The China Vortex

Americans are at their best when they use their creativity to solve problems which most people believed could not be easily solved. In my generation, there was the challenge of sending a man to the moon, put forward by President Kennedy in the early 60s by the end of the decade, a challenge which was realized on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon saying those famous words, “One small step for a man, one great step for mankind.”

Even though many thought that the race to moon was a technological race with the former Soviet Union (politically, it was), we now know that the journey to send a man to the moon brought many economic benefits, not only to the US, but also to the whole world. Some of the technology led to the development of the microprocessor, which has helped and benefited billions of people on earth. Today, I write this article on a MacBook Pro notebook computer, which has more processing power than the Saturn V rocket which carried those men to the moon. In those days, the astronauts calculated their trajectories and re-entry angles with slide rules!

Unfortunately, following that great achievement, the country seemed to lose direction. In the field of science, different administrations questioned the value of a space program which seemed (to them) to offer no great economic benefit, and projects were funded in a very half-hearted way. The tragedies of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 forced NASA to engage in some navel-gazing with no clear results. (In my opinion, space exploration and travel should be opened up to civilian competition, something which is only recently happening.)

Politically the US turned inward following the end of the Vietnam war and the politics turned highly divisive and poisonous, especially during the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations. All of this has achieved nothing.

Therefore, I was very pleased to hear that the National Academy of Engineering of the National Academies in Washington DC announced the Grand Challenges of Engineering for the 21st century. According to them, they are:

Make solar energy economical
Provide energy from fusion
Develop carbon sequestration methods
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Provide access to clean water
Restore and improve urban infrastructure
Advance health informatics
Engineer better medicines
Reverse-engineer the brain
Prevent nuclear terror
Secure cyberspace
Enhance virtual reality
Advance personalized learning
Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

When I read the list, I was very impressed. It made me think of the Saturn V project and the dream of putting a man on the moon. Each of the challenges are huge, even immense. But the benefits for all of humanity would be enormous.

This is all the more reason for countries like China and the US to work together. The Chinese have been much more willing to invest in applications which can generate returns in a fairly short time frame; Americans were willing to make investments for the long haul. It would be great if governments could set aside their mutual distrust so that the scientists can do meaningful research which would benefit all humanity.

Wouldn’t it be great if the US was respected again for its leading-edge scientific research instead of its weapons and military might? It would be nice to have a US which the rest of the world could look up to and admire, not out of fear but out of respect.

Maybe it’s all a dream, but dreams can become reality too…

Technorati Tags: 21st_century, challenges, China, economy, engineering, moon, NASA, nationalacademyofengineering, technology, US

Ever since its publication, The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, has captured the imagination of marketers and PR people all over the world. Basically, the book argues that ideas are spread by different groups of people, and that some have more influence than others in helping an idea to spread.

For marketers and PR people, the book basically argues that there is a formula for success; just feed your client’s idea or product into this ecosystem, and you can come up with a very predictable result. It’s almost like a software engineer’s dream: given a certain input, then a process, there is a predictable outcome. The marketer/PR agency can argue that the amount of money spent forms a direct correlation with the input, and if a project fails to take fire, it’s because the client didn’t spend enough money. As a result, the right connectors could not be influenced, and the project failed.

This is known as Influentials theory and forms the backbone of much marketing practice.

All clear and simple, right?

I have always had my doubts about it. For one thing, the model fails to take into account what is a good idea and what is a bad idea. And it fails to explain how people decide what is a good idea worth transmitting to one’s network, and what is a bad idea which should be immediately dismissed or ignored. If you were a Google engineer, how would you write an algorithm to describe how these very human and subjective individual judgements are made?

It seems to me that it is impossible to write an algorithm to describe them. What an engineer can do though, is plot how ideas are spread in a time when we are bombarded with more and more information, making our attention spans progressively shorter.

Wouldn’t there come a point when influence becomes almost random, when Influentials lose most of their influence? And doesn’t this coincide with the breakdown of the “mass market”, a concept which has collapsed with the rise of the social networking phenomenon and the long tail?

I had long suspected this, but I had never been able to prove the thesis. However, the results of some serious research by Duncan Watts supports this thesis. In this article published in Fast Company, his experiments suggest that the success of many fads has become, for all practical purposes, random. The article is an excellent read.

For one thing, I believe that The Tipping Point was written too long ago, and it described a world vastly different from ours in 2008. When it was published in 2002, the book described a time when people still read paper newspapers and books and before blogs. You may remember a term then called the “mass media”.

Now, ideas spread much faster, and within smaller groups which may appear random. It is also very likely that products/services/ideas will be served to much smaller groups of people.

One example is the gaming industry where the shelf life of titles has become progressively shorter, almost to the point where the marketing industry has trouble keeping up with the shorter time cycles. Hollywood movies have to prove their box-office success in their opening weekend in the US. These two industries have yet to adapt to lower production expense models which fit in with the lower shelf-life of their titles.

Basically, they need to downsize their costs.

If you boil it down to essentials, it means that you will have to market your ideas/products/services yourself, since you know your own audience best and understand how to pitch it to them. If they like what you have to say/sell, then they will become your connectors, and push it beyond your immediate circle, creating a breakout phenomenon.

In the end, the Internet empowers smart generalists who understand technology and keep the human touch in their marketing. Dumb messages may have short-time entertainment appeal, but they are unlikely to be profitable unless there is something behind them.

And marketing cannot buy credibility.

Technorati Tags: algorithm, attention, blogs, engineering, google, human, ideas, influentials, malcolmgladwell, marketing, PR, software, tippingpoint