Sporty Justice – The Curious Case of Alejandro Banquero

I know I swore never to write about bi-cycling again, and I almost won’t. Today came the final ruling in the Clenbuterol case against Alberto Contador. Just a quick summary: Alberto Contador tested positive for Clenbuterol during the 2010 Tour de France, a tour he proceeded to win. The amount was minuscule. Alberto explains he just chilled with some friends, who came up from Spain with a load of contaminated steaks. The Spanish bi-cycling federation clears Contador. The International bi-cycling union (UCI) appeals to The Court for Arbitration in Sports (CAS) along with Wada, because they think the Clenbuterol stems from  blood doping. CAS then rules that neither explanation is probable and instead decides that it probably came from supplements. Contador is stripped of all his victories in that period.

Now let us switch to a parallel dimension where I heard of a curious case that in some respects resemble the case of Alberto Contador. Meet Alejandro Banquero a famous building contractor. He was caught two years ago on one of his building sites with a small ketchup stain on his shirt. The prosecution alleges that Alejandro had snuck in to some unidentified Mac Donalds at some unidentified time and cooked himself a Big Mac menu to-go. Then he brought it somewhere out of sight of anyone and ate it, but spilled some ketchup on his shirt. Alejandro assures that he and his friend just had a barbecue and the ketchup was brought by his friends and eaten with the burgers they made. Now, Mac Donalds clears him of all charges because they find it unlikely that anything illegal has passed. Here is where it gets interesting. Now the International Restaurant Association and an independent gourmet association appeals the verdict to the supreme court. The supreme court looks at the explanations brought forth by the prosecution and the defense. They don’t find any of the stories convincing. Here is where it gets really strange. The supreme court now decides to build their own case and act as a second prosecutor. They think it is likely that Alejandro stole the ketchup from some supermarket somewhere. They are really convinced by the case that they made themselves and so, perhaps not surprisingly, they rule in favour of their own case. The real estate poor mister Banquero was constructing when caught, is ordered to be demolished, as is all other buildings he has constructed since then. Oh, and he should also pay 70% of everything he has earned, which is an amount orders of magnitude greater than the usual fines given to companies that pollute the oceans and rivers.

Don’t you just hate that dimension? They have absolutely no grasp of even the basics of Justice and the judicial system. How can you have a court that acts as a prosecutor? How can you rule in a case with no hard evidence? and how is it that anyone just seems to be able to appeal? And what do you think about the severity of the punishment? Ridiculous, right? Luckily we live in free western democracies where we have fought for centuries to eradicate such arbitrary judicial practise.

Back to our own dimension. Now I think Alberto will think twice before ever eating or ingesting anything at all, and anyone aspiring to become professional cyclists will think twice too. The ruling sends a firm and clear signal to the world: The cycling world is the anthithesis of our civic ideals; it is an immature third world somali-style crypto-democracy with serious latent anal period issues.

Christmas sentiments – hapiness and my new favourite Cristmas song

My favourite Christmas song used to be “Driving home for Christmas” by Chris Rea. I love the mood and ambience. I never paid much attention to the lyrics apart from the title line, only I got it wrong. I thought he sang “driving home from Christmas”, so I was conjuring up a mood of impending peace and quiet a long way from all the Christmas commotion. That’s why I liked it so much. It was giving me such a beautiful feeling of jazzy, slightly dazed calm. It’s just that I recently found out I completely misunderstood the song. Inadvertently I came to listen more attentively to the lyrics and I realized that the song was about “driving home for Christmas”.

Another christmassy sentiment is the spirit of giving. At Christmas you give a gift to your loved ones in order to make them happy. It has recently become popular to give charity gifts. Like a goat to an African family. But that really fucks up the whole system. Who is realy giving? and who is receiving? At Christmas you become happy because you receive a gift, because someone have thought about what would make you happy. But when the gift is charity, that is in effect a gift to someone else, the basic premise of Christmas is violated. I can’t see a lot of people becoming genuinely happy. (Although you could argue that the system is already severely “off track” since we are giving each other gifts in honour of the birthday of someone who is long gone)

Happiness and money are two central concepts of Christmas. We usually assume that money is directly proportional to happiness. The more expensive the gift, the more happy the receiver will be. If I get a 1000 dollar tie I will be 10 times more happy than if I get a 100 dollar tie. Most people will probably agree that this view is at best “simplified”. It is however a central tacit assumption  in the modern world: more money – more happy. We rank countries in terms of how much money they make: Gross Domestic Product. An indicator of how a country is doing is the growth of the gross domestic product: how much more we made this year compared to the last. Just as we realise on Christmas eve, the bhutanese king Jigme Singye Wangchuck realised in 1972 that this view was “simplified”. What matters is not the amount of money, but the happiness of people. This resulted in his creation of a new measure called the Gross National Happiness. This in turn has resulted in the development of scientifically more stringent measures pursued in a number of research projects, which investigate the GNH in different countries of the world .

So, we should reconceptualise the value we measure Christmas gifts by. The true value is the amount of happiness it creates, but we should not stop there in our revamping of value. When we invest money we also have a typical measure: The Return on Investment (ROI). This measure describes how much more money we got relative to what we put into it. Rather than Return on Investment we should measure the Happiness of Investment HOI: This measure describes how much more happy we became as a result of the investment. If I buy a tie for a 1000 dollars would that make me more happy than an ipad 3 and dinner with my family. That is essentially asking where is the HOI greater: investing in a 1000 dollar tie or an ipad 3 and dinner with family.

The spirit of Christmas shows us that we fundamentally want to be happy. By using measures such as GNH and HOI we get a measure that is more valid. The experience of Christmas gifts tells us that there is not a linear correlation between money and happiness. That is why we should always go “right to the heart of the matter” and look at how happy money and stuff makes us. I think no one has put it more precisely (and high pitched) than Geddy Lee (the singer of Canadian progressive rock band Rush):

Right to the heart of the matter

Right to the beautiful part

Illusions are painfully shattered

Right where discovery starts

In the sacred wells of emotion

Buried deep in our hearts

from the track “Emotion Detector”  by Rush

So, after the fall from grace of my previous favourite Christmas song, I hereby reveal my new favourite:

Happy Christmas!!

What Lars Von Trier said and it’s meaning – Latin oracular inscriptions or the A27 roadwork law

During the Cannes film festival Danish director Lars Von Trier spawned controversy big time over the utterance “I understand Hitler”. Now it has even become a police matter. Very few, including the director,  understood completely what he was trying to say, but hey, nothing good comes from Hitler, so, the consensus of the world and now also apparently the police is that the meaning must also be evil and even criminal. I do not concur with this assumption.

The incident is interesting because it points to the heart of human communication: who decides what something means?

We are often fooled by our everyday understanding of communication. The “folk model” of communication has it that we communicate by encrypting whatever we mean into symbols such as words, which are in turn decrypted by the receiver to give a pristine view of our innermost conscious thoughts at the moment. Once encoded, anyone with a decryption key (that is knowledge of the language), will be able now and forever to decode the message. That is, however, wrong. Very wrong!

About 30 years ago anthropologist Daniel Sperber and philosopher of language Deirdre Wilson showed that the “folk model” of communication was not an accurate way of looking at it. Rather, what happens when we communicate something is that a communicator shows an intention to communicate (a communicative intent). But that is not all. He also has an informational intent, something he wants to inform about. This is what in everyday parlance is called the meaning. So, how do we get at the meaning?

Now it gets a bit complicated. In order to communicate he needs to make the receiver aware that he wants to communicate and make him infer his informative intent. Our communicator therefore chooses some sort of utterance to get his informative intent across. He or she provides the signs that in his view will most likely convey his informative intention to the receiver. What does that tell us? It tells us that communication is a guessing came. We are always guessing how we can provoke the right ideas in the minds of those we communicate with. The minds of those we communicate with can however be filled with greatly differing assumptions producing vastly different views of the meaning of an utterance. This is why three different political commentators can infer four different meanings of the same utterance by a politician and it is also why your spouse hardly ever really understands what you are saying, but only your friends do.

The same communicative stimulus, as Sperber and Wilson calls it, will not always produce the same meaning, because it depends on a lot of assumptions taken by the receiver. When we say that Lars von Trier means something by his opaque utterance, we are to some degree deciding the meaning ourselves. This degree can vary greatly depending on the utterance.

The more opaque an utterance is the more free we are  to project our meanings into the utterance.Let me give you an example. A latin oracular inscription reads “Certa incerto ne fiant, si sapis, caveas”. In translation it means something like “Certainty doesn’t come from the uncertain. If you you know, beware”. Pretty obscure right? It could mean anything. The inscription was one of a collection of lots that were drawn as responses to a question. This was the Roman way of getting oracular responses. So, the more obscure the utterance the more useful it was. This is why politicians, oracles, ouija boards and poets are never too precise in their utterance. They leave a bigger room for interpretation.

Conversely, legislation seem to go on and on about seemingly simple points. Let me cite an example from the UK law: ” The A27 Trunk Toad (Lewes Road, Near Eastbourne) (Temporary Speed Restrictions) Order 2011″. It goes like this:

“the trunk road” means the A27 Trunk Road (Lewes Road) near Eastbourne in the County of East Sussex;
“the length of trunk road” means the trunk road between points 1000 metres west and 605 metres east of the centreline of Folkington Road west of Polegate;
“works” mean resurfacing and road marking work on the trunk road; and “a works period” means a period of 101⁄2 hours starting at 1930 hours on Monday 17th October 2011 or on any subsequent day until 14th April 2013

Basically this paragraph just says that there will be road work on A27 from October 2011 to April 2013. As little as possible should be left to interpretation when it comes to laws.

On a scale between Latin oracular inscriptions and the A27 roadwork law, where would you put Lars von Triers “I understand Hitler”? It is right up there with all the other obscure oracular responses. It could mean anything, moreover you are free to have it mean anything you want. When people think of Hitler they do not think of anything good. They think of concentration camps, ethnic cleansing etc. They guess that von Trier meant that he was a big fan of concentration camps and ethnic cleansing, but he never said that. The meaning is all in the mind of the beholder when utterances are as opaque as his. Language is a bitch.

Leading Change – Lessons from Landscaping

Have you ever heard of the following situation: a new IT system, a CRM system for example, has been implemented. The solution has been found to be significantly better by management, but somehow the users don’t exhibit the expected natural proclivity towards adopting this system. They want to use the old system. What can we do?
We can whip every single employee into using it, but the effect will probably not be very good. Known side effects are inefficient use and unhappy employees that leave the company.

Instead we should try to frame the problem differently. Let’s say we are redesigning a park. There are a number of beautiful sculptures scattered around the park. These sculptures are portraits of the royal family. And the sponsor of the entire park project also happens to be the royal family. The royal family expects people passing through the park to see all the sculptures, but people just follow the straight route through the park. It is not very efficient to put up signs stipulating turn left, turn right etc. or having park rangers patrol incessantly. If the park is a grass lawn it is easier to just go straight through. What to do? Well maybe you could make a rubble path, plant bushes and trees along this path, so that people are naturally lead this way. It is still possible for them to pass through the bushes and trees, but not the easiest way. You use the landscape to make it easier to take the wanted path along all the beautiful statues.

How does that translate to the adoption of our splendid new system? If you have a new system you have to make sure that it is the easiest path to use it. So, what can you use as bushes and trees? Here are a number of different methods that you can try:

Controlled Subversion – Tell every single employee that their colleague has been known to secretly use the system, although he will openly deny it. Subtly imply that it is in order to get that promotion that your employees are competing for. Go and tell every single employee exactly the same thing.
The Kafkan Shortcut – Make it possible for the users to do whatever they want as long as it is engulfed in excruciating administrative procedures. For example, make them fill out forms that make no sense/cannot be found and submitting them to persons that have not been informed about the procedure.
Brute Force – install a bug on the PC that makes the computer crash every time the employees try to access the old system. Remember also to inform IT support, so the incident will be given absolutely minimum priority.

Bottomline is: if you want to effectively lead change, the most important is to make it easier to use the new system than the old.

The Next Tech Bubble – a Survival Guide for Angels Alaska Style

Recently the economist asked whether we were headed towards a new tech bubble like the dot com bubble. The valuations of companies like Facebook, twitter, Skype, google and linkedin has skyrocketed. Some are publicly traded and others privately. But is this growth in value real or imaginary? If we look at the NASDAQ index, which is a good indicator of the technology industry and compare it with more traditional indicators of the growth of the economy like Dow or S&P’s, we seethat since 2007 NASDAQ has widened the gap. NASDAQ is up some 20 plus points compared to the general economy. This is a lot less than the last bubble, and it may indeed be that the industry is now more mature and that technology really is a more attractive investment. However, the article in the economist points out, much of the tech investments are not even public, but private. The private market is dominated by angel investors and capital funds and they could be doing over optimistic investments in any thing that vaguely sounds like Facebook, google and twitter.So, let us see what angel investors are throwing money at presently. The June issue of wired magazine featured an article about a number of hopeful startups in one of the most hyped tech incubators Y combinator. These start ups had diverse business plans. Here are some examples:

Convore: next generation of group chat.
Like.fm: a social music site that tracks what you listen to online. It’s like an upgraded version of last.fm
Moki.tv: an easy-to-use tv guide for the streaming video era.
inPulse: a watch that displays emails, tweets and other info
LikeALittle: a service that lets you flirt and chat with people who happen to be near them.

When angel investors invest it is much like the gold rush. They hope to strike gold, but are they aiming for a panning operation for small nuggets of gold or are they systematically searching for a mining operation? It seems that they all hope to strike gold mining style and discover the new google. Do the above mentioned examples really warrant that kind of optimism? In order to understand why let us look briefly at innovation, since all these companies are innovative in one way or another.

According to Clayton M. Christensen there are two kinds of innovations: sustaining innovations and disruptive innovations. Sustaining innovations are small incremental improvements like a faster CPU, purer insulin, or cleaner steel. Big companies with large R&D units have an advantage here, since they can have many people working on fine tunings and experiment with what works and what doesn’t. Today google, amazon and yahoo are in this class. An example of a sustaining innovation is the google Chrome, where google has made a faster browser, and they continue to make it faster. A sign that you are dealing with a sustaining innovation is that you can put “A better/faster/cheaper way to…” in front of the product.

On the other hand we have disruptive innovations. These are innovations that fundamentally change the game. They are frequently a lot better on one attribute, but worse on most others. An example of this is cellular phones. They were initially not as stable as fixed line telephones. You could risk not having connection or maybe run out of battery. But they had the important property of being mobile.

This special attribute makes it attractive to a niche initially (business men for the cell phone) and through sustaining innovations the disruptive innovation reaches the competing products. This is also what happened for google with search. The results they could produce initially were not as good as the edited ones by yahoo. But google excelled on one parameter, how much content could be indexed per employee, since it was done by an algorithm and not by a human. When in 2000 the then dominant yahoo wanted to outsource their stage-two searches, that is searches that were not in their directory, google won the contract ( “Planet google”, p.67). The search traffic that yahoo led through google helped them to continuously improve their results until they reached a level that matched what yahoo’s manually indexed product did. Eventually they superseeded the competition.

The big succesful companies we see today are all disruptive:

ebay – a new way of trading between people
facebook – a new way of communicating with your friends
amazon – a new way of buying books
skype – a new way of talking with friends and relatives
Paypal – a new way of paying

The sign that you have a disruptive innovation is that you can put a “new way of…” in front of the product.

But what about our batch of “the new google”. Are they disruptive or sustaining?

Convore: next generation of group chat. is a sustaining innovation of chat.
Like.fm: a social music site that tracks what you listen to online. It’s like an upgraded version of last.fm. Is a sustaining innovation of music tracking technology
Moki.tv: an easy-to-use tv guide for the streaming video era. Is a sustaining innovation of tv guides.
inPulse: a watch that displays emails, tweets and other info. Is a sustaining innovation of the watch.
LikeALittle: a service that lets you flirt and chat with people who happen to be near them. Is a sustaining innovation of chat.

All of them seem to be sustaining innovations that do things a bit better. It seems more like panning operations that will produce they occasional nugget of gold than mining operations that will truckloads of gold. The amount of cash they were able to raise, however, indicated a disruptive potential. It is of course never easy to spot the new google, but it should at least be a disruptive innovation if this is your goal.

So, if you know any angel investors, next time you hear them humming “North to Alaska” remind them to listen attentively after phrases that contain the words “a new way to…” in the salespitch and  move on as soon as they hear the phrase “an improvement of..” .

“I predict a(nother) riot” – The Good and the Bad School Master

Few had thought the 2004 hit “I Predict a Riot” by Kaiser Chiefs to be prophetic. Energetic – yes, melodic – yes, but prophetic – no way. Never the less, the riots in England the past few weeks have shown that it does indeed have divinatory qualities. However, the clues to the understanding and solution seriously predates Kaiser Chiefs. They can be in a 500 year old old book written in Latin by a British author.

The riots and lootings were hard to comprehend for brits as well as for foreigners. Indeed the rioters did not seem to follow any common agenda. Some seem to have taken the chance to demonstrate against the governments cut down on well fare, while others were indulging in anarchistic joy and yet others sought to enrich themselves.

After the riots Prime Minister David Cameron made it very clear that the cause of the riots was criminality pure and simple. He promised severe punishment to anyone who had participated in the riots and would use any means to come down hard on rioters in the future. Deputy Prime minister Nick Clegg made clear that it was a top priority to punish the criminals, and he would also consider longer terms for rioting.
But are these riots just caused by criminality pure and simple and would more severe punishment actually help?

The question is far from new in British political thought. The philosopher Thomas More touched on this problem in one of the classics of political philosophy “Utopia” already 500 years ago. Utopia is hailed as one of the key inspirations of the modern well fare states, such as the British. In the book utopia is an island just recently discovered with a very just society. Many interesting thoughts on the constitution of society can be found here. It is however not in the description of Utopia that we find the key. It is actually before the description of Utopia in the first book. Here we find a dialogue about the present state of the British society under King Henry the Eighth. the subject under discussion was theft. Allow me to quote the passage in full here:

“It happened one day when I was dining with him there was present a layman, learned in the laws of your country, who for some reason took occasion to praise the rigid execution of justice then being practised on thieves. They were being executed everywhere, he said, with as many as twenty at a time being hanged on a single gallows. And then he declared he could not understand how so many thieves sprang up everywhere when so few of them escaped hanging. I ventured to speak freely before the Cardinal, and said, “There is no need to wonder: this way of punishing thieves goes beyond the call of justice, and is not in any case for the public good. The penalty is too harsh in itself, yet it isn’t an effective deterrent. Simple theft is not so great a crime that it ought to cost a man his head, yet no punishment however severe can restrain men from robbery when they have no other way to eat (..) you (..) seem to imitate bad schoolmasters, who would rather whip their pupils than teach them.” (p. 15-16)

While I don’t intend to push the analogy too far (rioting is obviously different from simple theft), there are some interesting observations that can be extracted from this passage:
1) No matter how hard you punish, there will still be this crime.
2) People commit this crime because they are pushed towards it by circumstances in their lives.
3) It feels better to punish the offender than to educate him.

I think the reaction of Cameron and Clegg shows that they have not realized any of these three points made by their compatriot 500 years ago. They call for harder punishment and do not accept that there is a deeper reason for these riots and most notably: they do not look to measures that could improve the situation. They take the stance of the bad school master who would rather whip than teach. So, maybe Cameron and Clegg should pause for a moment and look to the good school master instead and turn their attention to educating the people. Only thus can we strip the tune by Kaiser Chiefs of its prophetic qualities and merely succumb to the energetic and melodic qualities.

The New Face of Marketing

The traditional role of marketing was to push information about products to customers in order to maximise the probability that the salesforce would sell this product at customer touch points. But that role is changing. A recent McKinsey report reveals that this picture is one of the past, especially for companies that focus on customer intimacy.

Pushing marketing material down the throat of your customers is not how you build loyalty with your customers. Not even if it is very well targeted and on email or through an app (although it may help under certain conditions).
It is not either through superficial utilization of web 2.0 utilities, such as a fan page on facebook, a twitter account or a channel on you tube, where you can demonstrate your company’s awesome products and how they address your customers needs (although it may help under certain conditions).
Marketing is not either an onslaught of cross channel sniper attacks, where you will incessantly be bombarded with just the right offer for you (although it may help under certain conditions).

Now, how “may these things help” “May” is an auxiliary verb used to express a possibility. What are the conditions that transforms the possibility into a reality? The basic condition is that marketing should depart from a customer problem. But how do we find them?

The McKinsey report states that you must understand the customer “buy cycle”. I believe this is a key observation. We need to focus on the steps a customer goes through when he or she makes the decision to buy to understand the problems they are facing. Let us look at what such an understanding of the buy-cycle may reveal about their problems.

In food retail we know that most customers have not made up their mind about what to buy for the most part when they enter a store. So, let us understand what sort of problems they may have when they enter. Peter enters the store with his children after work and needs to find some cheap food to cook quickly (less than thirty minutes). Ethel is arranging a dinner party and need inspiration for the menu and find the right wines to match it. Those are surely not the same problems and cannot be addressed through the same marketing mechanisms.

How would future marketing proceed from such a list of problems? You could develop the capability to advice the customer on dinner options based on relevant criteria (cooking time, meal type, dinner for guests/everyday dinner and price). You may even make that into an app on facebook or on your web page, but then you still wouldn’t solve the customers problem. They are in the store now. You need to make it accessible at the moment the problem arises for example through an app for iphone. You can even put up QR codes in the store so people can download the app in the store the moment they are facing the problem. You could also make in-store information points with touch screens made of tablet computers running you webpage.

When a suggestion for dinner menu pops up Peter would appreciate a good offer on some of the ingredients and Ethel on the wine. Suddenly shopping has been a good experience for Peter and Ethel and marketing has helped solve one of their problems. When the customer pulls marketing information in order to help him/her solve a problem it is much more efficient and less invasive.

The call for action is therefore to go a new way in understanding the customer buy-cycle and pick out key problems that are un addressed presently. This understanding of the buy-cycle is anthropological in nature and may be more complicated than just conducting interviews and focus groups, which is the traditional methods of marketing research. The anthropological method of participant observation is probably more suited for this. If an anthropologist lived with a a group of subjects, such understanding of their problems would be more forthcoming and thus the new face of marketing can become a helpful face instead of an intrusive one.