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Doctors Share, Globally: So Should We!
By Shlomo Maital
Doctors all over the world are using social media to rapidly share information about the coronavirus. And this is saving lives. Here is an example.
An emergency room doctor at Lincoln Hospital, in the Bronx, New York City, reports on the BBC that some distressed COVID-19 patients are NOT being intubated, with ventilators. And the results are good. Why? What is going on?
An Italian doctor published, on social media, the following insight: There are two types of coronavirus patients: L type and H type. L type have poor oxygenation, 60-70% oxygenation of their blood, or even 50% (normal is 95%). But they show no distress, are hungry and have good clinical presentations. Hmm. The H types have similar lack of oxygen, struggle to breathe – and they definitely need intubation.
Intubating L type patients can be harmful, and actually make them worse. Besides, with ventilators very scarce, misusing them can actually cost lives, by depriving those who need them. The Lincoln Hospital doctor read this and acted on it, with success. Well done!
There is a desperate need to learn more about the novel coronavirus, and because this is a pandemic, it is vital to share knowledge rapidly, efficiently, candidly and truthfully, among countries. And doctors are doing this. They are sharing insights on-line and other doctors, despite long desperate work days, are tracking this literature and learning and applying what they learn. As they are in Lincoln Hospital, Bronx.
We can all learn from this. Why just doctors? We all can share ideas, creative solutions, and information. There is a catch. There are evil people out there, spreading rumors, fake news, conspiracy theories…and muddying the water, fogging the insights. And there are miscreants who are inserting pornography into Zoom conferences, some of them important.
Twitter has been effective in preventing and punishing fake news. You get a warning, then removal, and have to meet conditions to get back on. Facebook has been delinquent and unwilling, for the most part. With social media playing a crucial role today, we cannot afford to have them act as delinquents, like Facebook. If needed, regulators should step up and put their feet to the fire.
My Apology to Technology: Sorry!
By Shlomo Maital
Dear Technology,
OK – I know. I’ve written many hard words about you, especially about social media, how they distribute fake news, ruin our trust in experts and in one another, waste our time, destroy face-to-face social contact…ruinous!
And then – the coronavirus. We have organized family Whatsapp gatherings, with our kids and grandkids in LA, NYC, and various sites in Israel…seeing those beautiful faces keeps us healthy.
Yesterday we had a regular class with our Rabbi Elisha, with 11 participants, including Q&A and lively discussion, on Zoom. A whole program of lectures has been organized by our Synagogue.
I’ve been videotaping (with Zoom) lectures on entrepreneurship and startups, and recycling old tapes, these have a new life as everyone is at home and often online.
My wife Sharona observes that we are not engaged in social isolation, or separation, but in spatial separation. Stay together, but stay apart, is the message. And the only way to do this safely is through technology. Thank heavens for Outlook, Zoom, Whatsapp, Facetime, Facebook…and, yes, hard to say it, but yes, for Twitter.
So – sorry, Technology. This is my Apology. We need you more than ever. You are coming through for us just when we need you. If we did not have you, it would be hard to bear the isolation, especially for us grandparents and seniors.
Yours truly, Shlomo Maital
“Business Does Better With Love”
By Shlomo Maital
So let’s be clear. Friendships do better with love. Marriage does better with love. Religion does better with love. Love does better with love. Obvious, right?
Everything does better with love. Even war. Respect your enemy and retain your humanity even when fighting for your life.
But – business?? After several decades of teaching MBA classes, in business schools that preach hard-core bottom-line business warfare, I am reading Moshe Engelberg’s new book, first of a series, The Amare Wave, with a combination of delight and perhaps, amusement – at how those who preach fierce capitalism will respond to it. * (Amare means ‘love’ in Latin).
Engelberg is a successful business consultant, founder of ResearchWorks; he has a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University.
Business does better with love, Engelberg shows. Love for whom? Love for your stakeholders – your workers, managers, clients, shareholders… all those who have a stake in your success. It’s a mystery why so many businesses purposely exploit and squeeze their workers, when long-term, respectful love given to them drives long-term loyalty and motivation. If everything does better with love – why then have economists sold the idea that business is the exception – and business does well only with knife-in-the-teeth competition, perhaps the only human endeavor that is a no-love zone?
How is company success measured? By short-term operating profits? How about, Engelberg writes, how well people are treated? By how much real value is created for clients? Imagine, Engelberg writes, that love is not only “the new necessity in business, it is simply how business is done in the 21st C and beyond”. And guess what? Because business is done better with love, it is also, in the end, more profitable. Engelberg knows; he has long years of experience as a consultant.
Imagine — business acts to become kind, green, socially responsible, philanthropic and good for society. Imagine. All business.
I eagerly await Engelberg’s second book in the series – a set of stories about love in business. I kind of wish Engelberg had started the series with the stories – narratives are, I think, far more powerful than polemics.
Show us, Moshe, how business really does work better. You have a tough road ahead – Amazon, Facebook, Google are not exactly Mother Teresa. Google’s “do no harm” has done loads of harm, and Facebook doesn’t even pretend to do good, while Amazon ruins many small retail businesses and squeezes workers.
Here are today’s market cap figures for these three companies: Google $894 b., Amazon $869 b., Facebook $551 b. In contrast: Exxon’s market cap is only $67 b.
Could Google, Facebook and Amazon have even bigger long-term market caps, if they practiced Engelberg-style love? Well, I believe they could – but right now, very few agree.
Alas.
= = = = =
- Moshe Engelberg, with Stacey Aaronson. The Amare Wave: Uplifting Business by Putting Love to Work. Angel Mountain Press, 2019. 359 pages.
Disruption – It’s Personal!
By Shlomo Maital
In the musical Hair, there is a song, The Age of Aquarius. Today, we might sing, The Age of Disruption. Technology is disrupting virtually everything – and everyone needs to be keenly aware of how to live under continual disruption.
A short and very partial list: Amazon disrupted bookstores, then all retail stores; Tesla’s electric vehicles disrupts GM, Ford and big dinosaur car firms; Blockbuster disrupted movies by renting DVD’s, then Netflix disrupted (bankrupted) Blockbuster by mailing DVD’s, then disrupted cable and networks with streamed creative content; Uber disrupts taxis, Coursera, EdX etc. disrupt traditional colleges, Sprite and Verizon disrupted copper phone lines, Skype disrupted phone companies, Facebook and Google disrupted advertising, especially print and TV, Internet disrupts everything, especially print magazines and newspapers.. and AI disrupts all routine tasks (e.g. airport check in, without seeing a human being before security).
Notice — virtually always, it’s small upstarts that disrupt the big giants — dinosaurs too slow and too dumb to innovate. Often though they use their size and muscle to catch up. Microsoft seems to have caught up to Amazon in Cloud services, despite being way way behind at first.
It’s a good news/bad news joke. The good news is, all this disruption does create value for people, otherwise it would not be disruptive. The bad news is, disruption ruins big dinosaur companies who are also big employers. So far, however, these massive shifts (e.g. from assembly lines manned by human hands to ones without any at all) seem to create lots of jobs while destroying many – but that’s little comfort if your own personal skill suddenly becomes valueless.
Disruption is highly personal. Be prepared to be disrupted. It will happen to everyone. Think about how, why and when. Think about what to do to prepare. Think about your personal skills and passions that fulfill two conditions: You love doing them, and are good at it; and they create value for many people, in ways that machines and algorithms cannot.
As an educator, I feel disrupted because young people today can learn things on their own that I used to teach them. Solution: Embrace the disruption and try hard to partner with it, so that a human element is needed and creates value.
How are you being disrupted? And how are you adapting?
Why Facebook is Destroying Civil Society: In 218 Words
By Shlomo Maital
Social media are destroying civil society. Here is why, in 218 simple words. I base this blog on the brilliant words of a young Egyptian, whose Facebook posts initiated the massive 2011 protests that ousted Hosni Mubarak. He was interviewed on a recent BBC program.
Facebook and all social media earn fortunes in profit. In 2018 Facebook had $55 billion in revenues and made $22 billion in net income (profit), a 40% net margin!
Facebook earns money by advertising. Advertising is based on ‘eyeballs’ (number of viewers). So Facebook engineers build algorithms that maximize profit by maximizing ‘engagement’ (number of viewers).
Engagement is maximized by hatred and negative messages. Why? Psychologically, negative messages gain more attention than positive ones.
What role does truth play? Virtually none. You can post almost anything. Like the fake video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ‘stumbling’ on her words (didn’t happen). Facebook refused to remove it.
Result: Conventional media like newspapers are driven out of business by social media. The investigative journalism of newspapers is replaced by the vicious falsehoods propagated by social media, entirely to make short-term profit.
Result: A sharp decline in public trust, in the institutions that govern us — legislatures, politicians, political leaders and even the courts.
What can be done, when a lot of really bad people, like Russia’s “Fancy Bear” unit linked closely with GRU (KGB’s successor), use social media to screw up elections? What happens when economists pitch the idea that if you let greedy companies like Facebook maximize profits, everybody wins? What happens when people don’t yet grasp the immense harm social media are doing, let alone press for action to constrain them? What happens when the evil asymmetry of ‘hate drives out love’ generates $22 billion a year in profit, when just a decade ago Facebook LOST $56 million?
I have no idea.
How We Economists Missed the Boat
By Shlomo Maital
As an economics student, many years ago, I was taught that production (both industrial and agricultural) was ruled by a Law. The Law of Diminishing Returns. (See diagram). The more effort you invest in something, the less and less additional output you get. This law originated in agriculture. For a given plot of land, the output of food it produces rises by less than the labor and resources invested in it. Here is the proof: If there WERE increasing returns, you could grow all the world’s wheat in a flowerpot. The same “law” translated as well into industrial production.
Some 23 years ago, in 1996, a brilliant and convention-breaking economists named W. Brian Arthur published an article in Harvard Business Review. The title: Increasing Returns and the New World of Business. I wish I had paid closer attention to it. Here in his words is why the ‘law’ of diminishing returns has been repealed forever.
The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things. As the economy shifts steadily away from the brute force of things into the powers of mind, from resource-based bulk processing into knowledge-based design and reproduction, so it is hsifting from a base of diminishing returns to one of increasing returns. A new economics – one very different from that in the textbooks – now applies, and nowhere is this more true than in high technology. Success will strongly favor those who understand this new way of thinking.
What does this mean for us ordinary people, in simple language? Mainly, this. If you live in a world of increasing returns, then follow what a brilliant Israeli manager once decreed: first to imagine, first to move, first to scale. Think of a great idea. Get it rolling. And then scale it up fast! Because – winner takes all. The farther ahead you are of competitors, the more efficient and more profitable you become. And in the end, you, the winner, rule the market and can eliminate or buy up all your competitors. And basically, do whatever you want to make piles of profit. Including — hire armies of lobbyists.
Does this sound familiar? Apple? Google? Facebook? Amazon?
Problem is, our political and regulatory systems still do not fully understand this. Only now are government bodies beginning to investigate the monopolistic practices of Facebook and Google. These huge winner-take-all operations operate globally, so checking their power locally, in individual countries, is very difficult.
The dominant economic idea of free markets and open competition does not hold when the law of diminishing returns has been repealed and replaced by increasing returns. In this new world, little fish grow bigger, swallow the smaller fish and become predatory whales. Despite Arthur’s seminar article written in 1996, I believe it has not fully dawned on us that the old economics is gone forever.
We need to rethink how we regulate economies dominated by predatory whales rather than vigorous little minnows.
Can Facebook Innovate?
By Shlomo Maital
This cartoon ran in a German newspaper; it was accused of anti-Semitism, because its portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, who is Jewish, with a long hooked nose, recalls anti-Semitic literature.
Actually Facebook and Zuckerberg do have a problem. But it is NOT anti-Semitism. It is innovation – how to remain innovative, even though Facebook is not that old. When startups grow to global size, almost invariably they lose the creative spark. And Facebook is no exception. Facebook has been forced to acquire its innovation, rather than initiate it internally. Its innovations like Home and Graphsearch failed; and it paid huge sums for Instagram and WhatsApp.
In an interview with New York Times writer Farhad Manjoo (April 17, “Can Facebook Innovate?”), Zuckerberg describes Creative Labs, an effort to unbundle the “one big blue app” that migrated Facebook to mobile phones. Creative Labs will try to create a wide variety of Facebook spinoffs, with specific features users seek, some of them not even branded as Facebook. It should not be that hard. People spend 20 per cent of their mobile time, on average, on Facebook. This is amazing, considering Facebook migrated to phones not that long ago. But – how to sustain this 20 percent? It already seems to be eroding.
Why is it so hard for companies to innovate, as they grow large? Zuckerberg’s answer:
“Understanding who you serve is always a very important problem, and it only gets harder the more people that you serve,” says Mark Zuckerberg.
Big companies become isolated from their customers. Senior management sits in their 30th floor corner offices, and never speak to a real customer from one year to the next. And when customer preferences change rapidly, daily, hourly, this isolation from customers and clients is almost fatal. Zuckerberg is struggling to keep in touch with Facebook users.
Will he succeed? Stay tuned. Meanwhile, let’s learn from Facebook. As your startup grows, do everything possible to keep decision-makers in touch. Have them make sales calls. Get them out of their offices at least two days a week. Have them answer the customer service phones for a few hours a week. and have them bring regional executives and sales personnel back home frequently, for informal chats. It is the sales people who really know what is going on with customers.
Another key issue: Wealthy senior management live lives totally different from those of their customers, and soon grow out of touch with reality. Zuckerberg says: “ .. my life is so different from the person who’s going to be getting Internet in two years. One of the things that we do is ask product managers to go travel to an emerging-market country to see how people who are getting on the Internet use it. They learn the most interesting things. People ask questions like, ‘It says here I’m supposed to put in my password — what’s a password?’ For us, that’s a mind-boggling thing.”
Startup entrepreneurs must make a point of trying to live more or less ordinary lives, if they are to remain in contact with real people. Pretty hard, when your net worth is several billion dollars.
Internet for the World: Facebook & Drones!
By Shlomo Maital
Hard to believe, but the World Wide Web is only about 23 years old. In 1993, only 20 million people were on the Internet. In 1999 only four per cent of the world’s population of 6 billion people, or 240 m., were Internet-linked. Today 40 percent of the world’s population of over 7 billion people, or some 2.8 billion people, is Internet-connected! The Internet has changed our lives massively and permanently. That is – those of us who are connected.
But what about the remaining 4.2 billion, or 60 per cent of the world? Google and Facebook are both racing to find ways to connect them. It is not easy. Most of those 4.2 billion people live in countries with minimal infrastructure. How can it be done?
According to Vindu Goel, writing in today’s New York Times, Facebook is pulling an “Amazon” (remember Jeff Bezos’ recent pitch, that Amazon will deliver packages with drones) and is hiring as many as 50 aeronautical engineers and space scientists, to “figure out how to beam Internet access down from solar-powered drones and other ‘connectivity aircraft’.” This will be done in a new Facebook Connectivity lab and a project called Internet.org. Part of Mark Zuckerberg’s goal, apparently, is to make (and keep) Facebook the most cool, interesting place to work. He is fighting against the curse of scale – big companies lose their creative drive, and their creative people, as they scale up and bureaucratize.
Earlier, Google too announced a drive to connect those unconnected 4.2 billion. Google’s approach currently focuses on high-flying balloons. Facebook is also working on compressing Internet data, cutting the cost of Internet mobile phones and finding ways to hook up remote areas.
Neither Facebook nor Google seem to have a clear business model in mind for their balloons or drones. The advertising model probably won’t work, because most of those unconnected 4.2 billion people are quite poor – although the late C.K. Prahalad pointed out, in his book, Fortunes at the Bottom of the Pyramid, that collectively, they form a huge market.
Many analysts are very critical of both Google and Facebook for their ‘connect everyone’ efforts.
Maybe we are missing the point. Maybe Google, and Facebook, are trying to connect everybody, because – it’s just the right thing to do. Maybe this is a new face of capitalism? Could it possibly be? Maybe an exlusive capitalism that leaves out over half the world will eventually crumble, taking Google and Facebook with it..and maybe Sergei Brin, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg realize it? Maybe inclusive capitalism is cool?!
TIMnovate 