iPlot

The Opposite House

Otherness and other pillars of a new moral economy

“So, what is the reason for your existence?” the German professor at a Chinese business school reception in Shanghai asked me, to start a conversation. I felt like ad man Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men when his false identity is unveiled. Who are you really? Caught off guard, I answered: “I’m a marketer.” The conversation moved on, others had wittier sound bites to contribute, and my unease continued. It had been weighing on me since I had put my foot on Chinese soil a few days earlier, and here in this beautiful mansion, confiscated by the government from the corrupt former mayor of Shanghai, it was a steady companion.

You may think that the homogenized cosmopolitan settings of the tier one cities Beijing and Shanghai would seem familiar and comforting to a seasoned Western business traveler like me, but this time the glitzy, uber-capitalist façade did not alleviate my profound sense of dislocation and alienation. I was a stranger and everything was strange to me. This sentiment was exacerbated when I checked into the Opposite House, a chic designer hotel in Beijing’s Sanlitun village district that literally comprises of two opposing halves, each housing generous rooms, connected through a vast space underneath, which is used as both art gallery and lobby. Designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and catering to the ‘global soul,’ it was meant to make you feel at home in an open, accessible space of kindness, but it did the opposite to me. It manifested the Otherness of my being here, in the heart of this strange city, with other strangers, who, like me, probably had no clue and so, like me, just marveled at the strangeness of it all.

It occurred to me that the Opposite House was a metaphor for some of the issues I had been pondering for the past few months. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and while his words were infinitely wise, I thought that a more intelligent mind than mine may very well hold the two opposites, in Beijing or anywhere, but perhaps even the most intelligent mind would not necessarily be happy in doing so. It’s hard to be happy if you are denied a happy ending, and it’s an unpleasant, arduous task to withstand the temptation to reconcile dual or multiple truths. We are hardwired to believe – and to believe in one truth.

Having just worked through the intricacies of integrating a marketing function and harmonizing two brands (and very different business cultures), I know how exhausting it can be when there is always ‘the other side of the story.’ This ‘other side’ can be the externalization of effects (responsibility), or it can mean putting yourself in someone else’s shoes (empathy). What the other side rarely appreciates is how hard you have worked to be on yours, and how much effort it has been for you to truly believe in it. Whatever it takes then to make you switch sides (or at least recognize the opposite one), it must include some kind of reimbursement for the intellectual and emotional work that went into asserting and upholding your one truth. The grass may or may not be greener on the other side of the fence – the path there, the ‘empathy dividend,’ better be worthwhile. This is true for conflict management at the individual, institutional, societal, and international level: Israel and the Arab world, Shiites and Sunni, Pakistan and India, China and the US, North and South Korea, Occupy Wall Street versus the 1%, and the list goes on – the world is conveniently framed by antagonisms, by dualities that stubbornly resist both reconciliation and the parallel truths that Fitzgerald heralded.

China resolves dualities by grasping Yin and Yang as complementary, interconnected forces, and its defiance of dichotomous moral judgments is not always easy to accept for the Western mind. Henry Kissinger’s views On China are a notable exception to the many books (e.g. Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World and James Kynge’s China Shakes the World) that have recently examined how an ascendant and increasingly confident China could affect the rest of us. Kissinger seeks to understand China’s place in the world from the conditions of China’s complicated history and rich culture, not through the lens of Western morale. Kissinger does not portray China as hegemonial power but as an introverted nation that aims at protecting its ideal of a ‘harmonious society’ by making calculated offensive moves. He compares them to the Chinese board game Weiqi where the onus is on strategic encirclement rather than the black and white of absolute victory or defeat. Morality, essentially, deals with the question of how we treat the Other – the one who is not identical with us. Empathy, or even sympathy, is its foundation. With respect to China, this raises the question: To what extent can you leave your comfort zone, your moral center of gravity, to understand the Other before your absolute truth becomes relative, your ethical behavior situational, and your moral compass rudderless?

Moreover, a concept of morality based on Otherness presumes the Cartesian continuum of Ego and Self. But what if the line between Self and Other is fuzzy? In his writings, the British moral philosopher Derek Parfit (who became famous through his teleporter thought experiment and was recently portrayed in this stunning New Yorker article) rejects the integrity of personal identity and instead proposes a reductionist view of human life that renders the Kantian concept of the Self’s moral autonomy obsolete. If parts of your brain cells were to be transplanted into another body, he wonders, what would that do to yours and the other body’s personal identity? Who would be you? Parfit claims there would be two Selves (or none). Consequently, morality, in his view, is meta-personal and non-relational, and can only be derived from universal truths. To him, the loss of the concept of a separate Self is liberating, which puts him him in close proximity to Buddhists, who identify and recognize themselves in the Other:

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness... [However] When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.” [Derek Parfit]

Sam Harris’ latest book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values covers reductionist terrain as well, albeit from a very different vantage point. Harris seeks to constitute moral relevance from the alleged objectivity of scientific findings. But do we really want to entrust science all of our moral decisions? Science is not an authority on morality; it is its very subject. The moral landscape is not as flat as Harris wants us to believe. Or to riff on William Gibson: “Morality is here, it is just not very evenly distributed.”

Steven Pinker, in his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, argues that the spread of literacy led to a “circle of empathy,” propelled by many rights movements of 20th century that brandished immoral behavior as anti-social and by doing so accomplished to largely ban it from Western societies. If you look at the Occupy Wall Street movement – as nascent as it may appear – one wonders if we may see a similar social norm-shifting phenomenon emerge in the corporate world. Writer and Techonomy conference curator David Kirkpatrick wrote a poignant piece on how the new social power we witnessed in the Arab Spring may lead to a corporate revolution, and indeed one may wonder: Will the American Fall usher in the demise of the corporation as we know it?

Trade is an arbiter of peace, as Pinker argues. Collaboration and inclusion produce morale, an effect that is amplified by the tremendous amount of social capital generated by social media and in particular through the principle of reciprocity at work on social networking sites. Facebook, through this lens, can be viewed as the biggest morale producer of our times, not in the sense of giving to charities or supporting causes one click at a time – the so-often-derided ‘clicktivism’ – but through rich interactions and an appreciation and experience of Otherness that is made possible through the voyeurism emanating from the transparency of individual behaviors at public display.

On the other hand, hyper-connectivity may yield the opposite effect: When everything and everyone is connected all the time, will the individual moral Self be neutralized by a seamless collective that absorbs Otherness into Sameness? In this vein, Eli Pariser argues that the Social Web is a self-selecting Filter Bubble, and that rather than experiencing the Other, we’re just experiencing an increasingly narrow projection of ourselves, so that our social graph, based on our web history of purchases, clicks, friends, and likes, will ultimately become congruent with the social universe of One. Then our lives and the lives of others will be identical, and even with our identity spread beyond our Selves, it will not occur in the way Parfit envisioned it.

This debate on the Other is the main debate we ought to have in light of the crisis of our economies. A ‘moral economy’ puts the Other at the center of all its activities, and if it truly does, it will no longer need the qualifier ‘moral.’ However, our largely secularized and rationalized economy is struggling to restore its moral and spiritual acumen (see Umair Haque’s musings on The Meaning Organization and my own piece on the Chief Meaning Officer), and simply borrowing best practices from religion as proposed by Alain de Botton’s “Atheism 2.0” (see a good rebuttal here) won’t suffice when what we are really lacking is not a practical “god-free” tool kit but an idealistic and spiritual vision, a social contract that is meaningful at the personal level. Economist Robert C. Solomon described it aptly: “Markets systems are justified not because of efficiencies and profits but because humans are first and foremost social and emotional beings, and markets provide a sympathetic community for social exchange.” Consequently, Brad McLane, in a recent Huffington Post article, makes the case for the role of a “Chief Community Officer,” a leader who can reconcile individual interests with the satisfaction of trusted cooperation (research has shown that trust and trustworthiness produce oxytocin, the “hormone of love”).

Embracing Otherness has been the foundation for business since its inception – business serves the Other, as in the customer, or the stakeholders of today and tomorrow (future generations), but it has gained new relevance. Another, perhaps more important side to it is innovation. Otherness is the very source of innovation. The deviation from the normal, the conventional, and the routine is how new and different ideas are born – ideas that change the world for the better, which at the end of the day is the entrepreneur’s fundamental moral obligation. This is the legacy of Steve Jobs and other “fools” who “saw the world as it is not” – and changed it.

The new moral leadership starts with business school education. Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana therefore asks for a “reprofessionalization of the manager,” so that he can overcome the self-interest-driven homo economicus, the self-inflicted Machiavellian mechanisms of competition and short-term gain, and instead focus again on his true task – to build and nurture long-term cooperative relationships that allow an economy, a plurality of interactions and transactions between trusted and trusting Others guided by shared values, to thrive.

Back to the initial question: what justifies my existence? As a marketer, it is my responsibility to understand the Others and connect them through many parallel truths – even if it’s just for a moment, a flickering desire, a shared passion and experience, or a common purpose. I am an engineer of trust, and I enjoy communicating for the very act of communicating. I can create and cultivate “sympathetic communities” that rely on “woven interactions” rather than “vector communications.” In the best case, I can help build a house of opposites on the basis of the social capital and goodwill generated by meaningful brands that serve as moral stewards, embrace paradox, and balance the dialectic forces of competition and cooperation, codified behavior and open-ended innovation. I am not here to generate impressions; I am here to reward attention with lasting value.

(c) picture by Coolhunting

India: Urgent Emergence

This was India’s year. Obama visited, as did Sarkozy, and many other statesmen of lesser political weight or star appeal. With an annual growth rate of close to 8.9% and foreign direct investments projected to exceed $100 billion, the booming Indian economy defied the global recession. For the first time ever, eight Indian companies made it onto the Fortune 500 global list. And even PR crises like the ill-organized Commonwealth Games and political corporate scandals that were an easy target for India’s cynical media did not eclipse the nation's staggering rise – in fact, these events just seemed to magnify the spotlight. Without a doubt, the sub-continent became ready for primetime in 2010, and to many outside observers a new confidence appeared to take hold of India’s economic and intellectual elite.

This year also marked my first visit to India. I had the privilege of assuming leadership for a team in Gurgaon (New Delhi), Bangalore, and Chennai, and to immerse myself in a country I had never been to before. I vividly remember the first five minutes after my arrival at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi in September, the dusty air, the thick fog, the vanilla scented perfume tree in the car, and the calm driver whom I, for lack of any alternative, decided to wholeheartedly trust as he was racing me to my hotel amidst the polyphony of honks. Other countries are in your face or slowly creep into your soul with their mores, oddities, and sensations. India is around you, all the time. It is simple as the tourist cliché of itself (especially when you live in the airport-lounge-and-luxury-hotel bubble of the global business traveler) and yet complex as a vertical staggering of infinite parallel worlds which make sense each by themselves but fail to strike a consonant chord – like in the movie Inception.

When I attended the India Economic Summit in Delhi in November a few weeks after my first trip, jointly hosted (for the 26th time) by the World Economic Forum and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), President Obama had just passed through India, leaving an indelible mark on the Indian collective psyche with his now famous line that “India is not emerging, it has emerged.” The mood was bullish, if not exuberant, and many considered the visit a breakthrough moment for India. The economic reality had not changed but the awareness of the sheer scale of the opportunity ahead and the self-assurance that it might indeed be feasible to accomplish it, had moved to a whole new level, seemingly overnight. No wonder the optimism was palpable at the Summit.

The official theme was “Implementing India” but the actual theme that emerged during the three conference days was “Inclusive Growth” – how can India sustain its tremendous growth and at the same time narrow the social divide? While India’s growth numbers are impressive, many of the speakers acknowledged that its so-called “demographic dividend” (a term coined by Harvard demograph David Bloom) is a double-edged sword. By 2020 half of India’s population will be below 25, and it will account for 25% of the global workforce. But this demographic trend is unevenly distributed. India’s northern states, with their high fertility rates, are the main contributors to population growth (by 2025, the median age will be 26) whereas the south faces rapid aging (a median age of 34 by 2025). This means that “India’s demographic dividend is actually a double hump, one of which is already nearly exhausted,” Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekan writes in his seminal book Imagining India.

This “double hump” makes capitalizing on the remaining, “unexpensed” demographic dividend rather urgent. Experts foresee a demographic disaster unless India’s young workforce is properly skilled and employable by global standards. Unfortunately this is far from being the case today: For starters, 300 million people live in extreme poverty, that is, they live on less than one dollar per day, and 90% work in the informal economy. 70% of India’s 509 million-strong working population has not received a primary education, and only 11% of those aged 17-23 receive a higher education. India has the lowest education indicators among the G20 economies and the world’s highest number of illiterate people. One of the main challenges for India will be to create jobs for the 270 million people expected to enter the working-age population over the next 20 years. Will these people become the world’s workforce, as some predict, or the world’s worry?

Sustainable growth, many argue, will come from frugal (or reverse) social innovation, through public-private partnerships that scale at the base of the pyramid. It is well known that IBM has more employees in India than in any other country, and many of India’s big IT outsourcing companies (e.g. Wipro, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services etc.) have long been competing with multinationals. But no longer is India just the development center of excellence of the world or an emerging consumer market of massive scale; it is increasingly home to bottom-up innovations in areas such as energy, healthcare, and automotive, spurred by the urgency of structural change. Crisis has always proven to be a hotbed of innovation, and the need to improve the livelihood of a society is a powerful driver for entrepreneurship.

India is already the front of some radical product and service innovations such as the $3,000 car or the two cents per minute nationwide cell phone service. Moreover, with the deep penetration of low-cost telephony, the country’s emerging middle class could be a testing ground for the burgeoning mobile health (mHealth) technology market, in particular telemedicine and rapid diagnostic services. Globally, mHealth revenues are projected to grow by 25% annually, from $1.5 billion in 2010 to $4.6 billion by 2014. India is seeing many of its pioneering efforts, for example start-ups such as mDhil and eHealthpoints. The Indian healthcare industry, in general, is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, growing at 23% per annum.

A basic enabler of “inclusive growth” is to provide the rural population with access to information- and communication technologies and financial services. Although India is the second largest telecom market in the world and tele-density has increased to 56.6% in 2010, 44% of rural Indian households are still unwired, and of India’s 6,000,000 rural villages less than ten percent have a local bank branch. Microfinance, long heralded as an able solution to this shortcoming, has recently suffered a serious setback. The rapidly growing private microcredit industry faced imminent collapse when almost all borrowers in Andhra Pradesh, one of India’s largest states, stopped repaying their loans. Critics accused microfinance institutions of making “hyperprofits off the poor” by extending loans to poor villagers at exorbitant interest rates and without enough regard for their ability to repay. It will take some time for the industry to restore trust (and some more regulatory oversight from the state will help, too). But again, this crisis may spur much needed innovation in the Mobile Money space.

India’s villages are increasingly becoming a breeding ground for innovation, as its rural poor develop inventions out of necessity. Mansukhbhai Jagani, Mansukhbhai Patel, Mansukhbhai Prajapati, and Madanlal Kumawat, and three others are on a recent Forbes list of rural Indian entrepreneurs (compiled by IIM-Ahmedabad professor Anil K. Gupta) “whose inventions are changing lives” of the people across the country. Jagani developed a motorcycle-based tractor for India's poor farmers, which is both cost effective – costing roughly $318 – and fuel efficient. A farmer, Patel invented a cotton stripping machine that significantly cut the cost of cotton farming and revolutionized India’s cotton industry. Prajapati, a potter, invented a clay non-stick pan that costs Rs 100 and a clay refrigerator that runs without electricity for those who cannot afford a fridge or their electricity and maintenance costs. Madanlal Kumawat, a grassroots innovator with no more than a fourth-grade education, developed a fuel-efficient, multi-crop thresher that yields cleaner grains, which can be bagged directly and eliminates the cost of cleaning.

Design and design-driven innovation are quickly entering the business vocabulary here, too, and when I met with editors of business publications in Delhi a few weeks ago, their interest in design was as keen as their conviction that India will soon become a powerful innovation engine with global impact, propelled by a distinct national design style and a throng of young, ambitious, and fearless entrepreneurs. It will require a mix of national policy and education providing the economic framework, global design and innovation firms bringing quality standards and best practices to India, and – perhaps most importantly – Indian companies embracing design as a key differentiator and value-driver, with some quick and visible market successes.

Whether you’re strolling through Old Delhi or driving along the campuses of Bangalore’s IT firms, you can’t help but marvel at the tremendous pace with which the country and its people are happening. The whole country is on the move, which offers plenty of opportunities for upward social mobility but also disrupts traditional lifestyles and cultures. New high-rise developments for the burgeoning middle class (91 million urban households are projected to be part of it by 2030, up from 22 million today) stand in stark contrast to the poor villages right next to them, which are in the progress of upending their local identities and cultural roots. According to the United Nations Development program, it is expected that 41% of India’s population will live in cities by 2020, compared to less than 30% in 2010. That is 590 million people, nearly twice the population of the US today. A recent McKinsey report (“India’s Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth”) estimates that 70% of net new employment will be generated in cities by 2030 and that 85% of total tax revenue will come from the urban economy.

Needless to say, that this migration will further contribute to stresses on the already insufficient infrastructure. McKinsey expects 68 Indian cities to have a population of more than one million by 2030 (up from 42 today vs. 35 in Europe). It warns that the current urban policy framework will lead to urban decay and gridlock. Today, India is investing eight percent of its GDP in infrastructure, which is a high number by international standards. And as much as $300 billion are forecast to be devoted to urban infrastructure over the next 20 years, a twofold increase in per capita spending of $17 today. But McKinsey believes that $1.2 trillion capital investments are necessary to meet the projected demand in Indian cities. The firm proposes fundamental city governance reforms to ensure these funds are not only raised but put to work efficiently. Unlike China, India cannot issue sharp policy shifts to appease a young population that may not be satisfied with the living standards of their parents. If urban policies fail, social upheaval, fuelled by underlying religious and ethnic divides, will likely be the result. Or as Nandan Nilekan puts it: “This is our biggest, but also our last chance.”

India is aware of its “moment” and understands that the window of opportunity for inclusive growth is limited. The government is seeking to balance the hustle, the frenzy, and the urgency with calm and confidence. It is the only possible attitude when you have to govern what seems to be genuinely ungovernable. I thought of a line from a song by Thom Yorke: “You have all the time in the world. Don’t squander it.”

[picture: painting by Vangobot. Vangobot is "a robot who paints with the soul of the human artists who taught him how to see."]

The Soft Power of Social

Over the course of the past twelve months, I wrote several blog posts and articles about the Chief Meaning Officer, a role which I envision as an innovative leader who employs the new social power of marketing – provisioned by Social as a governing principle of all business interactions – to transform his/her organization (Charlene Li also elaborates on this theme in her new book Open Leadership). I presented this concept at some conferences including next in Hamburg, mostly to fellow marketers or representatives from digital agencies, and you can also hear me riff on it in this podcast produced by Dutch brand agency Energize. I received a ton of feedback: encouragement, endorsements, and consent, but also skepticism suggesting that this model might just be another marketing fad.

Invited by BIDC, the Beijing Industrial Design Center, I was extremely grateful to have the opportunity to introduce the idea to a group of Chinese designers at a workshop in Beijing a few weeks ago. It was the first time I shared the Chief Meaning Officer framework in a different cultural and professional context, and it was a welcome reality check.

I was a bit worried that the topic might be a stretch, both because product designers would not really care that much about marketing innovation, and also because I wasn't quite sure how relevant the gospel of the social web might be for a Chinese audience.

The attendees, however, repudiated all my concerns. First of all, meaning seems to be a timely denominator for a generation of digital natives that demands more self-governance, quality, and accountability in its interactions with brands, no matter what the cultural and regulatory parameters are. The appetite for “betterness,” as Umair Haque would call it, is a global phenomenon.

Moreover, because both my audience and I were outside of our comfort zones, we ended up having a very open and animated discussion that nicely bridged marketing and design. One can’t exist without the other. Marketers’ task, you could argue, is to make tangibles intangible, whereas designers make the intangibles tangible. Both orchestrate time and space to create meaningful experiences that transcend a unique value proposition based on scarcity by pointing to a higher mission, a greater cause that is universally appealing.

This is the unique “soft power” – the ability to shape a brand of cultural principles and behaviors – that marketers and designers have in common and that nowadays is mostly facilitated by the mechanisms of sharing and collaborating on the social web. If economic growth stagnates, currencies deflate, and institutional systems fail, this social soft power might be the only power remaining to hold our societies together – in Greece, California, or China.

Chief Meaning Officer: Tangible Ways to Create Intangible Value

Privacy Is Over. Here Comes Sociality.

As widely discussed by privacy advocates and blogs, Facebook recently changed some of its privacy settings. Users are no longer able to limit the viewing of their profile photos, home towns, and friends lists to only approved friends. Those are all public now by default. Moreover, Facebook’s new default settings “recommend” that dynamic content such as status messages and photos be made public. While the blogosphere still closely scrutinizes these changes and is aghast at Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘privacy is over’ claims made at the Crunchies awards (he didn’t actually say it verbatim but his statements more or less implied it), I have to admit I was surprised that all this stirred such an uproar. Facebook is only reacting to a larger social trend as it strives to become an asymmetrical and therefore more growth-enabled network (or communications platform) – like Twitter. Privacy, at least a more traditional notion thereof, is the collateral damage of this strategic agenda. With the value of reciprocity (narrowcasting) succumbing to the prospect of exponentiality (broadcasting), privacy is no longer commercially exploitable. “No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of ‘free,’” writes social networking researcher Danah Boyd in a blog post in which she otherwise harshly criticizes Facebook’s move. The age of privacy as we know it might be over indeed. Is it worth fighting for?

Privacy (from the Latin ‘privatus,’ according to Wikipedia: “separated from the rest, deprived of something, especially office, participation in the government”), the “right to be let alone,” is considered a human right in most parts of the world, in spite of all cultural relativism. Historically speaking, privacy has undergone a remarkable evolution. Aristotle distinguished between the public sphere of politics and political activity, the polis, and the private or domestic sphere of the family, the oaks. If a citizen of Athens was a private man, then it meant he was stripped of any political office and therefore considered “inferior.” Later, in the enlightened civil societies of Europe, however, privacy became a hallmark of the bourgeoisie, a hard-earned privilege that marked the delineation between upper and working classes. The latter had work – if they were fortunate – the former “had a life,” because they could afford it. This life tended to be private, by definition. In the emerging information economies of the 20th century, various theories described privacy as control over information about oneself (Parent, 1983), while others defended it as a broader concept crucial for human dignity (Bloustein, 1964), or emphasized the social aspect of it with regards to enabling intimacy (Gerstein, 1978; Inness, 1992).

Throughout their historical mutations, the public and private spheres needed one another like yin and yang. Having a life was a private act, but only if it was publicly earned and respected. This dialectic relationship will always remain. There is no privacy without publicy and vice versa. And yet, while privacy may never go away as a philosophical counterweight to publicy, today it is publicy that counts as the new privilege of the digital upper class. Privacy has been marginalized to the fringes of a society whose modus operandi is based on the very public mechanisms of social sharing. In the digital era, a private life does not exist. Google ergo sum.

The search engine’s recent public stance against the Chinese government, threatening to shut down all its China operations after Gmail accounts of Chinese activists had been hacked, highlights this new power structure and the evolving value of privacy in our ever-connected world. When the privacy of Google’s users was violated, the company decided to respond with a public statement, mounting public pressure to press on an essentially private matter. Good for a company that does not want be evil, many people applauded, but it bore a certain irony that Google acted as de facto digital state with its own foreign policy. Isn’t Google, after all, built on the very principle of making private data public? Isn’t it because of Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” that we have come to terms with the fact that our online lives and afterlives will never be private again and will be perpetually archived in the very public cloud?

In the case of Google vs. China, what was bemoaned as the loss of privacy was in fact the lack of publicy. Privacy is the most precious asset in more or less closed societies in which trust is a scarce resource and true publics don’t exist. But as we live our lives in the openness of the web, isn’t it publicy that we need to enable and protect? An ideal publicy that is so transparent and democratic that it doesn’t need privacy as refuge?

It’s complicated. Stowe Boyd has declared this to be the “Decade of Publicy,” in which he expects “the superimposition of publicy on top of, and partly obscuring, privacy:”

“Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent. (…) It’s as if we are gaining the ability to see into the ultraviolet and infrared ends of the social spectrum when we are online, and in some contexts we are dropping out yellows or reds. To those tied to the visible color spectrum we are habituated to, this new sort of vision will be 'irreal.' But ultraviolet has always existed: we just couldn't see it before. (…) This will be a fracturing of the premises of privacy, and a slow rejection of the metaphors of shared space. The principles of publicy are derived from the intersection of infinite publics and our shared experience of time online, through media like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The innate capability we have to shift in a heartbeat from a given public, and our corresponding persona, to another, is now being accelerated by streaming social tools. This will be the decade when publicy displaces privacy, online and off.”

As we struggle to maintain the traditional, monolithic privacy-publicy dichotomy, perhaps we must start using a different terminology altogether and embrace a new concept: sociality. In a hyper-individualized society, sociality is becoming the main object of desire for individuals. Or as Markus Albers puts it in his forthcoming book about what he coins the Meconomy:

“The Meconomy does not entail a purely egoistic philosophy. On the contrary, it promotes a new culture of empathy and social engagement. As we increasingly decide for ourselves how, where, and with whom we work, the search for meaning gains more importance. The trend to combine economical with social engagement grows stronger. We want to do good, be happy, and make money. In the old patriarchal, hierarchical, and inflexible working world, these aims were often mutually exclusive. In the Meconomy, their combination is almost a precondition for success.”

The semantic coincidence is telling. “Me” desires “Meaning.” As much as publicy needs privacy and vice versa, the “Meconomy” needs the “Meaning Economy” – as its co-evolutionary, symbiotic partner. With meaning emerging as the core currency of all market interactions (because it is ultimately what consumers buy; and friends, fans, and followers buy into), people, organizations, and brands that provide meaning will be the power players of the new Me(aning) Economy – brands like Apple, conferences like TED, contests like the Olympic Games, sport clubs like FC Barcelona, media organizations like NPR, non-profits like UNICEF, and, yes, politicians like Obama.

Sociality may succeed privacy because it is a critical precondition for meaning. To be meaningful, meaning needs to be shared, and sharing can only occur in open social settings. Open social settings, however, by definition, compromise privacy, in all its four textbook modes (solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve). Meaning means giving things a name, making sense of “Black Swans,” unexpected events. In other words: Only an event that becomes a story (which still is the most powerful social media of all times, a true evergreen on the social web!) is meaningful.

Thus, it makes sense to replace the strict privacy-publicy opposition with a multi-layered continuum along progressive levels of sociality. Sociality may turn out to be a much better variable for describing and regulating our digital lives. The question then no longer is how private we can be, but how social we want to be. Instead of privacy seetings, we should speak of sociality settings: The maximum number of friends we want to have; and through which channels we want to ‘socialize’ our contents etc. Privacy understood as sociality (as an enabling and not a defensive right) grants us the ability to control who knows what about us and who has access to us, and thereby allows us to vary our social interactions with different people so that we can control our various social relationships at different levels of intimacy.

This new sociality is most visibly manifest in online social networks. It is worth noting that these not only mirror the mechanisms of offline social interactions but actually provide users with more control over their privacy (or sociality) than they would ever have in the physical world. On Facebook and other networks, you can pick and choose the people you want to meet and share ‘presence’ with; in a restaurant, bar, and other public spaces, you can’t. Exclusivity in the real world needs to be earned, whereas online it is a given.

Bill Thompson pledges we should embrace the new liberties that come with this new radical transparency:

“The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality,’ how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted – in all senses – disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human.”

All this openly shared user data represents not only an enourmous amount of social capital but also a huge collective leap of faith. Whether the big digital platforms and ecosystems will honor this trust to maintain civic publics or if they will choose to exploit it for (private) economic reasons, at any price, will be one of the defining moments of this young decade and the most impactful decision it will have to make. Control (as the catalyst of privacy) is good, but trust (as the catalyst of sociality) is better. We can afford to lose our privacy, but we will not survive the loss of sociality.

[image: Geekologie]

Marketing with Meaning: How KLM Activates Dormant Social Networks

I wrote earlier that 'marketing with meaning' has the ability to 'activate' customers. An effective way to activate customers is by activating the dormant social networks they inhabit (often without even knowing it). While social networking has visualized the so-called 'six degrees of separation,' all business transactions have a social component and can be seen as expressions of the underlying social micro-universes, 'the worlds within worlds,' in which – shifting time and place – individuals travel and interact. As marketers face the daunting challenge of connecting with fragmented audiences that are increasingly split into billions of social atoms populating myriad micro-networks, activating dormant social networks is their foremost task.

KLM's Africa and China Clubs, launched in 2007 and 2006 respectively, provide an interesting case study. The Dutch airline offers business customers the opportunity to meet fellow travelers who do business with or in either of these two regions – before take-off or during the flight, online and in person. KLM plays the role of the matchmaker and adds value to the otherwise somewhat value-free hours frequent travelers spend at airport lounges. It is the principle of the social networking site Dopplr, applied to the exclusive crowd of business or first class travelers: Connecting travelers who share the same connections. KLM pre-filters the club members so that travelers who sign up for the exclusive network are warranted a certain quality of contacts.

The clubs are a win-win-win: Trade groups and business offices from the travel regions are provided with a highly targeted way to advertise their services; travelers benefit from a true value-add and a richer travel experience; and, lastly, the clubs bolster KLM's reputation as an airline that cares about its customers. Of course, these networks already exist – they're just dormant. KLM does not make immediate revenue but it generates "social wealth" as long-term equity.

The KLM clubs exhibit all the characteristics of 'meaningful marketing' (see chart below):

- Social: The clubs help people connect.
- Personal: The clubs are relevant for the people they serve, and the service is exclusive and highly personalized.
- Storytelling: The clubs make sense of disparate information, perspectives, and events. They facilitate crossing paths by creating – quite literally – a common goal and therefore a joint narrative.
- Disruptive: The clubs disrupt the usual travel routine; they make it comfortable for business travelers to leave their comfort zone and go 'off the beaten path' to meet new people.
- Responsible: The clubs generate social capital by bringing together business people in pursuit of related goals. The KLM Club Africa, in particular, has helped African entrepreneurs to get in front of influential business executives (investors) conducting business in Africa.

China's Economy and Foreign Companies: What Now?

How does China's current economic downturn affect the strategy of foreign companies in China?

A Chinese-American law firm conducted a mini-survey among its clients and shares the results in a blog post:

"China's downturn had made them look more carefully at their China expansion and hiring plans. They said they were going to be very 'cautious' and 'careful' in 2009 with respect to expansion and hiring. Many of them (5 or 6?) said they had an 'official' hiring freeze in place for the first six months of 2009 or the entire year. Two said they were going to expand faster than anticipated in China because they saw now as the best time to get a jump on their less well-funded rivals. All of them said they had no concrete plans to get out of China, but one worried that the company's overall problems might force an ill-advised China exit. Many of them responded to my question about their leaving China by asking me 'and go where?'"

For China, the Financial Crisis is an Opportunity

I asked my colleagues in frog design's Shanghai studio about their perspective on the current economic downturn, and here's what they wrote back:

"The US may be the initiator of this round of global economic recession but it may not be the final payer. China's economy is about to suffer as well - and in more ways than one. And yet, the people who have been around the longest know not to pay too much attention to one-direction comments. They know that the sufferers will always shout much louder than the beneficiaries. They also know that there are ways to take advantage of the economic downturn.

In China, the rule of the game is always "Stay One Step Ahead of Your Competitors." There are some companies in this country - mostly the ones that operate domestically only - that will remain silent. Culturally it's what they've always done and what they always will do when facing these situations. Other companies will be more pro-active.

For example, when Chinese businesses run out of initiatives in which to invest their capital or when their investments stop growing (which is happening in stocks and real estate, two markets that have yielded big returns in recent years), they make a concerted effort to get back to the basics and invest in research and development. In fact, senior executives in some companies have said publicly that in the near future they would either invest in their own health and personal happiness, or they would increase R&D budgets in their businesses to invest in better products to prepare for a new run when the downturn ends.

This may be a survival strategy - that is, a strategy shift from the short term to the long term - but surviving a crisis is better than suffering from it. While the current crisis is eliminating big and small market players still trying to eke out short term gains in the form of cost cutting measures, the survivors will ride out the crisis while positioning themselves to win in the long term. The economic recession in Hong Kong fifteen years ago is a great example. In 1993, business opportunity in Shanghai was largely non-existent, but that didn't stop one Hong Kong property developer from buying cheap land and developing it in the center of the city. He envisioned Shanghai as the hub of Asia and the future of China, and he turned out to be right. He now owns several of the buildings in the heart of the Central Business District. The real estate developer's strategic long-term vision not only saved his company from the economic recession in Hong Kong, it also made him one of the biggest market players in the mainland property market.

So, while big global marketers withdraw themselves from the game, Chinese brands have a good opportunity to step up by investing money in R&D and product innovation, which will bring to market world-class products. The entrepreneur spirit always involves a combination of risk taking and long-term strategic planning, and indeed, the Chinese people have proven themselves and excelled as entrepreneurs. The reformation opened China's door to the world, and the skyrocketing economy created a Chinese "Gold Rush" that lured the world to underpriced real estate, amenable trade laws, and a surge of capital into the stock market. Now the challenge for Chinese entrepreneurs is finding opportunity in more unconventional places.

It could be that in the coming months and years, businesses in China will reinforce the domestic market as a way to fend off the global reverberations from the economic downturn. Domestic companies could add Western assets at a good value. More importantly, though, China can leverage the economic gains it has made over the past ten years into more investments in domestic R&D and innovation. This puts a premium on vision and strategic planning instead of short-term financial risk taking, and ultimately, that's going to benefit everyone, even as some will suffer now."

China: Ready to Innovate?

Notes from the Shenzhen Original Design Fair

If you want to experience Woody Allen's claim that "80 per cent of success is just showing up," I recommend you speak at a conference in China. I just had the honor of being invited to the Shenzhen Original Design Fair, which, in its fourth year, brought together "elite designers," as the local daily called them, with the Shenzhen design and manufacturing community. Although not a designer myself, I represented an "elite design firm" (frog), and I was therefore welcomed with the utmost respect and the occasional "I love frog" adulation. Clearly, Chinese design students, practitioners, and officials alike are extremely receptive to learning from Westerners' best practices -- to the point where I just wanted to tell them: Stop listening to others. Stop listening to me. Stop considering originality something you can copy. And start to understand that "You are unique, just like everybody else," as Margaret Mead put it.

The rallying cry for originality and innovation is nowhere more relevant than in Shenzhen, a city bigger than London (imagine Las Vegas with less fun -- it even has a mini- Eiffel Tower) and the first special economic development zone under Deng Xiaping's reform policy. At the beginning of the 1980s, Shenzhen was an unremarkable fishing village, but over the next three decades it has become an emblem of the Chinese capitalism that Zhang Weiying and his colleagues were building. Shenzhen is now home to more than 14,000 manufacturers and more than 200 industrial design firms. Leading Shenzhen-based companies such as Konka, Huawei, and ZTE have established design departments in Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the US. Oh, and the iPhone is manufactured here.

The first booth I saw when I entered the ultra-modern convention center was that of the Office for Intellectual Property Rights Protection. But don't be mistaken, the Shenzhen design community has grown in sophistication and originality. The design firms which presented their work at the Fair were pretty impressive. It was eye-opening to see the quality of the exhibited products. Consequently, everyone I spoke with confirmed that China's main challenge on its path from a manufacturing economy to an information economy to a creative economy is not the lack of talent (which is abundant), but rather to unlock, reward, and translate this talent into tangible outcomes. International advice is welcome: Ken Cato, an Australian brand design consultant, presented "10 Things to Know About Brands," and product designer Paul Cohen drew parallels between Australian and Chinese design culture. An apparently renowned British architect, whose name is escaping me, mumbled something about "the great ordinary," and I was wondering what would better describe China: "the great ordinary" or "the ordinary great"?

In the ensuing panel discussion, I contended that design is not only a differentiator, but also a powerful force in creating efficiencies, namely shorter time-to-market through process innovations such as high-fidelity prototypes in the early development stages. Because it has the ability to weave together efficiency and excellence, design is at the beginning and the end of the innovation process. It is both input and output, and it eliminates the distance between the two. Simply put, design drives innovation, innovation drives brand, brand drives loyalty, and loyalty provides a sustained competitive advantage. But branding means more than just putting a label on something that looks alike otherwise. Branding means being different, standing out; it means having an opinion, a point-of-view, and an "argument to win" (John Battelle). Branding means being different -- consistently. It means being always the same in being different.

China has passed Germany to stand fifth in international new patent rankings. In absolute numbers, it spends more on R&D than Japan (in fact, only the U.S. spends more). But it lags behind in break-through innovations, and it can’t count a whopping 30% of its workforce as members of the "creative class" as the US can. China has a branding challenge. It wants to move from "Made in China" to "Created in China." The reason is pragmatic: With the development of the market and changing demands for products, the seller's market has become a buyer's market and competition in the manufacturing industry has become fierce. In a TV-interview with a nationwide business channel I was asked for my recommendations to THE most pressing question that is beleaguering Chinese companies and economists these days: How can OEMs and ODMs become OBMs and create sustained brand loyalty based on differentiation and excellence and not just volatile competitive advantages derived from low-cost manufacturing efficiencies? I suggested the usual recipes -- political and macro-economic stimuli such as improved IP protection and financial reforms to foster entrepreneurship; company cultures that tolerate failure and reward experiments; and a more holistic business and design education that teaches designers to think more like business people and vice versa.

Nothing groundbreaking, but apparently exactly what the interviewers wanted to hear. The interview aired a day later on national television. I realized that I did have a voice and could perhaps even make a difference, albeit a small one, and for a moment it made me happy. But then I shuddered and felt like an innovation chauvinist: Who was I to tell the Chinese what to do? What if the state-run "Yellow River capitalism" is perfectly content with offering an alternative model to the US and Europe? Is the design industry not as advanced as in the West or is it maybe just different? Is it a sign of superiority to be the teacher or the student?

Design In The Age Of Convergence

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: frog design)

In my presentation, I promoted a few simple attributes to describe a better "innovation citizen." One was "Think like a child," drawing on the famous quote from Picasso: "We are all born creative; the challenge is to stay creative when we become adults." Someone in the audience dug deeper: "How do you do that? Think like a child?" "Travel much," I replied but I am not sure my answer satisfied the questioner. The audience seemed obsessed with process, with how-to. Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of frog design, disappointed them, too: "The why is much more important. Why are you doing what you do?"

It all comes down to culture, in the end. I spent a sunny afternoon in Beijing (on Mooncake day, a national holiday, so the air-polluting factories were off) with my tour guide -- Sunny -- who showed me Tienanmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Emperor's Summer Palace. The Palace is easily the most beautiful place I've ever seen -- so much taste, culture, and space for thought! Victor Hugo found better words to capture its beauty: "Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem gild it, paint it, have architects who are poets build the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, basins, gushing water and foam, swans, ibis, peacocks, suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such is this building."

It's an interesting experience to spend six hours with a total stranger in a conversation on big political, religious, and social issues and then part ways. Kind of like "Before Sunrise" without the romance. "Most of my friends still want to marry Westerners and leave China," Sunny, who had never traveled outside of China, remarked with some chagrin, "I really don't understand why." She also didn't like Bush, did like Obama, and lost her cool for a moment when I showed off with my knowledge of the latest news on Maggie Cheung's (a famous Chinese actress) upcoming wedding with a German architect (who worked with Rem Kohlhaas on the stunning new CCTV headquarters).

When we walked by the marble boat designed solely for the delight of the emperor's concubines, Sunny told me about the old Chinese proverb which says that those who govern are like boats and those governed like the water. Leaders can easily drown if the sea becomes furious and turns against them. This metaphor describes a fear that is deeply embedded in China's culture -- a "trust no one" fear of enemies from within. It is no coincidence that the country's most iconic sight is a wall. In VIP rooms and other social gatherings (and also in Cathay Pacific's business class), all seats usually face the middle of the room. The backs are close to the wall and protected at all time. The Forbidden City, in this spirit, is essentially a complex system of stage-gates that vetted the legitimacy of visitors before they made it anywhere near the emperor -- a heavily safe-guarded, multi-layered system of filters. And here I am preaching Chinese firms about open innovation and collaborative work flows!

At the closing ceremony of the Shenzhen Design Fair, I served as a judge in the local design award competition (well, the organizers pushed me on stage with the award winners, where I, clueless and without clear brief, stood around for a few minutes before I was discretely told: "You can go now. Your part is over"). After a local vocalist had broken the ice with an over-the-top interpretation of Celine's Dion "My Heart Will Go On," the party ended somewhat abruptly and I ventured out into the Shenzhen night, karaokeing rather poorly "Hotel California." I thought how grateful I was to be able to witness the epochal transformation of such a grand society. The tools are all there. China is poised to innovate. It wants to be different and never to be the same again.

New Destinations

Down to Earth: My Favorite Living Room

HKIA, Hong Kong International Airport, located on the Chek Lap Kok island in the Kowloon Bay and designed by Sir Norman Foster, is easily the best airport in the world. That's not just my opinion: For the seventh time in 10 years, it has been named World's Best Airport 2008 in the World Airport Awards. The terminals are like long stairways to heaven, with enough natural light to make you wear sun glasses. There is a Muji store, and 747s left and right, staring at you with stoic calm as you shop or daydream. If your idea of happiness is like mine (watching planes and people while sporadically browsing through Monocle or the New Yorker), make sure your next lay-over in Asia is here and at least a day long.