A New Start

Woo Hoo

NY Times: Israeli Army, a National Melting Pot, Faces New Challenges in Training Officers

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/world/middleeast/31israel.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=all

Israeli Army, a National Melting Pot, Faces New Challenges in Training Officers

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

A target at shooting practice last week in the Negev for Israeli officer candidates. They were to hit the figure but not the balloon.

•    

                                                              E-Mail

• Print
• Reprints
• Save
• Share
  • Del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Newsvine
  • Permalink

          

 

By STEVEN ERLANGER

Published: December 31, 2007

 

MITZPE RAMON, Israel — The young officer candidates, in uniforms and old American helmets, their M-16s slung over their shoulders, were blowing up balloons. Lilac, blue and red balloons. Then they attached them to targets.

Skip to next paragraph        

Enlarge This Image

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Almost every branch of the military is represented at the school, where officers-to-be rehearsed recently for a ceremony.

   

The balloons were “hostages,” they said. The point was to hit the target but not a hostage. Of course, since some of these young men and women were training for office jobs, their skills were not always so acute. They did not kill any hostages, but sometimes they did not hit the target, either, their bullets piercing the desert hills.

Other candidates, combat soldiers, were considerably better shots. But the mix was intentional: virtually all Israel’s officers-to-be, from every military branch excluding pilots, pass through this institution in the desert hills of the Negev, near the natural wonder of Mitzpe Ramon, an enormous eroded crater.

Israel’s defense forces are considered among the world’s best, a people’s army that combines professionalism and informality, and serves as a melting pot for a complicated society with real enemies. Yet it also faces challenges, including an effort to recover from a poorly run war, a rise in the number of young people dodging military service and an increase in religious Israelis, many of them settlers, who serve.

The army has faced harsh criticism after the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon,  and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, a former chief of staff who was Israel’s most decorated soldier, has complained that too many people are evading service.

“From the army of the people, the Israeli Defense Forces are gradually becoming the army of half the people,” Mr. Barak said. “A soldier must not feel that when he goes to battle that in the eyes of part of the society he’s a sucker.”

Col. Ziki Sela, who is in charge of personnel planning for the military, said it was important to distinguish between those who were not asked to serve — Israeli Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews, the ill — and the roughly 25 percent of eligible male draftees who found a way not to serve. That figure is nearly twice as high as in 1980, yet not much different from five years ago.

But some of the draft dodgers, both men and women, have been prominent in entertainment, including a famous model and five of the eight finalists in Israel’s version of “American Idol.”

Today, Colonel Sela said, about 54 percent of Israel’s 18-year-old men are being inducted, which is not enough to meet his needs, especially for support personnel. About 43 percent of eligible women do not serve either, he said, in part because a young woman can merely state that she “follows a traditional lifestyle” to be exempted as too religious for the army.

But of the 25 percent of eligible men who do not serve, many live overseas, have criminal records or medical exemptions. Colonel Sela said about 12 percent were draft dodgers. But some analysts, like Stuart Cohen, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, argue that the real figure for true draft dodgers is 5 percent or less.

What the figures disguise, however, is the undiminished fervor of young men volunteering to fight in combat units, which make up roughly a third of the army. The Golani infantry brigade, for instance, gets 10 applicants for every place.

But in another challenge for the army, a large proportion of those volunteering for combat units — 30 percent to 40 percent — come from the “national religious” sector, Zionists who tend to wear knitted skullcaps and are frequently settlers. In the past, many fighters volunteered from Israel’s kibbutzim, or collective farms. But now, large numbers are “the new pioneers,” the children of settlers.

They are eager to fight Israel’s enemies. But as Israel contemplates new peace talks with the Palestinians — and an eventual withdrawal from large sectors of the occupied West Bank — the government and army worry that many of those soldiers, and officers, may refuse orders to dismantle settlements.

Col. Aharon Haliva, 40, is the commander of this school, which is almost as old as the state. A former brigade commander in the occupied West Bank, Colonel Haliva is blunt. “The army reflects the society, with all its strengths and problems,” he said. “After the second Lebanon war, people want to be able to believe in their army, which is themselves.”

He said he worried for a time that young people might refuse to become officers after the failures against Hezbollah in Lebanon. “It’s much easier to win battles when you understand why you’re there, and what you’re expected to do,” Colonel Haliva said in a tart comment on that war. “We all want to be part of a strong organization.”

By the time the candidates get here, “they know how to fight,” he said. “I’m not worried about how they use their weapons. I’m concerned with implanting the right values.”

But this school, like the society, is struggling with the great internal challenge of how, if ordered, to remove thousands of Israeli settlers from the West Bank — many more than the 9,000 torn with such national agony from Gaza.

The army draws many of its best combat soldiers and officers from the “national religious.” Here, they make up about 10 percent of the staff officers, 15 percent of the combat support officers and up to 40 percent of the combat officers, the colonel said. “You don’t find them in Tel Aviv, but all over the hills of Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the biblical names for the West Bank. “They are the pioneers of today.”

When there is a pullout from the West Bank, “a lot won’t serve in a disengagement, I’m sure of it,” Colonel Haliva said. “Just as some kids on the left don’t want to serve in the territories.”

He wants his officers “to have more questions than answers.” But it is his job and that of his staff to explain “the importance of what they’re doing, and the reasons they’re being ordered to do it,” he said. “After Gaza, we thought that maybe some of these kids would refuse to become officers, but it’s not true.”

Still, there are doubts. Levi Harvith, 22, is a member of the Golani infantry brigade, like the current army chief of staff. Tall, fit and articulate, he has already served in Lebanon and Gaza.

“We’re in elite units,” he said. “We’re trained in flexible thinking. We want to lead by example, but we’re encouraged to solve problems in more creative ways.”

Mr. Harvith sees himself as a leader. “In two months I’ll command 20 soldiers, and from them there will be maybe two officers, and that’s another 40 soldiers, and another 40 families. We have a big effect on the society.”

First commanders matter, he said. “The way I hold my weapon — it’s the way my first commander held it.”

He is also religious, he said. Would he have pulled people out of Gaza?

“That’s a good question,” he said, then paused. “For me, it’s not just a religious question but a moral question. I do what I’m told,” he said, pausing again. “Except in moral cases, that’s the point.”

Asked where he would seek advice, he said he would first talk to his father, and then to “previous commanders I admired.”

Would he talk to his rabbi? “Maybe my father would,” he said. “You need the right proportion of asking questions and obeying.”

The national religious are estimated to make up some 15 percent of Israel’s population, and they have growing influence in the officer corps. Yael Paz-Melamed, a leftist columnist for the daily newspaper Maariv, warned that the army was becoming “increasingly political and right wing.”

The “hesder yeshivas,” which combine military service and Torah study for some of the most religious candidates, also raise concerns. The hesder yeshivas now turn out 1,200 recruits a year, Colonel Sela said, a 40 percent increase in five years. “We’re not happy with that,” he said. “It’s too much. We want about 900.”

Israel rarely identifies future officers before they join the army. They are chosen by their commanders after a year or more in uniform, after a battery of tests and often after combat, to come to this place, known as Bahad 1, short for Instruction School No. 1.

About 6,500 cadets a year come through here, Colonel Haliva said, divided into those who will command offices, combat support units and combat units. “We have the young elite of the country here, full of motivation,” he said. “They want to become officers, it’s still a very strong brand in the society, and it’s a brand for life.”

Noa Leshem, 19, arrived here after 16 months in the military. An air traffic controller, she will command a platoon of them. “This place gives me tools,” she said. “What it means to be a leader, what it means to be a Jewish Zionist. I’m more clear-minded now about the army, about the relationship to democracy and the way we can improve.”

This semester takes only 15 weeks, with classes on technical subjects like navigation and weapons and courses on leadership, psychology, character and values.

There is a trip to Jerusalem to visit institutions like the Parliament, the Supreme Court and the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem. It ends with a long combined armor exercise.

Then there are another 15 weeks of specialized training with their units. They graduate as first lieutenants and platoon commanders.

Shahar Heimann, 20, is a combat soldier, having served in Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah. He said the cadets were conscious of Israel’s social divide and how it could affect the army.

“Every soldier here sees himself as a company leader,” he said. “We can’t change the whole society, but in a smaller way, by leading our soldiers the best we can.”

He said it was important to mix with officer candidates from “all over the army and the society — the Druse, Bedouin, Ethiopians, Russians.”

“You see all the minorities,” he said, “and you understand their problems better.”

NY Times: In the Fight Over Piracy, a Rare Stand for Privacy

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/us/31bar.html?th&emc=th

Sidebar

In the Fight Over Piracy, a Rare Stand for Privacy

•    

                                                              E-Mail

• Print
• Reprints
• Save
• Share
  • Del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Newsvine
  • Permalink

          

 

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: December 31, 2007

 

The record industry got a surprise when it subpoenaed the University of Oregon in September, asking it to identify 17 students who had made available songs from Journey, the Cars, Dire Straits, Sting and Madonna on a file-sharing network.

Skip to next paragraph      

Harry Campbell

 

 

Sidebar

Adam Liptak’s column about the legal world appears on Mondays.

Columnist Page »

Related Documents

University of Oregon's Motion to Quash

Record Industry's Response

University of Oregon's Reply

Record Industry's Reply

R.I.A.A. v. The People: Four Years Later (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Blogrunner

Reactions From Around the Web

 

   

The surprise was not that 20-year-olds listen to Sting. It was that the university fought back.

Represented by the state’s attorney general, Hardy Myers, the university filed a blistering motion to quash the subpoena, accusing the industry of misleading the judge, violating student privacy laws and engaging in questionable investigative practices. Cary Sherman, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, said the industry had seen “a lot of crazy stuff” filed in response to its lawsuits and subpoenas. “But coming from the office of an attorney general of a state?” Mr. Sherman asked, incredulous. “We found it really surprising and disappointing.”

No one should shed tears for people who steal music and have to face the consequences. But it is nonetheless heartening to see a university decline to become the industry’s police officer and instead to defend the privacy of its students.

The recording industry may not be selling as much music these days, but it has built a pretty impressive and innovative litigation subsidiary.

In the past four years, record companies have sued tens of thousands of people for violating the copyright laws by sharing music on the Internet. The people it sues tend to settle, paying the industry a few thousand dollars rather than risking a potentially ruinous judgment by fighting in court.

“People get pushed into settlements,” said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. “The Oregon attorney general is showing what a real fight among equals would look like.”

In his filings, Mr. Myers claimed to be looking for a middle ground.

“Certainly it is appropriate for victims of copyright infringement to lawfully pursue statutory remedies,” Mr. Myers wrote last month. “However, that pursuit must be tempered by basic notions of privacy and due process.”

“The larger issue,” Mr. Myers said, “is whether plaintiffs’ investigative and litigation strategies are appropriate.”

Mr. Myers questioned the tactics of MediaSentry, an investigative company hired by the recording industry. He said the company seemed to use data mining techniques to obtain “private, confidential information unrelated to copyright infringement.” He added that it may have violated an Oregon criminal law requiring investigators to be licensed.

A spokeswoman for MediaSentry said it collected only information that users of peer-to-peer networks make available to anyone who cared to look. She had no comment on the licensing law.

The record companies, in an apoplectic response in court, accused the university of having “a political agenda.” They said that it was protecting people who had broken the law and that it was not entitled to raise privacy and due process arguments on behalf of its students.

“Hundreds of universities and dozens of commercial Internet service providers have responded to the exact same subpoenas,” the record companies’ lawyers wrote.

James Gibson, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said Mr. Myers’s arguments had been raised in other cases and had met with little success. Still, Professor Gibson said, “it’s significant that a public university and its state apparatus is standing up to the R.I.A.A.”

Mr. Sherman, of the recording industry association, predicted that Mr. Myers’s motion would fail and said the industry’s litigation strategy had worked well.

“The litigation program, as controversial as it is often written up to be, has been very successful in transforming public awareness,” Mr. Sherman said. “Everybody used to think this was legal. Now everybody knows it’s illegal.”

Indeed, the program seems to be expanding, and universities are being asked to play an even bigger role. In February, the association started asking universities to identify students suspected of file sharing and to pass along “prelitigation letters” to them. The association says it has provided some 4,000 such letters to more than 150 colleges and universities. The letters offer the students what they call bargain settlements of about $3,000 if they act fast, by punching in a credit card number at www.p2plawsuits.com.

“The ‘reduced’ settlement amount, in other words, represents the record companies’ savings from cutting out the middleman — our justice system,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report.

The universities are under no legal obligation to pass the letters along, but most do. Those that don’t typically receive subpoenas like the one issued to the University of Oregon.

At least one other public university in Oregon has cooperated with the industry. In 2004, Portland State responded to a record industry subpoena by blandly and efficiently providing the names, addresses, phone numbers and goofy e-mail addresses of two roommates. The university said it could not say which student’s computer was involved, so it fingered both of them.

“We definitely felt betrayed,” said Karen Conway, the mother of one of the roommates. “They readily turned over private information without notifying us. They placed responding to a legal subpoena far above a student’s right to privacy.”

Though her daughter Delaney was blameless, the record companies’ lawyers demanded $4,500. It was, Ms. Conway said, “basically extortion,” and the family was forced to hire a lawyer. The case against Delaney Conway was eventually dropped. Her roommate settled.

Mr. Sherman said the University of Oregon should disclose what it knew and let the legal system sort out the rest. “It’s no different than us subpoenaing Verizon,” he said.

But an institution of higher education has different aspirations and obligations than an Internet service provider, which is why Portland State’s actions are so unsettling. The University of Oregon’s efforts may be doomed, but there is something bracing about them nonetheless.

All the university is saying, after all, is that the record industry must make its case in court before the university will point a finger at one of its own.

Online: Documents and an archive of Adam Liptak’s articles: nytimes.com/adamliptak.

NY Times: When the Germans, and Rockets, Came to Town

Huntsville Journal

When the Germans, and Rockets, Came to Town

Josh Anderson for The New York Times

A restored Saturn V being prepared for display at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, part of an effort to showcase contributions to the area.

•    

                                                              E-Mail

• Print
• Reprints
• Save
• Share
  • Del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Newsvine
  • Permalink

          

 

By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: December 31, 2007

 

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — In 1950, this cotton market town in northern Alabama lost a bid for a military aviation project that would have revived its mothballed arsenal. The consolation prize was dubious: 118 German rocket scientists who had surrendered to the Americans during World War II, led by a man — a crackpot, evidently — who claimed humans could visit the moon.

Skip to next paragraph        

Enlarge This Image

Josh Anderson for The New York Times

Konrad Dannenberg, 95, is one of the original German scientists who helped turn Huntsville into Rocket City.

 

The New York Times

Before rockets, Huntsville was better known for cotton.

   

Ultimately those German immigrants made history, launching the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit in January 1958 and putting astronauts on the moon in 1969. The crackpot, Wernher von Braun, was celebrated as a visionary.

Far less attention, though, has been given to the space program’s permanent transformation of Huntsville, now a city of 170,000 with one of the country’s highest concentrations of scientists and engineers. The area is full of high-tech giants like Siemens, LG and Boeing, and a new biotech center.

Rocket scientists, propulsion experts and military contractors have given the area per capita income levels above the national average and well above the rest of the state.

Huntsville residents regard their city as an oasis, as un-Alabaman as Alabama can be. But they acknowledge that the state’s backwater reputation is a hindrance to recruiting. Local boosters are hoping to use the 50th anniversary of Explorer I on Jan. 31 as a way to promote Huntsville as Rocket City, unveiling a new pavilion, housing a 363-foot Saturn V rocket, at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a museum and popular tourist attraction.

Even the Germans, who had spent five years cloistered on an Army base near El Paso, knew beforehand of Alabama’s spotty “résumé,” as Konrad Dannenberg, who at 95 is one of the last surviving members of the original von Braun team, put it last week.

“We knew that the people here run around without shoes,” Dr. Dannenberg said, in a tone of deadpan gravity. “They make their money moonshining and that’s what they drink for breakfast, and supper. And so we, in a way, were a little bit disappointed that it was really not that bad.”

The residents were wary of the Germans as well. They knew that most of them had been members of the Nazi Party and that they had built the V-2 rocket for Hitler. But the charismatic von Braun accepted virtually every speaking invitation, winning over Rotarians and peanut farmers.

And the Germans tried hard to assimilate. Von Braun insisted that the scientists speak English if there was so much as a single American, even a janitor, within earshot, said Ernst Stuhlinger, 94, another surviving member of the team. Dr. Stuhlinger was one of many who settled on Monte Sano, the mountain overlooking the town, which reminded the Germans of home.

“People said, ‘If you had just been at war with these people, how can you be so accepting of them?’ ” recalled Loretta Spencer, the 70-year-old mayor of Huntsville, offering a visitor a homemade pecan cookie. “But I think we were just in awe.”

In school, the German children’s diligence posed a challenge. “I remember working real hard in physics class to beat Axel Roth, who later worked for NASA,” Ms. Spencer said. “I beat him by a point on the final exam, and I was really tickled by it.”

The Germans also needed thousands of Americans to staff the missile program. Many who answered the call were “rocket boys” like Homer H. Hickam Jr., author of the memoir by that name, who scavenged together his first rockets in a West Virginia mining town and now lives here. Others were young men from cotton-picking families who went to school on the G.I. Bill.

By the time Explorer I was launched, the residents of Huntsville had so thoroughly adopted the Germans that there was an impromptu celebration. Charles E. Wilson, the former secretary of defense whose severe curtailment of the Germans’ work was blamed by some as having allowed the Soviet Union to beat America to space with Sputnik, was burned in effigy.

And by the mid-1960s, von Braun had so mastered the local culture that when he wanted voters to approve a bond issue for the Space and Rocket Center, he persuaded Bear Bryant, the revered University of Alabama football coach, and Shug Jordan, the rival Auburn coach, to make a television commercial supporting the project.

Rocketry permeated Huntsville, where windows shook and dishes cracked each time the powerful propulsion engines were tested. Children built rockets powered by zinc powder and sulfur, and the mad-scientist-in-the-basement tradition still has a hold. Tim Pickens, a rocket designer who helped a private manned spacecraft win the $10 million X Prize in 2004, attached a 200-pound-thrust engine to a bicycle in his garage here.

City officials trying to capitalize on this kind of ingenuity are irritated that prominent scholars have chosen this moment to scrutinize the von Braun team’s Nazi ties.

A new biography by Michael J. Neufeld portrays von Braun as a man who made a Faustian bargain. Diane McWhorter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Birmingham native, is at work on a book on the space race that compares Nazi ideology to contemporaneous white supremacy in the South.

Most Huntsvillians concluded long ago that the Germans had been coerced into joining the party. And, though skeptical of claims that the scientists were thoroughly apolitical, Ms. McWhorter says Southerners might easily understand that membership in an organization is not necessarily the best indicator of sentiment.

“There were members of the White Citizens Council in the South who were probably less racist than people who weren’t members,” she said.

Residents point to the symphony and the Huntsville branch of the University of Alabama, both nurtured into being by the Germans, and say their enlightened views contributed to the fact that the town had the first integrated elementary school in the state. Dr. Von Braun himself was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan for hiring blacks, said Bob Ward, a Huntsville newsman and von Braun biographer.

Besides, Huntsville is a forward-looking place. The Nazi question “just doesn’t come up,” said Loren Traylor, a Chamber of Commerce vice president. “That was then, this is now.”

FT: India’s IT outsourcers face increasing costs

    India’s IT outsourcers face increasing costs

By Joe Leahy in Mumbai

Published: December 27 2007 22:53 | Last updated: December 27 2007 22:53

India’s information technology outsourcing sector is heading for crunch time next year, as a rising currency and increasing wage and real estate costs force the industry to rethink how it does business.

Multinationals continue to view the country as one of the most viable outsourcing destinations, but competitive pressures are making other countries look attractive.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Cisco to network whole cities - Dec-23

DreamWorks in India studio deal - Dec-21

China and India keep building on success - Dec-17

IBM in $1.6bn emerging markets drive - Dec-12

TCS takes outsourcing centres to US - Oct-16

Vineet Nayyar, chief executive of Tech Mahindra , described as “horrible” the impact on IT margins of a 12 per cent appreciation of the rupee against the dollar this year.

“All your emerging sectors are going to have major problems because of the currency adjustment,” Mr Nayyar said.

India’s IT outsourcing companies have been among the worst performing on the stock market this year. The sector has underperformed the MSCI India index by 47 per cent.

Much of the negative sentiment concerns the stronger rupee, which hit Rs39.16 against the dollar last month, its strongest level since March 1998.

Indian IT outsourcing companies earn most of their revenue in foreign currencies, particularly dollars, but they incur most of their costs in rupees.

The leading companies, such as Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services, have so far largely maintained their margins. Measures they have used to keep margins up include moving more work onshore and hiring cheaper graduates from disciplines other than engineering. They have also employed hedging.

Analysts believe, however, that a longer-term shift in strategy is necessary if India’s IT companies are to prevent more work going overseas to emerging centres such as Vietnam, China and Brazil.

Gartner, the research group, in a study of outsourcing destinations, found that India accounted for 28 per cent of the estimated workforce available globally for offshore work. That makes the country the largest such labour pool in the world.

But the study also found that costs were rising fast. Salaries are climbing an average 14.5 per cent a year, almost double the rate in China and the Philippines, and the rate of attrition is 20 per cent to 25 per cent.

“The attrition [rate] leads to the challenge of consistency and therefore of quality for buyers of these services,” said Ian Marriott, research vice-president at Gartner. “And so the whole appeal of India is starting to just lose a little bit of the gloss.

“It’s still very appealing for a whole variety of reasons but it’s starting to get people thinking: should we investigate other locations as well, probably not as an alternative necessarily but in addition to India.”

Indian companies needed to move away from thinking that more demand meant more hiring and extracting greater productivity out of existing workforces, Mr Marriott said.

While the larger companies were also trying to become more global and were setting up centres in other offshoring locations, this was not an option for the small and medium-sized outsourcers, he said.

These smaller companies had to become more specialised. “They’ve got to be very niche by design and very focused on specific markets, specific services, specific kinds of customers,” Mr Marriott said.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

NY Times: Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike

Bright Ideas

Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike

•    

                                                              E-Mail

• Print
• Reprints
• Save
• Share
  • Del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Newsvine
  • Permalink

          

 

By JANET RAE-DUPREE

Published: December 30, 2007

 

IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.

Skip to next paragraph      

Igor Kopelnitsky

 

     

Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.

This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.

Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse of knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set of people, called “tappers,” a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called “listeners,” were asked to name the songs.

Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.

The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?

That’s a common reaction when experts set out to share their ideas in the business world, too, says Chip Heath, who with his brother, Dan, was a co-author of the 2007 book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” It’s why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other engineers. It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.

“I HAVE a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too,” Mr. Heath says. “People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.”

But there are proven ways to exorcise the curse.

In their book, the Heath brothers outline six “hooks” that they say are guaranteed to communicate a new idea clearly by transforming it into what they call a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. Each of the letters in the resulting acronym, Succes, refers to a different hook. (“S,” for example, suggests simplifying the message.) Although the hooks of “Made to Stick” focus on the art of communication, there are ways to fashion them around fostering innovation.

To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”

In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track.

When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”

She cites as an example the work of a colleague at Ralston Purina who moved to Eveready in the mid-1980s when Ralston bought that company. At the time, Eveready had become a household name because of its sales since the 1950s of inexpensive red plastic and metal flashlights. But by the mid-1980s, the flashlight business, which had been aimed solely at men shopping at hardware stores, was foundering.

While Ms. Rabe’s colleague had no experience with flashlights, she did have plenty of experience in consumer packaging and marketing from her years at Ralston Purina. She proceeded to revamp the flashlight product line to include colors like pink, baby blue and light green — colors that would appeal to women — and began distributing them through grocery store chains.

“It was not incredibly popular as a decision amongst the old guard at Eveready,” Ms. Rabe says. But after the changes, she says, “the flashlight business took off and was wildly successful for many years after that.”

MS. RABE herself experienced similar problems while working as a transient “zero-gravity thinker” at Intel.

“I would ask my very, very basic questions,” she said, noting that it frustrated some of the people who didn’t know her. Once they got past that point, however, “it always turned out that we could come up with some terrific ideas,” she said.

While Ms. Rabe usually worked inside the companies she discussed in her book, she said outside consultants could also serve the zero-gravity role, but only if their expertise was not identical to that of the group already working on the project.

“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field,” she says. “Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”

Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.

ST - From bullet maker to defence tech giant

>> Back to the article

Dec 30, 2007

ST ENGINEERING'S 40TH ANNIVERSARY From bullet maker to defence tech giant

Singapore Technologies Engineering's transformation is recounted in a new book, Under One Sun, published to mark its 40th anniversary. Defence correspondent David Boey reports

SINGAPORE Technologies Engineering had a somewhat unfortunate beginning. The year was 1967, two years after Singapore became independent. The new nation had set up Chartered Industries of Singapore (CIS), the forerunner of ST Engineering, to make bullets for its fledgling army. A young Defence Ministry officer loaded 20 rounds into an AR-15 rifle magazine to test-fire the first batch of 5.56mm bullets. The first three shots went well but when the fourth round exploded, it sent bits of the bullet casing into the left arm of the young officer. There had been too much propellant. Luckily, he was not seriously injured. That young officer is now Mindef's chief defence scientist, Professor Lui Pao Chuen. So when he says that CIS 'nearly killed themselves' in the early days of production, he is not exaggerating. After the accident, all new ammunition would be tested with the weapon secured on a stand and fired remotely. Forty years on, the humble bullet factory sitting on a 10ha site at 249 Jalan Boon Lay has grown into a global giant. The group employs more than 18,000 workers in about 100 companies. It has offices and factories in all continents except Antarctica and chalked up sales of $4.49 billion last year. Its products include assault rifles and machine guns, armoured vehicles, stealth warships, road-paving machines and vehicle-tracking gadgets. AN EMPLOYEE at Mobile Aerospace Engineering in the United States, one of 100 companies run by ST Engineering, performing aircraft maintenance work. -- PHOTOS: COURTESY OF SINGAPORE TECHNOLOGIES View all thumbnail Photo 2 of 3 « Prev   Next » THE COMPANY MAY BE the world's biggest producer of 40mm ammunition for automatic grenade launchers. View all thumbnail Photo 3 of 3 « Prev   Next » TO SHOW HOW EASY it was to fire the Ultimax 100 light machinegun accurately, slim women in figure-hugging jumpsuits were hired to demonstrate its use   Contrast this to CIS' earliest days, when the company employed just 10 workers and its product range was a grand total of one - those 5.56mm bullets. But the importance of the bullets should not be underestimated. The then minister for the interior and defence, Dr Goh Keng Swee, reasoned that Singapore should make bullets for its own army to ensure self-sufficiency. Besides, imported ammunition would be expensive. But bullet production was not as straightforward as it seemed. Singapore's humid weather threatened to ruin ammunition production. To solve the problem, the bullets were manufactured in refrigerated rooms with dehumidification units to protect the gunpowder from humidity.   Match-grade bullets CIS learnt from the botched firing trial and went on to make such good bullets that the US gun manufacturer, Colt Industries, declared the bullets 'match grade'. This meant its bullets were as good as handmade bullets used in firing competitions. Match-grade bullets have their grains of gunpowder measured individually to ensure each bullet has the same amount of propellant. They are thus more accurate than mass-produced bullets where minute differences in propellant can result in inaccurate firing results. Prof Lui recalls proudly: 'The precision of the CIS-made rounds was so high that Colt bought CIS ammunition for their M-16 demonstrations around the world.' Colt later gave CIS the licence to make M-16 assault rifles for national servicemen. Ever the practical man, Dr Goh also got CIS to branch into minting coins in 1968. Though the two products make strange bedfellows, he said: 'There are many practical advantages in this combination for both share common facilities, for instance, in security arrangements, in metallurgy and in the tool and die workshop.' He also spearheaded the formation of a slew of defence-oriented companies to support the air, naval and land forces. The Government registered a company called Sheng-Li Holding to be the 'umbrella' holding company for these defence companies.   Change of names DR GOH himself picked the name Sheng-Li, which means 'victory' in Chinese. Singapore's expertise and production capabilities in defence grew as the military added more sophisticated war machines to its arsenal. In 1989, the stable of companies under Sheng-Li embraced the Singapore Technologies brand name and logo to forge a common corporate identity. CIS was absorbed under ST Automotive, which made guns, trucks and tanks. It was later renamed ST Kinetics. Whether it was under the old or new name, the companies ventured beyond national defence to take on commercial work. They also ventured overseas. For instance, skills developed for repairing, upgrading and modifying the Republic of Singapore Air Force warplanes set the scene for ST Aerospace's move into performing such work on airliners. Mr Ho Yuen Sang, ST Aerospace's deputy president, credits its former president, Mr Quek Poh Huat, for taking on commercial work. 'Today, if we were not doing commercial work, a significant part of our business would not be there. 'That was our first strategic decision,' he said. 'The next was the decision to go overseas.' That strategy paid off handsomely. Last year, Overhaul & Maintenance magazine ranked ST Aerospace as the world's top provider of maintenance, repair and overhaul services. Such work keeps the world's airliners flying. In a similar vein, the hush-hush work pioneered by ST Electronics to maintain Singapore Armed Forces equipment used to command, control and communicate with military units saw it amass skills sought after by the commercial sector, such as the development of computer software for 'intelligent buildings' that controlled features such as power, water and security. Leveraging on experience in integrating the building information system at Changi Airport in 1981, ST Electronics won projects for installing electronic brains in Singapore skyscrapers such as Raffles City, as well as China's tallest building, the Jin Mao Building in Shanghai. Such skills came to the fore during the Sars crisis in 2003. Working with the Defence Science and Technology Agency, ST Electronics developed a portable fever scanner that could screen large numbers of people for signs of fever - an early indication of Sars infection. Time magazine picked it as one of the 'coolest' inventions of 2003. Ten years ago, the defence industries marked their 30th year with the merging of ST Aerospace, ST Electronics, ST Kinetics and ST Marine into ST Engineering. Today, ST Engineering is more than a weapons company. Commercial services such as airliner maintenance work and ship repairs account for about 70 per cent of the group's sales. Military-related sales to the SAF and customers abroad account for the remaining 30 per cent. The group has also chalked up a number of world firsts. Its battle-proven Ultimax 100 light machinegun, weighing in at 6.8kg with a drum of 100 bullets, is the world's lightest light machine gun - a record that has stood unchallenged for 20 years.   People power ALTHOUGH ST Engineering has never divulged who its customers are, the distinctive Ultimax 100 has been spotted in newsreels in battle zones from Bosnia to Sri Lanka. To market the weapon, CIS had borrowed from the commercial world and used sex appeal. It hired slim women in figure-hugging jumpsuits to show how easy it was to fire the weapon accurately. The company reckons that it is the world's biggest producer of 40mm ammunition for automatic grenade launchers - an infantry weapon that spews baseball-size grenades at a rate of up to 500 per minute, up to a distance of 2.2km. For all the heavy hardware, ST Engineering's president and chief executive officer Tan Pheng Hock is mindful of the important role that software played in the group's achievements. 'It is imperative that as we globalise and expand, we continue to harness people power. The last 40 years are years of achievements created and led by people,' he said. dboey@sph.com.sg   Copies of ST Engineering's 40th anniversary book can be found at libraries. The book is not for sale.

heh

View all thumbnail	Photo 3 of 5	« Prev   Next »
PHOTO: AFP

Time: Meritocracy Is the Model - Infosys

Thursday, Dec. 13, 2007

   

Meritocracy Is the Model

By  Simon Robinson/Bangalore

 

So many big indian companies remain family-run that their board meetings might as well be held at the dinner table. Not so at Infosys. Founded in 1981 by seven engineers--none of them related--the Bangalore-based company has become not only a $3 billion-plus technology-services giant but also the epitome of the modern, professionally managed Indian firm, with a culture of meritocracy based on the idea that anyone could be boss.

 

   

S. Gopalakrishnan, Kris, CEO of Infosys and Nandan Nilekani, Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors lounge by the pool at the ITC Maurya Hotel in Delhi, India.

Michael Rubenstein / Redux for TIME

S. Gopalakrishnan, one of the founders and the current CEO, says Infosys built that culture from the ground up. "We said, If we're going to make it a success, there have to be some rules, some common values, some structure to the whole thing." That included a strict ban on nepotism and a compulsory retirement age of 60. Founding CEO N.R. Narayana Murthy, who still flies coach despite a net worth estimated at $1 billion, says the break with the past was deliberate: "We had to aspire to global standards, especially if we wanted to attract investors from abroad." When he turned 60 in 2002, Murthy stood down as CEO and moved back to his first, more modest office. His successor, co-founder Nandan Nilekani, retired as CEO in June, although he remains chairman.

But while its goals may have been global, the company was--and is--run in an unusually communal fashion. In the U.S., says Murthy, "the CEO is the emperor." At Infosys the CEO is more like a chief justice, presiding over arguments and casting a vote only when necessary. "Ultimately, I will decide," says Gopalakrishnan. "But I usually don't need to. We try to foster a much more collegial, consensus-based environment that allows the best information to come out."

That sounds so warm and fuzzy, you could almost hug it. But how does it work? A council of the top eight executives discusses all major decisions. It's rare that the entire group is in Bangalore at the same time, so the team has mastered the art of succinct e-mail for any question that comes up. Everyone weighs in with a yes or no and a line or two of reasoning. "Why waste time?" asks H.R. director T.V. Mohandas Pai. "We all know each other." And this is a company built on information. Says Murthy: "We've always thought data and facts will have to drive the company. We used to say, 'In God we trust. Everyone else brings data.'"

Infosys is one of the Big Three IT companies (along with Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services), but success is changing it. The company has doubled its workforce in the past 18 months, to about 80,000. This year alone, it will hire more than 30,000 additional employees.

Alas, recent staff surveys suggest that morale, especially in the lower ranks, has slipped.

The company has also been buffeted by external winds. India's currency has appreciated 12% against the dollar this year, hitting profits, and the subprime-mortgage crisis is forcing U.S. banks, among Infosys' biggest customers, to tighten their belts. Infosys has handled those problems by increasing salaries, boosting currency hedging and shifting its focus slightly to Europe and developing markets like South America.

But to keep growing while retaining its founding principles, Infosys decided it needed bigger changes. In late October the company announced a restructuring that will divide Infosys into industry units (e.g., banking and energy) and horizontal units focusing on issues like infrastructure that cut across industries. Infosys hopes that the new structure will drive the spirit of consensus-based decision making deeper into the company. Each division will have its own decision-making council, with at least one employee under 30, while the team at the top may eventually double. As well as sharpening Infosys' customer focus, "the restructuring is also partly about refocusing and re-energizing our staff," says Gopalakrishnan.

Those younger employees will be the ones to keep Infosys' principles going even when the five remaining founders retire, so Infosys also asks senior managers each to take half a dozen up-and-comers under their wing. "I firmly believe that a democracy will always avoid a disaster," Murthy says. But those values have to be taught. "It may not be the quickest way to do things in the world," Murthy adds, "but you'll never see a famine in a democracy." Infosys managers hope that what holds true for nations can also apply in the corporate world.

 

• 
• Click to Print

• Find this article at:
• http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1694473,00.html

Kandinsky

couple riding; moscow I; sky blue

==