Google’s recent decision not to play by China’s censorship rules has created quite the stir. Like most people, I thought it was an interesting brand-building move. A reinforcement of Google’s “do-no-evil” brand image. But Umair Haque at Harvard Business Review takes it a step further. He argues it’s a symbol of the shift away from doing business the 20th century way and signifies the start of a bigger movement - the ethical edge.
But aside from the obvious benefit of brand building, where else does a move like Google’s pay off? If your business partner, investor or board member were to ask you: “what’s the business case for having an ethical edge” how would you answer that?
Let’s put aside for a moment the very logical argument that success, real success, isn’t something that’s reasonably measurable because everyone has their own definition of success. Now let’s assume that we can somehow average out all those deviating definitions of success and come up with some type of measurable norm. Whether its a dollar figure, units of utility as measured by economists or whatever other scale you can come up with. Success isn’t linear, it’s exponential.
I’ve been thinking a lot about success lately. Now more than ever, I think, success is not tied to time. You don’t move up the success ladder like you graduate from Grade 7 to Grade 8. You can work in a similar field as another person and be more successful in a fraction of the amount of time it took your counterpart. This is especially true in more enlightened organizations that are more interested in rewarding results rather than seniority.
Yet for whatever reason we’re programmed to think that if we spend a year not dedicating ourselves to advancing our careers we are somehow behind. That one year is off the table for good and we’ll never get it back. I don’t think that’s true, at least not anymore. I’ve realized that in today’s world success experiences its peaks and troughs, and we’re in more control than ever before to capitalize on opportunities that could bring us exponential success. Time doesn’t matter.
I went to Dubai a few years ago, and couldn’t help but marvel at its breakneck development pace. While it was a nice place to visit, I didn’t really understand what the place was about. The city was modern, efficient, and had beautiful skyscrapers popping up everywhere. An indoor ski hill, fake islands jutting off the coast and one of the largest towers (combined with one of the world’s largest malls) were under development. When people asked me what I thought of Dubai, I could only respond “it feels like a big resort”. And when asked whether it was a good place to visit, I would say “Maybe in a few years, it should be done by then”. Shocking, really. To say a metropolis, not a building or a park, would need only a few more years to be “completed”. The idea that a relatively unknown region just a decade ago could grow to the size of London in the foreseeable future should have been alarming. The current crisis being faced by Dubai World is really only the end result of bigger problems present in the region.
This article from the Guardian shows the true cost of growing too quickly. As a result of the unsustainable growth rate in Dubai over the last several years, expats from poorer countries like India and Pakistan are returning to their villages empty handed and wealthier expats are chalking up their losses, selling their luxury real estate (which is down on average 60% this year) and heading back to their middle-class reality back home.
I haven’t been doing a lot of blogging here lately. Most of that goes on at the VEF Momentum site, or the VEF Momentum LinkedIn group, or my Twitter account. Basically everywhere but here. I think when I do blog on the VEF Momentum site I might as well make a note of it here. So here goes:
I’m really excited about the upcoming VEF Momentum event we’re organizing on November 10th. We’re kicking off our 2009-2010 season at Nuba that night with Jason Bailey (founder of SuperRewards) as our keynote - and he’ll be talking about “bootstrapping to success”. It’s been a long few months off, but after the success of last year we’re really confident this year will be just as good or better. It’s fun catching up with people again and shamelessly promoting the event. I think that’s what I was meant to do. Anyway, read more on the event here or register here.
The gap between the rich and the poor is widening as a wide range of data suggests. I came across this op-ed piece in the New York Times about the expected increase in foreclosures in the United States in the near term. It’s pretty clear that rising unemployment will just lead to more unemployment, and the US government’s foreclosure relief plans will only soften the blow, if anything. I’m not sure whether the increase in foreclosures will increase the divide between the rich and poor, or have no significant impact at all. My inclination is that the middle-class and lower-middle-class are far more vulnerable to the economic collapse than more well off Americans.
The op-ed suggests that in order to help people foreclosing on their homes and help the most vulnerable Americans, the government should do the following:
Push for new jobs in new industries
Expand union membership
Effectively mandate fairer distribution of corporate profits to employees
It’s pretty clear the objective of these strategies would be to narrow the gap between the rich and poor. The obvious short-term goal of the above options is to provide immediate relief to people who are struggling to make their monthly payments. Something tells me that in reality, none of these ideas will really work. I’ve never really had a stance on big government or small government. I wouldn’t really know if I stand on the left or the right. But something about the above options reminds me that people really don’t understand how we can effectively reduce the divide between the rich and the poor in the first place, and where government can in fact play a role in that process.
I came across an excellent article on the Globe & Mail the other day that really struck a chord with me. It’s about how universities in Canada should be upgrading their facilities instead of expanding their size. According to demographer David Foot, who wrote bestseller Boom, Bust and Echo demographic patterns suggest that Canadian enrollment in its universities will decline because the university aged demographic is no longer growing. Declining elementary and secondary school enrollment levels have hinted at this, and in the next few years university enrollment declines are sure to follow.
Irrespective of these important demographic changes in Canada (specifically - the aging population), and many other western economies, the government insists on funding university expansion across the country as part of their stimulus plan to jump-start the economy. It struck me how many macro-decisions like funding the expansion of universities across the board completely ignore the implications that demographic changes will have on these decisions. We can’t simply take for granted that the demographic make-up of our societies are somehow static. They’re constantly changing, and we need to be tracking this and incorporating expected demographic changes into our decisions.
Professor Foot argues that demographics explain two-thirds of everything. And he has a real point.
Preservation of the past is no strategy for the future. - Jeff Jarvis
I’ve recently become interested in how existing industries are grappling with the very transformative time we’re living in. Some organizations, or industries as a whole, have been unaffected by this change, others have adjusted and embraced change and numerous others just try to fight it. Take the newspaper industry, for example.
Jeff Jarvis was interviewed on TechCrunch (original post) and spoke about his new book, “What Would Google Do” where Jeff discusses how existing industries would operate if they adopted Google-inspired business models. I haven’t read the book, and am not particularly fond of the idea of crowd-sourced restaurants (see video below) but his main point is that businesses run by seemingly smart people have completely misunderstood the new economy. Jarvis calls it, among other things, the post-industrial economy and sites newspapers as a prime example of an industry that has fundamentally misunderstood the new rules.
I don’t know about you but just about every other week I’ll stop by TED and see what’s new in their collection of insightful and imaginative speaker series. In the embedded TED video below, Renny Gleeson calls on technologists, start-ups and creative types in general to create technologies that make us more human, not less. He’s right, it seems we’re becoming more and more interested in the story we’re sharing than the experience itself. Enjoy:
