Author Archives: Espen

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About Espen

For details, see www.espen.com.

Seeking PhD candidates for iAD project

(Note: This is not the official announcement, which you can find here, where you will also find a link to the application program. I post this here because this blog is easier to update, allows me to link to pertinent information more easily, allows pictures, and allows comments and questions.)

 

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Announcement: Available Ph. D. Scholarships in Technology Strategy

 

BI Norwegian School of Management is inviting applications for scholarships in technology strategy. The scholarships are made available through the iAD Center for Research-based Innovation, an eight-year research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council and hosted by FAST Search and Transfer, a Microsoft Company. The candidates will pursue their Ph. D. through the doctoral programs of BI Norwegian School of Management and do their thesis research on topics of interest to the iAD project.

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A thousand less than splendid fates

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A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Moving story of two women and their struggles to salvage some dignity and happiness out of an extremely bleak environment. I liked this book better than The Kite Runner – it is epic in form, gives a better understanding (I think) of Afghanistan, and lacks the slight sense of disbelief I had about the villainy presented. Obligatory reading for anyone trying to understand what is going on in Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan.

View all my reviews.

Kafkaesque it isn’t

Kafka on the Shore Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Exquisite metaphorical novel of loss and redemption, searching and finding. Anything in it that doesn’t make sense, eventually does. Or not.

View all my reviews.

Tag games again

I’ve been tagged by Kimberly to write seven things about myself (OK, I can do that) and then hit seven other people with the same curse (which I am way to shy to do, unless someone volunteers.) And I will take the opportunity to say that this is the last blogospherical tag game I will participate in. So here goes:

  1. I have once almost collided with a reindeer herd while skiing in a snowstorm just north of Finse in Jotunheimen (with my father). Quite an experience.
  2. I have fallen down in a crevasse once – and almost disappeared into another. One of the reasons my knees are bad and the rest of me is getting fatter.
  3. When young, I was sure I would never have children nor pets – now I (or, rather, we) have three of each.
  4. I really care about keyboards and have more than two for each computer (if you count the internal ones,) including übernerdy varieties.
  5. I often fall asleep in meetings, but don’t be fooled – I pay attention. At least I would want you to think so, especially if you are a student.
  6. I often predict correctly which technologies will win, but never seem to make any money from it.
  7. I used to hate gardening until I got a garden myself. Now I enjoy garden warfare – except digging.

There. Not too painful. Done for now. And forever.

Tintin and the US

image The Economist analyzes Tintin, pegging his lack of fame in the USA on the fact that he is a very European hero, written to conform to a set of cultural norms (and laws) with restrained violence, no sex, and the hero as an overgrown boy scout, constantly doing the right thing.

I think the reason Tintin never was a hit in the USA is much simpler: The setting is seldom the USA, and especially not the USA after the second world war. The only album set in the US, Tintin in America (1932), is a deeply sarcastic portrait of the US during the prohibition years, with Tommy-Gun-toting gangsters and indian reservations being replaced by instant cities 10 minutes after oil is found.

There are rumors of Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg making Tintin movies. I for one hope they maintain the irony and complicated plots of Tintins golden period from 1934 to 1956, with believable plots (well, there is Destination Moon, but that was fun, too, with Professor Calculus throwing temper tantrums) and interesting characters. Tintin is not an action hero, though he occasionally throws a few punches. The animated movies made of Tintin did not have the slickness and literacy of the books, but if Lord of the Rings is anything to go by, Spielberg and Jackson should be able to follow the books just fine.

As for the wider political analysis of Tintin as a "European hero" because he cannot change larger events – or the musings of his possible homosexuality – I think some people need to lighten up a bit. And stop reading the same albums over and over.

Livesync’ing

I am in the middle of reorganizing backups for the whole family, using Windows Live Sync, which is heartily recommended, except for the small matter of not being able to handle folders with more than 20,000 files. This has caused me to fiddle with shortcuts and splitting My Documents into two folders, not a big problem in itself, but anything that adds a layer of complexity for no benefit is an issue.

FolderShare – the precursor to Live Sync, which has saved me on at least one occasion – could do this, if you bought the Pro version. On the other hand, Live Sync has a much better interface and seems more robust. But what happened to the Live Sync trash bin – if I accidentally delete a file, does it then get deleted on the backups as well? In which case, I will need yet another backup scheme to back up the backups…

ERP analogies

Andy McAfee uses an analogy of an ERP as a factory for business processes. Here are my analogies:

  • We are born as originals and die as copies. ERP systems are the other way – they start as copies and die as originals. An ERP system, when it is installed, allows you to configure it by choosing parameters – what kind of budget process, how you define "customer", etc. etc. After having set a few thousand parameters, you can be absolutely certain that you are the only company in the world with that particular SAP or Oracle or whatever configuration. Of course, standardization was what ERP systems were all about when they were introduced in the mid-nineties: The idea that software should be simple again.
  • ERP systems are flexible the way cement is flexible. Less true now than it was – cement is ultimately flexible when you pour it, then it hardens into the shape of the hole it was poured into.
  • A more advanced version of this is the old joke that SAP (or insert your favorite ERP system) is like a new basic element. Basic elements go through three stages: Fixed, fluid and gas. SAPium (and its cousin Oraclium) start out as a fluid that runs down and fills the holes (basic business process) you want fixed. It then becomes a gas, expanding to fill the whole area (organization) until it has permeated everything, whereupon it becomes a solid that can never be changed again….

Oh well. Less true now than it was, maybe. Or maybe not.

Controlling Wall Street

Excellent article by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn on the deeper, yet not addressed issues of the financial crisis: The flawed checks, balances and incentives of Wall Street. Among the suggestions to fix: "Stop making big regulatory decisions with long-term consequences based on their short-term effect on stock prices."

Amen.

(Incidentally, Lewis wrote Liar’s Poker, so his coming book on this financial crisis is going on my shortlist right now.)

While the cat is out….

Gurcharan Das writes on the differences between India and China.

I just love the phrase “our economy grows at night when the government is asleep.”

(Also in New York Times.)

One of the saving graces of this year…

…is that Anthony Daniels (more commonly known as Theodore Dalrymple) was born in 1949, is less than 60 years old, and thus capable of producing for many years yet. Read him when he discusses imprisoning criminal heroin addicts, when he goes against a former Lord Chief Justice, when he points out the dangerous absurdity of monitoring people’s racial status ("a fragile ego maketh a glad authority"), when he warns against borrowing for consumption more than a year before the financial crisis.

What language, what logic. To quote Horace Walpole via Dalrymple: The world is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.

Oh, how I wish for a Norwegian pen like his.

The girl effect

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Pretty powerful use of Flash, music, and typography to underscore a very simple point: To get ahead, invest in the female side of the population. As a father of three of those, I find it hard not to agree.

(Via lots of places, starting with Arne Olav.)

Out of town news is out

image Another sign of the future of the traditional newspaper – Out of Town News is disappearing.

In the six years I lived in Boston and frequently walked by Out of Town News, I never bought anything there. Too expensive for a doctoral student’s budget. But I like the idea of a print-on-demand shop there, though I doubt it will be viable from a business standpoint.

Starbucks, methinks. It’s inevitable.

(Via Doc Searls.)

The efficient US auto industry

Fareed Zakaria makes it clear: There is an efficient US auto industry. It just isn’t in Detroit. Operative quote:

…there are 12 international car companies that have manufacturing operations in the United States. Collectively, they employ 113,000 Americans directly — even though that is less than the 239,000 at Ford, GM and Chrysler. However, those international car companies sell more cars than the Big Three and their customers love their products.

[…]

CNN: So you are against the bailout?

Zakaria: No. But the reasons the CEOs of Ford, GM and Chrysler present — that they will restructure, they are still competitive, they will change — are bogus; they won’t. The best argument for the bailout is that it is the most cost-effective jobs program that the government can run in the short term.

(Via Esteban.)

Here is a more philosophical piece by Roger Cohen.

Quote of the day

From a recently concluded teleconference on continuous business strategy:

Nagging is a core part of collaboration.

Ain’t that the truth….

Cisco does it again

Jim McGee comments on the case of Cisco (Fast Company article here, calling the company "socialist"), which seems to actually try to become a web 2.0 enterprise, whatever that might mean in the end. Cisco has always eaten its own dog food – back in the late 90s, I somehow bamboozled Pete Solvik, the CIO, into giving a talk to my students via teleconference. One of the things he stressed was the importance of being the first user of their own Internet technology. Back then Cisco was famous for serial buying of companies (for their technology) and for their extremely efficient internal procedures. It is one of the few companies I have seen that truly are strategy-driven, with strategy being an explicit choice and their vision and mission something distinctive.

The interesting thing here is that Cisco seems to be pulled in the direction of a higher-margin consulting company by its customers, which could leave it vulnerable to a low-end disruption from, say, Chinese home and SMB networking component companies powered by open source software. For those few companies that have been able to survive such a disruption, their survival has either been based on a move towards other places in the value chain (somewhat consistent with what Cisco is doing, it could be argued) or by a conscious choice to allow cannibalization by lower-margin products or services. In the cases I have heard of (such as Intel’s creation of the Celeron chip) this has dependent on top management with strong decision power and a long-term view of technology evolution. Could it be that decentralized management could make such a move, should it be necessary, harder for the organization to execute? Or,perhaps, easier, since at least the start phase can be done in a skunkworks fashion.

Nevertheless, Cisco is at it, again. I am looking forward to the rest of the story.

Posner and Becker: Let the Big Three go bankrupt

Both Posner (who has changed his mind) and Becker agree that the Detroit Big Three automakers should be allowed to go bankrupt rather than continue to suck up subsidies and produce cars the world market do not want. It is hard not to agree on principle, and in this case, also in practice.

The thing is, if the big three go bankrupt, this does not necessarily mean that Detroit is finished when it comes to producing cars. The designers, workers and machinery will be put to use – if nothing else, other automakers as well as entrepreneurs will come in, buy up the assets (free of dept), and start to compete by producing the most popular models, licensed models from other auto makers, or new ones.

The failure of the Big Three is complicated: A disastrous decision back in the fifties or sixties to make pensions the responsibility of individual companies rather than the government, short-sighted management, ossified unions, overfocus on automation (GM in the 80s), bad product quality, old-fashioned or just bad designs, short-term product development, financial rather than real innovation, slow product development (7 years per new model vs. the Japanese 3-4 in early 90s), too much focus on the domestic market, focus on what you can measure (such as parts commonality) rather than new customer needs and segments, political lobbying as marketing, and on and on and on….

Why not just let it die, and have something more sustainable (both in business and environmental terms) rise from the ashes?

Jobs for Detroit

Bob Cringely imagines what would happen if Steve Jobs ran one of the big three Detroit auto companies. For one thing, he would not design a car like the Chevy Cobalt, where you can’t reach the handbrake if you put the arm rest down.

Clayton Christensen on health care disruption

Here is Clayton Christensen giving a talk on disruptions in health care (but really a good introduction on disruption in general) at MIT:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/flash/player/Main.swf?host=cp58255.edgefcs.net&flv=mitw-01023-esd-innovator-prescription-christensen-13may2008&preview=http://mitworld.mit.edu//uploads/mitwstill-01023-esd-innovator-prescription-christensen-13may2008.jpg

 

Note that Clay uses Øystein Fjeldstad’s Value Configurations framework a little before 1:00:00 – a result of many conversations aboard the "Disruptive Cruise" which I arranged last year…. don’t say we aren’t doing our part over here….