Author: JP

I seem to move house every ten years or so. I keep telling myself “This is the last time”; my appetite for the wholesale upheaval that a house move represents has waned somewhat. There was a time when people didn’t move much, they tended to live and die close to where they were born. I have a brother-in-law, about the same age as me, and he continues to live in the house he was born in. Rare today, but commonplace not that long ago.

I left India in 1980. At that time I knew one divorced person, and knew of just one other within my parents’ circle of friends. Now I hear of people getting divorced after 10, 20, 25 years. When I was at the cricket last week, there was a couple behind me celebrating their 49th, and a couple next to me whose parents had  just celebrated their 50th. Very rare today, but commonplace not that long ago.

Names and professions have been closely linked ever since men had professions; if you weren’t named after your lineage or your environment, then your line of work sufficed. So we had people with surnames like Carpenter and Fletcher and Butcher and Baker here in England; the Parsees in India had comparable equivalents, calling themselves Contractor and Doctor and Palkhivala and the legendary SodaBottleOpenerWallah (I confess I’ve never met one). It made sense, at a time when people didn’t change jobs often, when your occupation came with security of tenure. In fact this created an enjoyable variant during my formative years: people were differentiated by corporate label. If you had two Subramaniams in your social network, one would be “named” Reserve Bank and the other Steel Balls (since he worked for a ball bearing company). And yes, I have known a Steel Balls Subramaniam.

Migrations have been happening since the dawn of mankind. We’re learning more about human migration every day, as we begin to piece together what our neanderthal and Denisovan antecedents were up to, and as we try and make sense of where to fit Flores Man in. When I was growing up, there was little such evidence in my social circle. Some of my Anglo-Indian friends went to Australia or Canada; one of my uncles did a stint in the UK, another settled in Chicago (he’s still there). Such migrations were few and far between. And yet today my wife and I have siblings in all five continents, and I’ve met classmates who have settled in eight countries (I think the real count is 19, but I can’t be sure. We move around).

There was a time when we didn’t change where we lived, who we lived with, what we did, where we did it. Changing such things wasn’t easy, the “cost of change” was high. Sometimes the cost was an economic one, sometimes it was a social one, sometimes it just couldn’t be done.

Some things used to be really hard to change. I was born black-haired. Pretty early on, using my childhood powers of observation, I worked out that in years to come, my hair could take one or more of three colours, in a series of combinations: black, the original; black-and-white, the transition style; white, with the expectation of a distinguished look; or scalp-coloured, where you don’t see the hair because it’s no longer there. Nowadays I see even black-haired people change their hair to a plethora of shades, mostly from the purple family. I’ve never been tempted to change my hair colour, and my teenage plans to grow my hair long stayed, like most other things, in the Vegas of life where teenagers hang out.

As a teenager I read Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, and it opened my eyes to all the transgender possibilities the world was then conceiving of. It was no longer a certainty that the gender you were born with was the gender you would die with. I’ve never been tempted to change, but I was old enough to recognise that the cost of change of something so basic and “permanent” also appeared to be dropping.

I understood that people could and did change nationality. As a cricket fan, I was aware of a number of Indians who had played for England before modern India existed, and it made me think. Did my grandfather have a British passport? An Indian one? Both? Yet, while I knew that nationality could be changed, it wasn’t something I saw often. And now I regularly meet people who’ve changed nationality; some have taken this further, and started collecting multiple nationalities rather than just changing them one for another.

In the 23 years I lived in India, I can only remember going to two barbershops. There were probably more, but for sure between 1966 and 1980 I frequented just two. I went to a nursery (Hindusthan Park School); a primary school (Miss P Hartley) and then, from 1966 to 1979, I was with the Jesuits at St Xavier’s. To all intents and purposes I went to one school. Nowadays parents move their children to what they consider the best school in the area, sometimes even moving areas to achieve their goals.

Names. Addresses. Gender. Marital status. Nationality. Occupation. Place of work. Country of residence. Things that are easy to change now, things that were hard to change in times past. It is not just the ability to change that has itself changed, the ability to afford that change has also changed.

An affordable freedom of choice, touching on areas where there was no such choice historically.

We all need to understand what this freedom of choice represents, what this affordable right to change represents, in all these forms and shapes. Each of us will have formed views as to whether this freedom to change is good or bad; that is not what I write about here; I’m concentrating on the fact of change, of the freedom of choice in that change, and not making any value judgments.

Some changes are less affordable, but the choice remains. Companies can now decide to incorporate themselves somewhere else in order to take advantage of the tax structures. And it’s not just companies, individual citizens also exercise their freedom of choice and move their tax domicile. These changes tend to be expensive and complex to carry out; as a result, it’s only the large company and the high-net-worth individual that are able to exercise choices such as these. In other words, these choices are only available to the high end of the taxpayer spectrum, and therefore can really affect the countries they leave.

And so we come to the customer. A customer who has more choice than he or she has ever had before, and who can exercise that choice more easily than has ever been the case. We get to choose what we buy, where we buy it from, how we pay for it, how we get the goods/services.

When customers have that freedom of choice, many things influence that choice. What they know and like/dislike about the company making the product or service, the “brand” and reputation and values. What they know about the product or service from past experience, either directly or vicariously, sometimes through their friend network, sometimes beyond even that. The softer “sustainable” elements related to the product or service: origin, transport costs, carbon footprint, ease of replenishment, additives and subtractives. If you make it through all that, then you may just get to traditional discriminators like price or availability.

When it comes to the customer, everything’s changed. Everything.

Which is why it’s really important for companies to have relationships with their customers. If their customers will let them. Not everyone wants to have a relationship with the companies they deal with, often because they’ve been let down time after time. So it’s hard going.

There was a time when a commodity was defined as something that is standardised, fungible, provided without differentiation. And companies moved heaven and earth to try and find a way to differentiate.

There’s a new definition of commodity emerging: a product or service where there is no relationship between customer and company. Companies in that position will go the way of all flesh.

Many years ago, I wrote:

We need to be in the business of providing the customer what she wants when she wants it, where she wants it, how she wants it. We need to focus on making things that the customer wants to buy, rather than trying to get customers to pay for things they neither want nor need.

There was a time when we could decide for the customer. There was a time when we could constrain the customer’s voice and choice. There was a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth.

Now is not that time. Now is the time for faster horses.

 

I was reminded of that post when I watched Kevin Spacey’s excellent talk on what’s happening with Netflix, House of Cards and customer choice. If you haven’t seen it, you must.

I’m singing this note ’cause it fits in well
With the chords I’m playing
I can’t pretend there’s any meaning here
Or in the things I’m saying

But I’m in tune
Right in tune
I’m in tune
And I’m gonna tune
Right in on you

Getting In Tune, The Who, 1971

 

I admit it. I wrote this post just to have an excuse to refer to this song. Not really. I don’t need an excuse to refer to this song. Nobody needs an excuse to do that. Or to listen to it. Great song.

This is a post about collaboration, about people working together. Not just in your own team or department (although it can be that). Not just in your own company (although it can be that). Not just in your own country, or language, or timezone, or culture.

The problems of a new paradigm cannot be solved with the tools of the old. If we really want to make headway on issues ranging from climate change to availability of water; if we really want to deal with medical conditions that migrate at speed and mutate even faster; if we really want to resolve today’s versions of age-old problems to do with poverty and hunger; and if we want to do all this in a world heading serenely for 10 billion people and dwindling resources, we’re going to have to get better at doing at least one thing.

Collaborating.

Across culture, timezone, language, jurisdiction.

While having objectives that are not just not aligned, but often in conflict.

And while figuring out what went wrong the last time and plugging in those lessons learnt as quickly and as effectively as possible.

Iteratively.

And at scale, at a scale we have never known about before. Facebook scale.

This is a post about those things.

 

Collaboration requires many things, starting with the heart. You must want to collaborate, to work together. Even though there are many conflicts to be resolved.

Collaboration at scale requires many people to have a common understanding of the basics; in most cases, this common understanding will need codification so that the sharing can happen digitally. Otherwise we will not be able to work at the right speed. And what is that right speed? One that is faster than the pace of change in the environment, in the market, in the context.

I think this common understanding begins with labels and descriptors.

Like “when”. Synchronisation of watches wasn’t necessary until the locomotive arrived, it is a function of people in different locations treating time differently, looking at time in the context of their sunrises and sunsets. A perfectly reasonable thing to do. Unless you want people to work across timezones. So yes, there was a time when Manchester and London were in different timezones, and they had to sort that out before train timetables could mean anything.

Like “where”. Location labels are very important, as important as time labels. In many countries, the “ownership” of maps and mapping has been given away by some benighted government in the past to some agency or other, sometimes public, often private. In the process, monopolies were formed, and monopolies never get given up easily. Wailing and gnashing of teeth all the way to the grave. A shame, since it holds up progress; open data activists the world over are trying to resolve this. If the monopolists aren’t careful, they will watch stupefied as new commonses emerge, labelling every GPS location using collective intelligence and the latest digital tools. Too late, it’s already happening.

 

A monopoly on place names and information is like having a monopoly on the word Tuesday.

 

Like “who”. Identity is much more than a name, it’s about relationships. Relationships with people, with beliefs, with activities, with aspirations, with intentions. In singular or in plural, in pairs, in large groups. The name itself is commodity, a label.

Like “what”. Plant names, creature names. Part numbers and SKUs. Names for elements and compounds; generic, public. And not public.

If you have a product and I can’t refer to it in my “buying system” (whatever that is) then you won’t have me as a customer.

Taxonomies and ontologies can and should be open.

 

Taxonomies are the DNA of collaboration; open data catalyses collaboration.

We’re only just beginning to understand what true multistakeholder multicultural collaboration will need to look like. Right now we’re still in the Khrushchev phase. There are a lot of shoes flying around, and more to come. Good time to be a cobbler, perhaps.

]

One day the shoes will stop flying. And by that time we will know who will survive, who will thrive.

Because they’ll be the ones that have worked out how to share the labels and descriptors, who else is interested in such sharing, and how to speed up the transformation and innovation that will take place as a result. Across culture and timezone.

More later. Probably not for a couple of weeks.

[To my readers: This is unashamedly a post about cricket. If that’s not your thing, you’re probably going to get bored reading this. In which case you have my apology, that was not my intention].

 

When I was young, there were many sportsmen I admired; they ranged from Pele (whom I had the pleasure of meeting in 1996) and Gary Sobers (who played golf with my father, in my presence, in 1967) through to Tom Watson (whom I’ve seen play a few times) and Derek Randall.

Yes, Derek Randall. The Derek Randall who famously doffed his cap to Dennis Lillee just after he’d bowled a bouncer at him. And then said “No good hitting me there, mate, there’s nothing to damage.”

 

Randall epitomised the true sportsman to me. Incredibly talented, fanatic about his sport, but with a sense of proportion that showed in his humour, both on-field as well as off. Randall had already made his name well before the Melbourne Centenary Test at which the Lillee affaire (shown above) happened, and he nearly made that Test his own, with a brilliant 174. It was a match full of incident. Yet, when asked what really stood out for him, Randall is reputed to have said that it was when Rodney Marsh called him back to the wicket after the umpire (Tony Brooks) had given him out. He said “It’s how the Aussies play – hard, but fair. I honestly don’t think it would have made any difference if we were playing for the Ashes. It was Rodney’s way. He was such a competitor but above all he values cricket.”

[Incidentally, Mike Brearley, in The Art of Captaincy, reported that Randall asked Marsh, just as he was taking guard “How’s it going, Marshy?” Silence. After the next ball “What’s the matter, Marshy, not talking today?” To which Marsh replied “What do you think this is, a garden party?”]

That was in 1977. A full two decades later, I was reminded of the Randall-Marsh incident when Robbie Fowler, of Liverpool, went to the referee shaking his finger and mouthing “No, no”, just as the official was pointing to the penalty spot, having adjudged that David Seaman had brought Fowler down unfairly. And the headline at the time “Football hero in honesty shock“. The shock wasn’t about Fowler — Robbie was always that kind of person. The shock was about football, and about honesty in football. Seventeen years on, I cannot watch Premier League football, especially when a corner is given. Hands everywhere, shirts being pulled, goalkeepers bulldozed out of play, nudges and pushes, so much happening that the referee’s job becomes impossible.

The system is one that can be played, and so it gets played. In premier league football, winning has become more important than winning fairly; fairness has become a luxury. When that happens, travesty is round the corner, followed by tragedy.

Test cricket runs the risk of heading the same way. Which would be a real shame, since it was cricket that gave us the term “not cricket”, to describe something that was just not “done”. I was reminded of this when reading the Sunday Times last week, where, in an eminently forgettable article, there was an eminently memorable phrase:

 

…… behaved in a way which would not do if generally adopted. What a wonderful turn of phrase.

There was a time when batsmen walked when they were out, without waiting for the umpire’s signal. It wasn’t rare. Going back to Art of Captaincy, Brearley says “I admire the Australians’ straightforwardness with regard to “walking” — that is, not waiting for an umpire’s decision if you know that you are out. After the Second World War, “walking” gradually grew in English county cricket. By the early ’60s anyone who did not walk was considered a cheat.”

He then went on to explain how this could be abused: walking when it wasn’t important, and then not walking when you were near a fifty or a hundred, or when the match result hung in the balance. But that’s not the point.

The point is what happened since. Somehow, we have managed to convince ourselves that there are different forms of cheating, and that some forms are okay while others are not. So today we believe that when a fielder appeals while knowing he did not take the catch cleanly, that is wrong. That’s “active” cheating, when you do something to achieve the wrong outcome. This is what Denesh Ramdin was accused of doing a few months ago, and he was suspended for two matches for that transgression. And at the same time we condone “passive” cheating, as when a batsman who knows he was out stays at the crease to see if the umpire gives him out or not. The argument here is that the batsman doesn’t actually do something to achieve the wrong outcome, he just takes advantage of errors by the umpire as and when they happen. So it’s “passive”.

Poppycock. Balderdash.

If you’re out, you’re out. And if you know it, then walk.

Kevin Pietersen walked today, without waiting for the umpire’s signal. [Well done Kevin, I shall be shouting for you at the Oval in a few weeks.]. He was probably still stinging from the cheating accusation levelled at him a few days ago, and rightly so. He strikes me as one of those hugely-talented and incredibly obstinate people who are capable of doing many things, right things as well as wrong things, but cheating is not one of those things. Not in his make-up.

Stuart Broad stayed at the crease some weeks ago when he knew he was out. When his team-mates knew he was out. When the opposing team knew he was out. When everyone watching, and a few million others who watched it later, knew he was out. When even the umpire had figured it out.

Yet Stuart Broad stayed at the crease because the system, the rules in use, made it legal for him to do so.

A few years ago, Ian Bell was recalled by MS Dhoni when he was “legally” out. Decades earlier, Gundappa Viswanath recalled Bob Taylor when he was “legally” out.

Broad is not a cheat, but he “behaved in a way that would not do if generally adopted”.

These are all “spirit” versus “letter” issues.

And spirit matters. If we lose the spirit behind all this, we lose everything. The essence of sport, learning about competitiveness and teamwork in an environment of fairness and mutual respect. Winning is important, but not at all costs.

That’s why I am concerned about DRS, that’s why I dislike Duckworth-Lewis. Because the unintended consequences of these changes tear at the spirit of the game.

The more we allow “letter” to dominate “spirit”, the more we are signalling to the generations that follow that what you do doesn’t matter; what matters is whether you get caught or not.

Sporting heroes are no longer readily available. Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll have invaded every aspect of their lives; every day we hear of failed drugs tests, violent behaviour, drink problems, marital issues, the list goes on.

Spirit matters.

…..

I am no troglodyte, I am willing and happy to endure and absorb change, some have even accused me of fostering and fomenting it in different contexts. But when change is brought about, it is important to remember the core values of that which is being changed, so that they don’t change.

We must understand what’s cricket.

And what’s not cricket.

 

 

Have you ever heard of omum water? Once I was old enough to be given it, omum water was my salvation every time I had any kind of stomach ailment.

It goes by many names.

Some people call it aqua ptychotis. In Bengal, people tend to refer to it as ajwain arak. In Tamil Nadu, it is more likely to be called omum water.

The Bengalis claim it as theirs. The Tamils do the same. [And being a Bengali Tamil, I don’t particularly care].

In fact I really don’t care about who claims the origin; while I know the patent system is broken, and terribly broken at that, I have enough faith in humanity to believe that no one will try and patent aqua ptychotis.

What I do care about is that people get to know all about it: what it is, how it works, why it works, where to get it, what not to do with it. [If you’re wondering why I added that last phrase, then ponder on why it gets called ajwain arak. As a vehicle for alcohol, it’s pretty serious.

Why am I writing about this now? Simple. My daughter got married last Friday; I’d taken time off starting last Thursday, and, once the festivities were over, let down my guard and managed to acquire a chesty cough. These things happen. That in turn meant I had to make a visit to the chemist, and, waiting to be served, noticed there were bottles of gripe water visible near the counter.

That took me back years. To my childhood. To a time when life was simple when it came to medication.

When I was young, everything began with cod liver oil, in those days it seemed to be chicken soup for the under-fives. Thankfully, it seemed to disappear quickly, even before the last of my siblings was born. I can’t remember dealing with cod liver oil since about 1965.

Life after that was simple. Stomach ache? A spoonful of omum water. Sore throat? Gargle with warm salt water. Cough and cold? Vicks Vaporub, with or without head-under-covers steam session, depending on how chesty the cough was. Cough continues? Vasaka syrup. Really bad? Benadryl. Fever? Blankets and rest. Sweat it out. Burns? Burnol. Mouth ulcers or small cuts anywhere on the surface of the body? Dab mercurochrome. Serious cuts, proper wounds? Upgrade from mercurochrome to tincture of iodine. Cleaning cuts and wounds? Savlon when you want it out of a tube, Dettol if you want it to sting. If it stung it was considered good, that the liquid was doing its work. Tooth powder? Monkey Brand, which was some sort of black crystal with salt. Tooth paste? Colgate or Signal or Binaca. Headache? Saridon. Dry skin? Nivea. Sprain? Iodex or Tiger Balm.

Life was simple. We used a whole pantheon of medications, drawn from a variety of roots. Some were traditional and local. Some were global and generic. Yet others were tightly branded. We learnt what to use where and when; most prescriptions were dealing with the generic name for the drug or medication, and the pharmacist converted it into the brand if and when needed.

There’s the rub. We weren’t always aware what kind of term we were using. Which ones were generic terms, which ones were local brands, which ones were global brands. Which meant that as soon as I left India, I had a whole lot of learning to do in order to get the simple things out of a pharmacy. Which was a good thing, perhaps, because it meant I never went to a pharmacy for years. It took me four years to register with a GP. And even longer before I went to a proper pharmacy.

As everyone and everything gets connected, as we all become able to publish our status, views and opinions, surpluses and shortages, the role of nomenclature will increase. Not just in medicine. In everything. Terms need to travel across cultures, and this will happen in many different ways. Generic names. Translations into local brands. Occasionally, translation into global brands. An expectation that every generic name will lead to choice when it comes to brand, rather than monopoly.

Those expectations can only be met if the generic terms get opened up and shared, locally as well as globally. Some of these terms are already in the public domain; others can be, but aren’t as yet. Open data movements aren’t just about what the government or the public sector holds, it will involve corporations. Corporate open data will become more and more important; initially we will see industry bodies (such as standards bodies or market associations) weigh in with the corporate open data, but in years to come all industry will be affected.

Every exchange needs that nomenclature, the low-volatility reference data that allows people to share transactional information. As we move towards a time when we are all able to expose our inventories, our wants and needs, our surpluses and scarcities, the vehicles of exposure will become exchanges. That’s what my friend and erstwhile colleague Sean Park kept pushing over a decade ago, as he visualised how digital markets would operate at scale.

Many markets are now digital; each market went through its gestation period, when term standardisation and normalisation preceded the ability to express transactions digitally. In some ways there is no difference between the dematerialisation of trades on a stock exchange, the mapping of the human genome and, for that matter, the explosion in standardised infrastructure in computing.

Terms had to become standard. They had to represent analogue things that were themselves more and more standardised, be they stocks or servers or gene signatures.

The terms had to become fungible. Exchangeable. Transportable across geography and culture and jurisdiction. Sometimes as-is. Sometimes expressed in translation. But transportable and fungible nevertheless.

We’re a long way from there. But terms like big data will remain just that until and unless that happens. We can have lots of data. But to have insights we need to have common terms, or at the very least portable terms, even if the porting involves translation or substitution.

People vested in the quasi-monopolies of the analogue world sometimes don’t want this to happen; term portability creates its own response to lock-ins. If all I know is a brand name, I am locked into the brand rather than the generic.

So for now I shall continue to ponder about omum water and ajwain arak and aqua ptychotis.

And wonder whether Wikipedia, or some other wikipedia, will solve the problem for us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For many years I have known that the world’s shortest poem was written by Ogden Nash. It was called Lines On the Antiquity of Microbes, and all it said was:

Adam

Had’em

For many years I was wrong. Not about the poem. But about the author. Recently I discovered that there was some debate as to the true author, and that there was a strong body of evidence connecting the poem to Strickland Gillilan, rather than Nash; between them they had seen off the third challenger, Shel Silverstein (who gave us the wonderful Sylvia’s Mother).

This post is not about any of them, or even about the poem per se. Instead, it’s about the subject of the poem.

Microbes.

We’re still learning about microbes. We have reason to believe that we may have been just a teensy bit too eager to rid ourselves of microbes in the past; we used to think of them as bad guys, but more and more, we’re coming to recognise them as a bunch of good guys in the midst of a bunch of guys we don’t really know much about.

Through Marc Benioff I met David Agus, and since then I’ve heard him speak at a number of places, starting with a Salesforce.com conference. [If you haven’t been to one, you need to. They’re amazing. I went to them before I joined the company, I will go to them long after I’ve left the company (if I ever do). They’re that good.]

David’s talk opened my eyes as to what was happening in the human microbiome, and how we could start imagining wellness rather than illness. His book, The End of Illness, is well worth a read.

In the serendipity that punctuates our lives, I then met with Larry Smarr while speaking at a Deloittes customer conference some time soon after. And the more I learnt about his ‘computer-aided study” of his own body, the more I was driven to investigate what David had opened my eyes to.

We have only just begun to understand our microbiomes. We have only just begun to understand that we have many good microbes, and that the microbes we don’t know much about may also be good for us.

A few days ago, I came across an intriguing idea, one that delighted me. It’s a long long way from being proven. But it is outrageous enough to be worth thinking about.

The idea is this:

Perhaps the human appendix does have a function after all. It may just turn out to be a “boot disk”

A boot disk for the human microbiome, preserving a perfect copy of the collection of microbes we should have started life with. The proposal was put forward by students at Duke some five or six years ago, and continues to pop up every now and then.

Now that’s an idea worthy of Ogden Nash. If he was alive today, I’m sure he would have penned a quick poem about the appendix. And mangled some poor word or other to rhyme with it. Riotously.