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.

 

 

I spent the first 23 years of my life in Calcutta; I lived there, and only there, between 1957 and 1980.

We didn’t have a television set at home. If we had had one, it wouldn’t have been of much use to us. In those days, especially in Calcutta, electrical power was a luxury, with “load-shedding” the normal order of the day.  Hurricane lamps are very useful things, especially in hurricanes. But they don’t power TV sets particularly well.

We didn’t have junk mail at home either. Or anywhere else for that matter. But the mail did arrive, every day, and at least once a day. Which is more than can be said for the mail today.

When it came to luxuries like cars, our choices were almost Hobsonian. Homegrown equivalents of 1950s Morris, Fiat and Triumph dominated; in the East of India, you could buy a brand-new Ambassador, based on the Morris Oxford II and III, or you could buy something second-hand, often an Ambassador. Or you could take a taxi. Which was always an Ambassador.

In those days there were no supermarkets in India; shops were primarily local and unbranded. And what they stocked, we bought. Sometimes aided and abetted by advertising in newspapers and magazines, on the ubiquitous hoardings, and on radio; but more often than not, “choice” was dictated by what was available at the local shop. So most of the time we asked for things by generic name rather than by brand. Things like tea, coffee, sugar, salt, we bought all of them “loose”. Brands did exist, but mainly for the drugs of the day: petrol, headache and pain pills, cigarettes and alcohol.

I think it must have been a time when “manufacturing”, in the industrial sense, was focused on core industries like iron and steel and transportation and communications and energy. India was emerging. So we had the unusual situation where, for example, it was cheaper to buy handmade clothes and shoes, as opposed to “manufactured” branded and labelled goods. Every neighbourhood had a tailor and a cobbler. You had to travel to get to a clothes shop or a shoe store.

Choice was not something we thought about. Availability and proximity were what mattered, and the local shopkeepers plied their trades honestly; mark-ups were moderate and acceptable.

Sustainability was a by-product of our underdeveloped status. We drank our unbranded freshly made tea and coffee out of mud cups that were completely biodegradable; plastics were expensive, so all our groceries were packed in paper bags, usually made from recycled newspapers. Our clothes were made of cotton; our shoes from local leathers; we even used a mixture of dried dung and straw as fuel, and didn’t think twice about eating food that had been cooked over the dung cakes.

When we bought things, they were expected to last. And they lasted. None of this planned-obsolescence nonsense. When something broke, you got it repaired. If you wanted to, you could repair it yourself. Parts were cannibalised as needed, or even made from scratch. A Maker paradise. People didn’t go and buy something new because there was something new to buy. When you did buy something new, the first question you were asked was “what happened to the old thing?”.

Similarly, our underdeveloped status meant that our diets were pretty good as well. [Of course there were many challenges. Infant mortality was still unacceptably high; many diseases hadn’t been conquered; droughts and famines affected food supply; neither sanitation nor hygeine was perfect; pollution was on the rise. Yes there were many challenges]. Yet. Despite all that. No electricity, no fridges. No frozen foods. Mainly vegetables. All fresh. No preservatives added. Where there was meat, it tended to be lean.

And people walked a lot. Walking was normal and natural. It’s something I’m trying to bring back into my life, I’m on a 10,000 paces every day plan and I am loving it.

So let me summarise. A lot of what we bought was produced locally and sold to us locally. There was little choice involved. Prices were reasonable. Stuff was made sustainably, and stuff lasted; what didn’t last was made to last through repair, often inventive, sometimes cannibalistic; packaging was kept to a minimum; manufactured goods were only just entering the consumer environment.

The past looks brilliant through the spectacles of nostalgia, doesn’t it? And if I knew it all sounded rose-tinted, why then did I bother to write this post?

Long answer. Long post. Long overdue.

I’m writing this because I think it’s important for us to understand the sheer scale of the changes we are seeing, and the incredible pace at which those changes are taking place. Changes which herald a new world, changes which nevertheless mark a renaissance.

Changes around and about the customer.

The customer. The person who makes sure there is a business. No customer, no business. As Peter Drucker said, and as I’ve repeatedly quoted him, the purpose of business is to create a customer. Someone who has a relationship with you enough to come back and do more business with you. Someone who will provide you with her custom.

Somewhere in my head, influenced by all I’ve read, influenced by all the people I’ve listened to and spoken with, businesses are also inextricably linked with one other idea, that of division of labour. Someone pays you something for doing/making/providing something instead of doing/making/providing that thing yourself. Initially, when we lived in small communities and settlements and villages, with limited means of travel and trade, the communities tended to be self-sufficient as much as possible, constrained only by nature, via the environment and hinterland and climate. Then, as we moved on to larger people-aggregations, as migration became more affordable, scale started entering the equation. Inventions begat scale. And step-changes followed, changes we  thought of as revolutions. Agricultural. Industrial. Whatever.

With all this geographical separation and scale it became possible to create monolithic business structures, based on serendipity as well as skill; serendipity in “ownership” to scarce resources, and skill in building monopolies in consequence.

Power slowly moved away from the customer, as, one by one, access to factors of production and distribution became scarcer and scarcer.

And all this led to an interesting outcome. Without access to factors of production or distribution, the customer could not control a key aspect of the market.

Pace.

The pace of a market is controlled by its active participants; for much of the time since the Industrial Revolution,  this pace has been set by the manufacturer; since the dawn of mass media, some of the control of the pace has moved to the distributor.

Manufacturer. Distributor. Anyone but the customer.

Scale begat lobbies. And lobbies begat regulation. And somehow or other these regulations enshrined the new status quo, of pace being set by manufacturer and distributor not customer.

Everyone understands about seed drills and ploughs and the automation of agricultural machinery and of the science that went into better seeds and irrigation and fertiliser and growing methods. Everyone understands about electricity and transport and iron and steel and assembly lines and vertical integration, and even the science that went into better methods of production at scale.

And then. And then we go into a bit of a blur. People use terms like “services revolution” and “information revolution” willy-nilly. And then they don’t want to deal with the outcome, an outcome that has been written about for decades by people far more knowledgeable, far more learned and far more articulate than I am.

The information revolution is a services revolution. One that reduces search costs, contracting costs, transaction costs in general. One that takes every market and undoes the vertical integration that underpinned the monopoly or oligopoly. One that does this by creating sets of horizontal layers and then reducing barriers to entry to each horizontal layer.

Initially it was a communications revolution, allowing us to find people more easily, people we trusted, people who knew about stuff. Phones, networks, mail, that sort of thing. And then, as the internet evolved and begat the Web, more things became connected, became indexed, became searchable, became findable. And now everything can be connected.

Initially we had the power to speak at the edge; then the power to publish; then the power to shift time (record and replay later) and space (connect remotely); more recently we’ve started acquiring the power to make. Again. [Reminds me of a cartoon I saw recently. Two Americans talking. One mentions that for the first time, non-whites outnumber whites in the USA. Within earshot there are two American Indians. And one of them remarks to the other “…for the second time”.]

Today, the customer is setting the pace of change. Again.

And businesses are in the business of serving. Serving customers. Again.

To do that, in a world where digital infrastructure rollouts and evolution accelerate commoditisation, businesses have to become more and more responsive to customer needs and wants. Business have to listen to the customer, gain insight from what is said, then know how to respond; how to adapt, to reform, to refine.

At a level of abstraction, I believe it’s what John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison meant when they said we’re shifting from stocks to flows, from experience-based organisations to learning-based organisations.\

In that sense, “stocks” are aberrations. Frozen points in time where change did not take place. Time when change did not need to take place, since customers were unable to request those changes. Time when change was artificially prevented from taking place. The market sets the standard. And the customer was disenfranchised from that market. Now that the customer has voice again, the need to listen and respond has become an imperative. That’s what “flows” represent.

You cannot be in the customer flow unless you’re able to sense, to make sense of the information gained, and to refine what you do as a consequence of that sensing. That’s what makes an organisation a learning organisation.

This is what I believe the authors meant in the Power of Pull: it’s a state where the customer dictates the pace of the market. We can invent whatever we like, but the invention means nothing until customers say Yea. Until customers adopt it and use. [And in today’s world, when customers then recommend the service to friends and relatives].

This theme is also borne out in a more recent book called The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think. In summary form, the three rules the authors quote are: Better before cheaper. Revenue before cost. No other rules. The focus on quality and adoption are essentially metrics that put the customer first. What I also like about this book, and about The Power of Pull cited earlier, is that the theories are based on detailed empirical evidence.

Customers want to be able to decide what they want, when they want it, where they want it, how they want it. Customers want to be able to provide active feedback on their wants, needs and experience, on how they can be served better.

And, now that customers can do just that, they are exercising that right.

They are deciding the pace of the market. Again.

Let me know what you think. I’m already working on a number of follow-up posts on what it means to be in the customer flow, and you will help me learn about it via your comments, observations and criticisms.

 

You just call out my name
And you know wherever I am
I’ll come running to see you again
Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you have to do is call
And I’ll be there

You’ve Got A Friend, Carole King, 1971 (sung here by Carole in 2009, when she was 67)

[Note: This is a follow-up to my post yesterday on the same subject]

I wonder how many times you’ve seen this movie. The one where there’s something being guarded by a patrol. The one where the patrol moves around on some sort of fixed route, taking a predictable time to complete the route. The one where all the action takes place just after the patrol goes out of sight and away on its rounds again. And the good guys/bad guys have to get their escape/robbery/whatever done before the patrol is back.

Remember the movie? Or should I say remember the movies? That tiny plot line must have been used a hundred times; sometimes the people breaking in are the good guys, sometimes they’re the bad guys. But they always do what they have to do when the patrol disappears on its rounds.

In some ways I feel I’ve observed that tiny plot line every day of my life, in many contexts.

People make the rounds. Sentries. Maintenance men. Doctors and nurses. Policemen. Supervisors on shop floors and factories. Cabin Crew. School monitors. Security guards.

People make the rounds.

In effect they go to where the problem is.

Before they know there is a problem.

They go to check whether everything is okay.

In so many disciplines, people go to the source of the “alarm”, the points where alarms could happen, just to check whether all is well or not.

Today, with the internet of everything, that changes.

The alarm comes to you.

You still have to go to where the alarm is. But only when there is an alarm.

Simple forms of this have existed for a long time. Call buttons. On airplanes. Beside hospital beds. In secured premises directly connected to the police or to a security service.

But now we can take this further, to cover all kinds of conditions. Loo paper run out? Send an alert. Bulb not functioning? Send an alert. Long queues at checkout? Send an alert. Unexpected heat-radiating body in secure premises that should be empty at the time? Send an alert? Unexpected movement in bank balance? Temperature over/under thresholds? Humidity levels? Paper in printer? Toner? Blood pressure? Inventory level?
Send an alert.

Soon we will be able to “sense” all this. For everything we can sense, we can set thresholds. Upper limits. Lower limits. Exact values.

And we can set instructions for what to do if the threshold is breached. Switch a light on. Switch a sound on. Send a message. Activate a robotic device. Transfer money. Start a phone call. Switch on a camera. Play music.

As part of the instruction, we can choose where the alert is notified, and when. Send me an SMS. In the morning. After 830am. To my personal phone.

When everything is connected, when everything can publish, when everything can subscribe, we can set thresholds; determine actions to be taken as and when a threshold is breached; determine which of our many devices we want notifications to be sent to, and when.

We can do that. Individually. Collectively.

Soon, the alert will come running to us. We won’t have to go on our rounds any more.

Long distance runaround
Long time waiting to feel the sound
I still remember the dream there
I still remember the time you said goodbye
Did we really tell lies
Letting in the sunshine
Did we really count to one hundred?

Long Distance Runaround, Yes, 1971

 

Album artwork: Roger Dean

Sometimes you wait a long time to feel the sound.

In August 2010, not long after seeing the film, I tweeted:

A year later, it comes up in conversation again, and I’m still taken aback by the similarities.

Another year goes by, and still …..

And then today I see this.

Long time waiting to feel the sound.