Ideas worth spreading

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.

The Second Economy

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

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 the McKinsey Quarterly site.

Khajuraho

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

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!