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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
To build off of my Bangalore blog, in the "The Great Indian Dream"(NYT, March 11, 2004), Tom Friedman describes India's current success as the culmination of a "unique techno-cultural-economic perfect storm." The elements comprising this somewhat camp metaphor include:
1) Strong cultural emphasis on education, which has created a huge pool of engineers and skilled labour.
2) English language capabilities which was "an accident of history and the British occupation of India."
3) Time zone arbitrage: designers in America can expect output the next day given time zone differences.
4) Skillful at "glocalization": India excels at blending local and foreign elements, a syncretic capability that spans its long history.
5) Luck in two respects: overinvestment in undersea fiber-optic cables during the dot come mania, thus enabling cheap data transfer; and the unintended consequences of Y2K, which gave many Indian software companies a reason to exist as western companies looked for cheap suppliers for solutions.
In sum, in Friedman's view, the good news is that there is only one India out there...
"The bad news, from a competition point of view, is that there are 555 million Indians under the age of 25, and a lot of them want a piece of "The Great Indian Dream," which is a lot like the American version. As one Indian exec put it to me: The Americans' self-image that this tech thing was their private preserve is over. This is a wake-up call for U.S. workers to redouble their efforts at education and research. If they do that, he said, it will spur "a whole new cycle of innovation, and we'll both win. If we each pull down our shutters, we will both lose."
I know it's trendy to talk about India in this way, and part of me loathes such fashion, but for the record I have been a one-woman marketing band for India since the mid 1990s. Fresh off the plane in 1998, I tried without success to push a learning journey to India. China was all the rage, fair enough, but only part of the picture. Practically speaking, it was a hard sell getting executives to take 10 days off to go to India, but many executives have done this since... and now the tide has come in. Oh well, one small consolidation, if a little plaintiff and puerile, is that at least I know that my early indicator sense of what's important in the near future is well-functioning. I have finally enough years behind me to do this kind of perceptual analysis. Of all the developments and ideas that I have had the most energy around, how many of those were where the world was going? How many were ahead of the curve? A good number (almost all) of them, I'd have to say. That pattern is quite clear now—namely, that pattern recognition is something I'm particularly good at, which might explain why I ended up in this business. I flatter myself, of course; we all like to say we're right and there is a particular psychological term for this, something like "retrospective sense-making." Or, as Gladwell frames it in his excellent article, "Connecting the Dots: The paradoxes of intelligence reform" (The New Yorker, March 10, 2003.)
Fischhoff calls this phenomenon "creeping determinism"—the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable—and the chief effect of creeping determinism, he points out, is that it turns unexpected events into expected events. As he writes, "The occurrence of an event increases its reconstructed probability and makes it less surprising than it would have been had the original probability been remembered."I think the paper trail I've left, and the documented period of feeling completely alone, out on a limb, in selling a particular idea, might prove my case, even from a disinterested point of view. Besides, there is no sense in being a good signal spotter if you can't capture the value of this skill. I've got a lot to learn in this respect. I think I suffer from the classic "too early to be relevant" dilemma, and may have other problems around finding the right language to communicate these things. Who are the best people you know who bridge this dilemma? Who are the people to learn from? And how do they do it?
[Ganesh, Hindu God of Fortune and other things]
