? How do you know that your mistrust is not wrong as well?" If you do not trust your own nature, you become as tangled up as anyone can be.

Their idea of nature is that which happens of itself so, and that is a process which is not fundamentally under our control. By definition it is that which is happening all on its own, just as our breathing is happening all on its own, and just as our heart is beating all on its own - and the fundamental wisdom behind Taoist philosophy is that this "self-so" process is to be trusted.

Taoist thought is generally attributed to Lao-tzu, who is thought to have lived somewhere around 400 BCE and to Chuang-tse, who lived from 369 to 286 BCE...In its final form, however, it is so similar to Buddhism that Taoist terms are often used to translate Sanskrit texts to Chinese. Once Buddhism was imported to China, Taoism so completely permeated Mahayana Buddhism in general and Zen Buddhism in particular that the philosophies of these schools are often indistinguishable.

When we look to Confucian ideas, which governed Chinese moral and social life, we find a different world that represents the basis of human nature...This word [jen or ren] is symbolic of mankind's cardinal virtue in the system of Confucian morality, and it is usually translated "human-heartedness" or "humanness." When Confucius was asked to give a precise definition of it, though he refused. He said, "You have to feel the meaning of this virtue. You must never put it into words."

The wisdom of his attitude toward defining jen is simply that a human being will always be greater than anything they can say about themselves, and anything they can think about themselves. If we formulate ideas about our own nature, about how our own minds and emotions work, those ideas are always going to be qualitatively inferior - that is to say, far less complicated and far less alive - than the actual author of the ideas themselves, and that is us. So there is something about ourselves that we can never get at, that we can never define - and in just the same way you cannot bite your own teeth, you cannot hear your own ears, and you cannot make your own hand catch hold of itself. So therefore you must let go and trust the goings-on of your humanness. Confucius was the first to say that he would rather trust human passions and instincts than trust human ideas about what is right... - The Way of the Tao, by Alan Watts

Creatively Destructing Our Work

Knowledge work is the future, they said. And 'knowledge' work is exactly what is being globalized. More often than not, it's a commodity. And Free Prize Inside does a great job describing how we've let our work slip into the netherworld of commoditization.

We've fooled ourselves into thinking that white-collar work is supposed to be as repetitive and rule-based as running a punch press. - Free Prize Inside

We need more creative, conceptual, innovative work. We need more creative destruction, not less. Not destruction for destruction's sake, though.

Perhaps we resist because we are yearn for some solid ground amidst the whir of chaos and complexity. It may feel as if there are no constants, nothing at all stable...but there is.

We are aware of the existence of a self, of a core in our personality which is unchangeable and which persists throughout our life in spite of varying circumstances, and regardless of certain changes in opinions and feelings. It is this core which is the reality behind the "I," and on which our conviction of our own identity is based. Unless we have faith in the persistence of our self, our feeling of identity is threatened and we become dependent on other people whose approval then becomes the basis for our feeling of identity. Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others...- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

(I'll share more about Erich Fromm's practice of rational faith in later posts.)

In 1996, as I left the then-secure world of computer programming and tentatively entered into marketing I said to myself: Well, I hope I know what I'm doing. Amidst all the ups and downs of the technology economic lifecycle - I've been threw countless lay-offs - you could always count on landing on your feet as someone was out there that needed C++ code written. Marketing departments were always being chopped and hacked. Engineering was safe.

Security isn't an outside job. I just followed my own inner compass even if it was outrageously out-of-sync. I was just done with programming. Fini. You couldn't pay me enough to do it and I had an inkling of what was next for me. While I follow trends I don't let them unduly influence my direction.

On speaking about his experience at Starbucks (actually Schultz' story is one of the best business stories on following your inner compass I've ever read), we're told:

To move from a small start-up to a respected global brand, [Howard] Schultz declared, the biggest personal challenge was "reinventing yourself." - The Power of Impossible Thinking

I don't mean to alarm anyone unduly. This is actually good news - really, it is. I was just doing a bit of research for another project and if you're not convinced that you need to continually reinvent yourself, this is your wake-up call below. As the authors of The Power of Impossible Thinking offer:

"Beware of the midlife crisis from postponing change."

Computer Associates CEO Sanjay Kumar remarks, "If you work behind a computer screen, your job is up for grabs." - ComputerWorld

A century ago, 40 percent of Americans worked on farms. Today, the farm sector employs about 3 percent of our workforce. But our agriculture economy still outproduces all but two countries. Fifty years ago, most of the US labor force worked in factories. Today, only about 14 percent is in manufacturing. But we've still got the largest manufacturing economy in the world - worth about $1.9 trillion in 2002. We've seen this movie before - and it's always had a happy ending. The only difference this time is that the protagonists are forging pixels instead of steel. And accountants, financial analysts, and other number crunchers, prepare for your close-up. Your jobs are next. After all, to export sneakers or sweatshirts, companies need an intercontinental supply chain. To export software or spreadsheets, somebody just needs to hit Return. - Wired, The New Face of the Silicon Age by Daniel Pink (yes, the same author who's publishing this)

Several recent studies concur that there has been an unexpected and large shift of work since the outsourcing pioneer Citigroup set up a company in India two decades ago. They cite cost advantages as the primary reason. According to Celent, in 2003 the average M.B.A. working in the financial services industry in India, where the cost of living is about 30 percent less than in the United States, earned 14 percent of his American counterpart's wages. Information technology professionals earned 13 percent, while call center workers who provide customer support and telemarketing services earned 7 percent of their American counterparts' salaries.

Experts say that with China, India, the former Soviet Union and other nations embracing free trade and capitalism, there is a population 10 times that of the United States with average wage advantages of 85 percent to 95 percent.

"There has never been an economic discontinuity of this magnitude in the history of the world," said Mark Gottfredson, co-head of the consulting firm Bain & Company's global capability sourcing practice. "These powerful forces are allowing companies to rethink their sourcing strategies across the entire value chain."
- NY Times, "Financial Firms Hasten Their Move to Outsourcing", August 18, 2004 (via NYBanker)

[John] Ludwig, the former Microsoft Corp. executive who co-founded Ignition [Partners, a Seattle VC firm], thinks about the future for his college-age children.

"I am encouraging them to wrap their head around the issue because it is going to be a real fact of life for their careers," Ludwig said. - Seattle PI, "Venture Capital: Weighing pluses and pitfalls of offshoring"

"There is not a board meeting that goes by in which outsourcing does not play a significant role," says [managing partner, Accel Partners, James W.] Breyer. [Accel is a top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm.] - BusinessWeek, "Look Who's Going Offshore"

NYT On When Offshoring Isn't Best Option

Good balanced NY Times story on outsourcing and offshoring to India:

Only certain kinds of tasks can be outsourced — what can be set down as a set of rules," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of Global Insight, a forecasting and consulting firm based in Waltham, Mass. "That which requires more creativity is more difficult to manage at a distance.

A typical challenge is the difficulty of finding programmers overseas who can go beyond following well-known procedures to the next steps of identifying problems and creating new solutions.

Takeaway: Want to be stay competitive and stand out from the pack? Be creative! Keep in mind the ultimate objective is to solve compelling and burning issues for businesses and society. Writing software or handling a customer account are means to the higher end. Strive to add value.

...ultimately gave up on outsourcing because the Indian company that it worked with could not deal with the fast-changing requirements.

Indian engineers and software designers in this country know that the businesses whose needs are driving technological innovation are mostly in the United States. It comes down to being where the customers are.

When outsourcing fails, he said, it is typically because "less disciplined" businesses try to farm out projects that are not properly defined.

But Mr. Pradhan agreed that the need for proximity to the final user of the technology does place limits on what types of tasks can be outsourced. "Whenever the pace of innovation is very rapid," he said, "is when the work should be done closer to the client."

Takeway: These (and more) reasons are the reasons I am a big advocate for agile software development processes, including the most well-known version called Extreme Programming, or XP. It's the ideal type of process for business requirements that change and evolve (know any that don't?), builds in frequent customer feedback to ensure the project meets customer needs and focuses on working software that delivers business value within an robust iterative process. (In my own personal experience, I nixed offshore engineering because I didn't have the bandwidth to create highly detailed specifications that I feel comfortable that were fairly fixed and manage the project frictionlessly.)

What cannot be sent to India, he said, is the invention of new business processes and technologies.

Takeaway: These are important core tasks for any company. One of my favorite Peter Drucker quote is: "A business only has two functions. Marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation make money, everything else is a cost." And I'm with Geoffrey Moore that you don't outsource your core function(s).

Such distinctions are why even the champions of India's programmers-for-hire industry are trying to do more work within the United States. This month, for instance, Infosys announced that it would spend $20 million to set up a consulting company in the United States.

Takeway: Being close to the customers (I'll grant you being close doesn't mean you listen to them -- so take advantage of the proximity to your customer) and their fast-changing requirements matters. And it's not a zero-sum game. I predict more jobs will be created across the board at a global level and it's definitely time to be a creative-class professional wherever you live in the world.

Decline & Fall of the American Programmer, Take 2

Last night I attended a Silicon Valley Patterns meeting where we discussed and reviewed the draft of Ed Yourdon's next book. Since I'm not sure that I can share specifics about the book itself, let's just say this is the man whom wrote the book titled "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" in 1992 (published in 1993) which foretold the offshoring trend back when everyone was still in denial (a trend now way way beyond the Gartner hype cycle ;-)).

There are enough nuances to write an entire hefty tome on the issues surrounding outsourcing and offshoring of "knowledge work" and in particular the offshoring of software development (something I know about intimately as I have a computer engineering degree, programmed for about 10 years before I went over to the dark side a.k.a. marketing). So, I am creating a new "category" in the blog: Offshoring/Outsourcing.

What was "irrational exuberance" at the start of the New Economy now feels like "irrational depression" or "irrational desperation". Methinks the pendulum seems to swing a wee bit to emotional extremes in this industry. Lest you think this is a permanent condition you might want to recall the New Economy (up, up, up forever -- what's an economic cycle) preachers. Now we are all ears to the prophets of unending doom.

So today I will briefy try to stick to one theme that has tendrils in global citizenry, non-zero sum games, and abundant mentality....whew!

Ross Mayfield has a thoughtful piece on outsourcing/offshoring:

In moments of percieved crisis, fear prevents us from acting for the future. It's also easy to forget in troubled times the plight of others, especially when they are out of view.

Eradicating global poverty has been an ideal of the Left since Humphery. The means of employing globalization has only recently been at our disposal. Outsourcing as a home front issue has led to senseless abandon of a larger war according to Charles Krauthammer.

Public opinion has trouble seeing past both tomorrow and our shores. Hard decisions with postitive outcomes have negative short-term effects. Outsourcing is no exception. As the leading force in globalization, the US is permanently embedded in an interdependent world (despite the Administration's attempts to the contrary). The press plays a significant role in furthering the disconnect between Americans and their future neighborhood, through episodic framing and the economics of broadcast to depict idealized shared identity.

From a Fast Company article:

I hope that this could be something that transforms and brings lots of people into the modern world. -- Ronil Hira, RIT assistant professor and chair of the workforce policy committee at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

I recall a speech I heard MIT professor of management and economics, Lester Thurow give at the Commonwealth Club a few months back. (He was on tour for his book, Fortune Favors the Bold : What We Must Do to Build a New and Lasting Global Prosperity.)

He said in the past people viewed themselves as Cincinnati workers or Pittsburgh workers or St. Louis workers because that was the arena where they competed for jobs and that was the place they identified themselves as belonging to. As transportation, telecommunications, etc. made the world appear smaller and more interconnected one might start to identify with being a Bay Area worker and by and by, expand into a nationality identity -- maybe, think of oneself as an American programmer.

The bold ones (reference to title) are the ones that realize that boundaries have expanded and blurred yet again. We are global workers and the people that "get it" see themselves primarily as global citizens.

Whom exactly is an American programmer, anyway? I asked last night. (There were obviously quite a few people at the table whom I'd guess by accents were not born and raised in USA. For the record, my parents are both from Cuba; so I guess I'm first-generation "American").

There is this feeling we are in a zero-sum game. There must be winners and losers, period. Right? Everyone knows there is a limited and fixed number of jobs in the world, right – and if someone gets one then they took it away from someone else. A zero-sum game is one where it is impossible for both sides to win. (Besides being known as a zero-sum game, this is also known as scarcity thinking.) Where does this assumption come from?

At the Accelerating Change conference last year at Stanford (btw, highly recommend), one of the most compelling speakers was Richard Wright, the author of Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny. He traces man's history to show a definite direction toward groups' recognition (starting with tribes) that they are inextricably interconnected and interdependent on one another for their own self-interest. His book sold out at the conference's book table within minutes of his talk.

From Fast Company:

Thorvald Stoltenberg, president of the Norwegian Red Cross, argues that poverty is the root of war, violence, and terrorism--and that alleviating it is in the self-interest of the wealthy.

Last night one of the participants was recently hired at Google. He gleefully offered to refer anyone at the table for a job at Google (his premise: if we willingly spend Tuesday nights talking tech we are in the top 1% of talent). They are hiring like mad at the Mountain View, USA campus. (Google is a global brand, so they are hiring worldwide as well.) Note I said hiring -- not laying off.

Much later in the discussion he remarked that Google has its eye on the top line (something I've noted many companies has lost touch with in their cost-cutting frenzy). In glaring contrast to the view of many companies today, this new Google employee cited Steven Covey and said that Covey would characterize Google as having an abundant versus scarcity mentality and culture.

So one secret to Google's success is: The prophets of gloom-and-doom don't even register. They have the mindset of plenty and unwavering belief in their success....which typically is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right. -- Henry Ford