William Watson spots what's wrong with too many of our "best and brightest":
Endless folly of innovation policy...
My own hunch is that you get successful innovation when obsessive people can make lots of money doing it and be celebrated for their success. We’re still some ways from that in Canada. Most of the often very bright undergraduates I talk to don’t tell me their plans for their lives, but most that do tell want to work for NGOs and save the world. Good for them! Good for the NGOs and the world! But not so good, I suspect, for Canadian innovation and productivity
Another view on a related subject:
America’s Apple economy widens the winner-loser gap...
The big winners from Apple’s innovation were the 6,101 engineers and other professional workers in the United States who made more than $525-million. That’s more than double what the U.S. non-professionals made, and significantly more than the total earnings of all of Apple’s foreign employees.
Here in microcosm is why America is so ambivalent about globalization and the technology revolution. The populist fear that even America’s most brilliant innovations are creating more jobs abroad than they are at home is clearly true. In fact, the reality may be even grimmer than the Tea Party realizes, since more than half the American iPod jobs are relatively poorly paid and low-skilled.
But America has winners, too: the engineers and other American professionals who work for Apple, whose healthy paycheques are partly due to the bottom-line benefit the company gains from cheap foreign labour. Apple’s shareholders have done even better...
RIM Update: Since the company pops up in the "Comments":
Under fire, RIM agrees to review executive structure...
Boy Genius Report, a technology website that follows RIM closely, posted a copy of the letter on Thursday [June 30] that accused RIM's senior management of, among other things, not focusing enough on user experience, giving developers bad tools to work with, and running a work environment that feels like “Soviet-era government workplaces.”
The website claims the letter's author is “a high-level RIM employee,” but did not identify the person. The letter, addressed to Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie, purports to express what “many” employees at the company think, but are afraid to say publicly.
“Almost every project is falling further and further behind schedule at a time when we absolutely must deliver great, solid products on time,” the anonymous author writes. “We urge you to make bold decisions about our organizational structure, about our culture and most importantly our products...
Mr Balsillie has been doing his own bit to help save the world--eye off the ball perhaps? Along with Bill Gates?
and on that topic, here is an 'asteroid' related link showing how the media can morph a 'news' story into an advertisment for some ponzi scheme or whatever:
http://www.nine-news.net/app/breaking-news.php?ex=905&c1=425440
It has been mentioned on business news that the biggest problem with RIM is an internal culture that strangles innovation with red tape. Guys can't get their cool ideas built because too many people have to sign off on it.
That is what killed IBM in the 1990's. Remember when they fired pretty much all of Upstate New York? Town of Armonk has never been the same. I was there at the time, the misery filtered down to the local universities and colleges, no more nice summer jobs and internships at IBM.
Compare and contrast RIM's Canadian, control-the-moronic-employees Canadian approach with Apple and Google, currently top of the game. Lets face it, this is the tech world. If you think your guys are such goofs that you have to maintain a paperclip count, you need new guys.
RIM employees are in agreement with that assessment, the best of them are fleeing to greener pastures.
Or so I hear anyway. Every frickin' day I hear it on Bloomberg, CNBC, BNN...
By the way, for all of you that got slaughtered when Nortel went down the crapper, Nortel's patents sold for $4.5 BILLION dollars this week. Some Chinese guy is going to make a whole bunch'a money off your taxpayer supported Canadian innovation/education/geniuses. Feel better?
After working for a couple of large multi-nationals for 15 years, the innovation capacity was slowly bled out of both companies in the name of shareholder value. 30 years ago, both companies had independent Canadian operations, with significant engineering and manufacturing capability. First, plants were shut down, and combined with plants down in the Carolina's. More recently, the plants in the Carolina's were shut down and moved to Mexico. Then, all new products were developed with global specs. That way one product could be used all across the world. Canada's market is a drop in the bucket globally speaking, so it made no sense to do the R & D work here. Eventually, almost all the product development people were gone as well. Any requests for new products were met with a mountain of forms and financial justifications for the bean counters. It would then get ranked against all of the other requests from around the world so they could get the best bang for the buck out of every R & D dollar.
All of it sounds like prudent business decisions in today's world. However, the by-product of it all is a severely hollowed out capacity within the companies Canadian operations to innovate and develop. IMO, the primary source of innovation is going to have to come from home grown small and medium sized business. At least until they get bought out by a multi-national.
Has Apple widened the winner-loser gap? I think not. It is true that wealth is becoming more concentrated in the hands of the few. But the phrase "winner-loser" implies that what we are dealing with here is a zero-sum game - one person's win implies another's loss. That is simply not true.
The winners in the Apple story are Apple's shareholders, Apple's employees, Apple's consumers and the foreign contractors who make Apple's products. It is true that the winnings are not evenly distributed but just because I get 1% and you get 5% does not make me the loser and you the winner. We both win.
Envy is an ugly and destructive force.
I tried to buy a Blackberry Playbook. I really, really did. Its a very nice machine. Fast processor, excellent screen, perfect size for me.
But.
It doesn't play ITunes movies or DVD movies ripped to PC (unless you go through some very tedious and unrealistic re-formatting).
It doesn't play Netflix. Just doesn't. And won't, for the forseeable future according to RIM.
It doesn't hook to any Blackberry not running OS 5.0 or better. So if you got the "special deal" crippled Blackberry 8300 from your Canadian phone company, which only runs OS 4.5, it AIN'T GOING TO WORK.
It doesn't actually run Android stuff. Its supposed to, they say it can, it -sort of- will, but badly and with a lot of fiddling about.
So I can't watch a movie on the plane, I can't check my calendar/email/whatever and I can't access 3G, I can't watch Netflix in bed. I can't even play Angry Birds. But I can surf websites with Flash, oh heavenly day.
As a little WiFi surfboard I'd be interested in this machine at ~$300. But not at nearly nine hundred bucks tax in for the 64 gig version.
I am -very- sure these concerns were stridently raised at RIM before they released this turkey. Released it anyway. Their stock reflects what people think of that.
Company culture is important.
What's really informative and ironic is that the leftist iCult play with their iPads and Macbook Pros and iPhones while sipping Fair Trade lattes, blogging about removal of collective bargaining rights, and reading about foreign sweatshops.
Cognitive dissonance.
Canada: Social workers of the World.
$525M / 6101 Apple "engineers" is only $86k/"engineer". Meanwhile houses that are even inhabitable in Santa Clara county pretty much start at $500k and only go up from there, especially towards Cupertino.
A huge problem in Canada is that HR people actively discriminate against hiring engineering talent, even in non-engineering roles, through bizarre 'behavioural' interviewing practices. These HR folks would rather screen for personality and psychology, than screen for technical skills or aptitude. The result end up being rather perverse, and certainly its a less effective system than sitting an engineer down with a professional counterpart and merely 'shooting the shit' for an hour.
Hey Mark, thanks for the back-up.
Cheeses me off to see Canadian companies drive -themselves- out of business through sheer f-ing stupidity.
BTW, on the subject of RIM and saving the world, did you know that there are -zero- summer computer/robotics/engineering camps for kids or teens in the Kitchener-Waterloo-Guelph-Cambridge area? Like, none.
Call me crazy, but that does not seem to be what you want if you're RIM. Or Google.
'Save the world!' - an NGO made a TV commercial a few years ago heralding their five or six decades of saving Africa, the gist was that they had the experience, so give your money to them. The commercial was probably made by a few of our 'best & brightest' stoodunts....
I find it funny that right wing english canadians will never be satisfied until Canada become an exact replica of the USA.
Their only point of comparison is the USA. That's the limit of their vision.
Personally I think an obsession on productivity is wrong. If canada has less productivity than USA but better quality of life, that's a plus.
Esp. in a Canadian ER.
Mark
Ottawa
BTW, on the subject of RIM and saving the world, did you know that there are -zero- summer computer/robotics/engineering camps for kids or teens in the Kitchener-Waterloo-Guelph-Cambridge area? Like, none.
Tried Shad Valley:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shad_Valley
Based right out of Waterloo, but expanded to campuses across the country. For high school students that are so-inclined.
I recall a speech or some such from Prime Minister Lester Pearson, the first P.M. to come out of the Civil Service as cultivated by P.M. MacKenzie-King. PM LP was then grown to maturity under P.M. Louis St. Laurant all of them fine Liberal Government leaders.
Anyways, the speech sic, was making a point the difficulty with Canada's civil service at the time was insufficient pay for the Mandarin level.
I always have wondered why the thrust of government was to encourage the industrious and higher wage seekers out of the job producing business community.
Possibly this was of some benefit at the time, but the natural human instinct to provide for our offspring, especially the weaker "younguns" has enhanced,IMHO, a strong culture of nepotism.
The well connected less worthy generations constantly need a leg up to advance to the level (read paygrade) of their parents. Thereby mandating ever increasing government programmes, for cross employing children of Deputy Ministers et al with other department Deputy Ministers.
An interesting study, never to taken, will be to track how many civil servants, not in the technical classification, but in the administrative and managerial classes are related to civil servants in other departments with hiring authority. Cheers:
The line from the song, "Everybody wants to rule the world" could be changed to, "Everybody wants to save the world."
It's usually a wholly misplaced sentiment. We probably do more for humanity by trying to do well in our own jobs, with our neighbours and our own communities. This isn't to say there's no place for overseas work, and I've done some myself, but we really should put our own houses in order first.
For a few years now I have been saying that Blackberry is the Atari of smartphones. Almost from day one they were conducting themselves very much in the mould of Nortel - looking of government partnerships, living off their competitive advantage until it wasn't.
Market cap is now below 15 billion - less than a mid-size natural gas producer, their optomistic playbook sales estimates are for 30 days sales to equal an afternoon of Ipad sales (or less). They have become a bit player in the market with a cascade of legacy phones going dark - being abandoned for for iphones and androids. The playbook's short-comings are only accelerating the demise.
Look for another company with cash trying to stay in the game to gobble them up (before xmas perhaps?) - maybe microsoft is desparate enough.
Anyone recall the great Canadian 'brain drain'from about 10 years ago? The media was lamenting the loss of our best and brightest.
Repeat.
The "brain drain" to the US stopped when US firms went to using mostly H1-B guest workers from India and China, rather than importing Canadians.
Canadian firms have largely failed to employ the engineering talent that has graduated in the past decade. Most of my 2002 graduating class in electrical engineering is underemployed or unemployed. Others are mostly clinging to low paid jobs. Unemployed engineering PhD's are a dime a dozen.
As a strategy and business development executive growing up in Canada, I offer some other related variables on Canada and innovation in general:
1. Brain drain. 9 of 10 of the smartest people in my high school class left for USA, which is not uncommon. I remember instituting government mandated pay scales in Ontario while I turned around a $400 million company, driving a used Hornet while giving a Mercedes to the government in taxes. I truly believed Canada was on the way to financial meltdown. I left.
2. Hierarchy is innovation's anti-Christ. Hierarchy assumes that a few really smart people can steer a complex ship, holding all other variables constant. Of course that is all wrong.
They are really just living off market share, price elasticity, and preferred regulation. Virtually all innovation is incremental and comes from the bottom. Large companies are currently flattening their management in order to cut red tape, but in general they still don't 'get it.'
3. In the end, all companies are just their people. If the FCC destroyed their oligopoly preserving regulation, even Apple would find it difficult to remain so dominant. IBM is one of the few stories of successful re-invention. Remember when they had the stupidity to out-source their OS to a bug ridden rip-off of UNIX (Microsoft) and their chips to Intel? Ten years later, they still tried to foist the proprietary PS2 on us. What a decentralization that was, although any PC programmer on the street could have told them what they needed to do. Half the users of 'smart phones' today could tell the hierarchies how to improve their crap phones as well.
What I am saying is that big business is really, really stupid (think banks selling NINJA loans or GM giving us the Caprice). Apple isn't smart as much as they aren't as dumb as the competition.
Forget the ideology. Hierarchy is the best practical refutation of big government ever invented. Their track record is abysmal. Rate of change will increase the rate of failure since it uncovers the lie that we can 'control' or 'manage' a complex world that continuously adapts in non-linear inter-causal ways.
In the end, Hayek had it right. Marx was a brilliant fool, and Keynes was just plain wrong. No one can 'manage' an economy or millions of people, much less a few thousand people making a phone. RIM needs to build cross-functional self-governed teams, paid in salaries of wild variation, with the freedom to fail, or begin the baton death march to bankruptcy. Ask IBM.
Jim: it sounds as though you're advocating more of a "neural net" type of organization along the lines of what evolutionary biology has evolved in the interests of survival of organisms. I'm not sure how one would exactly translate that into human organizations, but I have a gut feeling that it bears further investigation and development.
A close relative works for RIM she told me about their involvement with Free The Children and WE Day?
She mentioned Craig Kielburger was involved in a big youth rally with local kids and employees of RIM, which sounds innocent enough. Then she mentioned Al Gore & Jesse Jackson were also in attendance along with the Barenaked Ladies. I almost puked.
Here's the link: http://bit.ly/kACfLt
@phantom Do you know that the PlayBook plays more movie formats than the iPad? Angry Birds is coming. Netflix will have to build an app for PlayBook - that is not a RIM failing. Netflix chose to use Silverlight on the web. No mobile technology currently enables Silverlight - it is a Microsoft version of Adobe's Flash. The PlayBook is no turkey. Don't let Apple's marketing machine fool you.
By the way, this post is particularly hilarious in a period when the US is clearly in economic decline. Apple is a bad example of an example - their time will also come when something more disruptive takes hold. Don't mistake a fad for an indication of long-term success. Apple too has failings which will become more evident as consumers start to wise up. Don't forget what cost Apple their lead in the early PC era.
"Canadian firms have largely failed to employ the engineering talent that has graduated in the past decade."
I am a lowly technician, but I have professional contact with this engineering talent on a regular basis, and the ones who I have had to work with aren't that talented.
"Jim: it sounds as though you're advocating more of a "neural net" type of organization along the lines of what evolutionary biology has evolved in the interests of survival of organisms. I'm not sure how one would exactly translate that into human organizations, but I have a gut feeling that it bears further investigation and development."
Wow DrD. You get it. I have conducted a great deal of research, including the effectiveness of introducing a complex system (scale free network properties) into organizations in order to accomplish both clear and fuzzy tasks. How does it work: splendidly and fantastically.
Some of the best companies in the world are technically run like that, although they do not use those words because they have not availed themselves of the research.
BTW, you do realize that biological and psychological research has rendered Darwin's theory of random selection as a spectacularly small part of evolution (i.e. creativity), right?
A crucial portion of what makes the Left so silly is that they do not understand the true nature of competition. In fact, they hate it. But you can not have innovation or self-actualization without it.
I work for a tech company and recently we were bought out by an American firm. They looked at the books and figured out the company was going down so they started making changes.
As usual head office HR consultants, MBA beaurocrats and other liberal lefty academic types who've been messing up this company since the beginning put water in the wine. The result is an even more messed up company than before. It's funny the new CEO's ideas are solid. People in the trenches were very excited about what he was saying. As soon as HQ fouled up the plans it's been a rush to the exits. Turnover is probably going to be 40% this year and I'll be one of the ones leaving.
That's what happens in Canadian business all the time. Meek minded socialists get promoted and cook up crazy schemes that reward the lazy and useless people at the expense of the hard working people with talent.
Blackberry guy, i did a 24 hour thrash trying toget the Playbook to work. So I discovered all the stuff with Silverlight et al. Bottom line, Playbook zero function after 24 hour troubleshooting fest. Lots of promises, no -movie-.
Ipad? Works instantly right out of the box. Does everything it is supposed to do, right away.
Is it perfect? No. I'm typing on it right now, its got plenty of stupis little things about it, like it can't scroll this text box. I also resent Apple making this thing with no SD slot or USB for memory expansion, that was a pure rip-off. Which RIM also perpetrated, by the way.
I have no doubt at all that Apple is going to crash again in the next few years, nothing lasts forever in techworld. What will crash it is the same thing that's crashing RIM. Centralized decision making and bull headed stupidity.
Jim and Dr.D had it right above. Hierarchical structure doesn't work in tech companies. Once the MBAs take power, its over.
The problem I've seen with "neural network" or "matrix management", or "cross-functional teams" or whatever gibberish is being used to describe it, is that it ensures that no one is ever responsible for a decision. There are profound consequences when decisions have no consequences for those making the decisions. Worse still is the interminable bikeshedding when no one person has the authority to say "debate's over, this is what we're doing".
The problem with evolutionary models is that they produce sufficers, not optimizers. You'll get something that's good _enough_, but the guy who designs his org structure for the type of work he's doing will beat you to market every time.
Anyone posting here wrt what drives tech innovation might find the book or YouTube series Accidental Empires interesting. The author inadvertently makes an argument for the profit motive as a producer of innovation and economic growth as he documents the growth of the PC industry starting from the user-built and -programmed Altair 8800. You get the strong impression that the prospect of earning huge fortunes before reaching age 40, along with the ambition to be top dog in the industry ( like Gates achieved in software, and Jobs did in hardware ) were key ingredients.
Has anyone looked at the Balsillie School curriculum?
We don't need more people with expertise in Global Governance or Public Policy. These people have already screwed up the world enough.