Author Archives: Espen

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About Espen

For details, see www.espen.com.

Things Norwegian

Tyler Cowen, economist and blogger, has a list of his favorite things Norwegian over at Marginal Revolution.

My comment: I find Undset boring (and overrated), and Hamsun can be quite a piece, too (Hunger is good, but read it before Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" or Sartre’s "Age of Reason" which explore similar themes, i.e., aimless walking around while thinking deeply existential and mostly depressing thoughts.) As for other authors, try Erik Fosnes Hansen‘s "Psalm at Journey’s End", something by Ingvar Ambjørnsen (the movie "Elling", nominated to an Oscar a few years ago, is based on his books and deserves mention in the film category). Or perhaps something by Jan Kjærstad?

Tyler also notes the Norwegian Petroleum Fund, which is one of those things we Norwegians have a very ambivalent relationship with…. 

(To understand the Norwegian psyche, note that we tend to pay excessive attention to any mention of Norway by anyone abroad, an effect of living in a very small and rather remote place. As my students in India said when they heard of our population size: "In India, that would be a measurement error!") 

Videoconferencing with realism

HALO video conferencing 

John Batelle has visited HP and used their Halo videoconferencing lab, which looks pretty impressive. The hard part in that studio is not getting big screens and seeing the people talk to you, but to set up the cameras so that everybody there can see everyone else in the eye, i.e., that if the guy to the far right of the screens in the picture is looking at the woman to the far left, it looks to him and her as if they are looking at each other.

Video conferencing is one of those technologies that you wonder why never take off big-time, until you start using it yourself and begin to understand that the barriers to adoption are rather high. There are so many small details that you have to get used to, such as the fact that if the person you are talking to is not looking you in the eyes, that is not because he or she is shifty, but because they are responding to your picture. If you want to look honest and interested, you better learn to look into the camera rather than at the person you are talking to. Of course, then you can’t judge their facial expressions. Add latency, and you have a potential for very stilted and formal conversation until people get used to it.

I learned to use videoconferencing from a master: Doug Neal, research fellow with CSC and one of the world’s experts on this technology. Back when I worked for CSC we hade videoconferencing equipment at home and did a lot of meetings, sometimes with as many as 10 destinations (with the screen split in 9 and your own picture disabled, this worked fine.) We even established a system of signalling for the floor by waving, which broke down when my 5 year old daughter came into my office, sat in my lap and waved to all the people on the screen.

One effect of doing a lot of videoconferencing was that when you came out of your office and talked to regular people again, their immediate response to your talking to them was a bit startling…

Sony Reader review

Sony ReaderKevin Kelly’s very useful blog Cool Tools has an entry about the Sony Portable Reader, which the reviewer thinks trumps the Iliad. I have been meaning to get one of these devices for a while – looks like it will be Sony, on the theory that it is better to get one device that does things well than one that does many things less well. Anyone with Iliad experience?

Delightfully book-mad

Nicholas A. Basbanes (1995): A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.

This is the book to pick up if you feel guilty about having too many books: Basbanes tells of book collectors and their passion, describing the need to have many books and to keep them (and, occasionally, read them) as a psychological condition its sufferers have no need or desire to be cured of.

Basbanes writes beautifully, with passion and compassion, anecdote after story after chronicle of collectors from Winston Churchill to a man who stole more than 30,000 rare books from libraries around the USA. He dives into the rare book markets and their mechanisms and describes what collectors do to make sure that their collection lives after them (donates them to universities, mostly, with stipulations on where and how the books are to be kept.)

If you ever have felt guilty (as I have) about those cases of books in the basement and the lack of visible wall surfaces in your home, this is the cure: Basbanes make it all seem so normal, almost desirable. 

How fitting that it is out of print – if you can get your hands on a copy, add it to you collection!

An Indian argument

Amartya Sen: The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (2006), Picador.

I picked this up in India, after having read Gurcharan Das’ India Unbound and wanting to learn more about the history and society of a country that holds a fifth of the world’s population and now, finally, is beginning to pull its weight in the international economy. Sen’s collection of essays is the intellectual complement to Das’ rather easier and less multifaceted account of the economic liberation of India, focusing on the central aspects of deliberation ("argumentativeness") and religious tolerance that has been central to India for centuries.

The book echoes my own impression of India: That it is a mosaic rather than a melting  pot, and a mosaic that seems to be able to sort things out in a peaceful, democratic and intellectual manner. Notwithstanding certain dynastic tendencies (not unlike the USA, incidentally), India has always been a heterogenous society, tolerant of religious variety, open to ideas, with lively debates and a relative lack of coercion.

Any collection of essays, primarily built on speeches, runs the risk of repetitiveness and a certain heaviness of language, and this collection is no exception. I particularly like the chapter on Tagore and his role in the building of India (for some reason he is seen as a sometime-fashionable mystic by Western readers, at least as I dimly remember from my high-school days), as well as the discussions of India’s argumentative tradition throughout the centuries – democracy did not come to India with the English, who rather built on a tradition of debate and openness that was already there. Sen cautions against an idea of India as a monocultural country in general, and as a militant Hindu contry in particular: India has 180 million Muslims, for instance, living peacefully among many other religions.

I have not heard this poem by Tagore, quoted by Sen in the book, but it sums up Sen’s hopes for his country – and describes the foundation of heterogeneity and openness he sees as there to build on:

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Consulting as system and profession

Toppin, G. and F. Czerniawska (2006). Business Consulting: A Guide to How it Works and How to Make it Work. London, The Economist.

This is a useful but uneven book. Its main contribution lies in the development of a model called “the Business Consulting Ecosystem”, which describes the various entities in the consulting profession and how they interact. There are also good descriptions of how the industry has evolved over time and good interviews with many consultants and clients. I particularly liked chapter 11, which describes the markets for ideas and how companies try to capitalize on them, though that may be because one of the companies described is Index, which I worked for in the nineties.

On the negative side, the latter part (second half) of the book and the conclusions feel quite a bit like a Powerpoint presentation, with bullet points giving the outline and filler text added in. The book is also slightly dated, since it was published in 2004 and things have moved on a bit, though it does report on the transition to outsourcing and the increasing polarization between advisory consulting and implementation.

So, smart in parts, useful in general, but uneven when it comes to drawing decisive conclusions. Sounds like the consulting business.

Bragging

I scored 11 out of 12 on this quiz. Life has its moments….

(Irritating, though, that I missed one question because I thought tactics, not language. Oh well.) 

Bryson on cricket

After three weeks in cricket-obsessed India, I came back and dipped into Bill Bryson’s incomparable Australia travelogue, In a Sun-burned Country. I couldn’t resist quoting his comments on cricket (note that Bryson’s father was a baseball writer, so it is not like he doesn’t know other games):

"After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind) I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn’t fix in a hurry. It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don’t wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game. It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players — more if they are moderately restless. It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you can dress in white from head to toe and be as clean at the end of the day as you were at the beginning.

Imagine a form of baseball in which the pitcher, after each delivery, collects the ball from the catcher and walks slowly with it to center field; and that there, after a minute’s pause to collect himself, he turns and runs full tilt toward the pitcher’s mound before hurling the ball at the ankles of a man who stands before him wearing a riding hat, heavy gloves of the sort used to to handle radio-active isotopes, and a mattress strapped to each leg. Imagine moreover that if this batsman fails to hit the ball in a way that heartens him sufficiently to try to waddle forty feet with mattress’s strapped to his legs, he is under no formal compunction to run; he may stand there all day, and, as a rule, does. If by some miracle he is coaxed into making a misstroke that leads to his being put out, all the fielders throw up their arms in triumph and have a hug. Then tea is called and every one retires happily to a distant pavilion to fortify for the next siege. Now imagine all this going on for so long that by the time the match concludes autumn has crept in and all your library books are overdue. There you have cricket.

But it must be said there is something incomparably soothing about cricket on the radio. It has much the same virtues as baseball on the radio – an unhurried pace, a comforting devotion to abstruse statistics and throughtful historical rumination, exhilarating micro-moments of real action – but stretched across many more hours and with a lushness of terminology and restful elegance that even baseball cannot match. Listening to cricket on the radio is like listening to two men sitting in a rowboat on a large, placid lake on a day when the fish aren’t biting; it’s like having a nap without losing consciousness. It actually helps not to know quite what is going on. In such a rarefied world of contentment and inactivity, comprehension would become a distraction."

My thoughts exactly. Restful in the extreme, much like watching snooker on late-night TV. Micro-excitement and levels of understanding you can dip into if you care to. But in general, you don’t.

IBM and the other Indian companies

Excellent article about IBM and the company’s foray into India – echoes the sentiments I heard from outsourcers when I was there. IBM and Accenture legitimizes the Indian outsourcers, most importantly in the eyes of the local politicians and the public, and legitimizes their strategy to move to higher-level work, in the process improving profits and finding believable career paths for their engineers, who will want to break out of SAP fiddling and support calls at some point.

Supply-side supplied

Bruce Bartlett argues that supply-side economics has jumped the shark and now occupy the same place in history as Keynesianism did in the early 80s.
Hard to disagree: Any management fad (and, by extension, any school of economics) comes up to address a real problem, then expands in scale and scope, failing to recognize why it started in the first place.
Since the last sentence in itself is a Russell’s paradox, I better stop here.

Warming causes CO2?

Does global warming cause CO2 buildup, and not the other way around. Interesting discussion at Stubborn facts, summarized by Stuart Buck.

I don’t know myself – in cases like this, I would like to see the data, but as one commenter points out, the data is very hard to get. How I wish for a Hans Rosling-like source of data on environmental change, something you could put into Gapminder and see what came out.

Yes, pollution is bad, as anyone who has visited Beijing and Shanghai knows the second they step of the airplane. It is also a byproduct of certain stages in a country’s economic development, and the two biggest countries in the world are currently in that stage. That is the real problem here, not whether I should get a Prius I cannot afford or start biking to work.

Where is the data in all this? What kind of data is there that either isn’t very short-term (100-200 years) or very vague. How much does CO2-from cars matter compared to, say, Mount Pinatubo? Yes, I know that there are 3500 cars registered new in Beijing every day, and I get an instant headache the second I leave the airplane coming there. But coal-burning London was worse in the beginning of the century.

Is it nature or is it us? Most expert says it is us, the one that convinced me was Stephen Emmott, but I would so like to see the data.

Jim McKenney dies at 77

18-mckenney1-225I just got word that Jim McKenney, Harvard Business School Professor (Emeritus), died last week.

Jim was responsible for the MIS Doctoral students at HBS and my thesis advisor after Benn Konsynski left for Emory in 1992. Jim taught me many things, such as interview technique, longitudinal research strategies, and how to understand corporate strategy from behavior rather than theory. Most of all he taught me how to draw parallels between technical, organizational and societal evolution. He was an expert on the US airline industry (he was on the board of Continental Airlines) and had life-time memberships to most airline clubs, as well as a strong network of contacts in all kinds of transportation businesses.

Jim was defiantly original in everything he did. Small and wiry, he wore a bowtie and spoke quietly and eruditely in large classrooms, constantly surprising students with wry observations on why organizations did as they did. I still remember how I talked to him about an organization that did something specific (I have forgotten what). As I was trying to work out why, Jim said “That’s not a strategy – that’s just bad management!”

Jim had a big Victorian (I think) house with self-tended garden in Lexington where he and his lovely wife Mary held annual summer parties for faculty and friends. As he became my thesis advisor and I also worked as his research assistant, I frequently made the trip up to Lexington to retrieve papers or ask questions.

Jim is one of two reasons (the other is Benn) that I (and my good colleague Ramiro) wear bowties. His reason for wearing them was practical – when he arrived at HBS, he was a poor junior faculty with worn shirts collars, and the bow tie hid that fact effectively. That’s the story he told, anyway. I have a sneaking suspicion his real reason was to be original, though, to mark a distance to the slicker parts of HBS and cut a noticeable and contrarian figure around campus.

Jim was stricken with Alzheimer towards the end of the 90s, and we lost touch. I last saw him in 99, still living in his large house, still gardening, but gradually being reduced. Still, you could find that spark of originality underneath at times, and I like to think he never lost it completely.

My thoughts go to Mary and the rest of the family – may their memories be of an interested and interesting man, well read, soft-spoken, opinionated, kind and unabashedly original.

Something about the patient

I amy be preconditioned, since I just read Blink, but notice what Reynolds says here about a patient he took to the hospital because he "there was something about him that set alarm bells ringing".

That’s experience speaking.

I think experience like that takes at least 5 years to develop, to the point where you get a "feel" for how a number of complex variables interact without knowing it. I have some of that feeling myself: I spend a lot of time walking into companies to do presentations or interviews for research projects, and end up getting a "feel" for what the issues are in the company almost as I walk in the door. Other people within consulting and research – that is, problem solving activities – that I know have described the same experience. Of course, you have to do a lot of documentation and testing and so on, just as Reynolds runs the ECG. But very often, the first feeling you get when you arrive somewhere ends up being your conclusions and recommendations also.

Of course, I may delude myself, and engage in on-the-fly evidence distortion and theory confirmation rather than theory falsification. But I wonder… 

Blinkenread

Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink. London, Penguin.

Sometimes you make the right decision in two seconds, because intuition tells you so. This book is about those two seconds.

Snap judgments work because we use our unconscious to look for small cues that we don’t know that we know. If we try to rationalize the process and explain why we reaced a decision, it will bear little relationship to reality: They are different decision-making processes.

Many interesting examples: Art experts instantly spotting fakes, analytically oriented strategies losing to quick improvisation in war games, police making fatal mistakes (such as the Amadou shooting), experts being able to tell when someone is lying by looking for millisecond facial expressions. The skill of snap judgements can be trained (and many police forces do.)

This is a light read, but well researched. I picked it up before a long plane ride, and did not regret it. (Looked at it in 2005, but I had overdosed on these kinds of books after reading The Wisdom of Crowds, which isn’t nearly as good.)

Recommended.

Military intelligence

Keegan: Intelligence in warKeegan, J. (2003). Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda. London, UK, Pimlico.

Case stories of intelligence (from the Battle of Abukir, Shenandoah Valley, German-English sea battles in WWI, Crete, Midway, the U-boat war, and the hunt for the V-1 and V-2) and its strategic importance in warfare.

Main point (p.23):
"It is the intrinsic difficulty of communication, even, indeed above all, for the agent with ‘access’,  which limits his – or occasionally her – usefulness in real time. By contrast, the enemy’s own encrypted communications, if they can quickly be broken, will, of their nature, provide intelligence of high quality in real time.
The history of ‘how, what, where, when’ in military intelligence is therefore largely one of signal intelligence. Not exclusively, human intelligence has played its part and so, latterly, has photographic and surveillance intelligence. In principle, however, it is the unsuspected overhearings of the enemy’s own signals which have revealed his intentions and capabilities to his opponent and so allowed counter-measures to be taken in time."

On keeping the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt a secret: "Gossip helped to refine the picture. Some of the academics who were to accompany the expedition began to boast, a notorious failing of clever men leading unimportant lives."

From the conclusion (p398):
"[…] it strikes this author that the organization of intelligence-gathering and subversion within the same body is undesirable. Subversion is a weak way of fighting, differing from conventional warfare by the total unpredictability of its results; moreover, in a democracy, it is always liable to disavowal by legitimate authority and denunciation by authority’s political opponents. Intelligence-garhering, by contrast, can yield conflict-winning outcomes and , if securely and soberly conducted, is an activity only those of ill-will can condemn.
      Yet, in the last resort, intelligence warfare is a weak form of attack on the enemy, also. Knowledge, the conventional wisdom has, is power; but knowledge cannot destroy or deflect or damage or even defy an offensive initiative by an enemy unless the possession of knowledge is also allied to objective force."

The Wealth and Powerty of India

Gurcharan Das. (2002). India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age. New Dehli, Penguin Books.

India Unbound is fascinating – a combination of autobiography and an essay series, where Gurcharan Das reflects on the various stages in his life and how what he learned changed his views on India, its politics and economic development. Das is a commentator and an essayist, and the book is colored by this: It repeat itself and belabors the same point from many angles. For a novice of Indian it is useful, best read with access to a computer so you can look up words and places like "haveli" and "octroi" as you go along. Das’ language is fluent and content-packed, with an elegance reminiscent of Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (whom, incidentally, he criticises, rightly, for an overly simplistic explanation of India’s lack of progress).

Highly recommended. This essay borrows much from the book. Check out his columns here.

Some quotes:

On India after independence: There were two competing visions. Mahatma Gandhi had a vision of self-reliant villages, with a reinvigorated agriculture and craft production. He opposed modern urban industry because it dehumanized man. Jawaharlal Nehru had a modern scientific mind, and he was much impressed by the economic gains of the Soviet revolution; but he was also committed to democracy. He had a vision of democratic socialism with the state leading the process of industrialization. He spurned capitalism because it exploited and it created inequalities. Both Gandhi’s and Nehru’s ideas were flawed, however, and we have spent a long time chasing after them. Gandhi distrusted technology but not businessmen. Nehru distrusted businessmen but not technology. Instead of sorting out the contradictions, we mixed the two up. We have to deal with holy cows: smal companies are better than big ones (Gandhi); public enterprises are better than private ones (Nehru); local companies are better than foreign ones (both). They so mesmerized us that the succeeding generation, whose job was to jettison these foolish ideas, failed to do so and did us incalculable harm. (p.11) 

When ordinary human beings err, it is sad, but when leaders do, it haunts us for generations. (p. 51) 

If America is a melting pot, India is a mosaic. (p. 72)

The economists, it seems, turned out to be hopelessly optimistic about the ability of poor countries to transform their economies through investment in import-substituting manufactures and overly pessimistic about their ability to export. (p.75)

The more rules there are, the less people will do on their own, and the more effort they will spend in getting around the rules. […] The ordinary person will generally do the right thing, left to his or her own devices. The important thing is that people believe that only results will win them rewards.

In Hindu society the Brahmin (priest, teacher) is at the top of the four-caste hierarchy, followed by the Kshatriya (variously landholder, warrior, ruler). The Vaishya or bania (businessman) comes third, and the Shudra (laborer, artisan) is last. Below the four are casteless "untouchables" and tribals. The three upper castes constitute roughly 15 percent of India’s population, and have ruled th ecountry for three thousand years. About half of India is laboring or Shudra caste, divided in turn into hundreds of subcastes. [occupational or geographic]. More than 20 percent of the population are the casteless or "untouchables" and tribals for whose uplift Mahatman Gandhi worked all his life. The remaining 15% of India belongs to other religions: 11 percent Muslim; the rest Sikh, Christian, Parsee, etc. (p.140)

Modern India’s tragedy is not that we adopted the wrong economic model in the 1950s, but that we did not reverse direction after 1965. 

Businessmen are fine producers of goods and jobs, but they are cowards and do not speak out. 

The talented immigrant’s new choices

This is the kind of commentary that makes me remember why I continue to subscribe to the Economist. Especially since I am writing this from a campus in India.

I miss the US when in Norway, and Norway when in the US. The same, I suppose, is true for every other person with international experience. The Namesake seems to capture it perfectly. On my list of must-sees.

Update April 6: Elder daughter Julie read The Namesake six months ago. She had her formative years in the US, and saw the book as a pretty good description of herself. I’ll leave it to her to eloquently enunciate the details.

Best CIO quote of the day

"Of all "C-level" positions, the CIO post remains the least well defined and the most prone to identity crises. "

(Nick Carr, summing up the Chris Anderson-instigated debate about "keeping the lights on" vs. "installing cool stuff".)

Libraries vs. Google Booksearch

Tim O’Reilly provides the entry point for an excellent discussion of the research benefits of Google Booksearch.