A New Start

Dubai, Microsoft, Tourists, Innovation

                                                           

http://www.business24-7.ae/cs/article_show_mainh1_story.aspx?HeadlineID=1602 Microsoft and Emirates sign deal

by Staff Writer on  Tuesday,January 29,2008

(SUPPLIED)                                          Microsoft and Emirates said they will set up an ‘Innovation Lab’ in Dubai to develop products and services for the travel industry.                             Both companies will invest in the project, which they say will tap into the software giant’s technologies and the carrier’s expertise and experience in developing IT solutions for the aviation sector.                             A statement said: “Microsoft will work with Emirates experts in the ‘Dubai Innovation Lab’, which will be among the first of its kind for both the companies in this field.                             “The lab will enable Emirates’ IT division, Mercator, to incubate and develop creative solutions for airline and travel customers around the world, including Emirates. Mercator’s IT solutions are today used by more than 100 airlines globally.”                             Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum (pictured above, right), Chairman and Chief Executive of Emirates, and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (pictured above, left) witnessed the signing of the memorandum of understanding outlining the project during a meeting held in Dubai .                             “Innovation has been a cornerstone of Emirates’ success. By working with technology leader Microsoft to develop cutting-edge products and services, we are looking to reinforce our commanding position and continue to pioneer new ways to serve our customers,” said Sheikh Ahmed.                             The lab will take Microsoft’s latest technologies and apply them to the development of new ways of working across all parts of the travel and aviation industry – from reservations and check-in to cargo and ground handling systems.                             “Emirates airline has established a powerful reputation as a dynamic, forward-thinking company, and this agreement will strengthen this reputation further,” said Charbel Fakhoury, General Manager, Microsoft Gulf.                             “By adopting these next-generation technologies, the airline is setting an important precedent. The Gulf region has a massive potential to contribute to the global development of technology-driven innovations, and Emirates is leading the way.                             “Through the establishment of our Innovation Lab, Microsoft and Emirates airline will demonstrate how technology can play a defining role in enhancing business operations and customer experiences.”                             Through the lab, Emirates and Microsoft will explore implementation of technologies based on Microsoft software and hardware as well as online services.              Khaleej Times Online >> News >> THE U.A.E UAE, Microsoft in historic partnership By a staff reporter 28 January 2008  DUBAI — Microsoft Corporation joined hands with the Dubai Cares charity programme and the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation yesterday to spread the latest knowledge technology for education and research purposes in the Arab world. The Dubai Cares-Microsoft Digital initiative was announced during a special signing ceremony attended by His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. The joint initiative will provide children with access to technology that will help develop the knowledge and skills necessary for students, teachers and communities within the next five years.  The programme is aimed at raising the level of computer literacy among school staff and parents in needy communities and help teachers foster a culture of innovation among students. The initiative will result in a dramatic increase in the availability of quality education and demonstrate how technology can enhance learning and improve educational systems in the least developed parts of the world. In the first phase, Microsoft will help establish Learning Resource C|e|n|t|r|e|s |that |s|er|ve |as community based e-learning hubs for students, teachers and communities. The next phase will enable Dubai Cares and governments concerned to launch targeted PC campaigns that will ensure an effective learning environment with the relevant software, capacity development and educational curricula. Microsoft founder Bill Gates met officials from the Dubai School of Government. Microsoft will also soon partner with the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation to launch the Arab Education and Research Network, a first-ever knowledge portal in the Arab world.  Under an agreement signed between Gates and Mohammed Al Gergawi, Chairman of the Board of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, it has been agreed that Microsoft will provide state-of-the-art technology platform for collaborative research and knowledge creation in the Arab world. Microsoft will build the critical communications capabilities required for effective collaboration. These will include the latest knowledge sharing solutions, which will help develop an Arab Research Database and an extensive e-library. Microsoft’s world leading communication platforms, online chat and discussion boards, newsletters, and sites for blogging and social networking will also form a core of the project. This technology aims to boost the region’s capabilities and serve as a gateway to world-class knowledge, providing the right platform to encourage researchers and faculties contributing to the Arab knowledge development. The platform will facilitate communication and the exchange of information and knowledge among professors, researchers and academic institutions. It will also help construct a foundation for a data bank of digital Arabic research to provide a backbone for the Foundation’s initiatives. Microsoft in tie-up with EIA By a staff reporter ABU DHABI — Microsoft Corporation has entered into alliance with the Emirates Identity Authority (EIA) to enhance its technological capacity, besides providing developing human resources. This was stated by Microsoft Corporation Chairman Bill Gates during his keynote address at the Government Leaders Forum here. The technological support to the Emirates Identity Authority (EID) would help it secure personal data, more secure than on paper, he said.

FT: Various - talking, speaking, writing

Chief execs should learn the art of oratory

By Michael Skapinker

Published: January 29 2008 02:00 | Last updated: January 29 2008 02:00

There are so many lawyers crammed into London's International Dispute Resolution Centre that there is almost no room for anyone else.

Seventy of them are taking part in the proceedings over how much Britain's banks should be allowed to charge customers for unauthorised overdrafts. For anyone interested in how the English Bar's biggest names perform, this is clearly the place.

My interest had been piqued by a reader's comment on my column three weeks ago about how many more lawyers than MBAs were running for US president. The reader said the cut-and-thrust of the courtroom was better preparation for the political hustings than the daily life of a chief executive, who does not get enough practice speaking.

Is this true? Chief executives make dozens of speeches a year and address small groups daily. As for the liveliness of the courtroom, I recall a school careers adviser warning those with lawyerly ambitions that if we pictured ourselves moving juries to tears with our eloquence, we were in for a disappointment. I have since spent enough tedious days reporting from court to vouch for the truth of this, but I thought I should take another look.

What I had forgotten about English courts is how much time is spent finding the right page. Mr Justice Andrew Smith wrestles with the files in front of him, searching for footnote 19. Where is it? "Page 13 of bundle E, my lord," says Iain Milligan QC, representing Barclays.

Another document defeats the judge entirely. "I'm sorry, I can't read this because of the photocopy. It's rather like when you go to the optician and you can't see anything," he says.

The others gaze on placidly. This does not seem the sort of experience that would win you the South Carolina primary, or even a seat on Bedfordshire County Council. Yet watching two sessions on consecutive days, I begin to see the reader's point. The judge interrupts the lawyers constantly with questions and demands for clarification - and not just about page numbers. The lawyers find their lines of argument disrupted, their grasp of the facts tested.

At one point, the judge asks: "What am I supposed to be doing here?" This is less a philosophical inquiry than an expression of irritation at how long each of the seven banks and one building society is taking to present its case. Richard Snowden QC, representing HSBC, the next lawyer on his feet, finds himself streamlining his arguments.

It is easy to see how, after years of this, a lawyer might find hecklers and political opponents easy stuff. The problem for chief executives, I suspect, is not that they do not make enough speeches but that when they do, no one answers back.

The results were on display at the World Economic Forum at Davos last week. I was not there, but one of the wonders of the internet is that you can watch the webcasts. Indeed, if you are interested in improving your oratory, you can listen to the masters, from Winston Churchill to Martin Luther King, on YouTube.

There are few Churchills or Kings in today's executive suites. The Davos interview with John Chambers, chief executive of Cisco, began by asking: "What does the annual meeting theme, the power of collaborative innovation, mean to your business?" and did not get any more exciting than that.

Listening to the lawyer-turned- politician Tony Blair on the same panel as his new employer, James Dimon, head of JPMorgan Chase, was like watching the new Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic warming up with a ballboy.

Perhaps it does not matter. Chief executives are there to do, not speak - to make decisions, conclude deals, damp down crises. And if they do not make it in politics, so what? Well, it might help if more of them did: Michael Bloomberg has been an impressive mayor of New York. Also, if you are going to speak on so many platforms, you may as well do it properly.

In an interview in the McKinsey Quarterly last November, Chip Heath, professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford business school, gives business speakers two useful pieces of advice: keep it simple and keep it concrete. He worked with an organisation that had eight core values. The lawyer-turned-politician Bill Clinton had one: "It's the economy, stupid", which worked - at least at the time.

Second, avoid abstract proclamations, such as "we put our customers first". A practical anecdote is more effective, such as the one Prof Heath says they tell at FedEx.

A driver discovered he had forgotten the key to one of the boxes from which he had to pick up packages. If he went back for the key, the packages would miss their flights. So he ripped the entire box from its moorings. Better to destroy the box than the customers' trust.

There are plenty of stories like that in business - more, I suspect, than there are in Bundle E.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Accenture’s next champion of waffle words

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: January 27 2008 16:54 | Last updated: January 27 2008 16:54

When one door closes, another one opens. On Thursday the prison gates clanked shut behind Martin Lukes in Florida but, in London, the door of an office inside Accenture swung ajar, revealing Mark Foster, a middle-aged white man with a long-winded title.

Just as I was putting my final full stop to the story of the jargon-talking executive, someone forwarded me an internal e-mail sent by Accenture’s group chief executive for management consulting. Immediately I saw that this man could be a possible successor to Lukes. I don’t know if Mr Foster has Martin’s way with women or whether his golf swing is any good, as I have never met him. However, I have seen one of his e-mails and that is enough to convince me that, when it comes to world-class jargon, there is clear blue water between him and the rest – even at Accenture, where the bar, as they call it, is set so very high.

This isn’t the first time I’ve singled out Accenture for its work in the jargon space. A couple of years ago, I wrote a column about its annual report, which was a perfect snapshot of the ugliest business language of the time. Inside was an orgy of “relentless passion” and “delivering value”. The point, presumably, was to impress clients.

Yet Mr Foster’s e-mail is more troubling as it shows top people write like this even when they think no clients are looking. His memo was addressed to “All Accenture Senior Executives” – though title inflation being what it is, this probably stretches to include the cleaner. Indeed as “group chief executive”, Mr Foster is in a band of eight others with the same commanding title, and still has a couple of rungs to climb before reaching the very top.

The memo starts with some background to the announcement: “...wanting to give you continued visibility of our growth platform agenda...” it says. Visibility is the latest thing in business. Companies and executives all crave it but, until last week, I didn’t know that growth platform agendas were after it too. What is he saying here, I wonder? I think, though couldn’t swear to it, that he wants to tell his colleagues how the company plans to make more money.

And so to the meat of the memo. “We are changing the name of the Human Performance service line to Talent & Organization Performance, effective immediately.”

Before you marvel at the stupidity of the name change, note first that departments can’t even be called that: they are instead “service lines”. As for the name, the old one may have been no great shakes, but to take away the “human” (which was surely the point) and replace it with “talent and organisation” is not progress. As I’ve often remarked before, the word “talent” is a hideous misnomer as most people aren’t terribly talented at all.

Next comes the business rationale for the change. “With the rise of the multi-polar world, the task of finding and managing talent has become more complex, turbulent and contradictory than ever before.”

This conflicts with two laws, the first of geography – there are only two poles – and the second of business – finding “talent” has always been hard as there isn’t enough to go round. The only excuse for saying it is “complex, turbulent and contradictory” is to make it sound so complicated that the services of Accenture must be needed to sort it out.

Mr Foster says that what must be done is to teach organisations to “expand their talent management agenda from a narrow and tactical focus on human resources activities around the employee life cycle, to a broad and strategic focus on highly integrated systems of capabilities fundamental to business strategies and operations”. This is shameful, outrageous bilge. HR should be narrow. It should be specifically focused around the employee life cycle (if that means hiring, training, promoting, firing).

His suggestion is frightening. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen quite so many waffle words crammed together in one sentence. Broad. Strategic. Focus. Highly. Integrated. System. Capabilities. Fundamental. Strategies. Indeed the only words here that are acceptable are “to”, “and” and “on”.

I will spare you further long quotes from this dismal memo, which contains much “stepping up”, “blue water”, “space” and “walking the talk”. There is an obsession with capabilities. In four different places Mr Foster talks about “repositioning” them, “differentiating” them, “integrating” them and “evolving” them. This sounds like quite hard work, especially as I’m not quite sure what capabilities are anyway.

There is only one sentence I like – “Already we are seeing great progress!” – though it would be better still without the gung-ho exclamation mark.

Alas, the claim turns out to be unsubstantiated. The only progress mentioned is that the head of the newly named service line has written a book called The Talent Powered Organization and, to celebrate, Accenture is inviting clients to a party on Second Life – which I suppose cuts down on the bar bill.

How much does all this nonsense matter? Accenture isn’t selling pensions to widows; if its rich corporate clients are prepared to buy HR services designed for a multi-polar world, that is their lookout.

However, there is something else about the memo that worries me more. Accenture’s website reveals that, unlike Martin Lukes, Mr Foster has a classics degree from Oxford. I had always thought the point of studying classics was that it trained your mind and your pen. What this memo shows is that two decades at Accenture have a more potent effect on befuddling the mind than three years of Aeschylus and Horace ever had on sharpening it.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Economist - various

           

     
Evolution

Live fast, love hard, die young

Oct 18th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Chasing females can take years off life

IN THE cause of equal rights, feminists have had much to complain about. But one striking piece of inequality has been conveniently overlooked: lifespan. In this area, women have the upper hand. All round the world, they live longer than men. Why they should do so is not immediately obvious. But the same is true in many other species. From lions to antelope and from sea lions to deer, males, for some reason, simply can't go the distance.

One theory is that males must compete for female attention. That means evolution is busy selecting for antlers, aggression and alloy wheels in males, at the expense of longevity. Females are not subject to such pressures. If this theory is correct, the effect will be especially noticeable in those species where males compete for the attention of lots of females. Conversely, it will be reduced or absent where they do not.

To test that idea, Tim Clutton-Brock of Cambridge University and Kavita Isvaran of the Indian Institute of Science in Bengalooru decided to compare monogamous and polygynous species (in the latter, a male monopolises a number of females). They wanted to find out whether polygynous males had lower survival rates and aged faster than those of monogamous species. To do so, they collected the relevant data for 35 species of long-lived birds and mammals.

As they report this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the pattern was much as they expected. In 16 of the 19 polygynous species in their sample, males of all ages were much more likely to die during any given period than were females. Furthermore, the older they got, the bigger the mortality gap became. In other words, they aged faster. Males from monogamous species did not show these patterns.

The point about polygyny, according to Dr Clutton-Brock, is that if one male has exclusive access to, say, ten females, another nine males will be waiting to topple the harem master as soon as he shows the first sign of weakness. The intense competitive pressure means that individuals who succeed put all their efforts into one or two breeding seasons.

That obviously takes its toll directly. But a more subtle effect may also be at work. Most students of ageing agree that an animal's maximum lifespan is set by how long it can reasonably expect to escape predation, disease, accident and damaging aggression by others of its kind. If it will be killed quickly anyway, there is not much reason for evolution to divert scarce resources into keeping the machine in tip-top condition. Those resources should, instead, be devoted to reproduction. And the more threatening the outside world is, the shorter the maximum lifespan should be.

There is no reason why that logic should not work between the sexes as well as between species. And this is what Dr Clutton-Brock and Dr Isvaran seem to have found. The test is to identify a species that has made its environment so safe that most of its members die of old age, and see if the difference continues to exist. Fortunately, there is such a species: man.

Dr Clutton-Brock reckons that the sex difference in both human rates of ageing and in the usual age of death is an indicator that polygyny was the rule in humanity's evolutionary past—as it still is, in some places. That may not please some feminists, but it could be the price women have paid for outliving their menfolk.

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.                   Animal behaviour Ain't misbehaving Jun 28th 2007 From The Economist print edition Adultery yields benefits to females as well as males FROM an evolutionary perspective, monogamy looks good for females and bad for males. For mothers, it means devotion as dad is going to be around to help look after the kids. For fathers it is more of a prison sentence, because it restricts a male's ability to inseminate lots of females at relatively low cost. In most circumstances, unless the young are likely to die without paternal support, a male has little incentive to stay with an individual female when he has so many other females to breed with. That, at least, was the conventional wisdom until fairly recently. But modern genetic techniques have shown that in many species females in apparently monogamous relationships often produce families that have more than one father. To explain this, biologists have theorised that these females are mating with males who are genetically superior to their regular mates, thus getting the benefit of parental assistance from a cuckold and good genes from a Lothario. Proving that, though, is a lengthy process. And it is only now that Aurélie Cohas and her colleagues at the University of Lyon, in France, seem to have done so. Their paper in July's edition of the Journal of Animal Ecology shows that for marmots, at least, a bit on the side can help a female's evolutionary chances no end. The marmots in question live in the Grande Sassière Nature Reserve in the French Alps. For 12 years, Dr Cohas's team trapped them, sexed them, aged them, tagged them with radio transponders and then tracked them to see what they got up to, and with whom. She noted all breeding behaviour and recorded all births. Most pertinently, she identified which offspring were the result of monogamous relationships and which the result of cheating. She then studied those offspring, to see how they fared. What she found was that young born as a result of adultery were 30% more likely to survive for at least two years, and thus have a decent chance of breeding themselves, than those fathered by a female's permanent male partner. That does, however, raise the question of what the correspondent males are providing to generate this advantage. Marmots live in family groups, with breeding restricted to a dominant male and a dominant female. Young marmots—males in particular—have a choice when they reach adulthood. They can hang around and hope to take over, or they can leave and become wanderers. Dr Cohas's genetic analyses have shown that it is wanderers, rather than nest mates or neighbours, that females play away with. Wanderers have one clear advantage. Nest mates and neighbours are likely to be relatives. Indeed, marmot social structure actively encourages inbreeding. Wanderers, by contrast, bring fresh genes. The benefit of outbreeding might be explanation enough for the vigour of their offspring. But it is also possible that wanderers have other advantages. To survive as a lone marmot, you have to be tough. The mere fact of wandering and surviving might therefore be a good indication of genetic fitness. Whichever is the case, in marmots the idea that a little of what you fancy does you good clearly applies to both sexes. Whether there are any lessons in this for human adulterers remains to be seen. Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: On a hard drive to create team spirit

On a hard drive to create team spirit

By Chris Nuttall

Published: January 27 2008 16:54 | Last updated: January 27 2008 16:54

Bill Watkins, the straight-talking chief executive of Seagate Technology, is renowned for his speeches to employees, reminding them they are going to die soon.

The blunt message is meant to check their commitment to the world’s biggest maker of hard-disk storage drives. Mr Watkins, 55, believes it shakes out the employees who would rather spend the rest of their days doing something else.

“I say: ‘You’re gonna die, so is this what you want to do?’ I’m a great believer that people who are doing what they want and are excited about it make the best workers.”

His “pep talk” comes during an annual outing for 250 Seagate staff in the wilds of New Zealand. Those invited to Eco Seagate spend four days learning skills such as abseiling, white-water rafting and mountain bike riding before competing in a gruelling race as a member of a five-person “tribe”.

The participants are drawn from all levels and regions of the 55,000-strong company. They take part in team-building exercises where the strong help the weak. There are also inspirational talks – this year from the late Sir Edmund Hillary’s son, Peter, and a woman astronaut as well as from Mr Watkins himself.

“About half the time I lose a person on my team because life’s too short and I care more about them finding what they want from life than working for Seagate. Every year we lose people and I haven’t done Eco Seagate right if someone doesn’t quit.”

While some have questioned whether the $2m team-building exercise can make a difference in such a large company, Mr Watkins feels it has brought people together and improved the culture.

“It’s not about us holding hands and singing “Kumbaya”, it’s about being the best storage solution company in the world and accepting no less, and our culture’s got to help us do that. When I sit in a room with people, I can tell who’s been to Eco Seagate.”

Sitting in a room with Mr Watkins is to witness a fidget of fearsome proportions. He twists in his chair, rattles his spectacles on the desk, makes chopping, stirring and punching actions with his hands and punctuates his shoot-from-the-hip comments with staccato laughter.

He occupies a corner office in Seagate’s headquarters at the top of the aptly named Disc Drive in Scotts Valley, California. There are calming vistas of the surrounding forests and mountains from his windows and models of sailboats on display – quite a contrast to the threatening grenade that Tom Mitchell, an ex-Marine and former chief operating officer, kept on his desk to intimidate employees.

Mr Watkins says he and Stephen Luczo, his predecessor as chief executive, had worked at defusing a high-pressure culture where “people were able to run their kingdoms and there was a lot of screaming and yelling”.

He recalls how a senior executive once gave him advice on how to improve falling yields for Seagate’s complex hardware. “He said: ‘Here’s how you get yields up. You go on the floor, you bring everybody to the middle and you say: ‘If you don’t get your fucking yields up, I’m going to fire you all.’ And you come back the next day and you’re going to have good yields.’”

He took a different approach. “There should be no motivation by fear. Yields go up by methodical engineering improvements.”

More important, he says his experience as a former Army medic taught him that teamwork that includes emotional bonds is the biggest motivator – another justification for Eco Seagate.

“When I was in the army, one of the things that amazed me was that people didn’t want to die for their country or their god and they absolutely wouldn’t die for money. But they would put their life on the line day in and day out so as not to let down the platoon or their fellow soldier.”

Mr Watkins did not have any early ambitions to join the hard-drive business. The son of an itinerant oilman, he was born in Venezuela, before his family moved to Alberta and then Texas, where he grew up and graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in political science.

He moved out to Silicon Valley in 1979 “because of a girl. I spent one week and that didn’t work out.”

A new job with a microfilm start-up did work out. It was followed by one with a floppy-disk start-up, which went public, and subsequently a thin-film media start-up. He then joined Conner, a hard-drive company, which was taken over by Seagate in 1996. He became head of disk-drive operations in 1997, chief operating officer in 1998, president of the company in 2000 and chief executive in 2004.

With his down-to-earth manner and ultra-casual blue jeans dress code, he is something of a throwback to Al Shugart, who founded Seagate in 1979. Mr Shugart favoured Hawaiian shirts, smoked, worked without a secretary and made coffee for his co-workers.

But Seagate today is a much bigger company, shipping hard drives in the hundreds of millions. Its second quarter results this month showed that revenues had grown 14 per cent since last year to $3.4bn. Its global market share was 35 per cent, up from 21 per cent in 2000. Its nearest rival, Western Digital, also of the US, has a share in the low 20s.

Mr Watkins says his factories cannot make enough of the latest terabyte computer disk drives - holding 1,000GB of data - and his business is benefiting from the inclusion of hard drives in a growing number of consumer electronics products, such as digital video recorders.

His own beach house in nearby Santa Cruz is a model for future digital homes. He has six terabytes of storage holding movies, music, photos and security camera pictures that can be called up on screens all over the house.

The chief executive sees a strong future for digital storage, and for Seagate under the brand of leadership he has established, with a management team that has worked together for more than a decade.

“I grew up in the Valley and a lot of times passion and being excited about your job and being aggressive and wanting to drive for outstanding results translated as having to be a total asshole to everybody,” he says.

“I don’t believe that. You can be nice, you can be motivational, you can get emotional, but you don’t have to be disrespectful. You don’t have to be an asshole, and that’s what it’s all about.”

Drop the formalities: bringing a start-up culture to big business

Bill Watkins believes that large companies should create a culture similar to the one he enjoyed in the four Silicon Valley start-ups he worked at before joining Seagate.

”What I loved about start-ups is that there were no titles, you were just a bunch of guys and girls, trying to get it done, everybody does everything, you’re totally focused on one thing and you try to accomplish that,” he says.

”What happens then is that you get scale, you have to create organisational structure to handle that. Now you’re no longer Bill Watkins, you’re the VP of sales and marketing or whatever and you start limiting your roles. Worse case, you become very ’silo-istic’.

”So my answer to that was every time I got into a company that scaled very large, I would go back to a small company again where I felt comfortable.”

He broke this cycle at Conner Peripherals: ”I got talked out of [leaving] by a guy who said: ’Why don’t you try to make a big company work that way?’

”So it got me intrigued and I stayed . . and that’s where I thought culture comes in. It’s my way of bringing back that relationship - that we’re just people.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Lofty view from Davos could just be a mirage

Lofty view from Davos could just be a mirage

By Stefan Stern

Published: January 28 2008 20:09 | Last updated: January 28 2008 20:09

Last week, some of the world’s most important people headed to Davos in Switzerland for intensive high-level debate and supercharged networking. I went to a presentation near Smithfield meat-market in London.

Those of us who made it to Haberdashers’ Hall, London EC1, last Tuesday were reminded of one of the classic leadership dilemmas that should have been – but wasn’t – on the Davos agenda. The view from the Swiss mountain tops may be splendid but down on the ground managers are wrestling with other, less glamorous but ultimately more significant matters.

The presentation I saw was given by the Roffey Park Institute, a venerable management training and research body. Every January for the past 11 years Roffey Park has presented its “management agenda” report, based on the responses of managers to a large set of survey questions.

This report provides an annual barometer reading of managers’ attitudes and concerns. Not every finding comes as a devastating surprise, of course. Organisations are worrying about how they should deal with change, how to attract and retain the best people and how to develop future leaders. They are still not sure what an “HR business partner” is and what he or she might do for you.

But just when your correspondent feared he was about to become the next sorry victim of the techno serial-killer known as PowerPoint, a magical slide popped up on the screen. It was headed “Effect of hierarchy”, and it uncovered the stark differences in the opinions held by managers, which varied depending on the position those managers held in their corporate hierarchy.

For example, 82 per cent of board directors felt that the leadership enjoyed by their organisation was good or excellent. But only 52 per cent of middle managers felt they could describe their business’s leadership in such a positive way. Where 37 per cent of board directors declared morale in their organisation to be high, only 9 per cent of middle managers thought it was as well. While only 26 per cent of board directors found a mismatch between the “espoused values” of their organisation and what actually went on, a startling 75 per cent of junior managers found precisely such a gap.

In fact views on these (and other) issues varied at all managerial levels. Not so much a case of “us and them” as “us and them and them and them”. What seems true in the C-suite can look utterly different elsewhere in the organisation.

So did lobbyists, consultants, politicians and other assorted Davos hangers-on (oh, all right then, journalists) waste their time last week trying to grab a few minutes’ schmoozing time with those global chief executives? I don’t suppose they did. Power resides at the top. Deals are signed in boardrooms, not in the staff canteen. But, equally, if you want to find out the truth about the organisations that these elite chief executives are leading, more time has to be spent listening to middle and junior managers. Their views may not be quite the same. They are hardly irrelevant.

But what explains this mismatch of perceptions? Jo Hennessy, Roffey Park’s director of research, says that, inevitably, business leaders often end up losing touch with the rest of the organisation. The upward flow of information can be unreliable and intermittent. At the presentation last week, Ms Hennessy described how one business leader had said to her: “People tell me what they think I want to hear. I have to work really hard to find out what’s going on.”

The problem of hierarchies is hardly new. Cain and Abel had their own hierarchical bust-up, with fatal consequences. John Hunt of London Business School used to say that whenever two people meet a hierarchy is immediately formed. But a big effort is needed if leaders want to bypass the costly misunderstandings hierarchies inevitably create.

Would Chuck Prince have kept calling for the “dancing” to go on at Citigroup if he’d been able to communicate better with traders lower down the firm? Why did Tom Kirby, former Games Workshop chief executive, seeking to explain away poor figures last week, have to tell investors: “I’m sorry we have not done as well as we should the past two years. We grew fat and lazy on the back of easy success.” Why was no early warning signal reaching him from the shop-floor?

Most of us want to climb the career ladder. Natural born leaders will force their way to the top. But there is danger in that ascent. And, as we all know, the higher a monkey climbs...the easier it is for the vet to carry out an intimate examination.

The late John Garnett, the former head of the Industrial Society, an even more venerable (and now reconstituted) organisation, used to say that leaders needed to have “their eyes on the hills”, while keeping “their feet on the ground”. We can all dream of one day reaching the snow-topped peaks of Davos. In the meantime, other more important work will be carried out elsewhere.

stefan.stern@ft.com

Leadership, Organizational Development

Organisational politics has overtaken increased workload as the main stressor for the first time - There is also a fall in the number of managers identifying increased workload as a stressor (2007: 44%, 2006:57%).

Organisational politics
• Organisational politics is the top stressor in managers’ working lives – 60% believe that politics has
increased in recent years (77% in the public sector, 50% in the private service sector).
• 44% report political behaviour as a main cause of conflict.

Download ExecSummaryAgenda07.pdf

NY Times: Experience

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/opinion/20kristof.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Op-Ed Columnist

Hillary, Barack, Experience

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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: January 20, 2008

 

With all the sniping from the Clinton camp about whether Barack Obama has enough experience to make a strong president, consider another presidential candidate who was far more of a novice. He had the gall to run for president even though he had served a single undistinguished term in the House of Representatives, before being hounded back to his district.

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Nicholas D. Kristof.

 

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That was Abraham Lincoln.

Another successful president scorned any need for years of apprenticeship in Washington, declaring, “The same old experience is not relevant.” He suggested that the most useful training comes not from hanging around the White House and Congress but rather from experience “rooted in the real lives of real people” so that “it will bring real results if we have the courage to change.”

That was Bill Clinton running in 1992 against George H. W. Bush, who was then trumpeting his own experience over the callow youth of Mr. Clinton. That year Mr. Bush aired a television commercial urging voters to keep America “in the hands of experience.”

It might seem obvious that long service in Washington is the best preparation for the White House, but on the contrary, one lesson of American history is that length of experience in national politics is an extremely poor predictor of presidential success.

Looking at the 19 presidents since 1900, three of the greatest were among those with the fewest years in electoral politics. Teddy Roosevelt had been a governor for two years and vice president for six months; Woodrow Wilson, a governor for just two years; and Franklin Roosevelt, a governor for four years. None ever served in Congress.

They all did have executive experience (as did Mr. Clinton), actually running something larger than a Senate office. Maybe that’s something voters should think about more: governors have often made better presidents than senators. But that’s not a good Democratic talking point, because the candidates with the greatest administrative experience by far are Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee.

Alternatively, look at the five presidents since 1900 with perhaps the most political experience when taking office: William McKinley, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. They had great technical skills — but not one was among our very greatest presidents.

The point is not that experience is pointless but that it needn’t be in politics to be useful. John McCain’s years as a P.O.W. gave him an understanding of torture and a moral authority to discuss it that no amount of Senate hearings ever could have conferred.

In the same way, Mr. Obama’s years as an antipoverty organizer give him insights into one of our greatest challenges: how to end cycles of poverty. That front-line experience is one reason Mr. Obama not only favors government spending programs, like early-childhood education, but also cultural initiatives like promoting responsible fatherhood.

Then there’s Mr. Obama’s grade-school years in Indonesia. Our most serious mistakes in foreign policy, from Vietnam to Iraq, have been a blindness to other people’s nationalism and an inability to see ourselves as others see us. Mr. Obama seems to have absorbed an intuitive sensitivity to that problem. For starters, he understood back in 2002 that American troops would not be greeted in Iraq with flowers.

In politics, Mr. Obama’s preparation is indeed thin, though it’s more than Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledges. His seven years in the Illinois State Senate aren’t heavily scrutinized, but he scored significant achievements there: a law to videotape police interrogations in capital cases; an earned income tax credit to fight poverty; an expansion of early-childhood education.

Mrs. Clinton’s strength is her mastery of the details of domestic and foreign policy, unrivaled among the candidates; she speaks fluently about what to do in Pakistan, Iraq, Darfur. Mr. Obama’s strength is his vision and charisma and the possibility that his election would heal divisions at home and around the world. John Edwards’s strength is his common touch and his leadership among the candidates in establishing detailed positions on health care, poverty and foreign aid.

Those are the meaningful distinctions in the Democratic field, not Mrs. Clinton’s spurious claim to “35 years of experience.” The Democrats with the greatest Washington expertise — Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson — have already been driven from the race. And the presidential candidate left standing with the greatest experience by far is Mr. McCain; if Mrs. Clinton believes that’s the criterion for selecting the next president, she might consider backing him.

To put it another way, think which politician is most experienced today in the classic sense, and thus — according to the “experience” camp — best qualified to become the next president.

That’s Dick Cheney. And I rest my case.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

NY Times: The Age of Ambition

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/opinion/27kristof.html?th&emc=th

       

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January 27, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

The Age of Ambition

 

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

   

DAVOS, Switzerland

With the American presidential campaign in full swing, the obvious way to change the world might seem to be through politics.

But growing numbers of young people are leaping into the fray and doing the job themselves. These are the social entrepreneurs, the 21st-century answer to the student protesters of the 1960s, and they are some of the most interesting people here at the World Economic Forum (not only because they’re half the age of everyone else).

Andrew Klaber, a 26-year-old playing hooky from Harvard Business School to come here (don’t tell his professors!), is an example of the social entrepreneur. He spent the summer after his sophomore year in college in Thailand and was aghast to see teenage girls being forced into prostitution after their parents had died of AIDS.

So he started Orphans Against AIDS (www.orphansagainstaids.org), which pays school-related expenses for hundreds of children who have been orphaned or otherwise affected by AIDS in poor countries. He and his friends volunteer their time and pay administrative costs out of their own pockets so that every penny goes to the children.

Mr. Klaber was able to expand the nonprofit organization in Africa through introductions made by Jennifer Staple, who was a year ahead of him when they were in college. When she was a sophomore, Ms. Staple founded an organization in her dorm room to collect old reading glasses in the United States and ship them to poor countries. That group, Unite for Sight, has ballooned, and last year it provided eye care to 200,000 people (www.uniteforsight.org).

In the ’60s, perhaps the most remarkable Americans were the civil rights workers and antiwar protesters who started movements that transformed the country. In the 1980s, the most fascinating people were entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who started companies and ended up revolutionizing the way we use technology.

Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Drayton, the chief executive of an organization called Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, likes to say that such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry. If that sounds insanely ambitious, it is. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan title their new book on social entrepreneurs “The Power of Unreasonable People.”

Universities are now offering classes in social entrepreneurship, and there are a growing number of role models. Wendy Kopp turned her thesis at Princeton into Teach for America and has had far more impact on schools than the average secretary of education.

One of the social entrepreneurs here is Soraya Salti, a 37-year-old Jordanian woman who is trying to transform the Arab world by teaching entrepreneurship in schools. Her organization, Injaz, is now training 100,000 Arab students each year to find a market niche, construct a business plan and then launch and nurture a business.

The program (www.injaz.org.jo) has spread to 12 Arab countries and is aiming to teach one million students a year. Ms. Salti argues that entrepreneurs can stimulate the economy, give young people a purpose and revitalize the Arab world. Girls in particular have flourished in the program, which has had excellent reviews and is getting support from the U.S. Agency for International Development. My hunch is that Ms. Salti will contribute more to stability and peace in the Middle East than any number of tanks in Iraq, U.N. resolutions or summit meetings.

“If you can capture the youth and change the way they think, then you can change the future,” she said.

Another young person on a mission is Ariel Zylbersztejn, a 27-year-old Mexican who founded and runs a company called Cinepop, which projects movies onto inflatable screens and shows them free in public parks. Mr. Zylbersztejn realized that 90 percent of Mexicans can’t afford to go to movies, so he started his own business model: He sells sponsorships to companies to advertise to the thousands of viewers who come to watch the free entertainment.

Mr. Zylbersztejn works with microcredit agencies and social welfare groups to engage the families that come to his movies and help them start businesses or try other strategies to overcome poverty. Cinepop is only three years old, but already 250,000 people a year watch movies on his screens — and his goal is to take the model to Brazil, India, China and other countries.

So as we follow the presidential campaign, let’s not forget that the winner isn’t the only one who will shape the world. Only one person can become president of the United States, but there’s no limit to the number of social entrepreneurs who can make this planet a better place.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

 

 

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NY Times: The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey

Prototype

The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey

Cathy Hull

 

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By MICHAEL FITZGERALD

Published: January 27, 2008

 

INNOVATION usually needs time to steep. Time to turn the idea into something tangible, time to get it to market, time for people to decide they accept it. Speech recognition technology has steeped for a long time: Mike Phillips remembers that in the 1980s, when he was a Carnegie Mellon graduate student trying to develop rudimentary speech recognition systems, “it seemed almost impossible.”

     

Now, devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to hit the mass market, thanks to entrepreneurs like Mr. Phillips. He is the chief technology officer and a co-founder of the Vlingo Corporation, an 18-month-old start-up in Cambridge, Mass., that is selling services to cellular carriers and other software companies that want to give their customers the ability to let their mouths do the walking — and the searching.

Vlingo’s service lets people talk naturally, rather than making them use a limited number of set phrases. Dave Grannan, the company’s chief executive, demonstrated the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi John Hurt (try typing that with your thumbs), for the location of a local bakery and for a Web search for a consumer product. It was all fast and efficient. Vlingo is designed to adapt to the voice of its primary user, but I was also able to use Mr. Grannan’s phone to find an address.

The Find application is in the beta test phase at AT&T and Sprint. Consumers who use certain cellphones from those companies can download the application from  vlingo.com.

Mr. Phillips has spent more than 15 years in the trenches at companies that nourished speech recognition. In 1994, he was one of the founders of Speechworks, which made early interactive voice-response systems, the now-ubiquitous automated services that answer when we call a company. In 2000, Speechworks was acquired by ScanSoft, which five years later bought Nuance Communications, keeping Nuance as the name. Mr. Phillips left that year to work at M.I.T. as a visiting researcher.

In 2006, he and a colleague from ScanSoft, John Nguyen, started Vlingo because they thought that speech recognition technology, cellular networks and phones were all becoming powerful enough to allow voice navigation systems on cellphones. “We couldn’t have done this five years ago,” he says.

Now, Mr. Phillips is in a race for market share. Another start-up, Yap Inc., based in Charlotte, N.C., is running a beta test of its service, which is similar to Vlingo’s but already has text messaging. Igor and Victor Jablokov, Yap’s co-founders, decided to start the company because they saw their teenage sister text-messaging while in a car.

She wasn’t driving at the time, but Igor Jablokov says cellular companies tell him in meetings that two-thirds of their teenage customers have either sent or read a text message while behind the wheel.

Big companies are also attracted to this market. Nuance started its Nuance Voice Control system last August, the same month that Vlingo’s appeared. Nuance’s system is in use at Sprint and Rogers Communications and can be downloaded to 66 models of hand-held phones, with many more on the way.

Microsoft is a significant potential competitor, thanks in part to its purchase of TellMe Networks last March. TellMe offers a speech-driven search application for cellphones that is available to customers of AT&T — only those who were part of Cingular before the merger — and Sprint. TellMe’s system is built-in on the new Mysto phone from Helio, a mobile phone operator started by Earthlink and SK Telecom, and is the engine for 1800call411, a free directory information service.

Over all, speech recognition was a $1.6 billion market in 2007, according to Opus Research, which predicts an annual growth rate of 14.5 percent over the next three years. Dan Miller, an analyst at Opus, said that companies that have licensed speech recognition technology would probably see faster revenue growth, as more consumers used the technology. The cellphone market holds the most potential, given its billions of phones, but cellular providers are still working out the business model for such services.

Igor Jablokov, Yap’s chief executive, says that he wants his application to be supported by advertising, but that the carriers with whom he is negotiating, which he declined to name, want to charge customers for the service.

To be sure, speech recognition technology has been available on personal computers since 2001 in applications like Microsoft Office, but few people use it. But in cellphone and other markets, speech recognition “is on the cusp of a curve,” says Bill Meisel, editor of Speech Strategy News, an industry newsletter.

Speech recognition, already used in high-end G.P.S. systems and luxury cars from Cadillac and Lexus, is now spreading to less expensive systems and cars — witness those slapstick Ford Sync commercials, featuring vignettes like one showing a young woman who approaches her office building and says “door open,” expecting it to respond the way her car does. It doesn’t, and she and her coffee cup smack directly into it.

Sync was developed by Microsoft and Ford, and based on Nuance technology. And the speech technology chief at I.B.M. Research, David Nahamoo, says the company has an automotive customer testing speech recognition to help drivers find songs quickly while driving — no more pushing buttons.

Then there’s SimulScribe, a New York company that is one of several businesses using speech recognition to convert voice mail into e-mail. “Voice recognition has finally hit the point where someone like ourselves can take it over the hump for specific applications,” says James Siminoff, SimulScribe’s chief executive.

James R. Glass, a principal research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T., says speech technology “is going to end up everywhere speech can be useful.” He says machines will keep improving their ability to recognize the way humans naturally talk, even if they have strong accents, and that the technology will find myriad new uses.

THIS doesn’t mean that people will always choose to speak. Genevieve Bell, director of user experience at the digital home group of Intel, says people are unlikely to want to use speech recognition to handle their finances, at least in public spaces. It also may not work well in the living room.

Ms. Bell jokes that if she could, she would yell “cricket!” at the television anytime she walked into a room, so her favorite sport would appear on the screen.

Even a digital expert like her cautions that some people may never be satisfied with the quality of speech recognition technology — thanks to a steady diet of fictional books, movies and television shows featuring machines that understand everything a person says, no matter how sharp the diction or how loud the ambient noise. But soon we will be able to speak our minds to many of our machines, and have them obey our commands.

Michael Fitzgerald writes about business, technology and culture. E-mail: mfitz@nytimes.com.