Doc Searls 4th law states that "No matter what car you want to rent, what you’ll get is a Chevy Cavalier."

Ain’t that the truth.

I read recently that Toyota is about to become the world’s largest car manufacturer, surpassing General Motors. Judging from the design and quality of the Chevy Cavalier that is to be my constant companion for the next six weeks, I can only wonder what took them so long.

A few issues after just two days: The front seat armrest, when down, blocks the parking brake. Snow on the rear window falls into the boot if you open it. The boot (or luggage compartment, can never remember what is UK and what is US English) is of decent size, but the door is so small that I had a hard time getting my one large suitcase in. You can’t open the luggage compartment from the inside (well, maybe you can, but I can’t find the button – you can use the remote key, however). My head touches the ceiling since the front seat cannot be lowered – and I am 6′ 3”, which is nothing out of the ordinary. The engine is noisy. The car understeers. Everything is cheap and plasticky. The brake pedal squeaks and the paint flakes off the door armrest, and this on a car with less than 9k miles on it.

At the same time, the people I am staying with are driving a 1988 Toyota Camry that they would like to renew. However, that is hard to do, since the the old clunker just keeps running and what little rust there is is purely cosmetic, according to their mechanic.

I wonder if you can say the same about any 1988 Cavaliers….

UPDATE I: Took another look at the car. It is not a Cavalier, but a Cobalt. Not that anything else has changed…..

UPDATE II: Have now driven this clunker for 5 weeks. Add a gas gauge that will alternately tell you "low on fuel" and "1/4 tank left", increasing engine noise (especially in cold weather) and the most anemic heater I have encountered since driving a VW Beetle many years back. (The Beetle was said to have only to heater settings: Cold and Ice Cold.)

…and an add-on: Interesting discussion over at Marginal Revolution on why most rental cars are US brands. Best hypothesis so far: Volume discounting because of inability to reduce production capacity.

After a serious case of overteaching, I am escaping to be in Boston from October 28 to December 8. The idea is to do some writing, hang out in Concours’ offices a bit (being a teleworker has its benefits, but there are drawbacks as well, such as not knowing what people you work with look like and what kind of beer they drink), visit universities and interesting companies, catch up with old friends, go to seminars, do a deep dive into the bookstores around Harvard Square and Kendall, and try to figure out what I should do with my six month sabbatical, which comes up January 1, 2006.

If anyone would like to meet, chat, know of an interesting seminar I should go to, want me to come and speak to their students or company, or otherwise have something for me to look into, please send me an email (self at espen dot com) or use the comment fields.

(Incidentally, I am also looking for an inexpensive room and/or car to rent – I can stay with friends, but six weeks is a bit long if you want to keep them as friends…)

See you in Boston! 

I spent Friday and Saturday in Kaunas, Lithuania, guest teaching strategic management to an executive class at the ISM business school. It was an interesting experience – I had never before been in a former East Bloc country. I learned as much as you can expect to when you have two days in a country and spend most of the time in a classroom. The school took good care of me, though, I did get an good view of Kaunas, including a walk along the main pedestrian thoroughfare (pictured) and an excellent dinner with honey beer and Lithuanian snack specialties in the old town center.
My impression was that of a country which is still trying to find its personality – at least in terms of what economic and cultural impression it intends to make on the world. The economy is lacking in natural resources, but has some industry. Still, a comparatively large part of the population makes its living off agriculture, most of which is produced for internal consumption. The country was relatively prosperous when part of the Soviet Union, but much of the industry folded in the face of international competition and the relative disappearance of Russia as a trading partner. The country is slowly coming out of the post-Soviet funk, but still struggles with unstable government (with many of the heads of business and politics having apparatchnik backgrounds), corruption and lack of internationally competitive industries.
Lithuania does not have a very distinctive history – the last time the country was important was in the 1400s with the Archduchy of Lithuania. The Holocaust remains a sore point, and the population is shrinking due to emigration, primarily to the United States. Like many nations which have been held in suspended animation during the Communist period, there seems to be a number of old issues that people still are willing to fight over, though anyone from the outside really can’t understand why. Democratic traditions are still immature, open for exploitation by populistic politicians such as Viktor Uspaskich, a former Russian welder who managed to become economy minister six months after forming his party. He was forced to resign this summer after using his office for personal gain. (He was also discovered to have bought fake degrees from Moscow and a university in Kaunas, which I am sure didn’t help him much.)
So there is some work to do find and implement anything resembling a national economic strategy. One possibility might be that the country takes a leaf out of Denmark’s book and recreates itself as a source of excellent agricultural products. The food certainly is good enough. The country does not have the luxury of the highly educated population and lack of industry that contributed so much to the Irish miracle, but perhaps political stabilization, increased trade with Germany and the long-term influence of their EU membership can induce the diaspora to take a more active and direct role in the country’s economy. It would be deserved – this nation needs to look forward to an democratic future rather than falling back on a largely mythical illustrious past.
They do have excellent basketball, though!

Some years ago, Norway’s then defense minister Jørgen Kosmo made a rather glaring sartorial mistake when he appeared at a meeting of European defense ministers wearing a white dress coat. The resulting group picture made him stand out – and one of his political friends joked that he looked like “an Italian pick-pocket.”
At the time, I thought that a rather unfair statement on Italians. But I am now back after my first holiday in Italy, and unfortunately my chief impression is that more people in that country than in any other I have been are out to cheat their visitors.

Continue reading →

The Economist has an interesting article on the coming optimization of airline processes, to make travel easier. Most of this is stuff that travellers have known for quite a while – self-service kiosks, electronic tickets, and check-in via mobile telephone. A more substantial investment (both in terms of equipment and procedural changes) is RFID for luggage handling. This will take longer time, and RFID technology will have to improve quite a bit. The article mentions 95% accuracy RFID tag reading in transportation settings, but a large company I talked to said it was more in the neighbourhood or 80-90%, that is, the same as unassisted bar codes and nowhere near what is necessary for accurate large-scale luggage handling.
That will change, of course. The main way forward, as the article points out, lies in standardization and interlinking – making all airlines use these technologies. Wonderful for the traveller, but it erodes the potential for differentiation. But that potential has probably disappeared already, since most of the large airlines, at least those within functioning alliances, have the technologies anyway.
The article briefly touches on the real problem of airline travel: The interlinking to procedures and services not provided by airlines. The high-speed train to the airport which requires you to queue through a moronically designed ticket reader (try Gardermoen in Oslo, where the train does 200km/h and then leaves you waiting for 5 minutes to get off the concourse), the taxi service (which in many countries, notably the US and China, still don’t take credit cards) and the various public control activities will need to be streamlined and interlinked as well.
A few years ago, when I travelled frequently to the US, I had a wonderful thing called the INSpass, which was a biometric identification system (hand geometry) that would get me into the US in less than two minutes. I walked up to the INSpass kiosk, pulled an electronic card through, typed in how long I would stay, put my hand on the hand reader, got a receipt I put in my passport and I was on my way. Wonderful, and if my technological insticts don’t totally underserve me, at least as secure and accurate as a manual check by an agent, electronic passport or not. The upshot was that I was through immigration in no time flat, and, with only carry-on luggage, could make my connection to Boston two hours ahead of my original booking.
Airlines cut costs and improve accuracy by using electronic identification. I just wich public control services would do the same thing. The INSpass was brilliant – I spent 45 minutes getting it, and saved many hours using it. I just wish the US Immigration office would revive it – and that many other public control organizations would look at the INSpass and realize that it is a lot easier to sell increased control to travellers by offering convenience than an increasingly threadbare offer of more security from terrorists.
Integration within airlines will help. Integration outside airlines is even better, but the benefits of the integation have to show through to the individual traveller.
And while we are at it – as a friend of mine once wondered, how come we carry our luggage until we are almost on the airplane, then drop it off on a conveyor belt that feeds into an incredibly expensive mechanism to take the bag the last 500 meters to the plane? Why not let us drop the bag off closer to home – or have us carry it all the way out to the plane? I am aware of the need for load balancing before loading the plane, but you could do that calculation at the gate, you could also get your luggage at the gate when you leave. This would reduce the wear and tear and theft that comes with moving luggage around on big airports, for instance. Of course, you would still need the conveyor system for transfers, but still….. Seing your bag leaving the plane on a conveyor belt as you disembark and knowing that you will see it again, if you are lucky, after 20 minutes deep in the not particularly friendly bowels of whatever airport you are at does not give the impression of a well integrated service. But I ramble…..
Change is in the air. But not really – what is happening so far has a strong whiff of speeding up the mess. And that, of course, is marginally useful.

Airlines have personalities. Singapore and Thai are delightful. Virgin Atlantic is genuinely hip. Lufthansa is desperately dull and tasteless. Air France can’t speak English or keep time, but serve delicious lunches. SAS is mercilessly Scandinavian (don’t for a second try to do anything out of the ordinary – and don’t expect a joke unless the flight attendant is Danish).

Icelandair, where I am sitting right now, is unapologetically provincial, and a throwback to an earlier time of flying. Not only do they fly old SAS planes with blue seat-covers and have stewardesses in blue uniforms with little pillbox hats. They also serve “Egils sodavatn” and a chocolate called Prince HPolo, and the inflight music is relentlessly optimistic (boy, is it fun and vaguely stylish to fly) in a way I haven’t seen outside a Dan Ackroyd parody commercial.

They used to have the smallest business lounge I have ever seen, where you got to know your fellow travellers surprisingly well in the five minutes you got at Keflavik between plane changes, but that has changed – it is now elegant in polished granite and dark wood, and, at least on January 1st, largely empty. Still, it remains fun to see cheesy Christmas decorations in the plane and vaguely threatening signs in Viking language (“Sitjid med sætisælar spenntar”). Now, I hope they have some interesting volcano show going as we pass Iceland…..

Update June 7, 2005: See also…