My interest in business or commercial activity first started when a work friend of my Mum visited our family. She brought a book on commerce which is what business studies would have been called decades earlier. I read the book and that piqued my interest.
At the end of your third year in secondary school you are allowed to pick optional classes that you will take exams in. this is supposed to be something that you’re free to chose.
I was interested in business studies (partly because my friend Joe was doing it). But the school decided that they wanted me to do physics and chemistry instead and they did the same for my advanced level exams because I had done well in the normal level ones. School had a lot to answer for, but fortunately I managed to get back on track with college.
Eventually I finally managed to do pass a foundational course at night school whilst working in industry. I used that to then help me go and study for a degree in marketing.
I work in advertising now. And had previously worked in petrochemicals, plastics and optical fibre manfacture. All of which revolve around business. That’s why you find a business section here on my blog.
Business tends to cover a wide range of sectors that catch my eye over time. Business usually covers sectors that I don’t write about that much, but that have an outside impact on wider economics. So real estate would have been on my radar during the 2008 recession.
Japan teams up with Finland on 6G development – Nikkei Asia the consortium on 6G development features a number of familiar names. On the Japanese side the following organisations are involved: includes NTT, NTT DOCOMO, KDDI, SoftBank, Rakuten Mobile and the University of Tokyo. I was a bit surprised not to see NEC here as they are Japan’s domestic telecoms equipment manufacturer. From Finland you have the following 6G development partners: University of Oulu and Nokia. (Paywall)
The underground zines that kept self-expression alive in Mao’s China – The Boston Globe – Despite Beijing’s tight control of the printed word and its dissemination, a new and diffuse network of underground printers — low-tech, affordable, remarkably flexible, and incredibly hard to police — springs up. Equipped with nothing more than Chinese typewriters, mimeograph machines, and stencil duplicators, underground publishers mass-produce an untold quantity of materials for a vast and diverse readership.
Security
How to Turn Off Amazon Sidewalk | WIRED – For the Echo family of speakers, open the Alexa mobile app and go to More, Settings, Account Settings, Amazon Sidewalk and choose Disable. In the Ring app, go to the Control Center, Amazon Sidewalk, Disable, Confirm.
Myanmar first came on my radar as a child. I was peripherally aware of it through the bits of Rudyard Kipling that I had read in the school library. Though I was reading Kipling more for his use of words and compact style with which he wrote.
I had also read a book that made grim reading on jungle warfare from the perspective of Wingate’s Chindits. The Chindits that went into Myanmar were named after the Chindwin river that they crossed. They were made up of underfed troops often weakened by diseases such as malaria and dysentery and suffered an extremely high casualty-rate. It is one of them weird bits of history that the British celebrate, but in reality sound like one long slow train wreck. The closest comparison that I think think of is the Irish lionisation of 1798 rebellion exemplified by Thomas Flanagan’s The Year Of The French. My impression of Myanmar, was a country that is hot and hard to live in. Myanmar was also well known for rubies and sapphires.
I moved to Hong Kong in 2012, the year before a civilian government had come to power in Myanmar after decades of military rule. Things rapidly started to open up. I worked alongside Red Fuse the dedicated agency that WPP had put together for Colgate-Palmolive.
In reality, Red Fuse was pretty much the whole of the Young & Rubicam office in Hong Kong at the time. Colgate launched its oral health month campaign in Myanmar with the marketing material printed on the insides of the brown cardboard boxes that there products where distributed to retailers in.
My more adventurous colleagues took short breaks in Yangoon. Some bought locally mined jade to take back to Hong Kong. A colleague whose partner worked for an airline even moved to Yangoon as airlines set up new routes and hotels opened up catering for business and tourism. I worked on Telenor’s recruitment of of local resellers in Myanmar for its soon to start mobile network. We provided strategy for a local agency to implement.
Soon after I came back in 2014, I put together a presentation on the potential of Myanmar. But why Myanmar? Well from my perspective other markets were either already on their way or on their way to decline.
China waning
I had already seen that China was slowing down from a growth perspective. China was aging, the demographic dividend would last for only another decade or so. (Population growth stalled in China during 2020 according to government official figures. The FT reported that China’s population had gone into decline. I am inclined to believe the FT more.) The Chinese government are sufficiently rattled that they have introduced a three child policy.
Chinese markets for products were saturated, particularly in FMCG. Whole sections of the economy are still walled off from foreign participation. There is continued capital flight out of the country by local business people and government officials.
The most important factor that I didn’t put in my slide deck was the gradual Han nationalism tone that was rising in China at the time.
Vietnam well on its way
Vietnam was already on the rise and well known by this point. We were getting some of our online creative built in Ho Chi Minh city by staff who were better than Indian or Chinese development houses.
Myanmar looked like Vietnam in the early 1990s. It has proven oil deposits that are largely tapped out. The Burmah Oil Company and Standard Oil extracted oil from Myanmar from the late 19th century onwards. In 1991, Shell discovered natural gas deposits. By the time I went to Hong Kong, western companies were joining the Indians, Chinese and Malaysians in developing natural gas fields.
Like Vietnam, there was a large young population, the majority of whom still lived on the family farm. 70 percent of people worked on the land and just 7 percent of people worked in industry. Meaning that workforce could be turned to manufacturing. The population at the time was almost 51.5 million and would grow to 54 million in a couple of years.
Myanmar by numbers
In 2012 and 2013, internet penetration was in single percentage figures. That’s why Young & Rubicam were printing marketing materials on the insides of brown cardboard boxes.
The economy was growing from a low base partly caused by the financial crisis and international sanctions against the military rulers at the time. The economic growth had been stifled by 59 years of military rule.
Year on year growth looked like the go-go years of China. The average income of a Burmese person was just $10 a day. Although most of the senior business and military elites were very well off indeed with bolt holes for them and their family in Dubai.
Myanmar had:
119.8 million tons of copper available to mine
283 billion cubic metres of proven natural gas reserves
Only 49 percent of the population had access to electricity
At least four international tobacco companies had entered Myanmar and up to half of Burmese smoked. Of those who smoked less than 5 percent were smoking filtered cigarettes
Myanmar challenges
Distribution partners. Tobacco companies and Telenor were encouraging people to become retail entrepreneurs
Infrastructure development had been prioritised for military rather than commercial needs. Those roads that are available are often of poor quality
While half the population had access to electricity, the supply isn’t reliable
Corruption is a major issue that I didn’t include in the presentation. The military and historic business elites didn’t get their Dubai penthouses through hard work and enterprise of their own.
2021
Of course the military overthrow of the elected government through all that into chaos.
Max Fujita, head of European hydrogen fuel cells at Panasonic, discusses the importance of hydrogen technology. Hydrogen is the most widespread chemical element in the universe and could play a significant role in achieving zero net emission and other goals such as wind and geothermal power. Hydrogen is important for more environmentally friendly steel mills and foundries. It even offers a solution for the range anxiety caused by lithium ion battery cars.
The Asia Society have a video on the story behind the Japan traditional craft revitalisation competition. If you read Monocle you will be well aware of Japan’s strength in traditional crafts, often within centuries old businesses. More Japan related content here.
Interesting observations on culture and remote working. Interesting where they are talking about a culture crisis. For the past five years before the pandemic I saw company cultures changed as noise cancelling headphones went on and desks turned into long benches. This ironically damaged company culture. The pandemic shook up office space again, with the home office. I was quite fortunate as I had pretty much everything I needed after freelancing. But I did a lot of Zoom calls with people punched on the end of their bed. The range of views in this series of interviews shows that there will be wide mix of responses.
Finally as a curry cup noodle fan, this next story appealed to me. Nissin (who make the iconic Cup Noodle) has a new strategy in the sustainability game by eliminating the “lid closing seal,” a thin strip of sellotape type material that holds your noodle cup closed while the ramen is cooking in boiling water. This very small change will save an estimated 33 tons of plastic waste per year produced by Nissin. Instead the lid will be held shut by two ‘ears’ on the lid film.
I was recommended Measure What Matters by my friend and fellow ex-Yahoo Cathy Ma. Cathy found the book useful in her way through managing teams. In Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains the idea of objectives and key results or OKRs.
About John Doerr
If you’ve worked in or around the Silicon Valley technology space from the PC age through to the 2010s Doerr’s name will have a passing familiarity to you. Doerr was a salesman at Intel in the 1970s, realised that there were too many good people ahead of him and took an over in venture capital instead. Doerr was involved in funding:
Compaq – Compaq kicked off the market for ‘IBM compatible’ PCs and made the first portable ‘IBM compatible’ PC. Soon after IBM was no longer the dominant player in personal computing leading to the Wintel duopoly. Compaq eventually offered a full range of large servers, workstations and PC when it acquired Digital Equipment Corporation and Tandem Computing. Compaq was in turn bought by H-P
Netscape – Netscape Communications mainstreamed the internet browser, email client, web servers and email servers. The server software lives on in Oracle’s product line via the Netscape – Sun Microsystems alliance. The browser indirectly carried on through an open source project Mozilla
Symantec – Symantec started off as a natural language processing company in the early 1980s, it became famous for its Mac antivirus software and then went into the DOS and Windows market after merging with Peter Norton Computing. It now has a consumer facing business called NortonLifeLock and the business focused software part of the business was sold to Broadcom
Sun Microsystems – Sun Microsystems started off as a UNIX workstation manufacturer. Over time they built up a healthy server and software business that supported much of the infrastructure of the web. They were instrumental in the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix – which influenced parts of the macOS that I am typing this post on, RISC processors in your smartphone, thin client computing like Google Docs, and virtualised computing that is instrumental for cloud computing. Sun Microsystems workstations were popular with investment banks, telecoms companies and internet startups bought their servers. The company’s decline can be marked by the dot com crash. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and their technology lives on
drugstore.com – was a first generation e-tailer in health and beauty products. Walgreens bought the business in 2011, and shut down the website five years later.
Amazon.com – needs no introduction
Intuit – Intuit sells financial software in the US. TurboTax helps Americans do their tax returns, Mint provides a personal finance dashboard for consumers and QuickBooks is accounting software for small and medium sized businesses
Macromedia – Macromedia was a software company that developed tools for creatives and programmers. It was eventually acquired by Adobe. Macromedia products live on in the Adobe product range
Google – the search engine.
About OKRs
For all of the companies that Doerr has funded he has advocated OKRs. The idea of OKRs came from Doerr’s colleague at Intel Andy Grove. OKRs are a collaborative process. The idea is that it is used with teams and the individuals who make up the teams. Management seeks to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. The key results in OKRs are how you track progress towards the objective, create alignment within the team, and encourage engagement around measurable goals. They are also supposed to flex with circumstance, which is one of the key points of separation from Peter Drucker’s management by objectives (MBO).
The first part of the book Measure What Matters explains the origin and process behind OKRs.
You can get everything that you need in the first two chapters covering 35 pages.
The Cult of OKR
The rest of the book is a series of self aggrandising endorsements of OK from senior executives who are OKR advocates:
Larry Page of Alphabet
Bill Davidow of Intel
Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook
Bill Gates on The Gates Foundation
It crosses the line for me and almost reads like a high water mark for Silicon Valley hubris; Doerr’s book was published in 2018. Three years later and:
Bill Gates is in the most trouble he has been in since the Judge Jackson ruling
Alphabet and Facebook are being assailed by regulators around the world
Intel looks like a shadow of its former self. Its fabrication process are three years behind competitors. Customers are designing their own chips and AMD is eating their lunch in high performance processors
Secondly, Doerr’s book, whilst acknowledging Andy Groves role of OKR creator; fails to acknowledge that Andy gave a good descriptor of OKRs in his 1983 book High Output Management.
I think one of the reasons that I am not that keen on Measure What Matters, is that the book doesn’t work for culturally as a non-American. Instead I would recommend Andy Grove’s own book High Output Management. More books that might be of interest here.
The Exponential Era is a business strategy book published by the IEEE Press as part of its series on technology, innovation and leadership. David Espindola and Michael Wright work at Intercepting Horizons and advise at the University of Minnesota.
The book is a concise 182 pages including its index. It has a satisfying hard cover about the height and width of a paperback book. The book proportions reminded of many of the books that we used to have my secondary school’s library. It felt right in my hand. Its a small thing, but it matters.
The secondary school analogy goes further; the book summarises knowledge and makes it relatively easily digestible.
The Exponential Era includes:
The threat of platforms and their ability to disrupt market sectors
Why people find it hard to grasp the change brought about by the future
The book consolidates the kind of reading that people in technology and marketing would likely have read anyway. Chances are if you’ve already read books like Saving Big Blue, Measure What Matters, The Lean Startup and Zero to One, then The Exponential Era isn’t written for you.
Who should read this book?
Instead this book seems to be an increasingly diminished audience. A company too small for it’s management to have been lectured on disruption by McKinsey, Bain, BCG or Accenture. But still large enough to be concerned. Like McKinsey et al Espindola and Wright are looking to create disruption fear and sell their SPX methodology to re-engineer their business. I would have thought the c suite in most businesses would have at least done enough reading to have a high level understanding of the content in the book.
The book’s relentless utopian optimism reminded me a lot of business works from the 1970s to the dot com era. I think that The Exponential Era will be of most use to junior people at the start of their career looking for a primer rather than its intended audience.
