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.

Time for thought

A private conversation between Barack Obama and David Cameron picked up by accident on an ABC microphone:

Cameron: Do you have a break at all?

Obama: Actually, the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking...The biggest mistake a lot of folks make is just feeling as if you have to be...

Cameron: These guys just chalk up your diary

Obama: Right. In 15 minute increments...

Cameron: We call it the dentist's waiting room. You have to scrap that...you've got to have time

Obama: And...well you start making mistake, or you lose the big picture, or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel...

Cameron: Your feeling. And this is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to making decisions.

It is not universal. I find it hard to imagine Hillary Clinton living by this ethic of reflective thought rather than just working harder. Maybe Hillary would have been better off with a less packed schedule and more time for thought.

For my money, this might be the best management advice I've ever had.

Scrabulous scandal

Start with first principles.

Intellectual property right (IPR) laws exist to increase the stock of knowledge in the public domain. Giving innovators a time-bound monopoly hurts the public interest in the short term. But it helps the public interest in the long term, by increasing the rewards on innovation.

Notice that the argument works only if the knowledge created actually filters into the public domain. The argument might work in pharmaceuticals. Patented drugs do become generics in fifteen years.

This is totally not working in media/ entertainment. Private businesses seem to have a lock on media/ entertainment properties pretty much in perpetuity, to a point where I simply can't believe that the public interest is being served.

Take the latest absurd scandal . A company called Hasbro claims to own rights to Scrabble. They therefore claim that the boys who developed the Scrabulous application are violating Hasbro's copyright.

Let's even assume that the corporate lawyers have their papers in order. Where is the moral case here? Scrabble was invented in 1931. Why is this game not in the public domain 77 years after it was invented?

To make this situation even more absurd, Scrabulous is not a knock-off. It is a real value added innovation.

There are any number of small businesses which will print and sell the old off-line Scrabble without paying Hasbro royalties. Seems reasonable that they shouldn't have the right to print and market zero-royalty copies for 15 years. Feels like even the argument breaks down somewhere between 15.01 and 77, but there is an argument.

But with a true innovation - one that delivers massive amounts of additional value to at least some end users - isn't that what IPR laws are meant to be enabling? And these same IPR laws are now being used to prevent such innovation? This is a system that has been perverted to the point of absurdity.

Separately, the business executive in me can't help spotting mutual interest.

I suspect the Agarwala brothers would not be averse to an appropriately valued buy-out. Nothing at all wrong with a buyout. Reminds me of a pitch-your-business-idea-to-venture-capital competition when I was at B-school. Six out of eight teams' exit strategy was to sell out to Microsoft. All that may be going on here is legal posturing by Hasbro to scare the developers into accepting a lower price.

It's just a shame that laws that were initially written to serve the public interest can be used to create the opposite of what was intended.

Lesbians, Scotch, Tigers and Identity

Three residents of the Greek island Lesbos moved the courts to ban the rule of the word lesbian to describe gay women. Apparently, there once was a time when lesbian used to mean someone from Lesbos.

Does capitalization - a lesbian Lesbian is a lesbian from Lesbos - sufficiently distinguish the two meanings? It does sometimes work. Someone who welshes on a deal is not necessarily Welsh. But sometimes it doesn't. JK Galbraith lamented that the word Scotch once used to describe people from Scotland.

I've personally run into a more reversible (hopefully) but more scary identity blurring: when I tell non-Indians that I am a Tamil, their first association is with the Tamil Tigers.

The greatest thing about the English language is that it has no language police, no notion of the One True English. Shape-shifting words can't be legislated out of the lexicon. Would the French language police have upheld the Lesbian's objections?


Note (following my lawyer brother-in-law's shock at some of my previous posts): I am a staunch supporter of gay and lesbian rights...and have no specific views on British sub-national identities. No offense meant to anyone

Fun days, summer balls, team spirit and all that jazz

I'm seriously back-logged at work after a day out water skiing, a night out camping and a night out for the summer ball...all company events. Got to spend lots of time out soaking up the glorious English summer, and to reflect on corporate fun events and how they work.

- Conclusions first. My top management tip. Spend the money, create the time, and make sure your team does lots of fun stuff together. The return you get in terms of morale and productivity (less time wasted on whingeing/ managing the whinge) is huge

- The cricketing parallel...more games are won in the dressing room than on the field

- Things I remember doing on Fun Days include, in no particular order: water-skiing, white water rafting, yatching, steering a canal boat, camping, ultimate frizbee, fishing, mini-golf, tennis ball cricket, baseball hitting in batting cages, softball, bowling, skiing, laser tag, rock climbing, a ropes course, hiking up Snowdon (the highest peak in Britain), hiking up Scafell Pike (the highest peak in England), quad bike racing, go karting, a treasure hunt through the "heart of rural England", archery, ice-skating, clay pigeon shooting, visiting an aquarium, visiting ESPN Zone, visiting an amusement park with many roller coaster rides, and wine tasting

- This does not include Community Days, which might involve riding a bicycle 75 miles across the Pennines, building a house for Habitat for Humanity, or painting the hall of an inner city school

- Fun Days are fun despite being hopelessly bad at the fun activity. This is less obvious than it sounds. Games I play regularly, like squash, are fun when I'm playing well and no fun when I'm playing badly

- The Fun Day is mainly about being out with the blokes from work, and not talking work. The activity is just time structuring

- The hardest thing about fun days is being inclusive. The activities I've listed above reflect the culture of the teams I work in...mainly quant jocks in their 20s. The teams are very diverse in terms of ethnicity/ race/ nationality, but are very homogeneous in attitudes/ interests/ mind-set. I remember a gentle, soft spoken girl who decided to make herself unavailable for white water rafting because she couldn't quite picture herself in a wet suit. That didn't feel right

- Twenty20 cricket games don't qualify as official Fun Days, because they are not inclusive enough

- It's impossible to be completely inclusive. Our most feminine fun events are probably the Summer and Winter Balls. These tend to involve nice clothes, stately homes, fine food and wine, live entertainers or fireworks, karaoke, an open bar and disco dancing. A shaven-headed Australian Vice President in his mid-forties consistently boycotts these evenings, since he "doesn't want to watch 23 year olds getting wasted and throwing up in the toilets". In case you're wondering, I've never seen or even heard of anyone throwing up in toilets at company events

- Fun Days have no impact on the number/ quality of people who apply for jobs at this company. Potential recruits, especially graduates, care a lot more about pay, prestige and career prospects than fun or culture

- Fun Days, and the broader culture that they are a part of, are great for retention. Culture is a big part of what people like about their jobs here. It is a key reason why people who leave want to (and often do) come back. People leaving and coming back...and the incentive that creates to leave on a whim...is a topic for another post

- The disconnect between the selection effect and the retention effect is quite an interesting puzzle, really. When asked, graduates say they want "serious" jobs. Join us because we do cool Fun Days sounds condescending. That apart, there are at least three other interesting economic effects going on here:

(i) Competition. Other employers competing for the same talent also do Fun Days

(ii) Asymmetric information. Everybody says their company is fun. But is it? Really? An extra $5000 is real for sure

(iii) Consumer choice theory. People are really bad at forecasting what they enjoy/ care about/ derive utility from. They overestimate the utility of obscure features while evaluating digital cameras. Similarly, they underestimate the utility derived from fun or culture in evaluating potential employers.

The 100th Post

Thank you readers. Here's to the next 100 posts.

Tired cricketers?

The new news from the Asia Cup has been about players being too tired to give 100%.

The players have a point. Back-to-back 50 over games in Karachi in June is insane. The media has a point. There is too much international cricket. And some of the scheduling is just incompetent.

What is not being discussed is a credible way out of this mess. There will be no mystic return-to-innocence of less cricket. More cricket means more money. That is good. The real solution is to find techniques that allow players to remain fresh despite the intense year-round schedule.

A simple technique we could import from baseball is rotation. It is unthinkable that New York Yankees starting pitcher would pitch two games in a row, even in the World Series. Why should Ishant Sharma or RP Singh risk career limiting injuries by opening the bowling two days in a row?

Pick a squad of 25. Make sure the fast bowlers and the batters who have played long innings get a rest between games. Cricket's stars deserve careers like Sachin Tendulkar or Shane Warne. We don't want them to retire at 25 like a Justine Henin.

Leos suffer from weak digestion. They do, don't they?

Great old story from the Economist about a very common statistical error. Cherry picking.

Hospital admission data from Canada shows that Leos are likely to have gastric trouble and Sagittarians are more likely to break their arms. Both results are statistically significant...if your statistical technique ignores the fact that with 24 comparisons 2-3 are likely to be significant at the 95% level due to pure randomness.

I unconsciously resisted absorbing this idea during stats training...probably because I'm usually very keen for the results of my tests to be significant. Yet when one is doing dozens of tests (as I often am) results that appear significant are often just noise.

This example hammered the point home...probably because I am very receptive to the thought that astrology is a vicious scam. Cultural context: astrology in India isn't just harmless fun. The truth is that Leos are no more likely than anyone else to have gastric trouble. And my mom's painful feet are because of poorly designed footwear, not her Virgo birth sign.

Scrabulous vs Scrabble

Five reasons I like Scrabulous more than Scrabble.

- I can check the official word list quickly and easily. This levels the playing field a bit when a beginner like me who was never very good with spelling is playing old pros like my sister

- I don't need to do the arithmetic to work out how much a word is worth

- I can play with family and friends who live on different continents

- I can complete games with my wife. We almost never have blocks of time big enough for a whole game. Leaving the board in place is not an option in a house with two kids

- I can make a move between meetings to break up a work day

Paris je t'aime

Great fun.

18 clips about love in Paris. By different directors, about different aspects of love, set in different parts of Paris. United only by the spirit of the city, which permeates every clip. Sounds a bit like a film school project. Very cool project.

Each film clip works a poem. Not a novel. There isn’t enough room to establish a character or situation.

Yet, no richness is lost. These are like re-enactments from the Ramayana. Each character, each situation in a love story has been worn so smooth with repetition that one can step right into the narrative without needing to find bearings.

Cultural Learnings of Eng-a-land for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Hindustan

A summit has been summoned in Kirkcaldy. The problem: asbo seagulls.

Geeks, meet the jocks

Michael Medved on the value of an education:

That piece of parchment from New Haven or Cambridge does indicate that you've competed with single-minded effectiveness in the first 20 years of life....the driven, ferociously focused kids willing to expend the energy and make the sacrifices to conquer our most exclusive universities...are likely to enjoy similar success...

Competed, single-minded, driven, ferociously focused, energy, sacrifice - these words could be used to describe sports people. Not gifted amateurs, but the tough competitors who win ugly.

Among my peers, the sportsmen/ games captains have certainly gone on to be as successful as the university toppers. There is something in that old Thomas Arnold belief about sport building character...

Culture is a Beast

Tigers hunt alone. They stalk their prey through dense jungle, relying first on stealth and then on a burst of incredible power. Wolves hunt in packs. They chase their prey down through open terrain, encircle, harass and exhaust their prey, before killing and feeding as a pack. The social organization of animals, their cultures, are determined by their survival strategy. Animals evolve to do what it takes to get food without becoming food.

Tigers don’t stomp. Wolves don’t graze…even if they are made to sit through a thousand PowerPoint presentations.

Organizations are like animals. They evolve to do what is necessary for their survival, and very little else.

All that is obvious, right? Apparently not. The alchemy of “leadership”, armed with the sword of PowerPoint, can transform organizations into the object of the heart’s desire…never mind how the organization actually makes money.

My top management tip: beware the man in the Armani suit who teaches the elephant to be stealthy.

Or teaches the snake to fly. Hey…a snake who learns to fly is a dragon. That’s the metaphor which will super-charge my next change management program.

Attack of the Asian female clones

Glorious giants of the Appalachians are being killed off by insignificant-looking Asian females. And this has nothing to do with outsourcing, job losses, small towns, bitterness, guns or religion.

The Eastern Hemlock, a glorious native American tree that grows to a stature of 100m, the Sequoia of the Appalachians, is being wiped out by a tiny parasite, an aphid called the Woolly Adelgid. This has been observed and mourned in the New Yorker (I found the story thumbing through a back issue), the New York Times (way back in 1991) and in various pamphlets accessible with a Google search. However, what doesn't seem to have attracted comment is that the attacker is fatally flawed.

The aphids first came to America on decorative Japanese trees which were planted at Maymont, a public park in Richmond, VA. All the male aphids died. They feed exclusively on spruce sap and the males could not digest American spruce. A few females survived. Sans males, they had to reproduce by cloning. So, the threat to the Eastern Hemlock comes from clones of a very small number of individual female aphids. The clones were fantastically successful because they could colonize the Eastern Hemlock. As a predator gets established in America, or worst-case, as the Hemlock populations in the wild die out, the clones will also die. Clones are evolutionary dead-ends.

Should conservationists freeze Hemlock gene-plasm to re-populate the Applachians once the Woolly Adenids clones inevitably die? Makes sense. Just be sure to freeze a diverse pool of Hemlock gene-plasm. And establish an Eastern Hemlock worshipping cult whose rituals will remind initiates to perform this sacred task when evolution plays out and the clones finally die.

Test cricket. Live at the ground

Five thoughts after a day watching test cricket at Trent Bridge:

1. The thonchk sound of bat hitting ball. That sound just doesn't come through on TV

2. The new TV screen at Trent Bridge is fantastic. Watching from a stand 150 meters from the screen, the picture quality is as good as on TV at home. They do show the key moments on screen. Makes the classic (expensive) seats over the top of the bowler's arm less relevant, really

3. They market special radios on the ground that pick up Sky Sports' TV commentary. They ought to also market special internet devices that pick up The Guardian's OBO coverage

4. The English start drinking at 11:00 am and drink continuously till stumps at 6:30. Men and women, white haired gentlemen in blazers and yobs in tattoos...they all sustain this rate of consumption. It is an amazing physical achievement. Even more amazing, Britain is ranked only 15th in European league tables for alcohol consumption per capita

5. Monty Panesar does a cool wave to the crowd. His back is towards the crowd, but he acknowledges the "Monty, give us a wave" calls by transferring his weight on to one leg, pivoting his hands at about waist height, shrugging a shoulder and just glancing back for a split second

IPL payments and CEOs

The winners of the IPL will earn $1.5MM. Works out to $75K for each player if there are 20 in the squad.

Sure, $75k is nothing to sneeze at. Unless you’ve been paid $500K to just show up and take part. The incentives aren’t sloped steeply enough. It is creditable that the stars are playing hard despite the relatively small prize.

For the true geeks reading this post…the formula that describes optimal effort in a tournament is (w1 – w2) = g(0)*c’(e). (w1 – w2) represents the increase in wealth due to winning. g(0) is a measure of how much randomness effects winning. c'(e) is a measure of effort. This formula is lifted from a seminal 1981 paper by Sherwin Rosen and Edward Lazear. If you really want to get under the skin of the formula, you can download the paper from jstor for $14.

The intuitive part of the result is that people work harder to win if the rewards of winning are greater. The fascinating part of this result is that the rewards for winning need to be greater in games with more randomness to extract the same effort. If you can win through pure luck, you’re less likely to work hard to win. So the reward needs to be bigger to get the same hard work.

This Sherwin Rosen paper - and the vast body of secondary research that his paper spawned - is often used to understand why CEOs get paid so much. Everybody in an organization works hard to become the CEO because the reward is so big. That hard work is what creates value for the organization, or for society, which is good. The reward goes to one CEO, one individual who basically got lucky, which feels unfair. Horrible dilemma. The only way to square this circle seems to be to design games with less randomness.

Geeks Rule

David Brooks on the rise of the Geeks

Micro Nations

Some Scots want to secede from the UK to create an independent nation of 5 MM people. Some Walloons want to secede from Belgium to create an independent nation of 3MM people. In this news item about Belgium's possible break up, Czechoslovakia’s split in 1993 into the Czech Republic and Slovakia is admiringly described as a “velvet” partition.

Yet ever more countries want to join the European Union. Big nations like Poland and Hungary are in. Giants like Turkey and Ukraine seem likely to become European within my lifetime (the next 50 years?).

So is Europe splintering or coalescing? What’s going on? The dynamic that feels under-observed, that Scotland beautifully illustrates, is that the two processes reinforce each other.

Chest-thumping micro-nationalism is great fun. It derives from the same emotions that cause people to support the home team at football games; these are powerful emotions. What limits the political potency of micro-nationalism is that micro-nations simply don’t have the scale to build the institutions that, ultimately, make people better off.

As European institutions become stronger micro-nationalism gradually becomes costless. People will gradually figure out that the institutions that make people better off are located in Europe. Might as well thump the micro-national chest and have a bit of fun.

The Scottish parliament voluntarily dissolved itself and threw its lot in with Westminster in 1707, at the cusp of the British Empire. Their reasoning was coldly economic (or so says the Lonely Planet guide). Scotland wanted to be on the winning side of the greatest opportunity-to-plunder/ economic engine that history had ever seen. Three hundred years later, the pro-union rhetoric coming out of Scotland is still economic.

Over time, the Euro-zone market will get bigger and deeper, European courts and parliaments and regulators will figure themselves out, the Trans European Motorway will get built. Maybe a European lingua franca will emerge (will it be English?). Union with England will just matter less to a Scotland that is part of a functioning Europe.

What are the odds that Scotland will be an independent European nation 50 years from now? I’ll offer you 50-50. Much longer odds though, on the European lingua franca becoming English.

Sandlot Wars

I’m really stretched at work nowadays (hence the relatively low frequency of blog posts). Too much work. Not quite enough people to get through the work. I’m not alone. Most of my peers are in the same situation.

One unexpectedly good consequence is that my peers and I are playing as a team more than we used to. We clearly need help from each other, and are generally quite happy to punt the ball over to each other.

This is in stark contrast to another time, within this same company, when we were overstaffed. We had too many ambitious and talented people, with plenty of time on their hands, looking to carve out bigger roles to match their ambitions and talents. This lead to the Sandlot wars. Almost all conversations were political rather than truth-seeking, and came with an undercurrent of “this is my sandlot and you’re not going to play here.”

Based on that contrast, my top management tip: keep your team slightly short-staffed. Your people will be under pressure. That’s OK. They will learn to take the pressure. An environment where people have a lot of room to play and grow, and have a credible prospect of advancement, creates a much healthier culture.

My inner sceptic just asked a question. Organizations riven by turf wars are clearly less pleasant work-places than those where people co-operate. But are they less successful? Great research topic for a Ph.D. student. But, for sure, you will have more fun working for a light, stretched organization.

The hardest people to manage

It's people who are on their way out of your organization.

My top management tip: don't prolong the agony. If one of your people wants to leave, tell her to just go right now. You may not know exactly how you will cope with the loss, but you will cope.

Just go right now sometimes feels hard. Having a familiar face who knows the ropes running her show for a few more months often feels safer. That is false security. Having an player who is not fully checked-in on your team for a few months is toxic. Best case, safe players start making amateurish errors. Worst case, open-minded, constructive scepticism degenerates into corrosive, contagious cynicism. I've seen it happen too many times. It's not worth it.

The shadow of the future is everybody's best friend.

Do better driving tests save lives?

Earlier this morning, I was talking a friend through the painful process of getting a UK driving license. My friend is a Chartered Accountant and a banker. He is bringing up a family. He has been driving for about 20 years in India, the USA and various holiday destinations. It's hard to find a lower risk-profile than him. But getting a UK license remains a painful process, low-risk-profile or otherwise.

Part of the pain is, of course, the sheer bureaucracy. But a part of the pain is that there is a real risk of cautious and experienced drivers failing the test. The UK test is a heck of a lot more rigorous than equivalents in either India or, slightly more surprisingly, the USA.

Does the UK get anything valuable out of these rigourous tests (apart from the perverse pleasure oily government employees get from randomly saying no)?

A quick Google search seems to show that the testing works. The per capita death rate through road accidents in the UK is about half US levels. That is massive, a lot more than I was expecting.

An interesting twist in the data is that almost 65% of the difference in death rates seems to be explained the fact that the US has more cars per capita. A first glance the more money -> more cars -> more road deaths pattern seemed natural. But no. One might have expected a society that is more dependent on cars to invest more in road safety. And at some human level, the risk of death per individual just feels like a much more important metric than the risk of death per vehicle.

Another interesting slant in the data is the ratio of injuries to deaths. The UK and the US are around the same level here, suggesting that there are no material differences in the quality of medical care delivered to accident victims. If anything the much-reviled NHS seems to be delivering a slightly better ratio than the USA.

There is a specter haunting Eurpoe

Here is another surprisingly simple reason why property prices in the UK are unreasonably high.

A price fixing building cartel with more than a 100 members. I'm surprised that the cartel manaegd to hold.

Fundas on the IPL

In the cacophony of media hype about the IPL and Twenty20 cricket, one crucial point almost everybody seems to have forgotten: this is not a new idea.

The only interesting media piece so far which sets Twenty20 in historical perspective is here.

Admittedly, the fact that test cricket was invented by an upper-class MCC establishment trying to defend its power base when challenged by a professional league playing an exciting, abbreviated version of the game is news even to a die-hard and relatively well read cricket fan like me. Hope the facts are right.

Another bit of historical perspective is from CLR James in Beyond the Boundary. He watches Learie Constantine playing limited overs cricket in Lancashire in the 1950s, notes that the game is both pure and innovative, and calls it the future.

The other bit of nonsense that keeps cropping up is that Twenty20 is a batsman's game. Cricket has always been a batsman's game. Arthur Mailey, the Australian leggie from the 1920s, noted that "the last bowler to be knighted was Sir Francis Drake".

There is a clear role reversal for bowlers in tests and limited overs. In tests, the bowlers are the attack. In limited overs they play defence. But in that, Twenty20 isn't really different from 50 over cricket. There are silly features like shorter boundaries that can be scrapped, but that doesn't really change the big picture.

My initial worry with the IPL was that the stars would take their money and play in cruise control mode. That worry was unfounded. Now that the top players are showing up to work, we have a great tournament on our hands.

CMJ on IPL

Christopher Martin Jenkins writing in Cricinfo magazine on the opening game of the IPL in Bangalore:

local interest was spurious, because they were watching a game between sides made up of mercenaries and little-known youths.

When Bangalore cheers for Mark Boucher, the sportsman becomes a mercenary and the interest spurious. Manchester United supporters cheering for Christiano Ronaldo if fine. Did CMJ ever describe Mushtaq Ahmed as a mercenary, or Sussex supporter's interest as spurious, when Mushy bowled Sussex to the county championship?

The English cricket establishment's sniffy insecurity when confronted with the success of Indian cricket is downright embarrassing. It starts getting nasty when the sniffiness results in ECB bureaucrats elbowing professional cricketers away from a decent chance to make good money.

Zorro. By Isabel Allende

Completely satisfying. Just the right mix of emotions, just the right balance of historical context and personal drama, just the right length, just the right complexity (for someone who typically reads after a hard day in the office and putting the kids to bed). Couldn't recommend it more strongly.

Don't read on if you like to read in suspense. But if you've read the book, or don't plan to read the book, or trust that I've given away nothing essentially suspenseful, or don't really care about suspense, here are some of my favourite nuggets/ reflections:

- "from the literary point of view, (childhood) has no suspense, children tend to be a little dull. Furthermore, they have no power, adults decide for them." Interesting point. Children are great as subjects, as authentic voices through which to observe the adult world. Think back to To Kill a Mocking Bird. Or the precocious Oskar Schnell in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Or even Richmal Compton's William. Maybe children, or even completely powerless adults, don't really work as the objects of fiction

- I loved the historical context. Spain had been annexed by Napoleon's France. Mexico was a Spanish colony. California was a Mexican territory. New Orleans had been sold by Napoleon to the Americans in the Louisiana land purchase. Britain fought America for Louisiana, and was defeated. Pirates ruled. The stench of the slave trade permeated the Caribbean. The Gypsies are a hunted, haunted European tribe, tenaciously holding onto their Indian roots. The Indians are a hunted, haunted American tribe, tenaciously holding on to their pre-European roots. None of this is hammered home. One picks up all of this casually wandering through the plot

- "Diego was a Gemini". Makes sense. The cultured, dandified, effeminate, patrician: Don Diego de la Vega. The fearless, swashbuckling, dashing, darling of the masses: Zorro. Are all super-heroes Geminis? Clark Kent and Superman. Parker and Spiderman. Bruce Wayne and Batman. Could they be Libras? No. The two sides of the balance are yoked together. Super-hero identities are completely separate. Could they be Pisces? No. Piscean fish swim in opposite directions. Super-hero identities swim together. Had to be Gemini

- Diego does not get his girl: Juliana de Romeu. That had to be. Diego's love was real. Juliana was worthy of his love. It was not their destiny. If Diego had got his girl that would have been the end of the story, he would have become a happy and wealthy ranchero in Alta California. The lost love was essential to Diego remaining forever hungry, forever young, to Diego remaining Zorro

- Juliana de Romeu would have been the perfect girl for Zorro. She is the wrong girl for the Diego de la Vega + Zorro combine. Juliana is about pale skin, cascading curls, beauty, grace, care, perfect taste, dignity under duress. She is all yin. Her man would need to be all yang. Every couple needs a balance of animus and anima

- "We shall soon be saying goodbye, dear readers, since the story ends when the hero returns to where he began, transformed by adventures and by obstacles overcome. This is the norm in epic narratives from the Odyssey to fairy tales, and I shall not be the one to attempt innovation"

London Marathon

Just ran my first marathon. The Flora London Marathon. On April 13, 2008. Had a totally fantastic time. Also had some reflections on marathon running while running the marathon. Hallucinatory reflections of this sort may be a symptom of extreme glycogen deprivation.

Yin and yang

A Jungian framework I happened upon years ago maps all social motivation onto a single axis. The psyche has an innate desire to feel connected, to belong, to feel at one with, to be a part of a larger whole. Yin. The psyche also has an innate desire to stand out, to be unique, to win, to conquer. Yang. The greatest fun happens when the psyche reaches both the yin and yang ends of the axis.

That happens at a big marathon. The sheer fact of running 26.2 miles delivers the yang. There is something special about the physical achievement...even in these days of mass participation marathons. Yet, that's only a part of the story. The training runs on foggy grey mornings stretching out over 20+ miles feel meaningful (and get done) only in the context of a framing event.

And what a great event it is. The company I work for had done a great job, putting up posters across town wishing our runners good luck. My daughter was delighted to see my picture on an advert while riding on the tram. Travel in London is free for runners. You start the run at the Greenwich observatory. The streets in front packed with other runners, with whom you feel a reflexive kinship. The route is packed with hundreds of thousands of cheering spectators. This is clearly the only time in my life >100000 people have cheered me on. My family and friends were along to cheer. It was fantastic.

Agoraphilia

I love the word. Will never have a better opportunity to use it.

After training outdoors through crisp winter sunshine, persistent rain, the occasional snow or hail, and - worst of all from a running perspective - gusty winds, I am more aware of the weather and it's moods than I've ever been. Less obviously but more powerfully, I love the sense of physical space, of eating up the distance, that I get running outdoors. I've had the same feeling when I'm out hiking.

There is a specter haunting Europe (2)

Britain is one of the world's more over-priced property markets. Prices can go into free-fall.

So what should be done about that? Cut interest rates to prop up prices? Or use the inevitable carnage as an opportunity to massively expand housing supply...to deliver a step-change improvement in the real lives of real people?

My (contrarian) vote is for the supply side expansion.

The elephant in the very-tiny-room during any conversation about housing in Britain is that the quality of housing really sucks. A country as rich as Britain need not live in homes that are so small that a standard "bedroom" is about the size of an American walk-in closet. Where double bedrooms don't fit double beds. Or where faucets that mix hot and cold water are an exotic luxury.

The simple and obvious solution is to develop large tracts of high quality housing, either on greenfield sites or by bulldozing some of the existing housing stock. But this simply has not happened. Is there a subtle but powerful political pressure from property owners defending high prices?

A counter-argument that is sometimes reflexively trotted out is: Britain is a small island and land is scarce. This is pure hokum. Britain can easily import tomatoes or milk. Britain can't import land. A very similar argument was used in the 80s to justify Japan's over-priced "rabbit hutches" and its heavily subsidized rice farms.

More realistically, a supply side expansion that might happen during this downturn is that sellers might be forced to spend more on the house to sell it at the same price. This will not get picked up as deflation in the published house price indices. But that investment will be a welcome improvement in the real lives in real people.

There is a specter haunting Europe

Here is why I am very happy being a renter

Science or religious war?

Are neo-classical and behavioural economics truly irreconcilable? Are the foundations of one of our great sciences crumbling before our eyes? Or, is behavioural economics a useful elaboration on the neo-classical tradition, that enriches rather than wrecks the great neo-classical insights?

My chips are on the enriching rather than wrecking side of the argument. Right here, right now, I clearly am in the minority. The sloppy-thinking chat tends to pit one tradition against the other.

Here is Elizabeth Kolbert, writing in the New Yorker.

"Rational calculators are supposed to consider their options, then pick the one that maximizes the benefit to them. Yet actual economic life, as opposed to the theoretical version, is full of miscalculations, from the gallon jar of mayonnaise purchased at spectacular savings to the billions of dollars Americans will spend this year to service their credit-card debt. The real mystery, it could be argued, isn’t why we make so many poor economic choices but why we persist in accepting economic theory."

Notice the condescension. "The real mystery...why we persist in accepting economic theory." She illustrates this self evident truth - that the assumption of rational economic behaviour is so broken that it is pitiful - with a personal anecdote.

Ms Kolbert was buying a book on Amazon for her work when a message popped up on her screen "add $7.00 to your order to qualify for FREE Shipping". She hesitated. Her nine-year-old twins wanted a Tintin book. She clicked it into the shopping cart and checked out, saving The New Yorker $3.99 and spending $12.91 of her own money.

Then comes the sucker-punch. "From the perspective of neoclassical economics, self-punishing decisions (such as this purchase of a Tintin comic) are difficult to explain." Really?

Neo-classical economics is very comfortable thinking about the Tintin comic as a bundle of information (about prices), services (delivery) and physical product (the comic book itself). Remember complements and substitutes from Econ 101? Amazon reduced the price of that bundle by flashing a free shipping advert on Ms Kolbert's screen, which reduced her tacit search costs, and by waiving the delivery charges. This prompted a purchase which otherwise wouldn't have happened. Lower price, more sales. This is the demand curve from Econ 101. There is no more unsurprising result in neo-classical economics.

Notice that the neo-classical theory makes no claims about the mechanism by which people maximize utility. In the neo-classical view people maximize utility the way a dog catches a frisbee. The calculations a dog needs to make to catch a frisbee are way beyond the scope of what a dog, or human, can consciously perform. Yet, dogs and humans successfully catch millions of frisbees every day.

This is where behavioural economics comes in. It sheds more light on the heuristics that people actually use while maximizing utility. This might prompt governments or businesses to use those heuristic mechanisms. For example, tax collections in America increased when taxes were collected at source. Once the money is in my bank account I am much more reluctant to give it to the government. Brilliant behavioural insight. By Milton Friedman, the godfather of neo-classical economics.

None of this challenges the one thought central to all of neo-classical economics: people respond to incentives. The way in which different people respond to different incentives is infinitely varied, which is why economic life is fascinating to observe.

Debark?

Much better than disembark.

Found it in Isabel Allende's Zorro. Thought it was Allende's genius that had conjured up the elegant new word. But http://www.m-w.com/ assures me that the word has been in use since 1654.

Stealing Music?

Fans and musicians are enjoying each other's presence at the South by South West music festival, unencumbered by record companies. And they are talking about how they can do just fine, forever after, without record companies.

It's good to move beyond the toxic divisions of the digital rights/ copyright wars and start the conversation about how the music industry ought to work.

Record company jobs and copyright laws serve a useful purpose if they bring together artists and fans. Everything else is secondary.

Nemo's dad can become Nemo's mom

It's true. Sure, it is not appropriate material for Disney movies. But the scientific fact is that when Nemo's mom was ate by a shark, Nemo's dad could have just turned himself into a mom.

All clown fish start their lives off as males. The live in colonies inside an anemone, typically on coral reefs. The largest fist in each colony is the breeding female, the next largest the breeding male. A number of smaller, sexually inactive clown fish also live in the anemone. If one of the breeding couple dies, the biggest of the sexually inactive lads will step-up-to-the-plate and become a breeding male. The promotion always goes from sexually inactive lad to breeding male, because if the fish who died was female the breeding male will become a breeding female.

There is a rigid hierarchy from sexually inactive lad, to breeding male to breeding female. Promotion up the hierarchy is based on an objective criterion: size.

It is fairly common for reef-fish to be able to change gender. A quick Google search did not reveal the genetic basis for this gender identity. But clearly gender in reef fish is something more subtle than X and Y chromosomes.

Acknowledgements: this post was inspired by a visit to the Sea Life aquarium in Birmingham

If you want to start a revolution...

...use radio. If you want to suppress a revolution use TV.

Radio forces people to focus, and listen to your words, and engage their imaginations. With TV, people are more focused on the colour of your tie than on what you're saying.

Just heard this on BBC Radio 4 ten minutes ago. I love the Marxist interpretation. TV is the ultimate capitalist plot to foil revolution by feeding the masses an opiate.

The Sultanganj Buddha

Should great works of art stolen by discredited, morally bankrupt empires be returned home?

This question has been rattling around in my head for a couple of weeks, since I stumbled upon a fabulous, life-size, 1500 year old bronze Buddha from Sultanganj, Bihar, in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

My mind came to rest at this thought: a day will come when India is rich enough and proud enough, to care for our heritage. Maybe not in my lifetime, but that day will come. That is when the Sultanganj Buddha ought to return home, perhaps to Sultanganj. But until then, it’s OK for the Buddha to stay on in Birmingham, where it has a place of honour and is displayed with sensitivity, respect and taste.

This is an interesting case, really. It is not an obvious story of rapacious, colonial plunder. This is not like the Kohinoor diamond, which was stolen by Queen Victoria for her crown from the crown of Maharajah Ranjit Singh.

Apparently, this Buddha was consecrated at the center of a Gupta era vihara on the right bank of the Ganga c. 500 AD. The vihara came under military threat c. 700 AD. The monks chose to bury their sacred icon rather than let it fall to their enemies. Their ruse worked. The vihara was razed. The Buddha survived, unseen but unharmed.

About 1200 years later, in 1862, a British engineer was laying a Railway line from Burdwan to Kiul. He was mining earth for ballast to lay under the railway track, and came upon a large, regular block harder than the earth around it. He mined around the block, dislodged it from the earth, chiseled open the block the next morning, and stared into the tranquil face of the Buddha.

The advice from his railway colleagues was to melt down the Buddha into rails. Not unreasonable; there is not a lot else that one can do with a massive metal thingummybob when living on a railway camp 500 miles upriver from Calcutta. But fortunately, a combination of fate, patience and the modern miracle of telegraph communication located a wealthy merchant who was willing to pay two hundred pounds to have the statue shipped to Birmingham. Maybe the Buddha travelled to Calcutta on the same railway tracks that he had so nearly become a part of. The weary Buddha finally reached Birmingham 1867.

The wealthy merchant, Mr Samuel Taylor, went on the become the mayor of Birmingham. On his death he donated his art collection to the city. Mr Samuel Taylor’s name is immortalized on a plaque near the Buddha. I couldn’t spot the name of the railway engineer.

So in what sense does the statue belong in India, or in Sultanganj, more than it does to the city of Mr Samuel Taylor?

One could make legalistic arguments here. The Greek state has trotted out a legal argument about the legitimacy of the Ottoman firman by which the British Museum acquired the Elgin marbles. But the argument which resonates with me (and apparently with the fair-minded British public who overwhelmingly support returning the Elgin marbles to Greece) is an argument about identity rather than legality.

India is not just the land of cricket, curry and customer service call centers. India is Bharatavarsh.

One of the most wonderful things about India - the modern nation state that was born in 1947 - is that India fiercely embraces its history. India isn't just a bunch of lines drawn on a map. India is charged with mythic meaning. India is the heir to the Mauryas and the Guptas, the Cheras and the Cholas, the grandeur of the Moghuls and the grit of the Marathas, heir to both Tansen and to Baiju Bawra. The choice of Ashoka's pillar as India's national symbol was inspired; the symbol of the "soul of a nation, long supressed, finding utterance".

That is the sense in which the Sultanganj Buddha might belong in India. The statue's story feels like the story of India itself. A nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. A magnificient statue, long buried, finds expression. The Sultanganj Buddha in Birmingham is just another beautiful museum-piece. The Sultanganj Buddha in India could be so much more redolent with meaning: the symbol of a great nation, once vanquished, now discovering it's own greatness.

The Sultanganj Buddha has his own tryst with destiny. The day hasn't yet come to redeem that pledge.

The last of the Eyak

Words are probably the wrong medium to express what this means

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10640514&CFID=10936602&CFTOKEN=e5314cade73cf83b-6D129736-B27C-BB00-012B1E18390442D7

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7206411.stm

Culling elephants

The South African government has decided to kill several thousand elephants to keep the elephant population within sustainable limits. Are they killing 5000 elephants? The number is not totally clear.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/26/environment

This is heartbreaking, especially for the foster daddy of a four year old elephant called Naserian who lives at the David Sheldrick orphanage in Kenya. But understandable. Especially if more humane alternatives have been seriously attempted. The good news is that elephant and tiger populations do really well when protected, unlike say, cheetah or pandas.

The news so far has shied away from a really interesting economic question: should the South African government sell ivory from this cull?

The money from selling ivory could be used to give elephants better protection. This has traditionally been the South African position. On the other hand, legitimate sales of ivory could "prime the pump" of the ivory trade by bringing craftsmen back to ivory, increasing steady state demand, and make it harder to protect elephants. This has traditionally been the Kenyan position.

I totally see and sympathize with both sides of the argument. Would love to hear about an objective no-spin analysis that sizes up these arguments.

My Family Owns a House in Telluride

Sometimes, things come together. Time, place, people, thought, soft afternoon sunshine, salty sea spray - everything - everything comes together in an exhilarating, intoxicating rush of adrenaline, testosterone, music and laughter that sculpts the soul, makes life real, and makes you who you are.

But things come apart again. Life moves on. The clocks didn’t all stop. We didn’t die then and there. The grey world that dawns the morning after Camelot, packing your bags for Faisalabad after winning the Ashes, it’s the hardest part. You still gotta do what you gotta do.

This haunting story is about the end of magic, about when the universe no longer has a center. Fortunately, the story still is on the New Yorker’s website.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/11/19/071119fi_fiction_nelson

360 degree feedback: is there a trade-off between usefulness and transparency?

The company I work for has a well-entrenched culture of 360 degree feedback. Five years ago, this feedback was often pointed and tended to emphasize the negatives. But it was genuinely helpful in helping managers poinpoint the skills/ behaviours their people needed to develop. Today, the same process spews out feedback that rarely rises above the level of anodyne praise.

What’s changed?

Five years ago, feedback was typically anonymous. Today, the norm is to copy the subject of the feedback on the feedback. Could that be the culprit?

I was around when the culture of copying the subject in on feedback started. The Senior Vice President who ran our department believed “if you’ve got something to say about a colleague, be man enough to tell him face-to-face.” That made sense. It prevented people from abusing the system by using feedback to vent, or to settle personal scores. It felt right. Initially, it seemed to be working well, because some old habits persisted and the feedback remained pointed. We didn’t imagine that the quality of feedback would diminish. But five years later, feedback clearly is a blunter instrument.

The other plausible explanation is a change in the company’s life stage. Five years ago, we were a young, fast-growing company. Employees were paid stock options. Promotions happened frequently. Now, we are a mature company that pays dividends, growing at about the same rate as the economy, where promotions are rare and precious.

So why would the slower corporate growth impact the quality of feedback? It takes a fair bit of work to write accurately-observed, balanced, insightful, constructive feedback. That effort is worth it if the feedback is acted on, and colleagues change their behaviour for the better. In a slow growth environment, improved behaviours don’t materially change the likelihood of getting promoted. With small or no incentives, people don’t respond to feedback with behavioural change. And so the effort that goes into writing high-quality feedback becomes as futile as writing a well-reasoned blog.

The loss of anonymity makes feedback risky. And the slower career trajectories make feedback futile. Which effect is more real? Without any scientific analysis, the loss of anonymity feels more specific/tangible and therefore more real. I suspect there is a grain of truth in both arguments.

Despite feedback becoming a blunt instrument, I still think it has a ton of value. My company has virtually no disrespectful or abusive bosses. People tend to treat each other as social equals across the hierarchy, despite very substantial differences in income. That is partly because a culture with 360 degree feedback self-selects leaders who conduct themselves in a particular way. 360 degree feedback just goes from being a tool that effects fine changes in behaviour, to being a tool that prevents grevious abuse. Sounds a bit like democracy.

Tear-free shampoo and the frightening guest

Took my daughters swimming on Sunday. Showered many blessings on the wonderful person who invented tear-free shampoo. And reflected that the history of science is obsessed with boring things like penicillin and does not celebrate genuinely great advances like tear-free shampoo.

This blogger is not alone in trying to set right this historic injustice. The late Viktor Schreckengost - whose name means "frightening guest" in German - is the grand-daddy of the sort of scientist who invents tear-free shampoo. Dan Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek thinks Mr Schreckengost has "done more for humanity than any single politicican in the twentieth century". Homage is in order.

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/01/viktor-schrecke.html

Fixing match fixing

This is absurd. The organizers of the French Open are sueing online betting sites (including Betfair - the site I use) to prevent betting on the French Open.

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/tennis/news/story?id=3225440

Yes, match-fixing in tennis is a serious problem. Tennis matches are easy to fix. But surely, major branded sites like Betfair and Ladbrokes are part of the solution. These sites are dependent on the trust of millions of small time punters. They have the data needed to spot odd betting patterns and extra-big bets.

This could actually be counter-productive. Betting on sport is great fun. It will always be a part of sport. Driving good, clean, fun betting underground will only bring in sleaze and increase the likelihood of match fixing.

Tintin

Found a superb article on Tintin in a back issue of the New Yorker, by Anthony Lane. The highlights:

- General de Gaulle declared that Tintin was his only international rival. He was envious, perhaps, of not just of Tintin's fame but of his defiantly positive attitude. Both figures can be recognized by silhouette alone

- Stimulation in Herge's solid, Catholic, bourgeois youth in Belgium came from his exploits as a scout. There remain in Tintin traces of the try-anything, do-gooding spirit of the scout troop

- Tintin was first serialized in 1925 in a daily newspaper which was described in it's masthead as a "Catholic and National Newspaper of Doctrine and Information". The editor had a framed picture of Mussolini on his desk

- Tintin in Congo (1931) is an unmitigated parade of racial prejudice, with bug-eyed natives swaying between ignorance and laziness. Herge later redrew the comic...and claimed that his concept of the Congo was no different from that of his compatriots at the time

- A crucial happening was Herge's encounter with Chang Chong-chen, a student at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts. Chang suggested using real events as the inspiration for his adventures...the ouevre would have a historical value...The Blue Lotus (1936) was born

- Chang returned to China and lost touch with Herge. Tintin in Tibet (1960) showed Tintin searching for a lost friend called Chang. In 1981, two years before Herge died, the real Chang came to Belgium for a tearful reunion. Chang had shown Herge how to beat back prejudice: just tell the truth

- Herge's principle: the further your reach, the more compelling your duty to get it right. Herge knew he would not be able to emabrk on Tintin in Tibet without amassing photographs of monastries, lamas and chortens, all of which would be copied in fanatical detail in his book. I was thrilled to read Hindi in Tintin which was real

- Belgium was occupied. Herge - like Wodehouse, who was interred as an enemy alien - not only survied but bloomed into one of his most flourishing periods. Once the war ended, both were interrogated about the nature and intensity of their collaboration. Both pleaded guilty of innocence; neither ever dispelled the shadow of suspicion. Herge's (and Wodehouse's) ability to avert his gaze from evil verges on the chronic

- Commentators are both enticed and exasperated by how little he gives away. In particular, the Tintin who gazes out from the cover of The Castafoire Emerald (1963) shushing the reader with a finger held to his lips

- There is no sex. Tintin passes increasing portions of his time with an unmarried seaman, yet it seldom occurs to us to question their rapport. He never has a girlfriend, and never expresses the need for one. He has no parents or siblings. We are unsure whether he counts as a child himself. He reminds me, if anyone, of Charlie Brown. Enid Blyton, and maybe even JRR Tolkien, would be at home in this beautiful, adventure-filled, but asexual world

- Tintin may be too constrained for American tastes, being posessed of no superpowers. He is Clark Kent without the phone booth, although Clark at least had a paying job , wheras Tintin, nominally a reporter, never receives a paycheck or files a story

Guru

This movie is about Bollywood telling India what Deng Xiaoping so successfully told China: "to get rich is glorious." Bollywood shapes India's attitudes. Bollywood delivering this message - to an India that has been wallowing for decades in the Gandhian mythology of self-denial, and in the consequent hypocrisy, mediocrity and poverty - just the concept makes this film a winner.

At heart, this is a thinly disguised Bollywood style documentary on Dhirubhai Ambani. There's a great item number with Mallika Sherawat, set in Istanbul. Aishwarya Rai plays Kokilaben (I'm sure Kokilaben is flattered) and is introduced to the film in a peppy dancing-in-the-rain sequence. Dhirubhai makes a big speech in the courtroom denouement, kind-of-sort-of comparing himself to Gandhi. It's fun to watch.

But the film never goes from being visually interesting to being viscerally compelling. There is no knot, no conflict, no tension that drags to plot forward until it is resolved. Nor is their any character development. Dhirubhai seems to have been born being Dhirubhai. For instance, there is no conflict between Dhirubhai's high aspirations and the sordidness of the bribes he needs to give out to meet those aspirations. The only attempt to create inner tension was with Nanaji, a Ramnath Goenka like character, who starts off as a father figure to Dhirubhai and then proceeds to wage a crusade against him. That storyline didn't really work.

That might be why Guru was not a box office blockbuster. It's not going to have a Sholay or Lagaan-like impact on India's psyche. A pity. Because the "to get rich is glorious" message really is reshaping India.