A colleague and I changed our travel plans at short notice and decided to take an earlier flight than the one we had booked. There were no seats available in business class on that flight, so they had to re-book my colleague into economy. This was the question the kind-hearted person at the service desk put to her colleagues at the gate: “Should I downgrade him first before I send him over?” After some further exchange, she asked again: “Should I put him down before he comes across?” Even well-meaning people trying their best to help sometimes make you feel like an animal past its use-by date…
Monday, 15 March 2010
Discovering Laura Marling, barely 20 but going strong…
According to allmusic.com, Laura Marling “was only 16 years old when she emerged on the British indie scene in 2007 thanks to a handful of infectious singles made available on her MySpace profile”.
I discovered her through a Timesonline article which features a stream of her new album entitled I Speak Because I Can.
Unfortunately, my cynicism with new talent – it’s all been done before, hasn't it? – prevented me from appreciating Marling at first. Surely, she sounds like Dolores O’Riordan (of the Cranberries), or Patti Smith when she was much younger, or Mark Knopfler in drag…And how wrong I was!
Well, she’s none or all of the above. I Speak Because I Can contains 11 tracks of poetically lilting folk tunes, covering a wide range of emotional themes. Some of the songs contain sorrowful, sometimes even raw, insights, as the pain of loss in What We Wrote (“…beg him to stay in my cold wooden grip…”), unspeakable despair of Hope In The Air (“…No hope in the air, no hope in the water, not even for me your last serving daughter…), the exploration of loneliness in Devil Spoke, or the angst of discovering identity and self-esteem in Blackberry Stone.
Unlike Ellie Goulding, Laura Marling has not been billed as one of the top acts to watch in 2010, but is well worth a listen. According to her web site, I Speak Because I Can “will be available in the new iTunes LP format (a sort of modern twist on the classic vinyl format)”. Apparently, the iTunes LP version of I Speak Because I Can will “open up a digital album dashboard where you’ll be able to listen as normal, but also watch the HD video for ‘Devil’s Spoke’, view the album cover artwork and the lyrics, complete with illustrations, for all of the tracks, as well as read the album credits”.
Laura Marling follows close on the heels of a crop of young female talent from the UK in recent years, in the fine tradition of Dido, Katie Melua, Joss Stone, Norah Jones and Lily Allen, and the music scene is so much better for it.
Saturday, 13 March 2010
André Brink at the Man Hong Kong Literary Festival says literature in South Africa is “exuberant“
“Language,” André Brink says, “is the starting point of literature, an invention in and through language.” As someone who writes in both English and Afrikaans, he should know. He tells me that since the transition to multi-racial democracy in South Africa, more literature is written in Afrikaans, often seen to be the language of racial oppression. It is perhaps not so surprising, since Afrikaans was, in the words of Brink, “shaped in the mouths of slaves” which in a process of “creolisation” became the language of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century.
In a wide-ranging, erudite and stimulating lecture at the 2010 Man Hong Kong International Festival, held recently at the University of Hong Kong, Brink talks about South African fiction after apartheid.
He begins by observing that apartheid has not been eliminated, but is “receding”. “The road to freedom for the creation of literature,” he says, “still has to be walked.”
According to him, the most obvious characteristic of post-apartheid literature is probably its more “inward” nature, a perceptible shift away from engagement in the political field during apartheid when the urgency of politics “necessitated a direct response”.
Themes relegated to the background during the apartheid years emerge into prominence after the transition, bringing “electricity to the scene”. However, this does not mean a rejection of politics, but rather a “re-imaging” of the political. Brink cites the works of J.M. Coetzee as examples in which politics features but its personal interpretation gives it substance.
For Brink, however, the private and the political do not constitute a dichotomy, but are rather “positions on a sliding scale.”
Brink attributes the state of South Africa today to the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) , which held a number of public hearings into atrocities committed during the apartheid years. “Testifying in public about private horrors,” Brink says, “pushed the limits of storytelling.” Historiography, which had been monopolised and usurped by the ruling government for political ends, has been liberated – many histories are now possible.
Another aspect of the post-apartheid literary world in South Africa is the withdrawal of writers into themselves in a way more typical of their solitary profession in other countries. While during years of apartheid, writers got used to working together, they now work more alone, although the memory of that “closeness and solidarity” still remains.
Feminism, or more generally the female experience of the country, offers a domain for the new South Africa. Affirmation of femininity in many works denotes a shift in consciousness and awareness. Call Me Woman by Ellen Kuzwayo, Call me not a man by Mtutuzeli Matshoba and The Cry of Winnie Mandela by Njabulo Ndebele are fine examples.
At the same time, there appears to be an “appropriation of voice” – the fictional impersonation of man as woman or white as black. Brink refers to his own work in which he as a male author “poses” as a female narrator. He calls this “appropriation” as he wonders aloud about the difference between “speaking on behalf of” and “speaking in solidarity with”. In the re-interpretation of history, the master narrative devised by white male historians gives way to the re-discovery or re-definition of “an infinity of South African histories”.
It may appear to some that the notion of “magical realism” is new to literature in the post-apartheid era, but according to Brink this has always been a key element in the oral narrative tradition in African folklore – ancestors have always interfered with the present. As an example of magical realism, Brink recounts the story (apparently told by Justice Goldstone) of a black worker for the opera house whose job it was to lead some camels from the zoo to the theatre during performances of Aïda. Stopped en route by a white constable one day, and in response to the question what he was doing, he said, “I’m taking the camels to the opera”.
In conclusion, Brink uses the word “exuberance” repeatedly to describe the state of South African literature, which he says is “on the verge of an explosion in creativity”. This exuberance is an expression of joy in the “rediscovery of literature and its possibilities” – literature as “indomitable energy of the human spirit”.
Thus spoke the master, and baie dankie.
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
What If Everybody in Canada Flushed At Once?
Pat comments: "The The water utility in Edmonton, EPCOR, published the most incredible graph of water consumption last week. By now you’ve probably heard that up to 80% of Canadians were watching last Sunday’s gold medal Olympic hockey game. So I guess it stands to reason that they’d all go pee between periods."
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
A summary of Gary Hamel's analysis of the secrets of Apple Inc.’s success
In two blog entries in the Wall Street Journal over the past couple of weeks, management guru Gary Hamel has taken a stab at analysing the success of Apple Inc. You can find Part I here, and Part II here.
He begins by going through a set of surprising statistics about Apple:
- It’s the market leader in computers costing more than $1,000 – in one month, its share in this segment exceeds 90%
- It makes more money from its 3% share of global handsets than Nokia makes from more than 30%
- It’s the world’s largest music retailer
- Its stores generate four times more revenue per square foot than big box competitors; with its store on Fifth Avenue, New York, being the most profitable retail outlet in the world
- Its market value is three and a half times that of Nokia, and more than 60% higher than Hewlett-Packard’s, which has three times Apple’s revenue
He runs through a laundry list of strategies to which many would attribute Apple’s success:
- Heavy focus on design
- Fusion of hardware and software
- Integrating a broad array of complementary technologies
- Captivating customers with great end-to-end user experience
- Harnessing the talent of independent software developers
- Leveraging core competencies into new markets – Steve Jobs describes Apple as the world’s large “mobile devices company”
But, Hamel argues, while the above list is logical, it is also unsatisfying, as it reveals the “how” but not the “why”.
With a disclaimer that he has neither spoken to Apple’s senior executives, nor done thorough research into the company, Hamel offers “unstinting devotion to a particular set of values” as the secret behind Apple’s success. According to him, these values are “as rare as a rose in winter” among Fortune 500 companies:
Being passionate – although Apple doesn’t always pioneer a new product category, it always sets out to radically redefine a category with a distinctive product or business model.
Aiming to surprise - the company’s penchant for pre-launch secrecy is simply the way you produce the same sort of gee-whiz delight that any parent aims for on Christmas morning.
Being unreasonable - Apple regularly challenges itself to do the impossible, producing products that are as sexy as Ferraris and as practical as Hyundais, and its lean and agile supply chain gives nothing away to Wal-Mart or IKEA.
Innovating incessantly and pervasively - innovation infuses everything Apple does, in products, services and business models.
Sweating the details - “it just works” because hundreds of people sweat the details.
Thinking like an engineer, feeling like an artist - a company can’t produce beautiful products if the bean counters win every argument: Apple’s executives know that something lovely and sleek and unexpected can provoke a visceral reaction in a customer – a reaction that may not be easy to quantify but can nevertheless be monetised.
To the above, I would personally add: meticulously making the look and feel "hang together".
Of course, Apple also has its flaws. According to Hamel, Jobs is said to be “an egomaniacal control freak” and it has "all the monopolistic tendencies of its competitors". “Apple will one day fall prey to the same sort of arrogance, nostalgia and denial that has destroyed other once-venerated companies”, Hamel concludes. But for him the case of Apple “is just a convenient and plausible vehicle for driving home a fundamental truth: you can’t improve a company’s performance without improving its values”.
Thursday, 4 March 2010
Summary of a talk by futurist John Naisbitt at an AustCham regional conference – www.alanayu.wordpress.com
John Naisbitt the futurist held a discussion session at the AustCham Regional Conference. The gist of his talk:
- The Western representative democracy model is essentially “horizontal” with two parties slugging it out every few years
- This model has been rendered dysfunctional and inoperative by the information revolution
- An alternative “vertical” model is developing in Asia and China in which an interplay between top-down directions and bottom-up initiatives enables progress
- The “West” doesn’t understand that China and Asia will never accept the rules it imposes on them
- The success of the US lies partly in its ability to replenish the talent pool with immigrants
- Europe is on a path of mutually assured decline
- The “West” needs to seriously consider how to improve conditions in Africa – an impoverished Africa will not be good for the world
- China today is a country with no ideology, but it appreciates that it needs to change its educational system to engender more innovation
- The coming decade will be fantastic for Asia
- Based on the 10 to 1 ratio in direct foreign investment in China vs. India, China’s development will be a lot faster than India’s
- You don’t get results by solving problems, but by exploiting opportunities
- Australia needs to decide whether it is part of the “west” or Asia and act as a bridge between the two
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