And the point was?

Having lived through the tumult of the Beijing Olympics through the last two weeks, today is a good day to step back and reflect on what the Olympics are about. Or more generally, what sport is about.

Rohit Brijnath kicked off the Olympics with this piece about Natalie du Toit, the South African swimmer and flag bearer at the opening ceremony. She lost a leg in a motor accident in 2001. At Beijing she swam the 10km open race; not a special event for disabled people, she swam the main event.

Simon Barnes experienced the Olympics in a three level hierarchy of partisanship, drama, and greatness. To Barnes, observing the greatness of a Michael Phelps, Yelena Isinbayeva or Usian Bolt is the high point of the Olympics.

Ed Smith, who played test cricket for England and is now captain of Middlesex CCC, had the most interesting and querulous take on the Olympics. Having paid due homage to the record British gold medal haul, he goes on to observe:

“The proof about whether these Olympics have witnessed a true British sporting renaissance will come later, as we watch whether there is any trickle-down effect. Elite sport should inspire new fans to play games themselves. Among the greatest legacies a sportsman can leave is to inspire people to take up and express themselves at sport.

The strongest (though rarely articulated) argument for playing sport is that competitive games, especially team sports, can work against a smallness of spirit. I believe that sport's elevating quality should be available to as many young people as possible.”

This is a natural thought for a cricketer, a game which is inseparable from its roots.

Greatness is not just in the metronomic accuracy of Glenn McGrath, bowling in an Ashes match at Lord’s. It is in hundreds of club bowlers in the Melbourne cricket league, who may be tiling roofs weekdays, trying to emulate McGrath, reaching within, and finding depths they had never dreamt of. The spirit of Sunil Gavaskar was forged in the play-hard-but-fair ethos of the Dadar Union playing Kanga league cricket. The spirit of West Indian cricket comes from clubs like Shannon in Trinidad waging pitched battles waged on the Queen’s park Savannah.

This goes beyond cricket.

The greatness of Bjorn Borg was amplified many times over by the Swedish children inspired to hit tennis balls against their garage doors. The spirit of Diego Maradona is in the flair with which hundreds of pick-up games are played in the slums of Buenos Aires. The spirit of Vishy Anand is in the ferocity with which schoolboys in Madras play chess, with a pencil sharpener subbing for a rook.

I like this lens Ed Smith is using. Are the Olympics a vehicle for expressing of the worst sort of jingoistic nationalism? Are they just a synthetic made-for-TV corporate event? Or, do the Olympics really kindle a flame within millions of real people around the world?

When I’m out by the river Trent or the Thames in the summer, I see dozens of amateur rowers on the water. It’s a wonderful sight, and a lot of credit should be given to the Olympian efforts of Sir Steven Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent. They do seem to have kindled flames within regular people. The marathon, the 100m dash, javelin or discus throw – events that evoke the ancient games - are more resonant at the Olympics than anywhere else.

But synchronized swimming? Modern pentathlon? 16 gold medals in canoeing and kayaking? Do any real people play these games, or do I just not know the right people? A baseball tournament that matters less than any Yankees – Red Sox game? A tennis tournament that matters less than any grand slam? A pale shadow of World Cup football? Maybe this would matter more if it were kept simple.

And back home in India, yes, we are the world’s worst Olympic team. It's OK. Let's laugh at ourselves. Let's drop the bristling nationalism; it is the worst emotion the Olympics could inspire.

And when we are rich enough to promote sports in India, let us invest in sports that millons of real people could take part in and love - like football - rather than in some obscure targeted speciality event that might win us the notional glory of an Olympic medal.

Working hours

Found a interesting natural experiment on culture at my workplace.

As a manager, my approach to working hours has always been laissez faire. I'm fine with members of my team working whatever hours suit them, as long as commitments to colleagues are kept. Some people come in at 7:30 and wrap up by 4:30. Other come in at 10:00 and work till 7:30. Still other, like me, frequently do a second shift between 9:00 and 10:30 after the kids are in bed. This works just fine.

I recently discovered that my successor at the department I used to run until early 2007 has a different approach. He expects people to be in at 9:00. And he shoos home the laggards who're still working at 5:30. And while the panache and elan that this department had in my time are missing, this approach also works well enough. There isn't one right answer here.

However, the two right answers produce interestingly different selection effects.

My laissez faire approach tends to favour ambitious people willing to work long hours to get ahead. Other things being equal, people who were willing to put in 70 hours a week instead of the typical 50 would achieve more and be rewarded for that achievement. And I did observe a handful of people who were ravenously hungry for success choosing to burn their weekends at work trying to get ahead.

Under a more rigid 9:00 to 5:30 culture the ambitious can't catch up with more talented, knowledgeable or likable colleagues by sheer dint of hard work. Preventing over-long working hours is sort of like a price-setting mechanism in a cartel. People who work too many hours would be "punished" by an external or superior enforcer.

As a result, one would expect people with boundless raw ambition to self-select out of the organization. The culture would increasingly reflect the choices of people with ambition, but who are less willing to make personal sacrifices for the sake of ambition.

Nothing wrong with that. But over time, it does produce an interestingly different culture.

Why is this post in English?

An American friend observed at dinner last week that it is common for non-native English speakers, like maybe me and my wife, to speak with each other in English. Why does that happen?

The trivial argument is that my wife and I are native English speakers, as Indian-Indians. We've been educated in English in India since the age of three, like tens of millions of proud and privileged Indians. There is a case for India appropriating English and making it another Indian language, much like India has appropriated cricket and made it a very Indian game. But there is something more interesting happening here than identity politics.

English is famously weak among non-native speakers as being a poor medium for expressing emotion. But, despite that, English may lend itself to expressing precise, complex or subtle thoughts more readily than any other language.

That is an unprovable and potentially incendiary claim...but it still is worth holding that thought for a moment to see where it goes.

The strength of English is most obvious in the size of its vocabulary. English has about twice as many words as Spanish, the #2 language on the wordlists. This happens mainly because English is the default language of business, science and technology. Things that enrich people's lives, new experiences people want to talk about, happen because of business or technology and are therefore conceived in English. Translating gear, amplifier, covariance, browser or credit card out of English rarely feels natural. Hence, when Brazilians and Japanese want to talk, they talk in English. Hence Hinglish, Spanglish and Franglais.

Also, English is wonderfully assimilative. There is no language police to prevent beautiful words like gestalt, schadenfreude or zeitgeist from being imported into English words. Yin, yang, chi, karma, avatar and kismet are, or are well on their way to being, mainstream English words.

So, technically educated polyglots whose first language is Tamil, Arabic or Malay may well drift into English as they start expressing more complex ideas.

It looks like when history and custom provide a simple but robust (grammatical) framework, when nationalistic pride and the language police are kept away, when business and technology are allowed to just get on with it and do their thing, what develops is something amazingly powerful that connects a big slice of humanity. Is there is political philosophy lurking somewhere in here? Or is it just the Linux business model?

Manners for the Mangalam

To close out the thought from Shaping the Beast ...how would the Music Academy in Madras use design to discourage people from leaving during the Mangalam?

Here are five free suggestions. Without my usual consulting fee of $350 per hour :)

1. Lighting. Reduce the amount of light in the hall, especially in the stairwells, to make it hard for people to move in and out easily. Maybe even make the stairs slightly uneven, so one needs the light to walk comfortably

2. Symmetry. Make it mandatory for people to be in their seats before the concert starts. Lock the doors and don't let anyone in even slightly late. That makes it more natural for people to stay in their seats until the concert ends. For this to work, the artists also need to start and finish their concerts at specific times

3. Transport. Get people to park in a lot a mile away. Run a good bus service from the concert hall to the parking lot, with buses leaving immediately after the concert. People don't have a reason to leave before time

4. Ergonomics. Buy (or design) chairs that are comfortable to sit on for 150 minutes. The chair should ideally support the neck and arms, allow for plenty of wiggle room, and breathe. The pokey, folding contraptions usually supplied by tent-houses in Madras are a no-no

5. Food. A great thought stolen from Vishnu's blog. Serve soggy, over-priced sandwiches in cellophane wrap, like they do at the Kennedy center, instead of delicious idlis and vadais with piping hot coffee. Nobody will ever go to the canteen

Did Disney Invent Happiness?

Just attended a class at work on how to be a better coach. My employer wants to make sure younger analysts get really good at writing code for regression models and making snappy presentations to management. This class led to my thinking: Walt Disney deserves more credit than he generally gets for humanity's increasing happiness.

Where am I coming from? Or, what am I smoking?

The truism that effective coaching hinges on is that positive visualization works. Asking the coachee to avoid the silly stuff is counter productive. "Don't spill the milk" puts an image of spilt milk in the coachee's mind. The psyche is very good at taking these mental images and making them come true. So the injunction "don't spill the milk" almost inevitably leads to spilt milk, despite positive intent all around.

In cricketing terms, a good coach doesn't say "don't fish outside the off stump". That inevitably results in more slip catches. A good coach says "hit through the line". He wants the batter to have a vivid mental image of good batting.

John Wright, India's cricket coach in the early 2000s, was brilliant at this. Rahul Dravid is one of India's most gifted but psychologically weak batters (Rahul thinks too much?). Wright compiled a video montage of Rahul Dravid batting at his best, and made Rahul watch it before he went out to bat, most famously in Australia in 2004.

Ravi Bopara has a similar take on why winning is a habit in today's cricinfo.

"It makes a big difference to how you play when your team is winning. Then as a player you think less about it. You have that mentality that you are going to win every time you walk out. So you can go out and express yourself..."

The same process plays out in more important contexts than management presentations, drinking milk or hitting cricket balls.

Dr. Eric Berne, a psychotherapist who became famous for Transactional Analysis (TA), later developed TA into a more complete concept he called life scripts.

Dr. Berne's simple idea was that people passively and unconsciously internalize stories about the way their lives will play out, often when they are young or vulnerable, and spend their entire lives fulfilling that script. People who carry a visual, visceral sense of their own life-story featuring themselves as winners tend to be winners, in whatever sphere. Equally, negative life stories are self-fulfilling, even when (or maybe especially when) they are subliminal. Tragedies waiting to happen. This is interesting to a clinical psychologist because re-writing that subliminal script might change people's destiny.

Miguel Sabido is a Mexican film maker who tries to use soap operas, telenovellas, to re-program whole societies towards better lives. Here is the New Yorker's take on Sabido. It includes a thrilling passage on how The Bold And The Beautiful helped change attitudes to AIDS in Botswana.

These aren't new ideas. Religion is embedded within mythology for precisely this reason.

So, coming back to Disney. Generations of children have watched avidly, in a semi-hypnotic state, while princesses marry handsome princes, children go on adventures and return to their loving parents, and baddies get punished. No irony, no moral ambiguity, no confusion. Result = children programmed to live happy lives.

Would the world be materially different if Disney hadn't given happy endings to the gruesome Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm brother's versions of the same fairy tales? Yeah, I think so. Thank you Walt.

What would Bob do?

Bob Dylan's Girl from the North Country just came up on my iPod:

Please see for me if her hair hangs long,
If it rolls and flows all down her breast.
Please see for me if her hair hangs long,
That's the way I remember her best.

Bob wrote this song for Echo Helstrom , a girl he knew back in Hibbing, Minnesota, before he moved to New York.

So, now in the 21st century, what would Bob do? Would he just look up Echo's profile photo on Facebook, to instantly know how she wears her hair?

Shaping the beast

Where does culture come from?

I found myself arguing on my blog that culture is a given. More specifically, that corporate cultures are deterministically shaped by underlying economics. Companies, great companies, get good at the stuff that sits in their economic core and build rich cultures that celebrate and enhance that core. Even great companies remain mediocre at pretty much everything else, and have weak, transactional cultures in non-core areas.

I have also found myself passionately arguing on my friend Vishnu Vasudev’s blog that culture is malleable. The music lovers of Madras can be trained to sit in their seats until the concert is over. There is nothing about Madras or its culture that prevents this basic courtesy from taking hold.

Do I really believe both ideas? When is culture malleable? When is it diamantine?

Rattled the options around in my head over pints of Grolsch at Canal House last evening. Came up with a list of three culture-shapers. Economics and leadership were the usual suspects. The surprise candidate, the one I like most, was design.

Incentives shaping culture is obvious, to the point of being anodyne. It probably is the one thing Marxists and Chicago school liberals will agree on. The point worth remembering is that soft incentives - prestige, tribal membership, reinforcement of identity, shame, inertia - these are often more powerful incentives than explicit money.

So, incentives work. What else? Leadership? On no other topic have have more words been expended to say less. Naw, please. Lets not bring that cheezy, nutritionally-deficient, management jargon into this blog :)

More seriously, leadership can be transformational. Authentic leadership is rare, and can be an amazing experience for both the leader and led. I'm a huge fan of what Saurav Ganguly did for the self-belief of the ~20 Indian cricketers who played under him. Saurav and John Wright really did change the culture of the Indian cricket team. Dhoni (more than Kumble or Dravid) carries the torch Saurav lit.

But, unfortunately, authentic leadership depends on personal chemistry, which doesn't scale.

In larger organizations, leaders tend to reflect cultures more than they shape them. Strong cultures are very good at self-selecting clones. At best, change-leadership in large organizations (or even nations) is about sensing the shift in the tectonic plates the organization stands on, and preparing the organization to positively respond to that shift. Those tectonic plates are mostly economic.

So incentives work on both a large and small scale. And personal leadership works, but on a small scale. What else is out there?

Design. Architecture. Physical organization. Much more interesting.

An Agile team - with business customers, systems analysts, testers, developers and the copier boy all crammed into a messy conference room - creates a culture, a vibe, which is 10x more effective than the same people with the same incentives sitting at their desks and pinging emails at each other.

A suite of offices organized around a service hub - fully equipped with printers, sofas, steaming coffee, and streaming sports coverage on a plasma screen - creates a more social and collaborative work place than a bunch of closed doors along a long corridor.

Offices with glass doors and/or big windows opening on to the corridor takes that a step further, and also reduce the risk of corruption.

Facebook's instant messenger works on the same general principle of manufacturing chance meetings. I wind up chatting with friends I was not specifically planning to call. A laptop in the kitchen means the net gets used a lot more than when a desktop sat upstairs in the study.

My first job was at Procter and Gamble in India. While I was there, P&G formalized the dress code (made ties mandatory) as part of an effort to make the culture more formal, accountable and better at completing projects in time, within budget and up to specs. The broader effort worked. The dress code change was not irrelevant.

A petting zoo under the stands at Twenty20 cricket matches makes it easier to take kids along. I was glad to have this facility at hand at Trent Bridge earlier this summer. Changes the mix of fans in the stands.

The famous broken windows theory maintains that smartening up a neighbourhood can actually reduce crime in that neighbourhood. Policing inspired by this theory is credited with a part of reduction in urban crime in America, in very serious circles.

A lot of this can, of course, be interpreted economically. A laptop in the kitchen is less costly to use, in terms of effort. Accepting a bribe in a glass office is more costly, in terms of embarrassment or risk. The dress code change sends a "signal" about what the organization now values.

But it is more fun, and perhaps more useful while planning culture change, to think about these changes as design rather than incentives changes.