David Jones gives a good account of how consumers are able to hold businesses to account in unpredictable ways, often before companies’ PR machines have even grasped what’s going on. When Eurostar trains became stranded in the Channel Tunnel in freezing conditions at Christmas two years ago, customers were venting their anger on Twitter while Eurostar’s official Twitter account was preoccupied with promoting short breaks.

He cites statistics from research on social attitudes carried out by his company: 74 per cent of consumers think that business bears as much responsibility for driving positive social change as governments; 80 per cent think they have a responsibility to censure unethical companies by avoiding their products.  I would imagine that these would be challenging findings for many a business leader. They point to a social environment which puts the way profits are generated firmly at the centre of the contract between consumers and businesses.

Read the full post at Valoro VGW.

Ai Weiwei on a video link shortly before his detention in China

The FT reports on Huawei’s difficulties breaking into the US market.  Over the past decade, the Chinese firm has risen to become the world’s number two supplier of network equipment with growth in most major markets outside America.  But America’s growing distrust of China is proving a huge obstacle and it has failed to win any major contract with a leading US telecoms network:

This is in part because of the rocky state of Sino-US relations, including reports of cyberattacks on US companies such as Google in China. Fairly or unfairly, says James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, America will be loath to entrust a Chinese group with access to its communications network if it has reason to suspect doing so would bolster cyberwarfare capabilities.

“Awareness in the national security policy community of threats in the cyber domain has greatly increased,” says Mr Mancuso. “So if you believe that the Chinese government is engaging in cyber-intrusion, you’ll have a problem with Huawei because Huawei sits smack in the middle of the industry supplying the critical infrastructure.”

The FT describes how Huawei has modelled itself on leading American businesses, taking advice from the likes of IBM, Accenture and Hays Group in order to win acceptance in the business community around the world.  But in contrast to the Europeans, Americans calculate that they cannot trust their communications networks to a firm that is suspected of receiving financial support from the Chinese state.  They fear Huawei may lack the autonomy to resist complicity with cyber-espionage.

The story brings to mind Abraham Lincoln’s lesson that we cannot escape history.  The FT quotes a Huawei executive complaining that Ericsson does not face the same difficulties in the US.  But Ericsson eminates from Sweden, which has a good reputation for respecting the rule of law and is not attracting a name for involvement in cyber-warfare.

Huawei, on the other hand, has a great deal to overcome in terms of the cultural baggage that comes with being a big Chinese player in the sensitive field of technology.  In the week of the detention of China’s most famous artist, Ai Weiwei, there are plenty of reminders that Beijing has at best a loose relationship with the rule of law.  Take this from The Economist:

The government now dismisses the idea that one function of the law is to defend people against the arbitrary exercise of state power. On March 4th a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman told foreign journalists who had been beaten up by Chinese police while going about their work: “Don’t use the law as a shield.” Some people, she said, want to make trouble in China and “for people with these kinds of motives, I think no law can protect them.”

One could argue that the treatment of dissidents and journalists has little relevance to the conduct of business.  But, as Jamil Anderlini argues in the FT, corporations too find that the assumptions and traditions that engender trust in business are lacking in China:

China, just as it has been for millennia, is ruled by individuals who make use of weak institutions, including the legal system, to achieve their own objectives. Many thousands of private businessmen have been on the receiving end of this behaviour in recent years, as their companies were swallowed up by competitors owned by the state or by politically-connected individuals. Numerous foreign companies involved in business disputes in China can attest to the frustration of dealing with a judiciary that must do the bidding of the local Communist party and the powerful individuals who control it.

There is a connection between the civic culture and the corporate culture of a nation.  If a state fails to respect the rule of law in relation to its citizens, why would it do so in relation to businesses?  Google decided that the compromises involved in conducting business in China were too great.  Having submitted to four years’ of self-censoring search results for the Chinese market, its Gmail security was penetrated from China in an apparent attempt to spy on Chinese dissidents.

All companies seeking growth in markets with repressive regimes must weigh risks against the potential for profits.  The stakes are infinitely higher when it comes to opening access to sensitive domestic infrastructure to companies with questionable links.

It is perhaps not surprising therefore that Huawei finds it faces higher hurdles in America than its competitors to demonstrate its trustworthiness as a telecoms supplier.  The question arises, though, as to why the Europeans are not so fastidious.  Will they one day regret being so sanguine?

Image courtesy Jurvetson.

There’s an old joke about a banker whose plumber charged him £250 for a two-minute job to fix a leaking tap.  “I don’t earn that kind of money in the City!” the banker told the plumber.  “Yeah!” replied the plumber, “I didn’t either.  That’s why I switched to plumbing.”

The joke spoke to a pervading anxiety that the financial rewards of white collar work may be meagre compensation for the costs it exacts.  Now, along comes Matthew Crawford to rub salt in the wound with his thesis that the manual trades may also be more intrinsically rewarding.

The Case for Working with Your Hands (published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft) owes more to Marx than I had appreciated from reading reviews of the book. Crawford provides a critique of the alienation of work in corporate capitalism. He extrapolates the trends that Marx identified in 19th Century manual labour to show how so-called ‘knowledge workers’ in contemporary capitalism are subject to the same phenomenon. The argument is not new. What differentiates this book is that, while Crawford writes from the perspective of an academic philosopher, he builds his argument from his own direct experience in the manual trades (electrician, motorcycle engineer) and desk work (a writer abstracts of academic papers, a research fellow for a Washington think tank).

Crawford finds that his experience of manual work is more intellectually challenging and more intrinsically satisfying than his experience of knowledge work. As an electrician and running his own motorcycle repair shop, he finds engagement in problem solving, in creating something and working to demonstrable and tangible standards. There is holistic pleasure in working with both hands and brains, and daily experience of failure from which one learns, accumulates tacit knowledge and acquires mastery.

He contrasts this with our normal experience of alienation from work both as workers and as consumers. At work, jobs have been overwhelmed by bureaucracy and the stripping away of much of their intellectual content as the focus of corporations becomes the creation of maximum value for shareholders rather than for end-users. As consumers, we have no interaction with the products that we purchase which are designed to ‘free’ us from the need to fix or maintain them ourselves. He cites a model of Mercedes car which does not include so much as a dipstick to check the oil. The car still needs its oil levels to be topped up regularly but the owner is expected to leave this to the service engineer.

Crawford laments that in most organisational settings, work is not so much about mastery of craft but mastery of the dynamics of the team. He argues that the focus of management is to foster a certain sensibility in employees rather than require high standards in the application of skills. He gives a powerful account of his disappointment with his first job after completing his master’s degree. Employed to write abstracts of papers, he found that this was far from being the journey into knowledge that he had imagined. It turned out to be a mutilated form of intellectual work where the quality of his output — the integrity of his summarising of authors’work — mattered less than the number of abstracts that he could produce in a day. His colleagues were damaged people — including one who used heroin on the job and took pleasure in sabotaging his work by including in his abstracts outrageous material which his employers, none the wiser, would subsequently publish.  Crawford asks:

“How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a ‘knowledge worker’ at a salary of $23,000? I hadn’t gone to graduate school for the sake of a career (rather, I wanted guidance reading some difficult books), but once I had the master’s degree I felt like I belonged to a certain order of society, and was entitled to its forms. Despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as a manual worker.”

Crawford finds it perverse that Western democracies are alert to the dangers of a concentration of political power but not to the risks of concentrated corporate power. He advocates that, as consumers, we should show apply to our purchasing sensitivity to the impact of the production of goods and services on human dignity — in the same way that many routinely consider environmental issues. At work, he favours occupations which offer face-to-face interactions rather than control by remote forces, responsibility for one’s work, and solidarity between colleagues.  Such solidarity, he argues, is derived from the respect for each other which comes from working to clear standards and seeing colleagues do the job well.

Crawford offers nothing constructive for the masses of people who work in large organisations. The consolations of the trades cannot be readily established in the office.  Crawford himself acknowledges that to address the problems he identifies would require a revolution in the regulation of large corporations. Rather than hope for this, he suggests, individuals would do better adopting a ‘Stoic’ attitude — seeking out “the cracks where individual agency and the love of knowledge can be realized today, in one’s own life.” For many people, those cracks are to be found mainly in their personal space away from work  — which is a measure of the very alienation that Crawford seeks to highlight.

The Case for Working with Your Hands provides a thought-provoking critique of how we work. It offers a glimpse of a more sustaining alternative.  But it strikes me as the beginning of a discussion rather than the last word.

The Case for Working with Your Hands, by Matthew Crawford.  Available from Amazon.

Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive.

Amazon is appealing to customers to “vote with their purchases” against publishers who insist on an agency model, whereby the publishers set the price of books rather than let retailers introduce discounts.

Publishers are understandably alarmed at the threat to their revenue streams that ebooks represent. The piece quotes Tom Weldon of Penguin as saying:

“Our first and foremost concern is that we protect the value of our authors’books”.

Tom Holland of the Society of Authors says:

“Ebooks are only starting to penetrate the market now. If it gets written in stone that prices are low, that is what the public will expect from now on. The risk is that the book, which has been traditionally a high-prestige object, will be permanently devalued. Publishers are right to try to protect the value of their brand.“

Publishers argue that a large proportion of their costs is unrelated to the physical business of printing and distributing physical books. There are advances to be paid to authors, marketing costs, and so on. But they seem to be displaying the same inability to see things from the consumer’s point of view that did for the music business.

Books and ebooks are not equivalent value propositions. It may be stretching the point to say that a book “has been traditionally a high-prestige object”.  But the value one purchases with a book is tied up with the right of ownership that comes with it. You can lend it to friends. You can impress visitors to your home by displaying your book collection in prominent places. You can photocopy sections that you might want to share with others. Or, once you have finished with it, you can give a book to a charity shop so that the residing value can subsidise good works.

Ebooks offer none of these advantages. They are tremendously convenient, offer instant gratification and – depending on your choice of device – can be read in the dark. But, because of the onerous digital rights management imposed by publishers, all one is buying is the right to read the text.

Buying an ebook is about as far from owning a high-prestige object as it is possible to imagine. The experience feels to me more like renting a DVD, except you can’t even share an ebook easily with someone in your own household. Why would anyone pay a premium price for that?

Amazon’s customers won’t need much persuading to vote with their purchases.

Image courtesy Christian Guthier.

When humans evolved into seals

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1985 novel Galápagos is a Darwinian satire on the mess humankind causes for itself as a result of having evolved big brains. Set in the late 20th Century, it charts the breakdown of society and the near extinction of the human species — caused by a cocktail of hedonism, financial crisis and viruses. The twist is that the story is narrated from the vantage point of a million years hence, from which perspective the culture and behaviour of 20th Century humans seems inexplicable. The few surviving humans of the future — a small colony that settled on the Galápagos islands — have evolved a more stable equilibrium with their environment with small brains, minimal language and a simple life in which the only concern is when to dive into the ocean to catch fish.

The novel has a fragmented narrative but is brimming with ideas. Reading it in the wake of the financial crisis of the early 21st Century, it resonates more strongly possibly than it may have at the time of publication. Vonnegut evokes the rapidity with which society can break down when people no longer believe in the value of money: a catastrophe to which we came closer than most of us care to imagine.

The crux of the book is that our brains evolved to such a size that we developed redundant capacity. Somewhere along the way, the consciousness of humans was turned away from the boredom of simply existing and reproducing and towards a variety of lifestyle choices that could make life meaningful:

Human brains back then had become such copious and irresponsible generators of suggestions as to what might be done with life that they made acting for the benefit of future generations seem one of many arbitrary suggestions which might be played by narrow enthusiasts — like poker or polo or the bond market, or the writing of science-fiction novels.

The humans of a million years in the future are descendants of a motley group of mainly women and one man who survive by luck. They escape the mainland before the rest of humankind becomes infected by a virus which terminates further reproduction, and between them they embody some genetic and cultural inheritances that help them to adapt well to the small island of rock where they run aground. Most of the group are from a primitive tribe, the Kankabono, and there’s also a Japanese baby who was born with seal-like fur.

What quickly becomes apparent in this new environment is the uselessness of the sum of knowledge of Western civilisation, which happens to have been captured for them in a computer called Mandarax which accompanies them on their voyage. When human life is stripped of culture, the simplicity of the Kankabono has more to offer than the great achievements of art and science.

Vonnegut does not deny the positive things that have emerged from human endeavour — such as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. But it’s a running gag in the book that most people were never destined to create something of such sublime significance. The achievements of human culture seem to be outweighed by the inevitability that even the most destructive and outlandish imaginings of the mind would always end up being put into effect:

That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It’s just fun to think about.’

And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it – have slaves fight each other to the death in the Coliseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, or so on.

Even the narrator, the soul of a 20th Century American is compromised, having shot an elderly woman in Vietnam out of vengeance when he served there as a soldier. It was an instinctive reaction to seeing his comrades killed by a hand grenade, but one which would be unimaginable to the humans of the future — whose limbs whither away to flippers and who have no need for weapons.

I chanced upon Galápagos while researching my Masters dissertation. It is quoted by the educationist and psychologist Guy Claxton in his book on consciousness, Noises from the Darkroom. Claxton argues that we give too much credit to our sense of the conscious authorship of our lives, and underplay the largely unconscious processes by which our minds work for us:

The problem is that we can pretend to claim conscious credit for our decisions only if we persist in denying the existence, or even the possibility of unconscious influences. Once we see consciousness as an intermittent and unreliable print-out from the invisible biological system that underlies it, we can no longer claim the credit with such confidence.

Vonnegut’s novel delivers a warning about where our reverence for consciousness could lead us. In his depiction of the survival of humankind as being dependent on relinquishing our big brains, he challenges what we most value in Western culture. His imagining of how humankind might evolve is a call on us to learn again how to appreciate the simplicity of just being with our unconscious experience.

Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Available from Amazon

See also Things Mean a Lot.

Image courtesy putneymark.

“We have developed into a society or culture that is afraid of silence. The noise is now so great in many public places, partly because of all the mobile phone conversations conducted in them, that I am surprised people can actually hear the others they are phoning.

“Constant noise appears to be reassuring, or at least to be thought so. That is why music or muzak plays in shops, restaurants and on aeroplanes when they are about to take off or land. But what happens when noise is so loud and ubiquitous that you can no longer hear yourself think?

“Then the thought occurs that the whole point of all this din is to stop people thinking, or confronting themselves. The scary thing about silence is that you are left with yourself; the mirror which might have been conveniently darkened or blurred is now uncomfortably clean and unforgiving.”

He’s writing in response to A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, which I’ve not read. His article resonated with my own increasing appreciation of silence.

Long before iPods, and before them Walkmans, a music soundtrack accompanied my life as much as possible. At some level, it helped my mind switch off and to become more connected with life. But the iPod finally killed this for me.

When I first got an iPod, I uploaded my entire music collection and more or less listened to all of it over several months as I cycled to and from work. I found I didn’t much like most of the collection and still less did I like constant noise in the background. Where before, a soundtrack helped me relax, now it was becoming a source of distraction and stress.

More recently, I’ve noticed that I opt for silence by default. For as many years as I can remember, the start of my day was arranged to the rhythms of the Today programme on the radio. It connected me with the world beyond. My childhood and teenage memories of Today are of civilised, sophisticated and affable presenters whom it was a pleasure to invite to your breakfast table. But through the years that I was working at the BBC, the mix became more toxic.  The political culture seemed to demand a more austere diet of aggressive interrogation of guests. It felt like a civic and professional duty to listen, but no longer one that was wholesome. I was surprised how quickly the habit of listening fell away once I left the corporation. Nowadays, I’ve already checked the headlines on my phone before I even switch on the radio and as often as not I forget to switch it on at all.

Similarly, when driving I surprise myself by driving long distances in silence where before I couldn’t contemplate travelling without a playlist of podcasts or some music to alleviate the boredom. I currently need to drive to Oxford reasonably frequently and look forward to the opportunity to be with my thoughts and to take in the hills of the Chilterns as I speed through.

Silence lets us connect with ourselves in ways which are too infrequent in contemporary life. I notice this with my coaching clients. One of the greatest gifts you can give as a coach requires no particular skill or training; just the discipline to ask a question and then shut up. To experience the time and space to explore one’s thoughts is such a contrast to the demanding busyness of normal everyday life that it’s almost a value in itself. The icing on the cake is that it refreshes the mind, helps us see things in new ways and ultimately fosters a more grounded and measured approach to life.

Image courtesy ell brown.

Shirt and tie

Lucy Kellaway, at the FT, is chronicling a trend towards formality in business, which she puts down firmly to the recession. In recent columns, she has detected a rejection of the casual both in how people dress and in how they write.

It is on the latter that she is more convincing, having carried out a comparative analysis of emails she has received from readers recently against others received nine years ago:

The results prove beyond reasonable doubt that the pendulum has swung away from slouchy informality towards correct usage. In 2000, more than a quarter of e-mails were entirely written in lower case. In the recent batch only one e-mail shunned the capital letter, and that came not from a young techie but from a man who had worked on Wall Street in the 1960s. As his use of language was otherwise impeccable I am inclined to think that the reason for the absence of capitals was that the gentleman was having difficulty operating the shift key.

In my earlier audit there was a rich variety in e-mail sign-offs, but almost all were ugly. One of the most common was “rgds”, a hateful little abbreviation, insulting in its implication that the writer is too busy to make three extra key strokes for the recipient’s benefit.

Yet in the 2009 group there was only one “rgds”, and instead “Yours Sincerely”, even “Yours Faithfully” have made walloping comebacks.

There has been a corresponding return to favour of the surname, which in 2000 was little in evidence. Nearly 40 per cent of the recent e-mails addressed me as “Ms Kellaway”, “Mrs Kellaway” or “Lucy Kellaway”, and before the name came my very favourite form of address, which is “Dear”. This is firmly back in fashion, while “Hi” and “Hey”, which were both in vogue in 2000, are on the way out.

On the trend towards wearing suits, the evidence is rather more flimsy. She notes a few opinions that it is sensible to dress up to make a better impression in hard times and adds a few thoughts of her own along these lines. But the hardest data she can offer that there might be some kind of a trend is an anecdotal observation of a trade fair:

At a conference in London last week for HR managers, everyone was in a suit and tie while, at the same conference two years ago, they were all casual. HR people are on the front line of the jobs market and they are also like lemmings – so, if they think suits are in, they are in.

My email and SMS inboxes bear out a shift towards greater formality and correct grammar in written communication. But I don’t see a decisive return to the suit and tie culture. And nor would I expect to.

For one thing, the economic crisis began in the City where the trend towards casual dressing at work never really took hold. The fact that the enterprise of banking has been shown to be all superficial appearance with no substance might suggest that some people at least would hesitate to emulate its sartorial code.

For another thing, the wave of redundancies gives many people the impetus to strike out on their own and start their own businesses. For some of these, at least, part of the attraction is to be one’s own boss, be true to oneself and please oneself how to dress. Casual attire might signal someone who is facing the crisis with independence and groundedness. In certain circumstances, this may be more impressive than donning traditional office wear.

The suit and tie might make sense for some, but it is by no means the obvious or most rational stance in turbulent times. It is not surprising then that the evidence for a trend to formality in clothing is thin.

So it is interesting that the emerging formality in how people write seems to be a more robust shift. From one perspective, this can be seen as a hard-nosed attempt to differentiate oneself in a challenging economy. That Lucy Kellaway reports that sophisticated punctuation is back in fashion would imply that in some measure at least people are trying to demonstrate their cultivation.

But she is also right to suggest that the casualness of discourse which became familiar to us over the past decade in text-speak and emails somehow suggested a lack of respect for the recipient. By using honorifics, the “Dear” form of address and signing off “Yours sincerely” or “Best wishes”, people are now adopting a gentler approach to one another and signalling their own desire for respect.

Either way, the re-emergence of formality in language points to a careful, more orderly and more thoughtful world – one in which it is not sensible to give the impression that you are somehow above communicating in anything other than brutal and abbreviated language. This makes sense whether or not you are attracted to formality in clothing. Language conveys more powerfully than clothes the value of respect and the breadth of one’s intelligence. How you choose to dress is still in large measure contingent on how you see your destiny. How you address others is less negotiable in the current climate.

Image courtesy dotbenjamin.

West End Lane, NW6 - home to a dozen cafes and a library

Camden Council in north London, where I live, is considering changing the ethos of its libraries – to allow people to bring in food and drink and use their mobile phones.  The intention is to make libraries more appealing to young people.

As both a library user and the parent of a young person, this strikes me as an unfortunate and misguided idea.  Libraries are one of the few public spaces in the inner city to which people can turn for quiet.  Swiss Cottage, in the borough, hosts one of the best public libraries in the capital.  Young people constitute a significant proportion of the users.  They go there to find space where they can give unashamed attention to learning.  It’s a place of thought, study and contemplation.  It is wholly unsuited to be a stage for mobile phone conversations or snacking.  Urban life provides an abundance of venues for these activities.  The library offers an alternative realm.

Camden’s proposal loses sight of local councils’mission in providing public libraries.  Their role is as custodian of a value: of access to knowledge, embodied not just in the provision of books and reference facilities but in the creation of an atmosphere conducive to engaging intelligently with them.  If councils are concerned about falling attendances, they might consider a remedy which is aligned with the public value of libraries rather than capitulation to the coffee shop.  This would entail improving the intrinsic appeal of library collections and promoting respect for them.

Victoria Coren – a columnist at The Observer – is a  fellow Camden resident who is also alarmed by the council’s proposal.  She links it to a more general shift in policy in Whitehall.  Only two years ago, the Culture Minister, David Lammy, was telling us “Books are fundamentally important to what libraries are about.”  Now the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, insists that libraries must “look beyond the bookcase”.  Coren believes the contrary:

Burnham says that more library funding would ‘not be realistic in the current climate’. Cobblers. In ‘the current climate’, people need, more than ever, to know about the world. To think laterally and have ideas. To develop an internal life, as an alternative to clubbing and jet-setting. To study history and learn how we’ve got out of trouble before.

The man who thinks that books are a luxury to be cut back in times of recession is a man who doesn’t understand that knowledge is the key to everything and must be at the centre of everything.

Burnham’s approach is in line with a prevailing view that libraries are no longer relevant to the era of Amazon and Google – a view well-expressed by Jemima Lewis in The Telegraph:

People no longer want, or need, to borrow books. Public libraries were invented for the benefit of an aspirational working class – for autodidacts who could not afford the books they craved, at a time when books were really the only source of information.

Many is the clever child who clambered his way out of poverty with the help of a library card. But these days, as the Kaiser Chiefs sing, “it’s cool to know nothing”. Brave indeed is the child at a sink estate school who follows his inner swot. And if the urge to learn proves irresistible, he is probably better off on the internet, where nobody need know that he isn’t surfing porn.

This strikes me as a view which is wholly rooted in a culture – of affluent and ignorant consumerism – which is disintegrating more rapidly than we can comprehend.  As we’re all forced to review our spending, many will be delighted to find that libraries are more than equipped to meet the same need as impulse orders on Amazon address – but at a fraction of the cost.

Victoria Coren is surely right to suggest that libraries could find a new relevance in the impending period of austerity.  Could it be that preserving a space which exemplifies the ethos of concentration might serve young people better than pandering to an assumption that everything must defer to a culture of instant gratification?

Google Streetview car

Why do we love Google?  A question prompted by its tenth anniversary and the launch of the game-changing Google Chrome browser.  I’m in a love-hate relationship with Google – delighted by its products, worried about its encroachment into my life.  The dark side to Google’s brand foretells difficulties in the years to come.

Google’s products are not just good.  They’re elegant.  And free.  Each, individually, is relatively harmless.  It’s the all-embracing appeal of Google’s toys that makes me uneasy.  Every time it seduces me into adopting one of its services, Google deepens and broadens the picture it can paint of my life.  It knows what I want to know (Google Search).  It knows who I plan to see (Google Calendar); what I intend to do (seamless integration into my calendar of my tasks from Remember the Milk); where I am and where I’m going (Google Maps on my mobile); my prejudices and hobby-horses (Google Reader).  If I was a GMail user, it would know the contact details of all my friends and clients and what I was saying to them.

By rights, Google should enjoy the same kind of relationship with the public that Microsoft does – grudgingly accepted by the majority as a dominant force in our lives, but subject to opprobrium by a significant core of refuseniks who keep us alert to the dangers of its domination.  The risks presented by Google strike me as more worrying than those associated with Microsoft, broader in scope than the ID database being developed by the Government, yet we continue to love it.

Normally, consumers fall out of love with a company when a gap opens up between its values and it practices.  Google has already crossed this threshold with little discernible impact.  Its values are expressed in the words “Don’t be evil.”  Google’s code of conduct says:

Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably and treating each other with respect.

But in 2006, Google disgusted human rights campaigners by agreeing to do the bidding of the censors in China.  Perhaps this issue was too remote from people’s daily experience to influence their feelings towards Google.  Or perhaps they gave Google the benefit of the doubt, agreeing with its contention that it was better to provided censored information than to provide no information at all.

Perhaps we love Google because the threat it poses remains potential rather than realised.  Last year, Privacy International – a human rights group which monitors surveillance and invasions of privacy – named Google as the worst among internet firms for privacy.  According to BBC News:

Privacy International placed Google at the bottom of its ranking because of the sheer amount of data it gathers about users and their activities; because its privacy policies are incomplete and for its poor record of responding to complaints.

“While a number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy,” read the report.

Google responded that it aggressively protects users’privacy.  But the company displays a complacency about its values similar to that of the broadcasters, who claimed to uphold truth only to find that their programme makers were systematically manufacturing falsehoods. One of the risks in Google’s massive user database is that the potential it creates to enable evil spreads beyond the company itself.  In July this year, a US court ordered Google to divulge to the media company Viacom the details of every user who had ever watched a video on YouTube – more than 100 million of them.  It subsequently won the right to anonymise the data.  But the episode demonstrates that Google’s database renders vulnerable the privacy of its users, regardless of Google’s intentions.

There are risks in this for Google.  Sooner or later, the public will become sensitive to the implications of the data that Google holds on them – quite possibly through some event which will do lasting damage to Google’s reputation.  At present, the company is structurally incapable of containing this risk.

Google’s mission – “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” – may have begun as a consumer-facing value proposition.  But the logic of its business model compels it aggressively to push back the frontiers of privacy – both by bringing more and more private information (such as the contents of your living room) into the public domain, and by devising free and seductive ways to bring you online to disclose data about yourself.  As Nicholas Carr (via Chris Anderson) puts it:

For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks — entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions — Google’s range of complements expands into ever more industry sectors. That’s why cute little Google has morphed into The Omnigoogle…

Because the marginal cost of producing and distributing a new copy of a purely digital product is close to zero, Google not only has the desire to give away informational products; it has the economic leeway to actually do it. Those two facts — the vast breadth of Google’s complements, and the company’s ability to push the price of those complements toward zero — are what really set the company apart from other firms. Google faces far less risk in product development than the usual business does. It routinely introduces half-finished products and services as online “betas” because it knows that, even if the offerings fail to win a big share of the market, they will still tend to produce attractive returns by generating advertising revenue and producing valuable data on customer behavior. For most companies, a failed launch of a new product is very costly. For Google, in general, it’s not. Failure is cheap.

Google has been able to develop a culture which displays much lower risk aversion to product development than is typical elsewhere, a risk aversion that spills over into brushing aside long-standing societal values such as privacy.  Its business model incentivises this behaviour – a trend described by the analyst Scott Cleland as publicacy.

Cleland is by no means alone in expressing misgivings.  One of the most level-headed of internet commentators, John Naughton, said of Google’s mission to organise the world’s information:

What we perhaps haven’t fully realised is that these guys really mean it. Their ambition is at least as megalomaniacal as Bill Gates’s vision of a computer on every desk running Microsoft software. So it’s time we started thinking about what a world dominated by Google would be like.

As Google moves into its second decade, it is solidifying the foundations for that world domination with a new kind of browser which will make its cloud computing model – online applications replacing desktop ones – much more sustainable.  But the contradictory forces will be increasingly hard to contain.  The massive database on Google’s billions of users contains an accident waiting to happen.  The fondness with which we greeted Google’s tenth anniversary won’t be replicated in ten years’time.

Image courtesy Byrion.

Cyclist, Theobald's Road

My trusted advisor tells me my blog posts are “very eclectic”.  I don’t thinks she intends this as positive feedback.  She’ll be unimpressed, then, by this tangent into the world of cycling.  Bear with me.  It’s a tale of incivility, self-delusion and reluctance to accept responsibility.  An exploration, if you will, of the banes of modern life.

James Daley, a columnist on cycling in The Independent, offers an account of how he mowed down a middle-aged lady who crossed the road in his path on the Thames Embankment:

My arm was all cut up and bleeding, and as I gathered my bag and bike out of the road, I said nothing – trying to compose myself, while waiting for the pain to subside. The lady I’d hit was in her fifties, but surprisingly, she bounced back on to her feet almost immediately, and didn’t seem to have come out of the collision too badly. While her husband threw a few menacing glances at me, she apologised profusely.

As I rode off, I turned back and told her she should be more careful when she was crossing the road. And she agreed.

When I told this story to my friends, they were horrified – not out of sympathy for me, however, but out of shock that I’d mown down a middle-aged woman rather than slowing down.

As a cyclist myself, I tend towards the sedate, continental style of riding rather than the lycra-clad speediness that I suspect Mr Daley favours.  But I’d be disinclined to judge him for being involved in an accident with a more vulnerable road user.  I understand all too well how you can make an assessment that the pedestrian in front of you will vacate the space to which your heading, only to find in the intervening seconds that she stands stock still in order to let you pass.  I’ve only narrowly avoided collisions in precisely such circumstances.

I did have misgivings though about his unapologetic (and somewhat cowardly) hectoring of the pedestrian as he rode away.

His frank acknowledgement of the horrified reaction of his friends to his behaviour seems to prefigure a redemptive journey whereby he rediscovers his empathy for other human beings.  But, alas, he seems to learn nothing:

Incidents such as this are becoming more and more common, because pedestrians underestimate a) how fast bikes are travelling and b) how much it will hurt if they end up being run over by one. And more and more are learning the lesson the hard way… Given pedestrians’ignorance and complacency when it comes to road safety, it’s no wonder many cyclists on our roads are so angry and aggressive.

What interests me here is that this seems symptomatic of a pervasive incivility in the urban environment to which I have become increasingly sensitised since leaving organisational life.   It’s particularly evident during the morning commute, a time when the tensions between work and personal life are most telling.  I think it’s bound up in some way with how the stresses of working life dehumanise us.

I began to think seriously about it during my own daily cycle ride to school with my five-year-old son.  We travel through narrow side roads, congested by over-sized off-roaders.  I began to notice how drivers would take off at speed to advance a small number of yards, and battle with and swear at each other to stake their claim to space on the road.  Mostly I was struck by their extraordinary lack of consideration for a cyclist going slowly uphill with a small child on the back of his bike.

As I watched them scowling and losing their composure, I wondered what kind of lives they were leading which would cause them to behave in such boorish ways.  I suspected that a different part of themselves would be horrified to see the people they became behind the wheel.

But then I remembered that I used to be like them, anxious to close down a few inches of road between me and the office or jostling to get onto the escalator at the tube station as quickly as possible.  Since leaving my job, I was doing the daily commute on the school run without turning into a stressed ogre.  So I wondered if it might not be the conditions of the journey so much as the prospect of its destination that was causing people to behave inconsiderately.

The plague of incivility in modern society and the dehumanising character of organisational life have become pre-occupations for me, ones to which I will no doubt return here.  The capacity of organisations to destroy human relationships is well-documented.  The management thinker Peter Drucker famously said “The only things that evolve by themselves in an organisation are disorder, friction and malperformance.”  This is why an intervention such as coaching can be valuable in the workplace; it helps people step back from the imperatives towards disorder friction and malperformance and reconnect with their own sense of purpose and decency.

But what about pervasive incivility.  Is it a purely UK phenomenon? Or even just a London one?  It’s not one I’ve previously associated with cycling.  For me, cycling represents an escape from the tensions to which people subject themselves in their cars or on public transport.  Yet James Daley seems to see anger and aggression as a given of the cyclist’s experience in London.

There’s no logic or consistency to this righteous rage.  Just self-justification at all turns.  Had Mr Daley been involved in a collision with a car rather than a pedestrian, would he be blaming himself for underestimating how much it was going to hurt?  To ask the question is to answer it.

We seem to be experiencing a breakdown in our capacity to see others as we would see ourselves.  Recovering a sense of our selves at work is part of the answer.