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Thanks, Custodian & Sanitation Workers!
By Shlomo Maital
If you click on your Google logo today, say when you do a Google search, you’ll see the above graphic – and the (hidden) words, thanks, custodian and sanitation workers!
Well done Google.
Our daughter is a family physician who runs a large clinic in the south of Israel. Her protocol is to have those who feel ill, to call and a time is set up. The patient enters by a separate door, into a ‘clean room’… which is disinfected after the visit. Our daughter explains: The heroes are the cleaning personnel. They do the hard, dirty dangerous work. She made sure, in her clinic, to assemble them all, and recognize their dedication and heroism, on several occasions. In New York City, for instance, it is they who keep the hospitals clean, including the most dangerous virulent areas, like the ICU’s….
So good for you Google. I hope lots of people do read the hidden text behind the graphic, on Google’s logo….
p.s. another Kudo for Google — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz observes in the New York Times that by using Google Trends, you can spot what people are searching, and hence maybe find key symptoms of COVID-19…like itchy eyes…. worth a try! Seth is a big data expert….
“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?
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.
Larry Page: As Innovator Role Model
By Shlomo Maital
Fortune magazine has chosen Larry Page (Dec. 1 issue) as Business Person of the Year. The feature article begins with a revealing joke, told often around Google. At Google’s “moon shot” Google X center, where self-driven cars, high-altitude wind turbines, and stratospheric balloons for Internet access are developed, a ‘brainiac’ creates a time machine. As the scientist reaches for the power cord to start a demo for Larry Page, Page says: “Hey! Why do you need to plug it in!?”
For a decade Page was one member of a triangle – Sergei Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Page – that led Google. In 2011 Page took over as CEO. Turns out he is a good manager. In the past three years, Google has grown 20% annually, and has quarterly revenue of $16 b. It has $62 billion in cash. Page invests heavily both in Google’s core business (he says he argued with Steve Jobs, who said, ‘you guys are doing too much’) and in far-flung new projects. According to Fortune, in the past year, Google has invested in artificial intelligence, robotics and delivery drones. It has expanded its venture unit, which invests in startups and is a kind of scouting team. It bought Nest, a smart-home startup. It invested in Calico, a biotech firm.
Originally Google set out to “organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible”. Today that vision is too narrow. Page says he wants Google to change the world in ways most of us cannot imagine.
Some say Google is too narrowly focused on advertising revenue. But YouTube now brings in $6 billion in annual revenues. Page continues to invest in bold ventures, to ensure the company’s future. He is making ‘credible bets’ on the home, the car, and wearable devices.
Most amazingly, Google has a secret facility where a team of scientists are working on a project that will chemically ‘paint’ tiny nanoparticles, with a protein, so they bind to things like cancer cells. And then concentrate them through magnetized wearable devices, so they can be ‘queried’. This would enable constant monitoring and detection of a whole host of devices. Outside Google’s core competence? Not at all.
Page regards some of his bold bets as a portfolio bucket. Some will pay off. Many won’t. He doesn’t think the risk is high. By the time you want to put large sums of money into something, you pretty much know whether it will be profitable, he says. For him, not taking risks is the biggest risk of all.
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?!
Senior Brain: ‘Googling’ Expands Your Mind – Honest!
By Shlomo Maital
An article in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (Feb. 2009) by Small, Moody, Siddarth and Bookheimer, is titled “Your Brain on Google: Patterns of Cerebral Activation during Internet Searching”. It confirms something I personally have felt and believed – Google-ing is good for your brain and expands your mind.
First the experiment. The authors took 24 subjects, 12 of whom had minimal Internet search engine experience, and 12 of whom had extensive experience. Ages were 55 to 76 years. They used functional MRI scanning to study brain activity when subjects “performed a novel Internet search task, or a control task of reading text on a computer screen, formatted to simulate a printed book”. In both cases, the content was precisely matched.
Now, the results. “Internet searching may engage a greater extent of neural circuitry not activated while reading text pages, but only in people with prior computer and Internet search experience.” They conclude: “In older adults, prior experience with Internet searching may alter the brain’s responsiveness in neural circuits controlling decision making and complex reasoning”.
What this suggests is, perhaps, that Google-ing stuff is good for your brain. When you Google a subject, you scan through a large number of pages of material, fairly quickly, and your brain works hard to spot precisely what you need and what is relevant. And the more you do this, the better your brain gets at it – it’s a kind of exercise. It is a skill that is not developed when you simply read a printed page.
In general, modern technology clearly alters our brains. The way our children think, work and make decisions may become very different from the way we older-generation people think and decide. In fact, the differences already exist. Perhaps a good way for us Gen Senior to understand Gen Y is simply to make more use of the technology that they use.
TIMnovate 