About Ideas: TED Talks, Books, Movies and Travel

My Favourite TED talks

2012-01-31T18:12:00.000-08:00

In my course on Innovation, I use various TED videos as thought-provokers on different topics. Those deliver powerful lessons, and it's also a nice break from hearing me talk for three and a half hours straight.

I urge them to acquire the habit of watching TED videos that are not about business or their own industry. Those are the talks that will be most mind-expanding for this extremely focused group who are being immersed in a program of disciplined business study. One of the students this year asked me for a list of my all-time favourite TED talks. That's a tough question, but it got me thinking. I decided to try for a Top Ten list. I'll cover five talks in this post and five more in a subsequent post.

Hans Rosling

This brilliant Swedish academic could have quietly taught global health cloistered at the Karolinska Institutet in Stocklhom. He would have wowed his students and he would have been in demand as a dinner guest. But TED changed all that. He gave his first TED talk in 2006 and electrified the conference. His talk fused long-term global health trends, amazing dynamic data presentation techniques, incredible energy, and great wit.

"See this corner? Watch per capita incomes rising! And over here, watch world health improving at the same time! There goes Asia taking off!" It has all the panache of a sports announcer shouting "He shoots! He scores!" But it's not all performance art. He has a substantive and encouraging message about the world's progress toward better quality of life; what could have been boring statistics illuminates those underlying and connected trends.

TED.com has brought this man with his big ideas to the world. Rosling's talks are the most viewed of all TED.com talks. He looks totally spontaneous but he is the most diligent in preparation, according to Nancy Duarte who coaches many of the TED speakers. I chose Rosling's first TED talk in 2006 as my favourite here. It was my first TED conference and I spent the whole conference reeling with euphoria, with Rosling being a huge contributor. However, I've watched many of his other talks since, from various TEDs and TEDx's; I could watch him forever and I would recommend you watch any and all of his talks.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates gets a mention here for a different reason than Rosling. One couldn't claim that he's exactly charismatic, although he's developed a certain charm and warmth as a speaker now that he's a philanthropist rather than a business person. I wrote in a previous post about Bill Gates' TED Talk on Innovating to Zero, a well-reasoned plea for getting carbon emissions to zero. It was perhaps the best organized and persuasive presentation I'd ever seen. He laid out the arguments clearly as to why we should care about climate, and why, when you examine all the alternatives, 'safe' nuclear energy is the only way to go. Then he unveils such a new technology for safe nuclear energy (while transparently admitted it was developed by long-time friend and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's company).

Derek Sivers
This is a short talk, less than three minutes. But what a powerful message Sivers packs into that short time.

One of my firm convictions is that a prerequisite to great innovation is to be able to let go of what you know. In this talk Sivers brilliantly exposes how we can get locked into one way of thinking, with a great story comparing address conventions in Japan and the US.

William McDonough

William McDonough's talk wowed me at my first TED conference with 'his manifesto for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design' (his words on the Cradle to Cradle website.

McDonough believes that when you manufacture something, you should know the characteristics of all ingredients and components and ensure that these are environmentally benign. Moreover, you must ensure that the waste product, as well as your actual product must be environmentally benign. And you should build products that can come back into the system to be used again.

Isabel Allende

Why is Isabel Allende's talk on my favourites list? Because she was vibrant, inspiring, and funny. She was totally feminine and totally feminist.

When invited to carry the flag at the Opening Ceremonies of the Turin Winter Olympics, Allende's first concern was what she'd have to wear. Her second concern was how she'd be dwarfed by the statuesque and gorgeous Sophia Loren. How totally feminine!

Her feminism was even more strongly represented. She fervently disagreed with the thesis that feminism is passé. Firstly, women and children still suffer incredible hardships and mistreatment. The world needs to address these disadvantages. Secondly, Allende believes that helping women helps the world. This theme is often echoed in such movements as the microfinance movement. Lend to men, they say, and the men improve their lives. Lend to women and the whole family thrives.

Allende is, after all, a well-known and prolific writer. So it's not surprising that her talk centred around stories and was titled Tales of Passion.

Latest TED Book Club Selections - January 2012

2012-01-27T06:18:00.000-08:00

The latest TED Book Club selections are out. As always, it's an interesting bunch.

Steven Pinker has given several talks at TED, including his 2007 talk which made a deep impression on me. He argued that, despite today's news overload focused on bad news, the level of violence and wars has actually been declining in the world. You can find that talk here. Apparently the talk sparked further research and analysis and culminated in the publication of a book.

The Better Angels of our Nature elaborates on that theme, arguing that violence between humans is in long term decline. I remember Pinker showed a graph showing the incidence of wars and numbers of deaths in those wars. I imagine I'll find that one in the book when I get around to it.

A friend recently pointed me to a counterargument presented in a TEDx talk by Jonas Gahr Store, the Norwegian foreign minister, which you can view here. (Thanks Scott). Store focuses on a shorter time frame - just since 1946 - and he s argues that violence hasn't really declined overall: the increase in intrastate violence has grown faster than the decline in interstate violence.

I'm really looking forward to reading Pinker's book, to understand more clearly his proposition and the his evidence to support it, and to compare it with Store's point of view.

Also in this batch was Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain. Shermer is another TED speaker that I enjoyed. He characterizes himself as a professional skeptic and is the founder of Skeptic Magazine. His 2006 TED talk was hilarious as he mocked various outrageous beliefs held my many people. He did a reprise in 2010, unveiling more hoaxes and gimmicks, but also argued that we have a belief engine in our brains which makes us want to believe. The Believing Brain explores further why we believe the weird things we do. On his web site, Shermer describes the books as "a comprehensive theory on how beliefs are born, formed, nourished, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished." Again, I'm looking forward to reading this book. Maybe it will explain to this puzzled Canadian why so many Americans believe in creationism over evolution!

The last book in the mailing was The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. This illustrated collection of fairy tales was printed in time for the 200th anniversary of the Brothers Grimm's tales. A quick glance through the book revealed some tales that I was not familiar with. This should be an eminently skimmable book!

Defining Innovation

2012-01-24T19:14:00.000-08:00

I've just finished teaching a course called Managing Innovation at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto. It's a second year MBA course and I always start the course with a discussion of the real meaning of Innovation. Most students arrive at the class with a pretty narrow definition of innovation - and for most it centres on technological invention.

My definition is much broader than that and we had an extended discussion about our different views of innovation. Perhaps it has something to do with me being the professor, but we ended converging on my favourite definition, namely.

I like this definition for several reasons. I like the use of the word value. Value doesn't just relate to profit. The value can arise from cost reduction, or social value, or even a new way of thinking about the world. So the definition holds for corporations, governments, or non-profits. If we're going to solve the world's social problems, we're going to need a lot of innovation, so it's important that our thinking about innovation extends to social situations, not just profit-seeking enterprises.

The definition requires you to have more than just a great idea; you have to implement something to create value. I like that concept of creating value. An invention alone might not create value, and that's why I would argue an invention is not by itself enough to qualify as an innovation.

I like the use of the word fresh instead of new. Taking an idea that's been used in one area and applying it to another fits in my definition of innovation. Fresh captures that idea of taking an idea from one arena to another; I would classify that as innovation too.

This year, we had a particularly spirited discussion about value, and whether something had to have significant and immediate impact to qualify as an innovation. We concluded that something had to have a measurable impact in order to be considered to deliver value. It was an thought-provoking discussion. You always learn from students!

The Big Short

2011-12-15T18:25:00.000-08:00

If you read at bedtime to relax yourself so you can sleep, DO NOT read The Big Short at night. This book can agitate you, disturb you, upset you - it's not a suitable bedtime story.

Lewis presents a view of the financial crash of 2008 through the stories of a few savvy investors who realized something was desperately wrong and bet big on their intuition by going short. Moreover, they were patient when the financial edifice didn't crumble as fast as they had anticipated. They were investing money on behalf of others, who weren't so patient and weren't convinced of the strategy. They faced the wrath of these investors who implored them to withdraw from these positions and ultimately started to withdraw their own funds. It's the story of a few brave individuals who backed their contrarian instincts. There's a Bertrand Russell quote that runs "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it isn't utterly absurd. Indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." A good lesson for the markets in the future.

Lewis's description of how the debacle unfolded turns the usual explanation on its head.

Here's how it's usually presented. Financial institutions started to underwrite mortgages for clients with low likelihood of ever repaying. The banks and the mortgagees were counting on house prices rising forever. The banks were content with little or no documentation, irresponsibly approved mortgages that the client could never pay, and offered immoral incentives to lure in the unsuspecting. Now, banks need to maintain adequate liquidity to cover the requests from depositors for their money, and mortgages are not liquid, since it takes the banks years to get all their money back. So the banks packaged up a bundle of mortgages to sell as a security, which is easily tradeable and totally liquid - until it isn't! When institutions were no longer willing to buy these securities, the holders became illiquid and hence the trouble started. (This is of course glossing over the creative ways that these securities were sold in slices, or tranches, so that different investors got different rates and risks, turning the dross of subprime mortgages into the gold of AAA ratings). This explanation portrays the situation as a 'push' - all those mortgages piling up and thus the institutions securitizing them.

Here's how Lewis explains it. After the first few securities were created out of these mortgages, the banks became enamoured of this new financial instrument. They made lots of money selling it. They became addicted to that money. By creating 'synthetic' securities, consisting of bundles of bundles of mortgages, they could multiply the size of the market. But they still needed the underlying mortgages for the first bricks in the towering unstable financial edifice. To do that, they kept approving ever shakier creditors on ever shadier terms. So there was a pull from the financial markets to drive the housing and mortgage market.

Lewis explains this in much more length and with great clarity. He does this by telling a story about real people. Lewis' protagonists are a hugely unlikely lot. But they saw what others couldn't see, or refused to see. They told people about what they were observing, but they were ignored. So they went ahead and bet on their instincts and made obscene amounts of money. The banks were the greedy creators of the market. The ratings agencies were the complicit stooges who handed out the triple-A ratings. And the regulators were the blind and/or stupid dullards who let this all go on. This is Lewis' take on the whole thing.

Lewis is a great story-teller. There's a lot of meat in this book, but it's also a real human interest story about a group of unlikely people with all their quirks. Lewis' first book, Liar's Poker, has been on my must-read list for years. This book makes that even more imperative.

The Nuclear Conundrum

2011-12-14T21:10:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, I wrote a post about Bill Gates' talk at TED 2010 - probably the very best organized talk I've ever heard.   Gates blew me away with his clarity and coherence as he took us through his analysis of the climate change problem. Basically, he said, 'If climate change is the question, then nuclear is the answer'.

Gates outlined the argument that to attack global poverty, you had to attack climate change, because it was the poor who would suffer the most from climate change. And if you eliminate all the ways that cannot solve climate change, you're left with nuclear power as the only option.   Of course, this option is anathema to environmentalists, but as Sherlock Holmes put it,“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”   One could rephrase that as "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the answer."

In that talk, Gates introduced a new type of nuclear reactor which uses spent uranium (helping clean up the existing nuclear waste mess) and runs buried underground for 20 years at a time without the need to refuel or remove waste (the activities that introduce immense risk in current nuclear plants). The technology was developed at TerraPower, a company led by Nathan Myrvold, former chief scientist at Microsoft.

Well, I recently read an article on cbc.ca telling of Gates' visit to China, where he had discussions about introducing this technology there. Pretty interesting, I thought. If there's a place that is likely to tip the planet over the climate change abyss, it's developing China. Wouldn't it be nice if this technology delivers on its promise and China doesn't fuel its growth by building more dirty coal plants?

There's another interesting perspective on this visit in the Washington Post, lamenting that Gates had to go abroad to try to sell this revolutionary idea because the US has become a hostile environment to introducing such revolutionary technology.   As a person who follows innovation, and writings about innovation, pretty closely, that article is part of a chorus of voices disturbed over the US' loss of innovative leadership in the world.

Nixon's visit to China is considered to be pivotal in global affairs; Gates' visit could be even more significant for the planet.

Kobo Vox - worse than the Kobo

2011-12-07T07:43:00.000-08:00

A previous blog post contrasted the Kindle and the Kobo. Since then I have unfortunately discovered that a Kobo cannot survive getting crunched by an airline seat coming to upright position with a Kobo caught in the mechanism. Sigh.

Still driven by the desire to access e-books from Toronto's wonderful public library, my husband and I decided to replace the Kobo. When he was out shopping, the Kobo Vox caught his eye and he brought one home.

To make a long story short, we returned the Kobo Vox after a few days of playing with it. I have already complained about the Kobo being slow in a previous post. The Vox is even slower!

I could not figure out how to download books from the library to Kobo Vox (despite previously having done this with the Kobo). I went to Kobo.com to try to get some guidance on how to do that, to be told that Kobo Vox isn't supported on Kobo.com. As I was searching around the web for info on downloading from a library to the Vox, I read extremely negative reviews on the web features, so I didn't even bother to try that. Besides, I have an iPad which I love (see my post on that).

My advice: don't buy the Kobo Vox.

Jobs and Jobs

2011-12-05T13:15:00.000-08:00

In Steve Jobs, author Walter Isaacson mentions how deeply Jobs was influenced by Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma. But there's another point of intersection between Jobs and Christensen.

Clayton Christensen has popularized the notion of organizing yourself by considering Jobs to be Done. Think of customers as people who hire your product to get a job done. No one wants a 3/4" drill; they want a 3/4" hole. Christensen advocates organizing your market research around understanding what jobs people need to get done, and to designing your products around getting those jobs done.

The Apple stores were designed around Christensen's idea of Jobs to be Done (although that connection is not explicitly mentioned by Isaacson).

Here's how it happened. Jobs had decided that in order to control the entire customer experience, Apple had to have retail stores. The board thought he was crazy. Jobs knew the way to convince them was to build a prototype store for them to see.

He recruited Ron Johnson, who had been VP for merchandising at Target, to design the stores. By October 2000, the prototype was just about ready to unveil: a stark minimalist style, designed with Apple flair, and organized around Apple products. But then Johnson had an epiphany and realized the store needed to organized around the jobs that people want to do, like listening to music, or managing photos.

Apple store - Tyson's Corners

There was an explosion as Jobs recoiled from the prospect of such a major redesign. However, after sleeping on it, Jobs knew Johnson was right, and the launch was deferred for a few months in order to get it right.

A new prototype was built, the board was convinced, and the first Apple store opened in May 2001 in Tyson's Corners, Virginia.

Why I Love my iPad

2011-12-04T17:53:00.000-08:00

Two months ago, I didn't have an iPad.

Two months ago, I didn't know I couldn't live without one.

That's a picture of my iPad on the left there. It has an orange cover because ING Direct Bank (where I'm a director) gave all their directors an iPad for receiving board information and of course ING Direct's colour is orange. I had been planning to buy one the next day, so this was a very welcome suprise. And the content management system we're using for board material is definitely a winner.

The stimulus for me to finally buy an iPad was an upcoming five-week trip to India: I wanted to stay in touch and I wanted to store the thousands of photos I expected to take there, but I didn't want to lug around my regular laptop. It felt like the right time to join the iPad tribe!

The iPad delivered everything I'd hoped for and more. In fact, I'm smitten. Let me take a note from Elizabeth Barret's famous sonnet "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways". I'll list things that thrill me about my iPad. It's hard to put these in order, because they are all important to me.

The iPad screen is absolutely gorgeous. The picture displays are vibrant. After I transferred my photos to my computer for storage and manipulation, it really brought home just how great the iPad screen is. Compared to the iPad, the photos looked washed out on my computer. They all looked in need of a bit of Photoshop juice to spike the brightness and colour.

The touch screen is, of course, totally addictive. In a previous post, I described how much I like the Kindle. I find myself touching the Kindle screen these days in the futile hope that it will respond to my fingers! I heard an anecdote about a young child of three who was fiddling on his father's computer. When he touched the screen, nothing happened. "Daddy, this computer is broken". This device is forming the expectations of this new generation. It won't be many years before the mouse will look as antiquated as the old DOS command line, or a rotary dial phone.
The iPad's size is marvellous. It fits in my purse. It's always there for doing practical things like taking notes, or indulging in games. I might feel this way about an iPhone, but I'm too cheap to pay the data charges - it's nice to be able to do everything on WiFi.
The iPad turns on instantly! On my laptop, I turn it on when I come downstairs in the morning. Then I go and make my breakfast while it chugs along getting started. Halfway through my preparations, I go and click on the browser to bring it up. When I've finished making my breakfast, everything is (finally) ready for me. As I become accustoed (or addicted) to my iPad, this clunky behaviour makes me more and more frustrated.
I love the apps. I've always been devoted to the game Boggle, and I love playing its equivalent Word Seek app. A couple of my grandchildren are fascinated by this game as well. Another granddaughter loves the Oven Break game, and my sister-in-law and I are enamoured of friendly Talking Tom Cat. There's sitll lots to explore here.
The cunning magnetic foldable cover/stand for the iPad makes me smile every time I use it. What a clever innovation!

There are a couple of disappointments with my iPad. There are places in my house where I can't get WiFi connection on the iPad; I do get WiFi on my laptop in those same places. Cleaerly, there's room for improvement in the WiFi's reception. And I sure wish the battery lasted longer. The cord is too short to comfortably use the iPad while it's plugged in. But these are minor blemishes on a wonderful new companion.

Peter Singer

2011-12-03T18:37:00.000-08:00

There was another great talk at Rotman this week, by Peter Singer, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada.

With boyish enthusiasm and rapid-fire delivery, he described the scope of the global challenges in health and how we must bring rogether science, ethics, and business to address these problems. Grand Challenges Canada is trying to do just that, innovating on all three fronts.

'Smelly socks' is a great example of on-the-ground - literally - science. Motivated by the observation that mosquitoes were attracted to smelly socks lying on the ground after a game of soccer, researchers wondered if isolating what made the socks attractive could help in fighting malaria. Bed nets protect you from mosquitoes inside your home; this can be complemented by placing something outside your home that draws the mosquitoes away. The research in Tanzania by Dr. Fedros Okumu is being funded jointly by Grand Challenges Canada and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

There were several main themes in Singer's talk:

The imperative for innovation: In my MBA course, we use this defintion of innovation: fresh thinking that creates value. A few years ago, there would be quite a debate about whether the word 'shareholder' had to precede value; lately there is no such discussion. I believe the applicability of innovation to non-business problems is much more accepted. Singer advocates for integrated innovation, encompassing technological, social and business innovation.

The need for business involvement: profitable commercialization accelerates adoption and distribution. A to Z Textile Mills in Tanzania is Africa's largest producer of anti-malarial bednets. Kick-started by funding from the Acumen Fund (a social investment fund), A to Z now produces 29m bednets a year, and provides jobs for 7,000. This kind of growth is possible because A to Z has a viable, self-supporting business. Serum Institute in India produces half the vaccines in the world, including meningitis vaccine at 50 cents a pop. Of course, business involvement raises huge ethical problems too. Is it reasonable to work with Monsanto, the poster child for bad corporate citizenship, on much-maligned genetically modified crop systems when those crops could save millions from starvation?

The importance of local involvement: A vaginal microbicide to fight HIV in South Africa is succeeding with South African sex workers. Other parts of the world are not seeing the same success rate. Singer hypothesizes that this is because in South Africa the women use the microbicide just before sex, rather than once a day elsewhere. It was the sex workers themselves who argued for this approach, because they were working with local people they were comfortable talking to about this sensitive issue.

The benefits of mixing 'big science' and 'small science': The Gates Foundation is a good example of an organization that first funded big top-down science and is now also funding many smaller initiatives as well. It's one thing to do the big science to develop antiretrovirals, but how do you get them to the children of HIV-positive mothers in the crucial hours right after birth? If you can do that, you can prevent or at least vastly reduce the virus' ability to lodge in the child's body and develop into AIDS later. How about putting in an aluminum pouch, such as we use for ketchup, and giving it to a woman any time during pregnancy with instructions to use it right after birth? Not big science, but big impact.

The value of collaboration: - Grand Challenges Canada has worked with the Gates Foundation, the Canadian government (who channels some foreign aid money through GCC), the Norwegian government, and the World Bank to amplify their efforts.

Singer is passionate in his search for solutions to global grand challenges. He bubbles with a dazzling array of ideas, more than I can cover in a short post - saving lives at birth, unlocking intellectual potential through proper treatment of children, He believes is starting small, in looking at at approaches, and, most importantly, in bringing these initiatives to scale. Not just scale on individual projects, but finding a way to bring a plethora of projects to scale, simultaneously.

Daniel Kahneman

2011-12-03T06:34:00.000-08:00

I first heard Nobel-prize-winning Daniel Kahneman at TED a couple of years ago, when he talked about the difference between experience and the memory of experience (see my post here and watch the TED video here). Kahneman is a great thinker, and delightful to listen to. He introduces ideas in a very gentle, intuitive way and takes rather simple and intuitive concepts and formalizes them. As you reflect on these ideas, their significance grows and sheds light on other things you've observed. So I signed up quickly for his talk in the Rotman Speaker Series this week.

In this talk, Kahneman was presenting ideas from his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He described two modes of thinking, which he calls System 1 and System 2.

System 1 is all about fast thinking; in the blink of an eye we exploit our past experience, our intuitive reactions and our emotions to come to an answer. We make all kinds of decisions without even knowing we're making them, using our automatic thinking processes. It's good to have System 1 thinking, because it would be too exhausting to think through everything with System 2. For instance, we judge a person's mood by looking at their expression unconsciously and automatically. We handle the myriad decisions around driving a car in a sort of auto-pilot mode. When someone says 2+2, we immediately respond 4.

System 2 is more deliberative and thoughtful. It is more logical. We are aware that we are thinking. But it takes much more energy and time. We would use System 2 to come up with an answer to 17x24.

Kahneman points out that people are lazy, and we often use the effortless System 1 to answer a question, avoiding the thoughtful effort of thinking it through with System 2. Take the old chestnut question about a bat and a ball:

A bat and a ball together cost $1.10.

The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.

How much does the ball cost?

Most people whip out the answer ten cents, without taking time to check the answer, which is patently wrong. Ten cents is a System 1 answer, given instinctively and without thinking. Since System 1 thinking is easy, we often don’t apply System 2 thinking when we should and we don’t even use it to check our System 1 thinking. Kahneman pointed out that giving the wrong answer to that question is not a case of ignorance – even students at MIT get it wrong about 50% of the time, and at some universities up to 85% get it wrong.

When a question is really hard, and demands effortful System 2 thinking, we often substitute an easier question and use System 1 to answer that question. He described an experiment where students were asked “How happy are you?” It’s a fairly hard question to come up with an answer to how happy you are because it involves so many factors. After answering this question, students were asked “How many dates did you have last month?” This is a relatively easy, quantitative question with a single answer. When asked in this order, there was no correlation between the answers to the two questions. However, if the students were asked first about the number of dates and then about how happy they were, there was a high correlation. The students were using number of dates as a proxy for the happiness question – in other words switching to an easier question and using System 1 to answer it.

System 1 is extremely weak at dealing with statistics – it prefers to deal in stories. And the more coherent the story, the more (unfounded) confidence we have in our System 1 conclusions. Kahneman described an experiment where people were asked the following two questions before taking a trip, around a time when there had been significant news about terrorist activities:

How much would you pay for travel insurance that pays $100,000 in case of death for any reason?

How much would you pay for travel insurance that pays $100,000 in case of death in a terrorist incident?

People are willing to pay more for the second type of insurance. The explanation is that System 1 thinking is involved in the second question – the words ‘terrorist incident’ arouse emotions that cause us to make an intuitive System 1 response, although paying more for the second insurance than the first insurance is not a rational decision.

Kahneman told a cute story about himself. He ran into a colleague in a small hotel in Australia, and was greatly surprised at the coincidence. What’s the probability, after all? Two weeks later he met the same colleague at the theatre in London. Clearly the second incident had even lower probability. But Kahneman observed he was less surprised in London – he’d already laid in the experience that he tended to meet this colleague in unusual places. His reaction was based on System 1.

People in marketing understand this dichotomy. For better or for worse, appealing to System 1's intuition and emotion can be more compelling than appealing to System 2's logic. The same is true for fundraising: a pure System 2 appeal is not likely to be effective for most people.

For me, Kahneman’s message was rather discouraging. It put more scientific evidence around what we often observe when people make decisions solely on emotion, undeterred by facts, whether in response to a politician or a commercial. When Kahneman was asked how one might train children to be more reflective and use System 2 thinking more often, his only suggestion was to lead by example. So, get out there and use System 2 thinking as often as possible.

TED Book Club Selection - November 2011

2011-11-27T20:26:00.000-08:00

Today, the lastest TED Book Club Selection arrived, Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs. What an appropriate choice! Both TED and Jobs stand for Technology, Entertainment and Design. I've received many comments on my posts about TED book selections, showing that many people enjoy hearing what the folks at TED have chosen. So I decided to post this, even though I've barely begun the book.

Jobs life is linked to three inspirations in my own life: Clayton Christensen, TED and Ian Sharp.

It's said that Jobs was inspired by Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma, and that it was pivotal in molding his views about innovation. I've talked about Christensen's ideas in previous posts (such as this one). I celebrated the fact that The Innovator's Dilemma was chosen as one of the six best business books of all time(click here), and that Christensen was named the top Business Thinker (click here). These posts explain why I think Christensen's ideas are so important, and if you examine the trajectory of Jobs' career, you can see his products as an illustration of Christensen's theories. Consultants from Innosight (the firm founded by Clayton Christensen) had a great article about the innovation lessons learned from Steve Jobs. I've seen lots written about Jobs recently, but that assessment is my favourite.

Jobs' life is an illustration of the very essence of the TED conference. So many conferences bring together people with shared interests in a particular field. They are very focused, and can often provide deep information, but seldom any true inspiration because they simply reinforce an industry's entrenched way of thinking. TED is different - it brings together people from a wide variety of disciplines and the sparks of creative and innovative thinking fly. Jobs similarly capitalized on the breadth and depth of his interest in technology, entertainment and design in the breathtaking innovation in his products. In just the first few chapters, there have been appearances by people I've met at TED like Larry Brilliant and Stewart Brand, and the index reveals more to come.

The description of those early days in Silicon Valley brings back memories of my early days in timesharing (now called cloud computing) in the early 70s in Canada. I worked for I.P. Sharp Associates, a pioneering software and network communications company, led by the brilliant and unassuming Ian Sharp (shown at left). Ian's penchant for hiring bright people resulted in a company full of them. Like Jobs, many 'Sharpees' had dropped out of university (often leaving the US motivated by the Vietnam draft). Like Jobs, some of them had nevertheless earned a BA (brilliant & abrasive) or a BE (brilliant & eccentric). Ian exhibited huge tolerance of eccentric behaviour as long as people were contributing and were respectful of their colleagues and focussed on solving customer problems. Jobs' success arose, at least in part, from the diversity of his interests and his appetite for ingesting ideas from many fields. Ian's disregard for people's area of specialization meant that I.P. Sharp was seething with people from diverse backgrounds - computer science as well as education, mathematics, biology, music and many fields. (It was also full of 'minorities', because Ian seemed blind to nationality, religion, skin colour, or sexual orientation).

Authorized biographies often present a somewhat varnished version of events. What has surprised me so far about this book is that it shines a glaring light on both Jobs' brilliance and his less desirable traits. Jobs and Wozniak have just founded Apple, and Jobs' trademark chutzpah, passion and single-minded drive are already evident. The reality distortion field has made its appearance. So has Jobs' arrogance, although that aspect of his personality remains to be polished and honed. His penchant for abuse and his 'anti-loyalty' is disturbing to read about. Perhaps it's a final comment on Jobs' unfailingly high self-esteem that he was willing to support a book that could present him in such an unforgiving light.

Glenburn Tea Estate

2011-11-20T19:51:00.000-08:00

Our last stop in India was at the Glenburn Tea Estate, a large working tea plantation at an altitude of 3,200 feet in the Himalayas. From our room we could see Mt. Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world at 28,169 feet. (For reference, Everest is 29,029 feet.)

We had to get up early in the morning to see the mountains, because by 7 a.m., they are cloaked in cloud. It really brings home the tales of climbers who wait for a break in the weather to make their final ascents on these huge mountains.

It's hard to express how awesome these mountains are. That picture above was taken from 130 kms away. On the first morning, we missed the view of the full mountain, but we now suspect the very tops of the mountains were visible that day and we mistook them for clouds. Your eye just doesn't look that high for mountains, until you see the full range and realize "Oh my goodness, those mountains really are touching the sky!"

Burra Lodge at Glenburn is the original bungalow built in 1859 by a Scottish tea company, and magnificently restored by the current owners. The Water Lily Bungalow (shown at the left) was built in 2008 and has been furnished with antiques and tasteful decor, right down to traditional antique baths and gorgeous teak floors.

Our room in the Water Lily Bungalow was named the RungDung Suite after the nearby river.

That window seat was my favourite spot to sit and read and absorb the mountains. My husband chose the patio for the same view.

One of the lovely features of Glenburn was the large dinner table which seated all 18 people staying there. (There were several children as well, who were fed before the grown-ups.) Glenburn is very popular with expats who live in Delhi and want to escape the chaos for a serene holidays, and most of the guests fell into this category. Our place cards seated us with different people each night and the conversation was lively and entertaining.

Another great thing about Glenburn was the wonderful gardens. We hadn't seen a lot of flowers growing in gardens in India. (In fact, I was always curious where those thousands of flower petals came from for all those rangolis we saw). But Glenburn was a refreshing burst of flowers for souls starved of flowers. We talked to the gardener one day, who said he had been taking care of Glenburn's gardens for over 50 years! Here are some of the lovely flowers:

Turbans

2011-11-19T20:56:00.000-08:00

During our recent trip to India, I became fascinated with turbans. There were many beautiful turbans, in a variety of colours, and wrapped in rather exotic patterns. One man demonstrated to me how he wrapped his turban - he did it so efficiently it was amazing.

These turbans aren't simply decorative though. The colours of the turban indicate who you are; for example in one region shepherds wore an orange turban, in another area yellow. Although we were assured many times that the caste system is dead in India, most of our guides self-identified the caste they were from, and often identified others that way. So it still seemed fairly top of mind to me.

I've appended some photos of turbans I particularly liked. You'll notice that most of the men wearing these turbans are older, so perhaps the practice is melting away with the younger generation. The exception is where I was taking pictures of hotel employees wearing local dress; they were much easier to pose so there are a few of those

Best 50 Business Thinkers

2011-11-17T19:51:00.000-08:00

Clayton Christensen has been ranked #1 in the Thinkers50 assessment of the best business thinkers of our day. The Thinkers50 uses ten criteria to evaluate thinkers: originality of ideas; practicality of ideas; presentation style; written communication; loyalty of followers; business sense; international outlook; rigor of research; impact of ideas and the elusive guru factor. The thinkers are judged by a panel of advisors and includes votes from people who have answered the question "Who is the most important living management thinker?"

Christensen's work is covered in several books, but his most influential contribution comes from the formulation of disruptive innovation theory first proposed in The Innovator's Dilemma, recently named one of the best six business books of all time by The Economist. (see my post on this topic here).

Christensen's acceptance speech is a departure from straight business talk. He waxes philosophic about the parallels between business theory and its application to personal life. He refers to Mintzberg's work on the difference between deliberate and emergent strategy - the deliberate being a unwavering pursuit of a specific intention with a fixed strategy, the emergent being a process where a series of actions in response to external situations or realities develop into a strategy. Clay uses this framework to conclude that he doesn't want to leave it to chance what kind of person he wants to be (deliberate strategy), but that he entrusts how he gets there to emergent strategy that adapts to unknown threats and opportunities. He is integrating this kind of thinking and discussion into his teaching at the Harvard Business School.

I was proud to see several Canadians featured on the list.

Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management (and my boss, since I teach there as an Adjunct Professor), vaulted to sixth place. Martin is best known for the concept of integrative thinking as a way of solving business problems, and design thinking as a path to success in business.

At the ninth rank is another Canadian (who also happens to teach at Rotman), Don Tapscott, who writes on impact of technology on society, including such books as Growing Up Digital and Wikinomics.

Can we count Malcolm Gladwell as Canadian? He was born in England and now lives in the US, but he grew up in Canada. So let's count him as Canadian. Gladwell is one of those journalists who investigates patterns and presents new possibilities in clear and understandable language. Books such as The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers have engaged the public in presenting new ways of thinking of things. Gladwell made it as #10.

Coming in 30th position was Henry Mintzberg of McGill University, recognized for his work on organizational theory and emergent strategy (as described above).

I heard recently that publishers estimate that only 30% of the business books people buy are actually read. This kind of honour helps filter the books that I really should be out reading.

The Ultimate Question

2011-11-16T20:05:00.000-08:00

Fifteen years ago, I attended a talk by Fred Reichheld, then a Bain consultant and now a Bain Fellow. Reichheld's message was simple. Treat your customers right and earn their loyalty. That's cheaper than being trapped on the treadmill of constant customer churn and the expense of attracting new customers to replace those you've lost or driven away.

Reichheld supported his argument with cold facts showing the increased profits and growth that came from a focus on customer retention. He later compiled that material in The Loyalty Effect published in 2001.

His message resonated with me, because I've always believed that if you keep your customers happy, revenue and profits will flow. The fact that it resonated is probably why I remember the talk to this day.

Last night I heard Reichheld again, in conversation with Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School at University of Toronto, who's just been named one of the Top 50 Business Thinkers. Reichheld talked about his new book The Ultimate Question 2.0, the follow-up to his previous book The Ultimate Question.

To Reichheld, the ultimate question is "How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?" Responses are scored on a scale of 1 to 10, ranging from 'not at all likely' to 'extremely likely'. The Ultimate Question introduced the concept of a Net Promoter Score which is obtained by subtracting the percentage of people who respond 1-6 from the percentage of those who respond 9-10. In other words, the score is intended to measure the people who really really like your product or company.

The Ultimate Question 2.0 fleshes out the concept with examples of companies who have adopted the Net Promoter Score as the core of their business philsophy. You can't just start surveying people and calculating a Net Promoter Score - that is just a superficial and meaningless approach. You have to follow up with the people who responded to the survey and get to the bottom of why they rated you the way they did.

Reichheld talked about Intuit, the software company behind Quick Books and Turbo Tax software. Intuit has adopted NPS and embedded it deep in their culture. Product designers talk about the Love Factor: at Intuit, it's not enough to keep customers satisfied, you need to make them love the product.

Reichheld is wonderful to listen to - down to earth, articulate and avuncular. He talked about good profits versus bad profits. Bad profits are when you make a short term gain, but at the cost of alienating your customers. He gave a couple of examples of such bad profits - phone companies that lock you into miserable contracts, or airlines that falsely advertise low prices and then stack on the extra charges. Reichheld argues that although they may deliver a quick hit to profits, such tactics will never result in a company that is successful in the long term.

Reichheld acknowledged that he was becoming more moralistic as he grew older. Age gave him the freedom to advocate his ideas, not just because they make good business sense, but simply because they were the right way to treat customers. What a nice philosophy.

Jodhpur

2011-11-16T17:58:00.000-08:00

Jodhpur is an interesting city of a million people. It's called the Blue City because of its indigo painted houses. This is done because there is something in the paint that repels insects - another example of ecologically sound traditional practices in India. Our hotel, the Raas, featured lots of red stone cut in interesting shapes, and had the upper stories painted blue.

We had a beautiful view of the Mehrangahr Fort from our hotel balcony. This picture of the fort catching the sun at dawn also catches the hotel pool - a touch of the old and new together which rather appealed to me.

What the picture doesn't capture is the mosque that was just off to the right with the loudspeaker that announced prayer at 4:45 in the morning, right at the level of our room. If there's a scale for how loud a loudspeaker can be, this one had to be a 10! The hotel handed out ear plugs, but they were insufficient. It was a shame, because it was such a nice hotel in every other way.

We visited the fifteenth-centry Mehrangahr Fort, perched on the hill above the town. Legend has it that to build the fort the local ruler had to displace a hermit, who promptly uttered a curse that the place would always suffer from water scarcity. Although he built a house and temple for the hermit at the fort, the ruler felt compelled to bury a man alive in the foundations of the fort to propitiate the gods and remove the curse. The family of this man still lives in Jodhpur, supported by the local ruler, and the extended family is invited to special events as honoured guests.

Another grisly aspect of the fort was the plaque with the handprints of the 30 wives who self-immolated upon the death of their husband in 1843. Sati is now banned in India but it is amazing that it was still being practised as late as the 19th century.

The fort had many lovely rooms and a good museum. A sign that had me laughing out loud was the no smoking sign. This sign was posted outdoors, something we saw a few times in India. One of the remarkable things about India was the dearth of smokers we saw around the country. Almost all the smokers we saw were Europeans.

Dabbawallas

2011-11-09T19:51:00.000-08:00

In Mumbai, about 5,000 dabbawallas deliver 200,000 lunches a day to city workers. The system started in the 19th century and perseveres today, although apparently the number of lunches has started to decline.

A dabbawalla picks up freshly made hot lunches from homes in the suburbs in mid-morning. Our guide pointed out that you better have the lunch ready when they arrive - even if it's a bit before their scheduled time - because if it's not ready they go without it! One dabbawalla collects many lunches and takes them on special dabbawalla trays, loaded onto bicycles, pushcarts or carried on their head, and takes them to the train, where they are placed in a special car on the train. When they arrive at the Churchgate station in central Mumbai, they are picked up by more dabbawallas and sorted for delivery to their final destination at 12:30. Empty tiffin boxes are returned home in the afternoon. The tiffin boxes pass through several hands and travel on bicycles, handcarts, trains or on heads to reach their destinations and undergo several sorting processes along the way.

The amazing thing is that this is a totally manual process, and is based on a proprietary (some say secret) coding scheme that is used by the dabbawallas, many of whom are illiterate. You can see the coding painted on the traditional tin tiffin box below; magic markers are used on the cloth bags and thermoses which are more the modern fashion. I got a picture of a partially sorted tray of tiffins.

Does the central sorting station make you think of FedEx's hub in Memphis? It certainly did for me.

And it's not quite fair to say the entire process is manual. Dabbawallas are now accepting orders through SMS. It is also SMS which is also killing the old habit of slipping messages into the tiffin box - why do that when you can fire off a text message?

Being a dabbawalla is a traditional job mainly held by people from the Pune area of India. The organization has very little management superstructure and is held in a charitable trust. Dabbawallas have to make an investment of two bicycles, a wooden crate for the tiffins, white cotton kurta pajamas, and the trademark white Gandhi cap. All the profits are distributed at the end of every month and come to about $40-$80. It costs less than $4 for the customer to have this amazing delivery service for a month!

What is astonishing about this system is its incredible accuracy and timeliness. Forbes magazine awarded the system Six Sigma certification in 2001, based on its 99.999999% accuracy rate which implies less than 1 error in 16 million.

Having read about this system, I was fascinated to see it, and expected to observe high intensity and even frenzy at the sorting stations. However, we watched the tiffin boxes being sorted on the sidewalk outside Churchgate Station and the scene was totally calm, even leisurely, although very organized. We'd been told the dabbawallas weren't fond of people getting in their way and taking lots of photos (understandable), so I have limited good pictures of the whole exercise. Here's a picture of some of the trays ready to go; it's a heavy load for one person to carry or push. Some bikers head off with tiffins hanging from every part of their body and the bike!

For those who think that a successful organization absolutely requires rigid top-down management, the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust of Mumbai is a great counterexample.

Towers of Silence

2011-11-08T02:12:00.000-08:00

Indian Parsis (or Parsees) are members of the Zoroastrian religion and descendents of the original Parsis in Iran. The number of Parsis in India has been dwindling, and may number as few as 50,000, mostly concentrated near Mumbai, with forecasts that the number will fall further to about 23,000 by 2020.

Zoroastrians believe that a dead body is contaminated and must neither be buried (where it would pollute the earth) or cremated (where it would pollute fire). In order to avoid this pollution, dead bodies are placed near the top of an open circular tower, exposed to sun and to birds of prey. After about a year, the bones are collected in an ossuary pit at the bottom of the tower, and the final deterioration of the bones is assisted by applications of lime. Eventually rain water washes the remains through various filters out to sea.

The name Tower of Silence was given to these towers by a British translator in the 19th Century. I had heard of Towers of Silence from two separate sources: an article four years ago in The Economist, and in A Son of the Circus set in Mumbai and reviewed in a previous post.

We visited the "Hanging Gardens" at the top of Malabar Hill in Mumbai, an upscale residential area in Mumbai. The Gardens are a lovely urban oasis in a busy city, with a pleasant view over the smog-covered city below. They sit immediately adjacent to the Mumbai Tower of Silence. The park is built on top of an enclosed reservoir; it's said the reservoir was originally enclosed to avoid contamination from the Tower of Silence.

There is a major problem these days with the towers: the vultures on whom they depend are being devastated by diclofenac, a drug used to treat cattle (as described in detail in this article from The Economist). Vultures not only help with human bodies in Towers of Silence; they are a key part of the Indian ecosystem in getting rid of the carcuses of cattle and buffalo. Since Indians don't eat much beef and revere sacred cows and since there are about 200M cattle and buffalo in India used exclusively for milk, Indian farmers have depended on vultures to dispose of their carcuses. These cows have been the carriers of diclofenac to the vultures.

Both vultures and Parsis are dwindling in numbers. Sadly, it's a question of who will outlast whom. The good news for the vultures is that diclofenac is now banned (though farmers are allowed to use up their old stocks), and there are conservationists breeding vultures in captivity. Meanwhile, Parsis are experimenting with other techniques such as installing solar relectors to speed up the action of the sun.

Riding a Camel in Jaiselmer

2011-11-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

Riding a camel is not quite as easy as it looks when you see Lawrence of Arabia loping across the sands in a movie.

When we were in Jaiselmer, our tour included a late afternoon ride across the sand dunes on a camel. We had been in the Thar Desert for some time now, the third largest desert in the world after the Sahara and the Simpson in Australia. Most of the desert has been rocky desert and, after the best monsoon in years, it has been uncharacteristically green. However, there is a small area just outside Jaiselmer with dunes.

Jaiselmer is a major tourist magnet. Jaiselmer itself boasts a huge fort on the hill, like many places we've visited, still populated by 5,000 people inside that fort. It had many havelis (mansions) with richly carved ornamentation. It was the first place we really felt the press of tourists, as we met many tour buses on the road to and from Jaiselmer, intermingled with the many army vehicles (Jaiselmeer is only 100 miles from the Pakistan border and the military is quite beefed up here). Many of the tours were domestic tourists. Jaiselmer is the setting for many Bollywood movies, and that draws Indian tourists the way Salzburg draws fans of The Sound of Music.

So, you've been waiting to hear about that camel ride. We had seen camels beside and on the road for a few days as we headed west in Rajasthan, but at the Sam Dunes, as they're known, there were hordes of camels, with their brightly colored saddles and streams of people setting off single file to the dunes.

Our guide picked out a camel for me and then led me around the left side to mount the camel, which is sitting low on the ground with his knees folded under him. Suddenly the camel jumped up, much to the dismay of the guy holding the reins, not to mention me!!!!! So, on to choose another, hopefully calmer, camel. I gingerly sat in the saddle, and the camel straightened his back legs. At this point, one is perched precariously at about a 70 degree angle pitched forward toward the ground. The camel then rockily gets off his knees and stands up straight and you breathe a sigh of relief that you haven't pitched forward off the beast.

The most uncomfortable thing is that the camel is very wide, and the saddle holds you in a tight position, so your legs are spread very wide, resulting in a lot of pressure on your hips if you're built like me. Anyway, we got off to a lumbering walk, accompanied by two guys, one young and one ancient, holding the reins.

Except for when the camel was going downhill, or when he lowered his head to crop some brush, it was relatively comfortable swaying ride, except for those darned spread legs. So I decided to call it a day and head back to the 'camel parking lot'. Immediately, the two guys, both the young and the old, whipped out their mobiles to call back to our driver who came out partway to meet us and put me out of my misery - quite literally. Quite an experience all in all.

Highway Driving in India

2011-11-07T08:11:00.000-08:00

It's said that you need three things to drive in India: a good horn, good brakes, and good luck.

Horns are used incessantly in India to indicate that you are about to overtake and virtually never to show impatience or irritation. In fact, trucks usually have signs on the back requesting you to 'Blow Horn' or 'Horn Please'. A rear view mirror seems to be the appendix of an Indian vehicle, a vestigial organ of no discernible current use.

Turn indicators are also vestigial organs. However, manual turn indicators are sometimes used. On the busy road connecting Mumbai to Delhi we were trapped behind a long line of transport trucks which our driver deftly passed, often a few at a time. We were puzzled by the man hanging off the left hand side of a big touring bus in front of us standing on the running board. (Remember we're driving on the left hand side here). We finally figured out his task; after the big bus had overtaken a truck, his task was to warn trucks that the bus was coming back in to the left lane and the truck had to slow down to let him in.

Brakes are important because you never know when you're going to have to slow to a crawl for a piece of road that has been completely washed out by the monsoons or for a speed bump which may appear even in a 4-lane highway. And then there are cows, sheep, goats, bullocks, camels, water buffalo, pigs, chickens, and dogs which may amble, stand or lie in front of you. Then there are the vehicles overtaking a car from the other direction and straying into your lane. The oncoming vehicle is expected to slow down to give the driver time to return to his own lane, or perhaps take to the shoulder to let him keep coming. Size matters in these contest. Everyone gives way to buses or trucks. Then come jeeps, cars and vans like ours. The auto-rickshaws are lower on the totem pole, and motorcycles and bikes bring up the rear.

Most of the accidents we saw were overturned vehicles, not too surprising, given that so many vehicles are wishfully loaded - 'I wish I had a vehicle that could legitimately carry this much stuff'.

Whereas in Canada a pedestrian can be fined for jaywalking, in India, pedestrians always have right of way. Simply walk into the road, raise your hand just above waist height and give a gentle to and fro waving motion and the cars (mostly) stop for you.

Driving - and crossing streets - in India is an adventure!

** Apologies to anyone who has read before. I accidentally deleted several posts and am restoring them

Why Do Cows Lie in the Road?

2011-11-07T07:57:00.000-08:00

Coming to India, one has been prepared to expect cows on the road. The odd one, here and there. What I hadn't expected was the sheer number of cows, on the streets and alleys in large towns and small, and on the highways. And not just walking around - lying in the middle of the road! Rather dangerous, one might think, even in India where cows are sacred animals and carefully avoided.

The explanation? In the extreme heat, some of the chemicals from the asphalt are emitted from the pavement, and those chemicals deter mosquitos and other bugs.

** Apologies to anyone who has already read this - I accidentally deleted a few posts and am now reposting them.

Divali in Mumbai

2011-11-07T05:52:00.000-08:00

If you look up Divali on Wikipedia, it is described as a festival of lights honouring good over evil, celebrated by both Hindus and Jains. There are five days to the festival, each with separate significance.

But in Mumbai, everyone we asked described Divali as the festival to honour Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity. This festival has been highly commercialized because it is considered an auspicious time for important purchases and proper observances will set you up for a prosperous upcoming year. Hence we saw huge billboards and newspaper ads encouraging people to get out there and shop: cars, furniture, home renovations, but most of all gold, both as a jewelry and an investment.

Divali is called the Festival of Lights but it seemed to me it could equally be called the Festival of Flowers. Buildings and cars were festooned with flowers, mostly marigolds, and rangolis were painstakingly shaped with flower petals on floors everywhere. Markets were full of clay saucers, to be filled with tiny candles floating in oil, and placed decoratively inside or outside buildings, or within rangolis. We saw a rangoli etched out with glittery powder and sprinkled with candles on the pavement in front of one shop, which was very pretty as it sparkled in the night.

We had spoken to some hotel staff about Divali and when we arrived back from breakfast, we were greeted with wide conspiratorial smiles. When we opened the door to our room, we were surprised and delighted to see that our room had been decorated for us, with a rangoli, and an elephant (representing Ganesh, the elephant of good fortune) decorated with flower petals.

Divali lasts for five days and Mumbai is reputed to celebrate most vigorously, especially with fireworks and firecrackers. We were at Marine Drive to enjoy the first night of Divali. Marine Drive is a boulevard that borders the bay in Mumbai, with wide sidewalks for strolling and a cement wall for sitting to appreciate the view. It gracefully curves around the bay and is dubbed 'The Queen's Necklace' at night.

On Divali along Marine Drive there were clusters of people were setting off things every few feet - six-foot high sizzlers on the ground, noisy crackers that startled you with loud bangs, beautiful fireworks shot into the sky. The cacophony was continuous and the air was filled with smoke. You had to keep your wits about you, as you might be standing looking at one display, to find another being lit right behind you, or perhaps a dud firework that had been shot high in the air coming to land near you. I found this short video on YouTube which captures the randomness of the firecrackers and fireworks very well.

It was such a contrast to Canada, where everything is so controlled, with planned fireworks by municipal authorities, let off by certified fireworks people, and with the crowds a specified safe distance from the point of lighting. Here very young children would dash up to the fireworks with sparklers to light them up. It was up to the crowd to be alert and stay clear of the explosions on all sides. It was similar to the Duresha celebrations where giant effigies 90 feet tall were burned, and people were standing very close. The effigies were supported by guy wires to force them to fall in place, but any surprises would have been quite devastating to the crowd. It was great to be part of something so different.

One lovely custom of Divali is that on the third day, brothers are supposed to visit their sisters. The sister ties a rakhi, a colourful thread, around the wrist of the brother, signifying the strong bond between brother and sister. The brother brings a gift to the sister. One of our guides said that he had given his sister a card. That seemed a bit modest compared to what we'd heard about. It turned out to be a credit card! His sister is studying in university and he had offered to help her, but she had declined preferring instead to earn her own money as a tutor, he said proudly. I think he is quite confident his credit card won't be abused. In a society of multi-generation families, where the wife lives with her husband' family, this custom to strengthen the bond between brothers and sisters is quite heartwarming.

Indian Village Life

2011-10-26T01:32:00.000-07:00

Chhatra Sagar is a beautiful 'camp' near the small town of Nimaj. It consists of eleven luxury tents which sit on top of a dam overlooking a reservoir which looks like a lovely natural lake, with wild life galore. The lake was created in 1890 by a powerful noble of the desert kingdom of Marwar, making the area a beautiful green oasis in this dry land. This year, India has enjoyed a particularly good monsoon season, and so we are seeing Rajasthan at its very greenest and all bodies of water totally full.

The site was a favorite place for visiting dignitaries for whom temporary camps were set up. The great grandchildren of the nobleman who built the dam now run it as a permanent camp for tourists. Raj was a cousin whose family was from Udaipur, and he was our gracious, rather shy, host during our visit.

We took a tour through the farm and learned a lot from Raj about the crops and habits of farmers. The hotel here pays people in the village to show their various trades as we take a tour; they contribute to the village in return for the villagers allowing copious pictures (taking pictures here is sometimes chargeable) and not petitioning the visitors for money or gifts. It meant that we saw some real people doing real things, without the begging associated with India.

The fields here grow three crops a year. We saw many different crops in the irrigated fields - millet, henna, anise, sesame. In Shahpura we had seen a large lake that had filled during monsoon. Within a couple of months, that lake would have dried out, and the farmers would grow wheat in that area.

For small farmers who can't justify owning or renting a harvesting machine, millet is laid out on the road, and cars passing over it do the hard work of separating the grain from the stalks.

Fences made of stone separate the fields. Stone quarries are common and we saw many companies cutting the stone for building material and for making fences, especially as we got close to Udaipur.

The fields everywhere seem to be worked mostly by women in their colourful dresses and shawls. When Wayne remarked to Raj that he saw a lot of men sitting around relaxing but no women relaxing, Raj laughingly pointed out that the men did the hard work - supervising the women.

We saw a mix of farming methods from hand farming with wooden tools, r bullocks pulling a plow, to some small harvesting machines. Medium-sized farmers will rent these harvesters from the bigger farmers. Interestingly, many of these harvesters were Massey Ferguson, even some quite new ones. We had not realized this old Canadian company was still manufacturing.

We saw many women walking with water containers, having collected water from a lake or pond or the village pump. Electricity was much more common than running water. Some pretty modest homes boasted TVs, or even the odd dish. There were lots of motorcycles, and of course ubiquitous mobiles.

Indian Cricket

2011-10-23T03:10:00.001-07:00

India ia a nation of cricket fanatics. The wound is still raw from India's shellacking at Britain's hand losing all five matches in their recent tour of England. The Indians have won the first three matches of the British tour in India. As we arrived back at our hotel in Mumbai today, the team was just boarding their bus to go out and face England in the fourth of five matches. Opposite us on the square in front of India Gate, there were throngs of excited fans, cheering and waving each time another player came out to the bus. There three army men with machine guns pointing out from an armored vehicle protecting the illustrious coup. (this was the Taj hotel where the attack and siege took place some years ago.). Our Indian friends tell us that India won't be satisfied with anything less than a five-game whitewash to redeem their pride.

We also saw cricket at the local level today at the Oval Maiden. The pictures you see were taken from the walkway midway of the field, which must have measured at least four football fields in length. There were myriad games going on, of varying degrees of formality, some teams with uniforms, some not, some all in white with an official referee. But here's the kicker: the pitches the games were being played on were all overlapping. The fielders from one game might be standing behind the wicket of a game two or threes over from their own game. Deliciously Indian. Just like road traffic. Thank goodness they were playing with a tennis ball, because a regular hard cricket ball could have been perilous, since a ball could arrive from one of many games.

2011-10-22T09:08:00.001-07:00

Udaipur - a dream city built around a number of artificial lakes, with a dream hotel, the Lake Palace 'floating' in the middle of Lake Pichola (it's actually built on an island.) We were greeted (and security checked) on shore and handed to a canopied craft to take us to the hotel. There we were greeted by a distinguished man with a luxurious mustache to escort us to the hotel under a highly decorated Indian umbrella. As we walked to the front door, I was showered with sweetly-swelling rose petals. This happened at the Rambaugh Palace in Jaipur, another Taj hotel, so perhaps this is standard for their properties. Despite its staginess, I loved it; I laughingly protested once when leaving that I hadn't got the full treatment on the way out, and the imposing gentlemen rushed to my side with the umbrella ever afterward.

Lake Pichola was full, due to this year's spectacularly good monsoon. As little as two years ago, due to several years of bad monsoons, the lake was completely empty. It would have been a crashing disappointment to arrive at this fabled locale to find the lake not there. Our room had a lovely oriel window, with comfortable cushions - I called it 'my' window although we did fit in two people at times - which overhung the lake and was a beguiling place to loll in comfort gazing over the lake at the main palace.

The Maharanas of Udaipur built several beautiful palaces here. Their main palace is the second biggest palace in India. Part of it is now a museum, part a hotel and the newest part is the residence of the current Maharana. Its massive presence dominated the shoreline view from the hotel. I have included some pictures of pretty parts of the palace.

The Lake Palace was once the Summer Palace. Though just a couple of minutes boat ride from the shore, it picked up cooler winds in the summer heat. And at the crest of a nearby hill, we could see the Monsoon Palace, more comfortable during the rainy season.

On our boat trip around the lake, we made a stop to tour the so-called Party Palace, the scene of special receptions and parties in the old days. The current Maharana is a consummate businessman and now runs this as a hotel, and also rents it out for parties and weddings. Apparently Bollywood stars like to fly in for special occasions here.

As the room key is put in the slot on arrival (like European hotels, indian hotels sensibly turn off the power when you're out of the room and putting the key into the slot signifies you're 'home'), the TV automatically starts running a video and the sonorous voice of a stately man with a full beard and mustache greets you. It is the current Maharana welcoming you and describing his hotels under Taj management along with a bit about their history and background.

Nagaur

2011-10-22T00:15:00.001-07:00

Nagaur is a small city, by Indian standards, of just under 100,000. Dominating the town is the huge fort, with 1.5 kms of walls enclosing 36 acres of land, accounting for half the area of the city. Inside the fort is an enormous palace area, controlled (still today) by the Maharajah of Jodhpur. 12 havelis occupied by 12 queens comprise part of the fort, and these have been restored and made into hotel rooms; we stayed in one of these rooms and had a lovely terrace looking out over the fort.

Many of the forts and palaces we've seen have been Mughal and reflected Islamic architecture and painting; this fort is completely Hindu. But what was most interesting was to have a peek into a historical site in the process of reparation. Because the Maharajah who owned the fort was in Jodhpur, this vast area lay unoccupied for hundreds of year, until the Indian army was stationed here during 60s. The fort took a real beating during their visit, and this has made the job of restoration even bigger. There was a small museum area within the fort, describing the efforts at restoration, which was particularly handy because of our guide's weakness in English.

Many rooms and their beautiful paintings have been restored, for example the room shown below.

There are many rooms made of plaster based on crushed sea shells, which resembles marble, some with beautiful original paintings. Pillars are lined up to give symmetrical vistas whichever way you look. There is beautiful painting and other decoration on the walls. But what blew my mind was the ingenuity of the cooling mechanisms for the middle of a desert. One kilometer of clay pipe or troughs circulated water throughout the palace and delivered it to countless internal fountains and pools.

The areas of the fort were positioned to maximize air flow during the summer months for natural cooling. On the roof was a square structure cunningly designed to catch and funnel the wind, from whichever direction it was blowing, down a vent and into the rooms below:

The roof had rainwater catchment with pipes that directed the water into giant pools - Olympic sized for sure. There were separate pools in restricted areas where the women would bathe.

For the baths, there were separate hot and cold water cisterns, and you could see the holes in the wall of the bath where the equivalent of faucets must have been (shown in picture) so you could mix the bath water to your taste in temperature.

Water pressure delivered water from cisterns on the roof (shown in picture) to power all the fountains, with oxen working to pump the water up. I couldn't help thinking how much I would have loved living here, but also how much water-starved peasants must have hated the whole idea of all that water being used for bathing, while they struggled for enough for sustinence and agriculture.

Our driver Harnam taught us the expression ABC (Another Bloody Castle) which can be applied to some trips to India. With the natural cooling and the many pools and baths spread around, and the ecological soundness of this fort, it was far from an ABC. Nagaur would qualify as an eco-resort in modern times.

Jaipur Fort

2011-10-14T02:59:00.001-07:00

Our visit to the Jaipur Fort was amazing. There are 12 kms. of walls leading from the hilltop fort - if you didn't know where you were, you might think you were looking at the Great Wall of China. Brightly decorated elephants deliver tourists to the top of the hill. The fort is enormous,making for a very impressive view from the highway below. Once inside, there is a magnificent palace enclosed within the walls.

What impressed me most was the Hall of Mirrors, full of intricate patterns, all involving mirrors. In another courtyard there were beautifully decorated doors, one for each season. There was a lovely formal garden sitting in the watery moat, designed to look like a Persian carpet floating on the water. Very good illusion. The palace had its own sort of air conditioning, generated by the flow of water, and the palace was positioned on the hill, to maximize its access to breezes. Truly lovely.

Government doing some good in India

2011-10-14T02:54:00.001-07:00

Everyone here constantly complains about the government and its corruption. To me, it seems as if they are doing some good things despite the complaints.

School support and rules:
Scool used to be mandatory to Grade Five and now it is mandatory to Grade Eight. Moreover, all kids in school get a free meal at lunch, which is important to some. There are also some 'incentives' for parents. Pretty well everyone we talk to seems to support these initiatives.

Government school kids all wear sky blue uniforms and we see them all over the place. We visited a village school with our gentle and quiet-spoken host Raj near our tented resort in Nimaj. The day started with a school assembly where the kids chanted to the goddess of learning, whereafter the kids went to their classrooms. They sat at long desks in dim classrooms. The teachers were all men and there were some posters and maps around the sparse classroom. In the principal's office, there were three Acer computers under covers and a paltry collection of books. For what it's worth, all the kids we see going to and fro to school seem very happy. Like everybody else here they smile at us a lot, and wave and shout.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the cost for university is fairly accessible at $50-100 according to our guide in Varanasi. However business education is more expensive, as explained by Harnam our driver, who says the fees for his daughter in undergrad business administration are $500 and will go to $1000 when she continues to her MBA.

Government work in rural areas:
One member of each family is given 100 days of government work a year. According to our driver, this has been transformative for the villagers, lifting them out of poverty. When we toured the village near Shahpura, the houses looked very poor; however, when you peeked inside the courtyard, things looked a lot more prosperous. Our guide had talked with these villagers and they told him that their annual income was about $4,000 dollars. As he put it, this is 'saving income'; i.e. since you grow your own food and barter a few things with other villagers, you have more money than you need for subsistence. One can see that many people spend this disposable income on a motorcycle!
On the other hand, our guide in Chhatra Sagar, from a much richer class, complained that the work was all make-work and not much to India's benefit in the end.

Land Ownership
Land ownership in India is restricted to 18 hectares. So explained Sat Sungh, the Rajah owner of our hotel in Shahpura. On the other hand Harman told us that this guy owned 850 hectares. Hmm. It seems that this rule is an 'Indian rule' (rather like the rule that you have to wear a helmet on a motorcycle in some places - yeah, right). Apparently you can set up a co-operative of family members to own land, because a co-operative can own unlimited amounts of land. Sat had lamented to us that he'd spent a day of looking through dusty old land records, to make sure everything was in order for when his only daughter came to inherit. Methinks he might be searching for ways to dipsy-doodle around that rule for another generation.

Havelis to Hotels
As well as restricting land ownership, the government has put pressure on the rich property owners to repair crumbling palaces and haveli (mansions) and turn them into historic hotels. They have also encouraged this by providing significant loans to support the work. This has saved many gorgeous buildings from disintegration - not to mention providing a pretty cool tourist experience for us!

Affirmative Action
And lastly, there have been efforts to support upward mobility by the lower castes through affirmative action with regards to entrance marks for various university programs and professions. Controversial just as it is at home.
However, in discussions here, it's not long before a reference to caste appears. Despite assurances that the caste system is dying out (and it probably is, though slowly), on my brief brush with Indian culture, I suspect affirmative action would be required to break the spiral of caste lock-in.

A Son of the Circus

2011-10-12T05:34:00.000-07:00

John Irving's books can be full of highly of wildly eccentric characters, and A Son of the Circus is no exception. The book pivots around Bombay-born Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon who practices at Sick Kids in Toronto. A secret screenwriter for the infamous Indian Inspector Dhar films, he retains an apartment in Bombay and returns there periodically to work at the Crippled Children Hospital and to further his research to find the gene responsible for anachondroid dwarfism by testing the blood of dwarfs at the circus. Inspector Dhar is played by John D., who was adopted by the Daruwalla family when his vapid mother, who had come to India to make a movie, gave birth to twins and only wanted one. And this is just a taste of the bizarre cast of characters: the eccentric but lovable Daruwalla, the inscrutable John D., the ambitious dwarf Vinod who owns a limo service, the religious zealot Martin Mills who is John D's twin brother separated at birth, the ambiguous and sinister Rahul/Mrs. Dogar, the crippled boy and young prostitute headed toward the circus and a better life, and the angst-riven American hippie. It makes one breathless just to lay out some of the characters in this book. All of them struggle with where they belong and who they are, whether it's the feelings of the immigrant who never feels at home anywhere, the sexual ambivalence of several characters, the quest for religious faith.

Against this backdrop the dogged Inspector Patel is working to solve a case of serial murders, with the help of this hodge-podge of characters. The plot flies all over the place with total abandon. The murderer is clear from the beginning, and the test is in catching the culprit with enough evidence to convict.

An indication of the quirkiness of the plot is the following line: "Dr. Daruwalla's awareness that the source of his conversion to Christianity was the love bite of a transsexual serial killer had further diminished the doctor's already declining religious zeal". Now strain to think of the plot development that led to that line occurring in the latter stages of the book!

I found this book quite interesting, because it takes place in India, and I'm traveling in India. When our guide pointed out that the well-dressed beggar banging on our window at a red light was in fact a eunuch, I was immediately able to identify the person as a hijra, whose male sexual organs had been brutally removed (you don't want to know the details). Whether I would find this interesting if it weren't for this connection, I'm not really sure.

The Raj Mandir

2011-10-12T05:07:00.000-07:00

I felt I couldn't spend five weeks in India without experiencing Bollywood in true Indian style. So I went to see the new movie Rascal in the Raj Mandir theatre in Jaipur, along with 1100 excited Indians filling every seat in the enormous theatre. It has a very impressive sign on the front and a grand foyer.

We had only scheduled about an hour for me, expecting that I would not endure more than that of a film in Hindi. In the event, I would have loved to stay for the entire three hour run time.

The film was easy to follow even when you couldn't understand the words. A thief and his girlfriend have come into a briefcase of money. The man goes to a sports bar to watch a soccer match, and ill-advisedly tells someone about his money. This 'friend' is a thief and makes off with the briefcase. Despite the first thief's heroics, he loses the money and is roundly berated by his mother; the macho guy is reduced to slumped-shoulder humility before this raging harridan.

Alas, the second thief spends the money on a Rolex, and a hedonistic holiday in Bangkok, only to be relieved of his watch, money, and reservations by yet another thief, the leader of The Art of Giving charity. I think you get the picture, an easy and hilarious plot to follow. Only I didn't get to see the end, having left just before the intermission.

There was a big Bollywood dance number with scantily clad beautiful woman dancing to a frantic beat and fawning over thief number three quite lasciviously. The jokes were broad and somewhat slapstick. At times, bubbles would apear as overlays over the characters' heads with text in them, whose purpose I could not discern. The production was extravagant and as far from subtle as one could get.

The exuberant audience was totally into it. As the stars of the film appeared they cheered and whistled, and laughed heartily at all the funny parts. It was such a thrill to be part of this crowd.

Indian religious festivals

2011-10-10T06:45:00.000-07:00

We have already been here for two festivals.

While in Varanasi, the festival of Durga was taking place. That's why our tour company didn't put us in one of the fancy hotels we've been staying in as they were all booked. (Lucky break for us, because none of them were right on a ghat). We saw many carts with statues of Durga, the goddess who embodies creative feminine force, in glittering dress being pulled along the streets by man, beast and motors. There was much chanting and loud music drifting in the air that we could hear day and night from our hotels.

We went to see the celebrations on the final night of Dussehra in Jaipur. We gathered in a large open area with hundreds of Indian families out for a fun evening. There were extravagantly lit effigies of Ravanna and his brother at the front of the park, and people selling souvenirs for kids and huge poppadams from baskets on their head. The day celebrates e triumph of good over evil, as Rama kills the ten-headed Ravanna with the help of the monkey god Hanuman. There were many beautiful fireworks set off and then finally the lights went out on the effigies and a blazing arrow set fire to the effigies for the grand finale. It was a great evening and we can now go forward feeling that we have been cleansed of evil.

Ideas worth spreading

2011-10-09T21:19:00.001-07:00

While in Jaipur we met up for a coffee with a delightful young man, Ajit, who had mounted TEDx Jaipur last year and has another conference being planned for this year. Ajit had been introduced by Becca, who works for TED and is a former MBA student of mine, and co-organizer of a TEDx conference in Toronto last year.

Ajit works in the family business making technology equipment for the dairy industry in India and other southeastern Asian countries. What a delightful young man, full of enthusiasm spreading good ideas, and bringing together people who are interested in ideas. He has some great plans for his conference to keep attendees totally engaged, and some fascinating speakers already lined up. He was keen to hear what I'd learned as curator of TEDxIBYork last year, and we had a lively discussion of what makes for a good TEDx and how to wring the best out of speakers. It was great to hear what he'd learned and how he experience differed a bit between Canada and India.

Chris Anderson has truly succeeded in his vision of making TED a global community, when you can walk into a foreign country and have instant rapport with someone who shares a passion for expanding their knowledge and impressions of the world and for ideas worth spreading.

2011-10-09T19:16:00.001-07:00

In the previous post I described the wonderful service we've received from our tour company and the hotels. Granted, this is an impression formed about people who are being paid to serve us. But people everywhere have been unfailingly pleasant.

I accidentally intruded on a photo a man was taking of his wife. I apologized but was invited to become officially part of the photo.

We took a fascinating walk through the Jaipur market yesterday, but not the part catering to tourists, but rather the part where residents shop, with plastic chairs, rope, mattresses, kids clothes, all sorts of shampoo in single serving envelopes, lots of spices, and wonderful fruit and vegetable stands. Everyone smiled at us a lot, well knowing we were not potential customers. My husband struck up several conversations with shopkeepers and everyone was delighted to have a chat with these foreigners.

People just seem to be pleasant here.

I've included some photos here of the market. Note the colourful vegetable stands and the bright drums and the hanging rows of 'single serving' shampoo and other products. (I remember reading in business publications what a breakthrough it was when western companies finally 'got it' that these sizes were the only hinge affordable to Indian masses). Doesn't that computer shop do just everything? One thing that really got me was the advertisement for electronic stock trading in the ATM kiosk tucked into the traditional marketplace.

A new definition of service

2011-10-09T04:08:00.001-07:00

The service in India has been over the top. Our guides have told us that Indians are taught to render utmost respect to parents, teachers and guests. 'Guests are golden', as he says. At the Rambaugh Palace in Jaipur, they said they wanted us to feel like a Maharajah and Maharanee - after all, we were staying in the palace of a Maharajah.

At every hotel on arrival a bevy of hotel staff will gather, to present flowers, to offer cold drinks and cold cloths, and to mark our foreheads with an auspicious mark. At the Rambaugh Palace, an impressive gentleman with a vast flowing mustache escorted me from the car with an ornate ( antique?) umbrella to the stairs; as I walked up the stairs, a lovely lady in a sari was throwing beautifully scented rose petals over my head. Flowers are a constant theme. Every lobby will have flowers, or elaborately arranged flower petals, floating on water in shallow bowls, often with lit candles at night. At the Rambaugh Palace one afternoon, I heard music and went outside to see a band playing, trumpets and drums, a man dancing with a horse body hanging from him(in bare feet on black pavement) and a line- up of hotel staff in the driveway to greet a woman arriving in the hotel's antique car. I couldn't determine if she was a celebrity, or had maybe just booked a more majestic room.

Everyone has a constant eye on you, to see if there is anything they can do to help. At breakfast one day, I gazed yearningly at the Cambazola on the cheese board. One of the hovering waiters offered to cut a slice but I said I didn't dare eat cheese (lactose intolerance) just before going out touring. Lo and behold, when we returned, there was the Cambozola, crackers and dates in the room. My iPad charger gave out in Jaipur and the hotel lent me a charger. As we were leaving at nine there were no stores open to buy a new one, since the stores open at 11. The upshot was i left with their charger which they would replace later. Good problem solving. The woman who did this had a delightful personality and was one of the most attractive women I have ever seen. After a quick photo, I whisked my husband away from her !!!

At an Indian hotel, You don't walk up to a desk to check in. Oh no, you are escorted to a nice seating area to fill in the registration form. (In one hotel, we even filled in registration form in our room). And, of course, someone escorts you to your room. This was true even in the fairly modest hotel we stayed in at Varanasi, so it's not just limited to the outrageously gorgeous hotels that have been the norm.

A buffet is not self-serve in India, at least not in the hotels we are staying in. After your plate is loaded, someone will rich to your side to carry it to the table. Items are also passed while you are sitting.

When you say thank you for these services, or for the driver always opening the door for you, the response is "It is my duty". Our van is stocked with cold drinks and snacks; when passing drinks to us, they are always presented on a small silver tray, as with other things in the hotels.

I have high hopes that my husband is taking careful notes about this assiduous service. Of course, he is probably hoping I am the one taking notes!

The Second Economy

2011-10-09T04:06:00.000-07:00

I've just read a fascinating article in McKinsey Quaretly, describing the Second Economy. The author considers the 'underground' economy acting underneath the economy we see above ground, an economy that consists of hundreds of machines which go into co-ordinated action when we begin a transaction. He uses a clever example of checking in at an airport kiosk which sets off a string of interactions with other machines, from those which predict total check-ins and adjust load placement on the airline, to updating frequent flyer programs, to checking security lists - probably numbering in the hundreds. And this computerized neural network is doing tasks that used to be done in the physical world by humans.

What I loved about this article was his analogy of this underground economy to the root system that links aspen trees. (I hadn't known that a stand of aspens would all share an underground root system. I will go and look up more about this). What an elegant analogy.

I often use another forest analogy to explain seemingly sudden explosions in innovation adoption. When a forest fire is raging through a forest, it will sometimes appear to have faltered, only to have trees a short distance away burst into flame. The fire had been carried forward through the underground root system of the trees. (At least that's what somebody told me ages ago). I think of innovation like that sometimes. You may have heard of the novelist Gibson's remark "The future is here; it's just unevenly distributed". So an innovative technology may pop up in one place and seem to lie dormant for a long time, only to flare up slightly differently. For those who haven't been watching closely, this new flare-up looks like the start date for the technology, but really the innovation has been incubating underground for a long time.

CHeck out the full article at I've just read a fascinating article in McKinsey Quaretly, describing the Second Economy. The author considers the 'underground' economy acting underneath the economy we see above ground, an economy that consists of hundreds of machines which go into co-ordinated action when we begin a transaction. He uses a clever example of checking in at an airport kiosk which sets off a string of interactions with other machines, from those which predict total check-ins and adjust load placement on the airline, to updating frequent flyer programs, to checking security lists - probably numbering in the hundreds.

What I loved about this article was his analogy of this underground economy to the root system that links aspen trees. (I hadn't known that a stand of aspens would all share an underground root system. I will go and look up more about this). What an elegant analogy.

I often use another forest analogy to explain seemingly sudden explosions in innovation adoption. When a forest fire is raging through a forest, it will sometimes appear to have faltered, only to have trees a short distance away burst into flame. The fire had been carried forward through the underground root system of the trees. (At least that's what somebody told me ages ago). I think of innovation like that sometimes. You may have heard of the novelist Gibson's remark "The future is here; it's just unevenly distributed". So an innovative technology may pop up in one place and seem to lie dormant for a long time, only to flare up slightly differently. For those who haven't been watching closely, this new flare-up looks like the start date for the technology, but really the innovation has been incubating underground for a long time.

In this article, Brian Arthur argues that by 2025, this digital second economy could be as big as the physical one.

Check out the full article at the McKinsey Quarterly site.

Khajuraho

2011-10-07T19:59:00.000-07:00

Khajuraho was a late addition to our trip, and we had few expectations, other than knowing it was a World Heritage site. It's nice to start with light expectations and then get a surprise. We arrived on the continuation of the flight we had taken from Delhi to Varanasi. Khajuraho is a small town in the countryside, 'only' about 25,000 people. As we arrived at the airport, women were working the plot of land between the building and the parking lot with hand tools, their bright saris gently lifting in the wind.

We stayed at a lovely new hotel, with a room looking out over a pretty pool and the distant temples. We quickly set off for the Western Group of temples.

The site contains 25 of the original 85 red sandstone temples in phenomenal shape. During the Chandela dynasty, who rules in the 10-12th century, this was their religious centre, but the rich and varied temples lapsed into obscurity until rediscovered by a British explorer in 1838.

The tall temples point to the sky, said to be resembling the peaks of the Himalayas, the red sandstone in stunning contrast to the blue sky. I was mesmerized by the beauty. When you get up close, you see rich and detailed carving. Very beautiful and realistic work covering every surface of the temple. Many carvings of daily life, military life, and what makes them so famous, erotic sculptures of various positions of the Kama Sutra. Amazing. That's what I'd read about and I thought this might be a place to have a few giggles, but I came away instead with a sense of awe with the beauty and majesty of this vast site.

Jobs headlines in Indian papers

2011-10-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

Indian papers, like everywhere I guess, had full front pages of Jobs info. These papers love their puns! Here's a sample from The Times of India and The Economic Time:

iQuit, Jobs Well Done

Jobs Takes iWay to Heaven

An iCon Who Revolutionized .....

I find Indian papers much more colourful than ours. They may start with 'such and such a ministry has got all their facts wrong'. No pussyfooting around with starting with official version and then gradually showing some factual weaknesses. And, as shown above, a marvelous inclusion of puns!

Bahai Temple in Delhi

2011-10-07T09:17:00.000-07:00

One of the treats in Delhi was going to see the Baha'i Temple. It's not listed as one of the main sites to see but the architecture was truly gorgeous. The architect was Iranian-born Canadian, Fariborz Sahba, and he designed a fabulous building, with nine doors and 27 petals of a lotus flower. The temple is intended to welcome people of all faiths, as Baha'i faith sees Abraham, Jesus and Mohammed as prophets who follow an evolutionary path of humankind. It was very peaceful to gaze at this temple.

Education in India

2011-10-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

There's an obvious thirst for education in India. There are billboards everywhere for schools, convents, universities, and educational institutions of all kinds.

We saw ads for play group to 8th, for civil, electrical and chemical engineering, for hotel management, maritime, nursing, MBAs, fashion, beauty and of course IT and English. One puzzling ad mentioned teaching Math by the abacus method. There were many more, basically anything you could think of.

Schools advertising play group to 8th tend to have names like Sunshine, Rainbow, Sunlight or Sunrise. As you reach higher grades, the names change to more aspirational ones, like Brilliant, Perfect, or Ambition.

While in Varanasi, we were taken on a tour of Benares Hindu University. I thought this would be a yawn, after all the things we'd already seen along theGanges. But it was actually very interesting. The University has 25,000 students, most of them living in huge hostels on campus. It is spread over immense grounds, with huge impressive buildings housing different faculties. Despite the word Hindu in its name, it houses 'regular' faculties, including the second best medical school in India, according to our guide. There were a couple of departments that we wouldn't see in a Canadian university, like Yoga and Ayurvedic medicine. We were told tuition runs about $50-$100 a year, including books, but the students have to fund their own accommodation and food expenses.

Our driver has three daughters. One is doing a BBA intending to go on to an MBA, another taking CA. He shared with us that they were given a choice between a dowrie and an education. He's confident the third will take the same route.

Varanasi

2011-10-06T04:02:00.000-07:00

Think of the quietest, most serene place you know. For me, it would be early morning at our cottage (yes, I do sometimes get up early). The mist hovers over the water, smudging all the colours and softening the rugged landscape of the Canadian shield. The water reflects the shoreline, and not a ripple disturbs the surface. Ah, peace at Six Mile Lake.

Now think of the exact opposite. You've just imagined Varanasi. There's nothing muted about Varanasi. Let me tell you about it.

Varanasi is the most holy city of the Hindus, situated on the banks of the Mother Ganges river, brown with silt and swollen by the best monsoon for many years. Broad steps, called ghats, descend from the town on the embankment down to the river. On our two boat trips on the river, I came to think of the ghats as stages for the performance of life.

Our hotel was located at the Shivala Ghat, and we reached it by walking down a narrow lane past one of Mother Thersa's hospitals, dodging big cow plops. We walked down onto the ghat, and then climbed a narrow unlit staircase wherw even i had to duck to the lovely central courtyard. We had dots painted on our forehead for luck and flowers sprinkled over us.

Our window looked out on the ghat, and we could go out on the long balcony and see life unfold. Men coming to wash and worship and to - shudder - drink the water, water buffalo coming for their morning or evening swims, barbers shaving customers sitting on the step above them, people doing washing in the river and laying it out on the mud banks to dry, boats docking and leaving, Hindu holy men facing the river and chanting, young nuns in some sort of initiation ceremony, escorted by drums and cymbals and tinkling bells, a group of women in colourful saris who wash themselves, then their saris, and then build a lingam of mud left from when the Ganges dropped silt on the ghat in monsoon, cover it with flowers, light candles and perform some kind of ceremony. And that was just one morning at dawn on the ghat outside our window.

We took one boat ride at sunset, to see the evening aarti ceremonies along the ghats. There were Hindu holy men in bright orange robes, worshipping with water, sandalwood, incense and fire. In fact, from our vantage point on the water by the main ghat,there were several ceremonies, with competing music and chants. Smoke drifted over us from the cremations taking place on the ghats, some newly set with flames dancing to the sky, other ones with embers gently glowing. A body drifted by - those who can't afford cremation sometimes sneak bodies into the river so their relative can participate in the holiness of the site.

Like others along the river, we floated little lights along the water. A beautiful young girl joined us on the boat with a wide shallow basket in which there were shallow saucers filled with beautiful flowers. One by one she lit little lamps (like tiny candles in paper muffin holders), handed them to us and we gently placed them on the water.

Everywhere we walked in the narrow twisting lanes, there was action and noise. The main reason I said Varanasi was the opposite of serenity was because of the traffic. Varanasi traffic is to Toronto traffic as a gentle hum is to a cymbal clash. And it assaults both your eyes and your ears, not to mention your equanimity. Here's a list of what you see on the streets of Varanasi:
Motorcycles and motor scooters: nobody wears a helmet, and there can be many people sharing a vehicle
Auto-rickshaws: an auto-rickshaw is a three wheeled vehicle built on a motorcycle frame, with a solid floor, front end including the windshield, and a body halfway up the back, with canvas on top. The driver sits in the middle at front with handlebars. There is a backseat that might fit two Canadians cozily. There's about a six inch shelf facing the back seat and either a shallow seat facing backwards at the back or just a running board. This vehicle is green on the bottom and golden yellow on top and they are ubiquitous. So far, the maximum number od passengers I've observed is fifteen.
Bicycle rickshaws, with a single seat and a small canvas awning, usually restricted to two passengers
Bicycles of all shapes and ages, with varying numbers of passengers
Carts, simple flatbeds, powered by men, bullocks, bicycles, horses (rarely)and sometimes with a cart trailing behind loaded with astonishing loads
Small three-wheeled trucks of all sorts
Some big trucks and buses, all highly decorated
A few cars, jeeps and mini-vans
A strange low vehicle, sort of like a recumbent bike, powered by a woman in a sari with her arms

However those are just the styles of transport on the road. Stalls spill onto the road. Pedestrians walk on the road, all the sidewalks being filled with vendors,terrifyingly young unaccompanied children. Old men sleep at the curbside. Sacred white cows wander at will down the middle of the road, mostly impervious to the beeps of horns. Herds of water buffalo amble by. Dogs sleep peacefully on the pavement. Goats are plentiful

Chaos rules. In Delhi I noticed drivers might wander across a lane. In Varanasi, people don't respect even the direction of the street! At one place there was a boulevard with cement divider about 3 feet high and 2 feet wide. Still, many rickshaws (auto and bicycle) would drive down the wrong side of the boulevard (we notice this eve on the main highway). And roundabouts! Well, it would really be too inefficient to go round three sides of a roundabout. Better to just drive around it the wrong way.

The horns in India are more a road-runner cartoon style beep beep than a full-throated honk. And they're used more for informational purposes, announcing one's presence to all these vehicles, most of whom have no rear mirrors, than to express irritation - sort of like "Fore" on a golf course. In fact many vehicles have "blow horn" painted on the back, requesting such a warning since they can't see behind.

At one point, we were trapped in a jamb at a round-about in a mess that really redefined gridlock for me. Vehicles interwoven so tightly that even bicycles could not squeeze through. Vehicles pointing in all directions all mixed up as they had chosen random routes around the circle. 20 minutes sitting stock still, soaking in the atmosphere.

We saw the Golden Temple. One can't take cameras in, so we stopped at a small shop which stored things in small locked boxes 'for free'. Of course, as we're becoming accustomed to the obligations for purchase that such services attract. We visited the area of the main ghat, saw cremations up close and met a procession carrying a body in a bright sari down to the cremated.

We visited the area where they make the silk that Varanasi is famous for. The weavers are Muslim men sitting cross- legged in dark low rooms lit by a single light bulb. The loom is powered by a treadle worked by the weaver's feet and the loom is directed by loops of cardboard on which are punched out the pattern (like a player piano) which raise and lower the appropriate threads. The weaver must know the order of thread to send through with the shuttle. The weaving is almost all done by men, while the trade of silk is almost all done by Hindus, including the beaming store owner who enticed us into parting with a chunk of change for a variety of
beautiful silks.

Social and political observations

2011-10-05T09:08:00.000-07:00

One of the things that surprised me the first morning reading The Times of India was a full page ad extolling the virtues of daughters. A (presumably famous) man was shown in a smiling portrait with his daughter. India is really struggling with unbalance between male and female birthrates especially with the spread of in vitro testing which leads to abortion of female foetuses. Later we saw a couple of different billboards inveighing against female foeticide and against dowries. The crippling cost of dowries is considered a factor in the, shall we say, lack of enthusiasm for daughters.

Our guide, Sanjiv, seemed to have an enlightened view of women. He had eschewed an a ranged marriage, and married 'for love' someone of a lower caste (he is a Brahmin), not popular with either family, although they were accepted. He went on to point out that he'd not only received no dowry but had invested in his wife's education as an accountant. Though she now works at Ernst & Young, she does love her electronic toys and he sees little prospect of earning back a (financial) return on that investment, let alone the value of a dowry, he said tongue in cheek.

Another common topic with our guides has been the prevalence of corruption and the venality of politicians. Whenever we see a piece of crumbling infrastructure, the guide will explain the area is prosperous enough but that work is poorly done because of politicians lining their pockets. As we drive past parliament and the enormous impressive buildings left from the days of the British, someone might suggest we look out for monkeys - the ones who work there.
Our Delhi guide Sanjiv had been among the thousands who had protested corruption at the inspiration of a man who went on a hunger strike (name escapes me). He attributed the protest and its peaceful nature to the influence of Gandhi, which he says is still deeply felt here. We've seen several statues of Gandhi as we've been driving, all hung with garlands, since the national holiday celebrating his birthday has just passed.

Touring Delhi

2011-10-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

Our guide met us early in the morning and headed straight off to old Delhi, so called because it was the part of Delhi that was there before the British moved their capital there.

We started with a visit to the Jama Masjid built by Shah Jahan, who was concurrently building the Taj Mahal. Shah JahaIt was clearly massively wealthy. The mosque was a dramatic building in red sandstone. The huge open courtyard can seat 20,000 people. It was blazing hot, even under tarps. Early arrivals would get under the canopy, next you might get some of the carpets, but late-comers would end up right on the superheated stones of the huge courtyard. Ouch.

Off to India

2011-10-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

This blog will contain posts about our trip to India for the next few weeks. Hold your seat belts for what I hope will be some interesting write-ups.

We left Toronto on 28 September on our Jet Airways flight - a little taste of India right from the start. Wonderful service, full length beds, and attentive service "Would you like some pajamas for your sleep?"

We arrived at the modern Delhi airpornowhere we travelled seemingly endless moving walkways and were picked up by our driver - we're to be pampered by our tour company, who will drive us everywhere and accompany us with guides. We drove down Embassy Row on a wide boulevard with, amazingly, virtually no traffic. Of course, it was 10:30 at night! We first noticed that the lane separation lines were mostly used as a guide for where the middle of the car should be!

At the famous Imperial Hotel, we were greeted by a tall turbaned doorman and escorted into the beautiful lobby, and seated in the lobby sitting room to 'complete the formalities'. There were carnations everywhere in densly packed arrangements and little pots burning scented oil, including in our room, although we had to put that in the hall to enable Wayne to keep breathing!

The Imperial Hotel could well be an art museum, as the walls of restaurants, corridors and guest rooms are hung with hundreds of paintings, mostly by British artists during the Raj. We had been to an exhibit about India which featured several of these paintings. The display in the hotel was stunning in it's volume. It made walking down the hallways quite a slow process because we kept stopping to gaze.

The Imperial made me feel as if I was some high-ranking Brit from the days the Raj. I had but to look at the elevator and start moving toward it, and someone would rush over to push the button. At the sumptuous buffet breakfast in the 1911 Restaurant (named for the year the British moved the capital from Calcutta to Delhi), waiters whisked away plated faster than you could blink an eye. And when we ate in the restaurant in the evening, service was actually over the top - simply too many waiters and too many people stopping by to ask how everything was. It was a very interesting experience and one which gave some insight into the period of the British Raj.

Does the World Still Want Curators?

2011-09-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

A curator is defined as 'a keeper or custodian of a museum or other collection'. You can think of an independent bookstore as a curator of a book collection that you might want to buy. The staff actually read the books, and they know how to match books to their customers. They can be instrumental in building readership for a new book because they stimulate that first groundswell of support in the first few months of release. This is one of the points in this Huffington Post article about independent bookstores. The article goes on to pay tribute to such bookstores' ability to create community around the people who frequent their bookstore, and to deplore the possible loss of such important community centres due to disruption of the bookselling and publishing business.

I think of newspapers in much the same way: the editors are curators of the news, selecting from a wide range of possible news items just which ones will be published in their newspaper. They further create a community among the readers of the newspaper. And they are equally threatened by disruptive forces.

But it's not only economic forces which are affecting the fortunes of these two businesses. It's also cultural forces. People increasingly lean on social media for recommendations as to what books to read, or what news to pay attention to. As we rely on our friends we move into a deep spiral of self-reinforcement of our views. Not that newspapers don't have a view themselves. They do. But the best report the news objectively, try to be wide-ranging in their selection criteria, and give space to columnists of many different views. Our friends don't usually do this.

In my humble view, the world needs curators for our intellectual input. The title of this article was about whether the world wanted such curators. Sadly I suspect now.

I'll be looking forward to part two from Huffington Post, which promises to offer suggestions of how independent bookstores can survive.

The Lean Startup

2011-09-22T09:28:00.000-07:00

Last night, I attended a talk by Eric Ries at the Rotman School of Management, here in Toronto. Ries is the author of The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Ries is an engaging speaker and presented a number of down-to-earth ideas about how to be successful at a start-up. They mirror ideas I teach in my course, so of course I thought he was brilliant.

I had a hint that I was going to like what he would say when early in his talk he said that he was a fan of Christensen's concepts of disruptive innovation and Jobs to be Done. Any fan of Christensen is a buddy of mine!

Students recall concepts better when there's a catchy phrase that captures the idea and I really liked some of Ries' sound bites and will integrate them into my Innovation course.

If you're building something customers don't want, why be proud of being on time and on budget?

The Jobs to be Done concept says that customers hire products to do a job for them. If customers don't want to hire your product, then nothing else matters. You need to find out - in the quickest and cheapest way - whether customers want to hire your product.

Ries gave an example of a company that developed - at considerable expense and pain - a software app that you could download. When they launched, people could go to a web page, read about the product, and hit the red button if they wanted to download. Nobody hit the red button. This was a valuable lesson: they had built a product that people didn't wanted to hire.

The question was - did they need to actually build the software to learn that lesson? Could they have built that web page with the red button, and a second landing page for people who hit the red button, which said something like 'oops - still in production'. For zero effort they could have learned that virtually nobody landed on that second page. Back to the drawing board.

Customers Don't Know What They Want

Henry Ford is famously quoted as saying "If I'd asked people what they wanted, I would have built a faster horse". This is a critical problem in innovation that is customer-driven: people who are already using a certain product to do a job for them seldom are able to break out of that framework and think of how the problem could be solved in a completely different way. I call this 'solving solutions'. A better approach than asking them is to observe them doing the jobs they normally do and think of how you could improve that task. Then give them an experimental product and observe their behaviour in using it.

Pivot - a change in strategy without a change in vision

When you're introducing a new product or starting a new company, you can almost guarantee that your initial strategy is wrong. So, your job as a startup is to experiment continuously and to figure out when you have the right strategy. Ries calls these changes in strategy pivots. I'm a basketball fan and I love this expression - a basketball player pivots when s/he finds the way to the basket blocked and pivots to continue to the basket, just on a different path. And the player keeps one foot firmly planted during a pivot, suggesting that the strategy is continuously grounded in what went before. What a lovely graphic image.

Pivot? or Persevere?

Timing is everything, and I've been pulling my thoughts together for a whole session on timing in my next courses. Ries added a nice sound bit to my repertoire for these sessions. His question of whether to pivot or to persevere is a fundamental one - and the ability to figure out which approach is correct is key attribute of a good innovator.

The great advantage small companies have over big companies is their agility, the ability to pivot to a new strategy based on what they learned from initial reaction to their products. Is it possible that small companies also have less cultural resistance to the pivot? They may have fewer people invested in the current strategy and this may make it easier to pivot. On the other, a passionate founder may be very invested in a particular strategy and resist a pivot. It's hard to fight the founder.

Invest in Agility, not Prevention

A common challenge to an innovation is around scalability. What if this product is wildly successful and we're not able to scale to meet demad. So, to prevent this possible calamity (we should be so lucky), some companies will invest considerable resources to make sure a product is scalable from the outset. And they'll often invest before they even verify if the product is something that customers want to hire. This is quite typical in a big company where there's concern that a failure in a new product can besmirch the reputation of the whole company.

Ries' advice is to invest in agility, not prevention. Make sure everything about the process of getting a product to market is flexible, enabling scaling at quick notice.

After listening to Ries' talk, I am definitely going to read The Lean Startup - and that's the whole point of a book tour, isn't it?

One of my former students in part way through the book. He is most taken by Ries' definition of waste. Until you figure out what people want, execution that doesn't contribute to that search is waste. Thanks Neil.

Economic Outlook

2011-09-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

Last week the Economic Club of Canada hosted a breakfast with a panel of economists from the Big Five Canadian banks. On the panel were

Avery Shenfeld, Chief Economist, CIBC World Markets
Derek Burleton, Deputy Chief Economist, TD Bank Financial Group
Craig Wright, Chief Economist RBC Financial Group
Sherry Cooper, Chief Economist, BMO Capital Markets
Warren Jestin, Chief Economist, Scotiabank

All the forecasts were made against a backdrop of extreme political uncertainty, which complicated forecasting to an unusual degree. The forecasts were all pretty gloomy - surprise, surprise.

The main themes that were common to all the forecasts were as follows:

It's going to be a long, arduous, painful recovery. The US economy is a car with a broken transmission. When your transmission is broken, it doesn't matter very much how much gas you give it, it's not going anywhere. Growth estimates were low, 1.5%-2% for US and 1.5% -2.5% for Canada. The IMF today released a forecast that the Canadian economy would grow 2.1% this year and 1.9% next year, which is way down from its April forecast of 2.8% and 2.6% last April.
There's a risk of a short term pause or stall, and a 25-50% risk of short term recession.
Emerging markets will continue to grow. This led to forecast of growth internationally at 3.5%.
Canada is not an island. We will outperform the US, but we are not insulated from what happens in the world, so our growth will also be stunted.
We're going to see low rates for longer than the economists had originally forecast. It will be mid 2012 or even 2013 before Canadian rates rise, and perhaps 2014 before they start rising in the US. There's a risk for Canada getting too far in front of the US.

Giller 2011 Long List

2011-09-19T19:56:00.000-07:00

It seems to be a week of lists for me. The Giller Prize 2011 long list was published today. So many books, so little time. Here's the list:

Bezmozgis, David | The Free World
published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

Blaise, Clark | The Meagre Tarmac
published by Biblioasis

Christie, Michael | The Beggar's Garden
published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

Coady, Lynn | The Antagonist
published by House of Anansi Press

deWitt, Patrick | The Sisters Brothers
published by House of Anansi Press

Readers' Choice winner

Dey, Myrna | Extensions
published by NeWest Press

Edugyan, Esi | Half-Blood Blues
published by Thomas Allen Publishers

Endicott, Marina | The Little Shadows
published by Doubleday Canada

Gartner, Zsuzsi | Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
published by Hamish Hamilton Canada

Gunn, Genni | Solitaria
published by Signature Editions

Holdstock, Pauline | Into the Heart of the Country
published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

Johnston, Wayne | A World Elsewhere
published by Knopf Canada

Laferrière, Dany
(trans. David Homel) | The Return
published by Douglas & McIntyre

Mayr, Suzette | Monoceros
published by Coach House Books

Ondaatje, Michael | The Cat's Table
published by McClelland & Stewart

Vanderhaeghe, Guy | A Good Man
published by McClelland & Stewart

Zentner, Alexi | Touch
published by Knopf Canada

TIME's Best 100 Novels since 1923

2011-09-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog (short in number, but long on taste, haha) may remember a guest post by Jane Minett a while ago with a review of The Help. She's just pointed me to TIME's list of the best 100 novels since TIME was launched in 1923. It was picked by TIME's book critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo. For me, it's a mixed blessing. Thanks for the great recommendations. But no thanks for making me feel more behind on my reading than before.

Here they are, in alphabetical order, with links to their original reviews:

Graphic Novels

TED Book Club Selection - Spark

2011-09-14T14:55:00.000-07:00

Spark: How Creativity Works by Julie Burstein consists of a collection of anecdotes about creative people. Despite the subtitle claiming it will explain how creativity works, I'm afraid I didn't find any great insights over the handful of stories I read. It's true I haven't read the whole book, but I don't think I will.

Spark is the first book I've received through the TED Book Club that I've put down after starting the book. I guess it proves that even the most wonderful selector, who has consistently selected books that I've loved, doesn't resonate with choices 100% of the time. Heck, some people have even told me they can contain their enthusiasm about Makioka Sisters, which I talked up in a previous blog!

No stars for this one.

Still Alice

2011-09-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

Still Alice, by Lisa Genova, is a terrifying and touching book describing the onslaught of early-onset Alzheimer's.

Alice Howland is a brilliant Harvard psychology professor, successful in her career, with a beloved and supportive husband, three children, a wonderful summer home - in short, a perfect life. She manages a hectic and demanding schedule of teaching and international public speaking, and the day-to-day tasks like finding the car keys for her absent-minded husband. But disconcerting things are happening. She loses her train of thought in a speech she's given countless times before. She can't figure out what something on her to-do list means. She gets disoriented walking her familiar path from the university to her house. She finds reasons for these lapses. It's mere forgetfulness. It's overwork. It's stress. It's menopause. However, her doctor doesn't think so and sends her for assessment: suddenly she's confronted with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's.

The disease takes hold more quickly in those who succumb to it before 65 and Still Alice is absolutely terrifying as it describes the swift and brutal deterioration of an extremely talented and intellectually gifted woman. Alice is smart, and devises all sorts of aids to continuing her life. She even devises a memory test meant to signal when the situation has deteriorated so badly she should take her own life with the pills she's been hoarding. We see different members of her family and her university colleagues struggle to find the best response; they range from denial, impatience, solicitude, avoidance, compassion, and constructive assistance.

The author of Still Alice is Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard. Because publishers thought this book would only appeal to the Alzheimer's community, Genova self-published and self-marketed. It's hard to believe publishers couldn't see that for many boomers, Alzheimer's is a fear greater than death, and this book would be greeted with great interest, as well as huge trepidation. The popularity of the book spread through word of mouth and an agent and a publisher appeared. In the end, the book was Top 10 on New York Times and Globe and Mail best-seller list. It's a gripping read, and no wonder it found an audience.

Genova's next book, Left Neglected, is the story of another highly successful, multitasking Harvard Ph.D. (notice a pattern here?) who loses the left side of her brain in a traumatic traffic accident. I remember Jill Bolte-Taylor's riveting talk at TED where she described what it felt like to have a stroke that damaged the left side of her brain and the euphoria she felt as her analytic left side quit working.

TED Book Club Selections - September 2011

2011-09-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

It's Christmas in September again. The latest books from the TED Book Club have just arrived - bringing tips about philanthropy, the evolution of presentations and how to resonate with your audience, and the importance of explanation in human progress . Since I haven't read them yet, I can't provide a review, but let me quote from the announcement letter.

In Give $mart, authors Thomas Tierney and Joel Fleishman peer into the decision-making process of major philanthropists. Case studies highlight the many ways it's done right - and the ways it isn't. This book is a short, fascinating read, filled with best-practice advice and guiding principles used by many philanthropists.

Nancy Duarte is no stranger to TED when it comes to creating great presentations - she has worked with some of the most effective speakers you've ever seen. In her latest book, resonate, she talks about how to take your presentation to the next level, and how to establish and keep an emotional connection with the audience.

In his latest book, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, David Deutsch argues that all progress is limitless and that it is fueled by our unique ability to form new explanations and drop bad ones in the the pursuit of knowledge. It's a mind-bending book (in the best sense).

Turn of Mind

2011-08-30T22:03:00.000-07:00

A good mystery unfolds in bits and pieces, tantalizing the reader with ambiguous clues and tangential meanderings. The devious author sets out to confuse the reader and to obfuscate the ultimate destination.

This is exactly what the devilish disease Alzheimer's does to its victims. It makes a mockery of their mind, offering only disconnected and sporadic memories. It can leave them standing on a familiar street unsure of the way home to their own house. What a clever device to write a mystery in the voice of someone suffering from dementia, using her aide-memoire journals as the text of the novel. This is exactly what Alice LaPlante has done in Turn of Mind. Jennifer White was a skilled orthopedic surgeon before Alzheimer's forced her to retire. Now her best friend Amanda is dead, her fingers cut off with surgical precision, and Jennifer is the prime suspect. She herself can't recall if she murdered her friend or not. The novel lurches forward in fits and starts, taking the reader along on the patchy path of White's brain. White is lost in the present, but relevant memories sporadically surface to fill in the back story. It was a fascinating read, although I found the abrupt ending a bit unsatisfying. (That's the second time in as many books where I've complained about the ending!)

Alice LaPlante teaches creative writing at Stanford, and Turn of Mind is her impressive first novel. I would recommend it.

Steve Jobs

2011-08-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

How sad to see Steve Jobs unable to continue at Apple. From when he was very young, Jobs has broken all the rules and made it work for him. I wonder how many university drop-outs have used him as a justification for their actions.

And so the speculation swirls as to what will happen with Apple. Tim Cook, Jobs' successor, has been written about in very flattering terms, but he's all about how to do business: he's fixed various supply chain problems and been critical to Apple's success in bringing products to market. Jonathon Ives, Apple's famous and revered designer, is all about how to design obscenely beautiful and usable products. But Jobs is the one who has decided what to do. His vision, his passion, his uncompromising expectations, and his micromanaging attention to detail have pushed Apple to deliver only the best. How do you replace an influence like that?

There's been a lot written about Steve Jobs this week - almost like eulogies while he's still alive, although deeply imperilled. He's certainly been a significant force in society beyond just business. He came full circle at Stanford when he gave the commencement speech in 2005. It's worth listening here for his take on life in general. You've probably heard the value of telling stories as a way of making your point. Jobs' three stories prove the point.

The Secret Speech

2011-08-21T07:23:00.000-07:00

The Krushchev Thaw refers to a period in the mid-fifties to early sixties, right after Stalin's death, when Krushchev denounced Stalin and the atrocities committed under his regime. This ushered in a fleeting period of openness and relative freedom in the Soviet regime. Krushchev first signalled this movement in The Secret Speech, delivered behind closed doors to the 20th Party Congress in 1956.

The Secret Speech, by Tom Rob Smith, swirls around the events sparked by the speech - the dissemination of the speech in printed form*, the political upheaval in Moscow as power shifted and the old hardliners ran scared, life in the Siberian Gulags and the Hungarian revolution**. It takes considerable, and not very believable, contortions to steer the plot through all these events.

Former state security officer Leo Demidov returns from his appearance in Smith's first book, Child 44. Demidov is the head of a homicide department in Russia; a rather unpopular position, because authorities do not want to acknowledge that there is such a thing as murder in the Soviet Union. Demidov is trying to be a good man, after his murky past when he arrested many civilians based on nothing more than typed lists of names. These days, he pursues 'evidential truth , not a politicized one" as he seeks to solve crimes. It's a precarious job because the truth is not always what the authorities want, especially in a country where it's an embarrassment to even acknowledge murder takes place.

I chose The Secret Speech because I'd enjoyed Child 44 by Smith, which also features Leo Demidov as the key character. But this plot was just too far fetched for me. One star.

*I don't know enough about Russian history to know if this wide dissemination is totally fictional. Wikipedia says it was only distributed to select Communist Party members in Russia, before widespread dissemination internationally.

** The book portrays the Hungarian Revolution of '56 as having been sparked by Soviet agents provocateurs. This was to give the Soviets an excuse for massive retaliation. Brutally crushing the uprising was to send a message that despite Krushchev's speech, the Soviets hadn't gone soft. Again, in my limited research, I found no corroboration for this analysis.