Recipe to build a Kolkata suburb

Ingredients:
1. A few acres of land
2. A few thousand families

Cooking time:
Sixty years

For each family:
1. Fence of your personal area with bamboo and twine, then string up a temporary shelter in the middle of it.
2. When you can afford to, replace the temporary shelter with a mud shack, keeping a small plot to grow your vegetables or tether your goat
3. When you can afford to, replace the mud shack with a fairly solid brick and plaster structure
4. As funds allow, gradually add floors to give yourself more living space
5. Tear the whole house down and build a block of flats on the same little plot, extending right to the roadside. Goodbye green space, hello modern suburb.

Kitchen Space

The basic layout of the typical house has changed radically over the last couple of centuries in the western world, and over the last couple of decades in the developing east.

Take the kitchen. In the traditional English Victorian house this was way out the back, cold and unfurnished except for necessary appliances. In India, even in the new build of twenty years ago, the kitchen has even less prominence. While the living area could be elegant, light and spacious - the kitchen could be a cupboard space with barely enough opening for the smoke fumes.

Of course the reasons are obvious. The kitchen is used by the lower class, the cooks, the servants. Not for the real homeowners.

Things are changing today. When we bought our place five years ago, we chose one with a completely open plan ground floor. The kitchen is just an intrinsic part of the "living room."

Changing subject, look around your workplace. If the temporary workers are the ones sitting in the cold gloomy corners, if the engine room of your department is kept in the dark, what does that say about your organisation?

One Year Old Today

It's been a whole year since post one. Time to take stock. In the holistic tradition of this blog, almost like it's indexed, this should also pull the last few posts together.

So the blog is perhaps like a real-time roadmap of middle America in these times of high gas prices. Well laid out, straight lines and an organised structure. Very clear and easy to read. Plenty of open space. And hardly any traffic!

Room to breathe

Despite my respect for the originator of the quote, I don't buy the cliché that the UK and US speak very differently. There are probably far more differences between regional accents just within England than there are between English and Americans. At least in the business world, perhaps unfortunately, we sound very similar.

However across Europe, things sound very different. Yet they look broadly the same. Old buildings, little roads, people on the streets. But it's weird, people are talking incomprehensively. In America, you can understand the language perfectly, but the look of the place is completely different. Not because they have fundamentally different goals and aspirations from Europeans. But because they have more space.

Background Graphics

I work with spreadsheets every day. I create them, edit them, review them. I consider some of them to be works of art. In yesterday's mail I received one with a background logo across the page that made it difficult to read the numbers. My short note back was not complimentary about that feature:

Like most background graphics, it adds to storage space and retrieval time, at the same time as hindering the clear viewing of the data. Bad on top of bad.

And don't give me the "oh it looks pretty" argument, save that for birds and flowers, not for spreadsheets.

( Though a good spreadsheet should look pretty, because of the elegance and clarity of the data there :)

Of course design and white space are important too. My reply was not entirely serious, but I stand by every word there. The official RNB guiding principles of spreadsheet design to follow shortly.

MyPod

Last week I finally got an iPod. It's only a low end model, acquired second-hand - basically it's a test to see if I am going to properly buy into the Apple ethos.

Initial impression - I completely agree that it is sleek and elegant and completely intuitive to use. But something about it is wrong. It's too closed. It's Steve Jobs' vision of the world, not mine.

For example ideally any new media player, if connected up to my computer, would immediately show as a set of directories from which I could copy or move files either way. But I have no choice but to download and use iTunes too. I've already got WinAmp and VLC here to run my videos, in addition to Microsoft's own players. Do I really want another one?

As Marc Nohr notes in Marketing Direct:

The shining vision of one man and his coterie of trusted advisers drives everything - and the space for individual expression outside of that clique is minimal, whether you're an employee or a customer.

The author of the article contrasts the Apple approach with "co-creation", where producers and consumers work together, the obvious example being open source software, but it is also applicable in marketing. Because we should all know that customer-centricity, interactivity and dialogue lie at the heart of DM.

The Fast Show Comic

Oh no, Scott Adams recently "redesigned the Dilbert.com web site and added a ton of features, such as animation, deeper archives, mash ups, and more."

It's horrible. You know my views on this subject. Simplicity. Space. Sex. Speed.

However, Scott suggested that there are three types of reader:

• The first group is the ultra-techies who have an almost romantic relationship with technology …


• The second group objected to the new level of color and complexity, and the associated slowness …


• The third group subscribes to the philosophy that more free stuff is better than less free stuff …

Obviously I'd be in group two at the moment. But good news, I'm catered for. There is a superb new comic site here.

Can we fix it?

A bad workman always blames his tools.

I changed a tyre on my car today. Just started driving down the road, almost immediately noticed the telltale shudder and drift.

It would have been easy to call the AA to fix it, but it would also have been borderline dishonesty. I don't have their "home start" service. I could have crept an extra few yards to get far enough away to claim roadside assistance. I could have used a card based at a distant address. But I did not.

It was bloody hard work though: Taking all the junk out of the boot to remove the surprisingly heavy "space saver" wheel and jack. Reading four pages of car manual that was warning of apocalypse unless I removed all the skirting, checked the road was level, made the wheel perfectly straight and placed the jack to the correct millimetre. Marvelling at how such a tiny piece of steel could hold up a ton. Fighting with the wheel nuts that seemed to have been tightened by titans. Fighting even more to release the wheel from the hub, eventually resorting to smacking it around with a hammer - that was actually a bit dangerous when the whole car was supported by aforementioned tiny jack on a road that was anything but level.

Eventually managed it. The tyre was clearly beyond repair. So I stopped at Kwik-fit on the way to work for a new tyre. Hydraulic jacks and electric wrenches, job done in seconds.

A Heavy Footprint

This comment is spurred by something written a while ago at the ever excellent primordial blog. I was described there as someone "from the UK who seems to enjoy writing about the physics of football (soccer) goons breaking opponents kneecaps. That and lots of cricket analogies." Close enough, and I'll respond to his specific request later.

Usually that blog provides an entertaining original commentary upon the madness of the world from the perspective of someone who lives very far away from most of it. But one post there dropped in a casual observation about how some people tread lightly and some clomp loudly.

I'll just throw in my viewpoint - after all that's why this blog exists. I think that we should all tread lightly, we each have a duty to leave as light a footprint as possible.

But that was not a serious point about long-term global warming, neither was it a vague philosophical observation. It was a practical reflection on daily life in a noisy city. Those who clomp loudly, without a care in the world, are disturbing the neighbours, particularly if those neighbours happen to be in the apartment below. Treading lightly in the city also means not having our headphones spill tinny buzzing to those next to us on the train, it means not leaving litter and it means allowing other people space. We should aim for a light footprint from our cars too, not just with low emissions, but also by not letting the stereo or engine blast those we pass by.

So be quiet. Respect.

Share ya' laws

A regular theme of this blog is an objective view of marketing hype, or indeed of any hype, but the principle remains that something is only worth noting here if the view here differs from the common view.

The common view at the moment, front page news across Britain, is that the Archbishop of Canterbury has said something really stupid, that he recommended that particular communities should be allowed to use Sharia law as an alternative to British law for certain types of case. He did not say that. Read his actual words. But even those who quote his actual words seem to be drawing another conclusion from them, that although he did not recommend it, he thought that this was inevitable. No, he did not say that either.

My view on this is simple - no religious law has any place in a modern state. However a fair analysis of the Archbishop's actual words is provided at the Language Log, I have neither the time nor space to replicate the linguistic analysis here, but I will repeat just two conclusions from it:

One that I agree with: Dr Williams is a gentle, learned, brilliant, scholarly man, and a bit of a public relations doofus.

And one that I don't: Someone duller, more political, less original, and less intelligent must be found for that job.

Everything is free - profit from it

I have been involved with Interactive Consumer Marketing and Customer Relationship Management since long before those terms existed, at least in common usage. I could write books about this subject, if you add up my writing around this area over the years then I already have.

Of course I am still looking for ways to enhance, refine and develop these concepts, to push it to its boundaries. And I was pointed towards an article that does just that.

Kevin Kelly is the author of New Rules for the New Economy. He started by looking at the proliferation of websites that were virtually (or literally) giving away their products. You know there are thousands of examples today, from Sun to Google, but as a business model it almost turned traditional micro-economic models upside down.

The proposition relies on the older concept of economies of scale and also on the newer concept of network growth effects, where pushing your product into the market has a substantial positive value on the value of your products that are already in the market. That is evident not just in the obvious world of compatible software solutions, but even in physical products such as mobile phones - again the value of the individual item to the consumer increases with the number of compatible products also out there.

Now he has pushed the envelope. He has suggested that basic price of everything is moving towards zero, everything is becoming free. If a product or service is to be worth paying for, then it must have "generative value".

A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time.

The analysis is sound and the insight is excellent. Broadly speaking it is the same message that proponents of CRM have been pushing for years, but as I stated at the start, he has pushed the envelope. In fact, the article appeared to have a focus on suppliers of software and services, but to me exactly the same principles apply to any commodity product. Wait long enough, other people will be able to build it cheaper than you. You need to make your product unique.

However there was one point that was glossed over. The article clearly refers only to products that can be copied, although Kelly's optimistic tone seemed to generalise that to everything. He talks of a world where not just manufactured products but even food and other essentials are free and unlimited. That is not true. For those basic commodities, for unpolluted water, for personal space, for that genuine experience of nature and history that ties us to our past, there is only a limited supply. The marginal cost for these items does not tend to zero. But it should.

My Religious Space

I am skeptical of all publicity campaigns, even those largely populated by skeptics.

I used to have a MySpace page. In fact I still do, but I have not updated it for many months. Over the last few days there has been a bit of a stir in the online world about the apparent deletion of that site's "Atheist and Agnostic Group", largely due to complaints from people who find atheism offensive. The complainers also presumably find other "religions" offensive.

I was not a member of the group. In fact I am not a member of any atheist or agnostic group, unless you count the entire human race as a group. Anyway, everybody is somewhat atheist or agnostic really, even the most deluded religious devotee does not believe in the sacred revelations of most of the gods that have been acclaimed by humanity.

As a peripheral point, I don't think this apparent censorship is an excuse to move to Facebook or Orkut or whatever happens to be the next social networking site of the day. The reason that Myspace is losing share is because of its ugly, noisy, cluttered bug-ridden interface, not the fact that it is owned by the Murdoch Media Machine. It is true that News Corp follows a broadly conservative agenda, but there is still a fair degree of diverse opinion there, at least in its UK operations.

But their main agenda is profit. So I find it very difficult to comprehend how the owners of a commercial networking site can deliberately choose to antagonise tens of thousands of members. I know they are outnumbered by the religious majority, but it is still a substantial chunk of annoyed revenue. A group of concerned christians can easily control a local community, keeping jobs and opportunities only to the chosen believers, but it is much more difficult to control a global web.

In this case, the group organiser's account was hacked and the group disabled, but the delays in reinstatement may possibly be due to incompetence and lethargy rather than malice. Surely no social networking executive is going to be so bigoted or so stupid as to deliberately engineer this mess?

School Ties

This is unusual, but almost a short "this is what I did today" post. Perhaps it is justified because the last two posts have been comparatively lengthy pieces about the tenuous nature of measurable marketing (about which I could write books), and also because at the lunch today I promised to provide some "publicity".

The lunch followed an informal alumni meeting. And I heard that Woodstock School appears to be having some trouble with recruiting and retaining staff, and also with attracting students from its traditional sources. I am sure it could get more than enough students if it just filled the intake with all the newly minted from India's growing middle class, but that would dilute the well balanced diversity that was so prominent twenty years ago.

I have neither the space nor the authority to provide details here, but there are various programs available to allow high school kids from Europe and America to spend an exchange year in the Himalayan foothills, and equally there may be contracts available for qualified teachers willing to spend some time there.

This is the official school website. I should confess that I disagree with the stated christian ethos, but other than a request to "bow your heads" for a few minutes after assembly while the principal waffled a prayer, I did not find that religion was forced upon me. Back to the brave new world of proper marketing tomorrow.

A Knight's Tale

I watched a film today. A film that got terrible reviews, a cheesy anachronistic corny Brit-flick. But I absolutely loved it.

Now I don't usually just post reviews here. But I think the amateur psycho-analysts of this world (including me) may wonder why this sort of film appeals to me.

Because I don't really like fantasies, other world stuff. Lord of the Rings was execrable. Even Star Wars was good but not great. And I don't really like real history stuff - educational but tedious. But when I recall my all-time favourites in fiction, they seem to involve the fantastical distortion of real history.

In film - Highlander. In television - Edmund Blackadder. In books - Dirk Gently.

On reflection, each features someone who is basically an alien, but in time not in space. On more reflection, that's surely just coincidence...

How to cure cancer

Any alternative treatment or strategy should still have a background in facts and a testable model. But if it can help to think from reverse angles about minor things like train tracks or aeroplane design, maybe we should apply similar ideas to the most important things in life.

Anyone with even basic high school biology will have been told about cell cycles, DNA and RNA, and they will have learned (or not learned) the various stages in cell division. But school textbooks are largely just descriptive - step 2 follows step 1 etc. Perhaps in fear of religious fundamentalists, they spend little time on exploring root causes of process and behaviour, and instead they largely document details of what actually happens now.

But it is clear to anybody - if living cells are given time, space and nutrients then they tend to multiply. That is what they do. We see it all the time. What is perhaps more interesting is why healthy cells eventually stop multiplying.

I don't expect non-specialists to understand the specific mechanisms used by cyclin-dependent kinases such as CDC2 to regulate phase transition in mitosis. Lacking a Nobel prize in medicine, I don't know the answer. But I think the solution may be in there.

People Facts

As any politician knows, the way that a fact is presented has a major effect on the way that you expect people to respond to it.

I saw a presentation on global consumer trends today. I emphasise the word global.

With a tone that seemed to be somewhere between concerned and disappointed, the presenter pointed out that 43% of people now live in countries with birth rates that are at or below death rates. The implication was certainly that this was a major problem.

An alternative way of presenting exactly the same information could have been to say that 57% of the people of the world now live in countries where the population is still increasing. And presumably still increasing at a faster rate than land and oil and other resources.

I have no comment on the statistics other than to point out the irony. The presentation's final slide was about the basic human need for peace and quiet and personal space.

Threads

There are about four distinct threads here, each taking about a quarter of the space.

Often we will see a detailed point about marketing, business, science, technology or mathematics. They may seem fairly unrelated fields, but I operate directly at their confluence.

Occasionally I will present what I think may be an original idea in some unrelated field. Not necessarily a grand scheme to feed the world, perhaps just a new way of looking at an old idea or a new word for the dictionary.

There is less of this now, but a strong thread a the beginning was a lesson in how-to-blog. A self-taught developing lesson. So not really a guide for how you should blog, more a description of the style that seems to work best here.

And there is a little about me. Not necessarily about what I've just done, more about who I am. I did apologise for this but it is inevitable that anything that I ever write must reflect the skills and experience offered by my company. So if you're looking for a marketing consultant or database architect or project manager ...

Set in stone

Finally time for another little picture. I travelled into central London on the tube at the weekend. Except for rush hour, it's a fairly rapid and pleasant way to cross the city. We pass a station where one line to the west splits into two lines to the east. I used to live there. There are three platforms at the station.

When travelling west to east you need to be sure that you get the right route. People on the platform don't know quickly which branch the train will take. We all know on-platform monitors are sometimes inoperative, then you need to read the little note on the front of the train to work out where it's going or hope for an intelligible station announcement.

And going east to west, it's a crazy random game. There can be two trains about to head in exactly the same direction, down the same track, but whichever one you settle in, you "know" the other one is going to depart first.

The whole line was closed for months recently. They should have rebuilt the station. I'm not presuming more space. You would still have three platforms. You would still have exactly the same lines going in and exactly the same lines going out. But issues above all sorted. Easy.

Scattergun

Match of the Day is showing the highlights of Spurs vs Arsenal. As usual, Arsenal created loads of chances but lack a clinical finisher. After spraying powerful shots in every possible direction, peppering the crowd behind the goal, the striker Adebayor finally connected absolutely perfectly and fired in a spectacular one.

Though he is possibly still a teenager, I think their midfielder Fabregas is a footballing genius. He never seems to whack the ball, but every touch seems to go straight to the feet of a colleague. Except for one time when he had a bit of space 20 yards out. Then he just stroked it into the goal.

But when they show the season's highlights or goal of the month, they will rave about Adebayor's.

It's like a tabloid editor trading rumours for week after week, randomly connecting with one, then splashing "exclusive - you read it here first". Or making loads of psychic predictions then seeing one come true.

DB

If you are reading this, then you are using a computer, then you are accessing a computer database.

Most people do not "visualise" the route from the keyboard to a physical space on a real disk when they do a search - they just hope to see a symbol on the screen that represents what they are looking for, then expect to click through to what they really want.

But I'm an architect. Sadly, I have not designed bridges or skyscrapers since college days. But I have designed databases. And while the search cursor flashes, I still picture magnetic heads scouring across disk space.

Database principles are not complicated, but data can be stored in many different ways at varying levels of redundancy with various indexing strategies. There are eternal struggles between ease of input and ease of access. Yet ultimately it is just like guiding a little micro-man on a journey around the information store.