American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s 1943 theory of Hierarchy of Needs is well-known in many countries. Although in later years through his extended studies of diverse cultures, he tried to modify the highest tier from “Self-actualization” to “Self-transcendence” to encompass broader cultural influences, a recent humor with joking modifications of his Hierarchy from China is simply more illuminating. [See Pic#1 and Pic#2]
Pic#2: Chinese Humor – Maslow’s 2.0
The humor in fact touches on some naked truth. Indeed the modern men need to be connected at all time and at all places. When food and drink are abundant, when comfortable life styles become a matter of fact, when we all feel fairly good about ourselves, when all leisured or non-leisured pursuits are mostly through various information systems and electronically connected conveniences, how could a contemporary person of today live without an online connection or an electronic device? It could only get more so in the days to come.
However, what if one day we were pushed back to the very basics of living by the sheer forces of nature? Would anyone be ready for a cave man’s life style even just for a few days? Would those type of events change our perspectives about life and modern technologies? Would we be sufficiently equipped with some basic survival and humanistic skills that may be required under such rare yet totally possible circumstances? If not yet, we may need start thinking about these questions. Moreover, would we allow ourselves to be put into the category of robots or machine men too soon?
There is such a saying in the U.S., “Behind every successful man, there is a capable woman.” This wisdom can be explained in Chinese sayings in a more straightforward way.
People in China used to call “hula” （忽悠）someone (Flattering in non-sincere ways that can cause hallucinations in someone’s mind) as “Patting a horse’s butt” （拍马屁）. Yet every once a while, they may accidentally reach to a true tiger’s butt instead. Another Chinese saying of “Never touch a tiger’s butt” (老虎的屁股摸不得）is self-explanatory. However even the tiger may start getting the hula-fever after a while because he simply needs doze off under all the hula noises. However what others may not know is that he may have a smart and tough tigress on ultra alert at that time, who will simply kick his butt to alert him.
In the mumble-jumble world of today, individuality is such a rarity that many people simply don’t even have the time to notice its void in themselves. Herd effect is a common phenomenon for those people who are trying so hard to fit into, either a corporation, a community, a group or even a family or friend circle. However, without individuality, rarely there is creativity, especially those extraordinary creativity.
For those folks who are buried by the “herd effect”, who even just remotely sense the same way consciously or subconsciously, who feel that they may have lost control of their own life, TriStrategist recommends the following practices:
1. Keep some simple minutes everyday as the “I, Me, Myself” time
2. Practice meditation
3. Get in touch with nature and strengthen their own earthly souls
By doing such often, we can all look forward to restoring our individualities and make the world a lot more colorful, interesting and tolerant.
In worldwide cloud computing market share today, US ranks the highest, at about 60%, and China occupies only about 4%. Although in a single digit, China has the average annual growth rate around 40%. In fact since 2013, the IaaS growth rate has been 100+% per year in China. After Lenovo purchased IBM x86 server business in 2014, almost all of the x86 machine productions from China have facilitated directly to worldwide cloud computing, especially for local market where cloud computing and Big Data are also entering central government’s catch-up agenda.
On May 20, China Customs General awarded a RMB 85 million (about $14 million USD) cloud and Big Data contract to AliCloud owned by Alibaba Group, the first one of its kind. It signaled the government’s broader acceptance and support of public cloud services. AliCloud, initially built for Alibaba’s extensive eCommerce platform, was developed by Alibaba internally. It can process about 100PB of data in 6 hours. The first stage of the project, building a cloud platform for China Customs, is expected to be completed in a month. In China, the potential speed of change is often hard to gauge, where government is often the key driver for large initiatives.
The market potentials for cloud computing in China are apparent, especially with the direct value proposition of Big Data processing. With its huge mobile population, the data growth rate is unprecedented. By 2014, Chinese population already produced about 0.5 zettabyte (ZB) of data (One zettabyte is equivalent to about 250 billion DVDs) and it is predicted to reach about 40ZB by 2020. Thanks to the readily available open-source technologies on cloud and Big Data, many Chinese entrepreneurs are jumping onto the cloud market. UCloud, an Shanghai-based IaaS provider founded in 2012, just closed another round of $100 million funding from global investors. Here is a brief summary of the current challenges and opportunities on cloud development in this market:
1. Cloud computing is still a protected market in China. A commercial ICP (Internet Content Provider) license is required for all internet providers and it’s not open to foreign companies. This law itself could prevent many foreign cloud providers to directly enter China. (See a recent legal blog on ICP). Although internet laws often change quickly in China, the latest data sovereignty rulings worldwide triggered by the Snowden event have made Chinese government more cautious about opening up its market in this area. However TriStrategist thinks that global data sharing is unstoppable over a longer term.
2. China’s cloud market is still at the very basic stage. The estimate is about 3-year lag behind the US market on the adoption of new cloud and data technologies. Lacking of local technical talents is a major deterrent, but that can be improved by the active global recruiting efforts that many Chinese companies are engaging in these days.
3. IaaS is a highly competitive and decentralized market in China. Internet hosting services have long been a scattered market in China with data centers and colos all over China which are often not organized for large-scale cloud computing although things are improving. There is no dominant large IaaS provider, but there are monopolies in broadband services. The laws changed in March 2015 to level the broadband market to small players may help promote IaaS market directly. IaaS providers in China have to consider specific local realities to accommodate low IT level in general public and the needs for high customization and support. The speed and reliability of the services are often more important than the cost differentiation at the moment. Successful IaaS providers need to find their niche, bundle other value services and seriously protect themselves from the uneven competitions.
4. PaaS is growing at a slow rate in China due to the unwillingness to get locked in on technologies. Technology market in China is very diverse. However SaaS is growing rapidly in China, starting from gaming, banking, and financial industries. Niche providers with industry-specific Big Data solutions are often preferred.
Still, as indicated in TriStrategist’s earlier blog on the Geographic Advantage of the cloud computing, things could change quickly in China. AWS just announced a new Direct Connect in April for the China (Beijing) Region to meet Chinese businesses’ preferences of dedicated network for hybrid-cloud environment. Today many global public cloud providers are collaborating with local data center or internet service providers to gain early entry and understanding of this huge yet challenging market.
Brain and IntelligenceA brain is the central subject to study intelligence, human or artificial. Today’s advancement in neuroscience, aided by fast computing and vast data analysis capabilities, has demonstrated some amazing results. Scientists today are armed with much more powerful tools to map the brain cells and signals, to fully understand, decode a human brain’s functions and put the knowledge to great use.
A recent story published in Science Daily told the first case of a patient’s controlling robotic arms using thoughts alone. The project was conducted as a clinical collaboration between Caltech, Keck Medicine of USC and Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center. Most earlier experiments on allowing brain’s controls over prosthetic limbs were done by implanting neural prosthetic devices to the motor cortex, the brain’s movement center, which gives detailed orders to the body through spinal cord for the right movements. They often observed clumsy responses and didn’t work as smoothly as designed. Now a different approach is adopted. For the first time, two small chips were implanted to the brain’s posterior parietal cortex area (PPC), a high-level cognitive area responsible for the “intent” of the movement, an early pathway of a brain’s movement planning. By recording the signals from PPC cells and decoding them through computer analysis simultaneously, computer can in turn order the prosthetic limbs to do what the brain has intended. It created an almost out-of-world experience for the first long-term paralyzed patient when he could grab a drink or move the computer mouse easily by just using his own thought alone.
Another study by Stanford published in WIRED this week is about using neural stem cells to grow 3-D pieces of brain balls -“human cortical spheroids” (hCSs) – that can look, form connections and pass signals like living brain matters. Molecules in stem cells submerged in nutrient fluid started dividing and growing, forming the “messenger” type of new cells, astrocytes, which are critical for the formation of synapses – bridges between neurons for passing electric signals. The high excitement of this experiment comes from the possibility that with today’s technological capabilities, the organic growth patterns of those “brain matters” in the lab can be sliced and recorded in great details with time through electrophysiological recording. Therefore real models of neural network are palpable and the human brain may be truly deciphered in its entirety one day.
There has been no better time to watch technologies and sciences feeding into each other in awesome discoveries and creations.
A company’s culture cannot be formed in a Powerpoint presentation. TriStrategist thinks that a company’s core quantitative measurement system can be one of the most important influencers of an established company’s culture, whether it is linked to goal setting, performance, compensation or time usage. For an established company, the influences to its culture from its founders’ glorious past or larger-than-life persona have already waned with time or scale. With effects subtle yet persistent, the company-wide “number” systems are usually interpreted by every employee in day-to-day job as “what are important” for the company and for individual’s success, and the closest reference to anything “objective” or “concrete”. Thus it’s consequential to get the measurement system right for a desired culture. For example, if a company’s most frequently visited number-entry system is a timesheet tool, then the company is surely not encouraging creativity, because creativity can never be tracked by hours. Usually the opposite effect is true.
OKRs(Objectives and Key Results), a simple quantitative goal-setting and measuring system, was introduced by Intel but made famous by Google. That’s how Google uses it to encourage its large pool of “smart creatives” (a term by Eric Schmidt in the 2014 book “How Google Works“) to think big, take risks and achieve results. OKRs can be applied to both individuals and teams. For example, “Increase customer traffic to the site by 20% by end of Q2.” is a clear goal and the progress can be measured and scored (1-100%) at the end of the time period. If anyone often scores 100% for all his/her goals, it could mean that the goals are set too low.
Google’s OKR implementation, as many other Google ventures, has its own characteristics and helped enhanced their desired cultural benefits when the company scales. Main ones are:
1. Link the big picture to concrete and measurable results. This is not the “Underpromise-and-Overdeliver’ type of the corporate game-playing. The precedence has to be set from the top on aiming at very ambitious goals towards the visions, but with deep thinking on measurable executions.
2. Transparency. All OKRs, from CEO to everyone else are published. Read one person’s OKRs can quickly understand what motivates him/her the most.
3. Alignment in a large and flat organization. Each quarter the top leaders will present and explain their well-established OKRs in a company meeting and grade themselves against the previous quarter OKRs. Failures are candidly discussed from the top. Everyone understands the shared stretch goals and priorities for the company and for the team.
4. Encourage risk-taking and a healthy environment of innovations. OKRs are scored, but the scores are not tracked or used for punishment. If the top leaders set high goals and are tough in grading themselves, failures become more the motivators in an innovation-driven environment. People can honestly grade their performance on goals. Hard goals and endeavors are valued. BAU(Business-as-usual) stuff are not even allowed in OKRs.
5. Forget about competitions. In the current highly competitive technology age, for any company or individual, creative innovation is the only way to stay ahead and not fall into oblivion. Well-formed and stretched OKRs will keep employees excited and focused on where they want to go instead of chasing competitions on things of the past.
How to change the culture of an established company which no longer has the startup ease and glaze? Culture change can start from something simple. “Aiming for simplicity” is also one of the lessons that Steve Jobs taught us from his legacy. OKRs is one such example. TriStrategist thinks that for any established company to change the culture, watch your company-wide number systems. If they are obsolete or cumbersome, change them quickly for something simple yet well-aligned to the desired culture. Then watch for the influences and make adjustments as needed.
In the cloud computing and Big Data world, we often use 3Vs (Volume, Velocity, Variety) to measure a data technology’s effectiveness. Traditional relational databases often fail at the fast scaling with large amount of unstructured data in either storage, processing or query performance, when data volumes are no longer measured in megabytes(MB) or gigabytes(GB), but in terabytes(TB) or petabytes(PB). For example, the challenges to analyze large influx of social media data or real-time streaming data. Under such scenarios, various NoSQL databases coupled with cloud-enabled processing technologies (e.g. Hadoop ecosystem) come into today’s arena.
Compared with Relational databases, especially in dealing with unstructured data, NoSQL database technologies in general are less expensive, more scalable and often with better query performance. Typically these technologies allow data to be stored in more native formats and does not need to enforce schema in advance.
Today’s NoSQL database products can be roughly divided into the following categories:
– Document DB: Data are stored in a “document” structure which consists of many different key-value pairs. Document itself is an object container. MongoDB is one of the leading Document DBs on the market. MongoDB data are stored in BSON (Binary JSON) format. Microsoft is now offering a fully managed XML-JSON-based DocumentDB service on Azure. The document concepts are the same.
– Graph DB: Data are stored in a network structure which can be easily represented by visual graphs, such as social connections. Neo4J and HyperGraphDB are examples of Graph DB offerings. The data in a Graph DB are stored as Nodes and Labels. It allows faster queries on relationships between nodes. For example, to answer a question on the potential relationship between two seemingly non-related Twitter IDs. The query needs not to perform expensive joins. In building a graph from raw data, most of the relationships in the data model need to be pre-defined by JSON files. Dynamic relationship crawling APIs can still be challenges for Graph DB.
– Simple Key-value DB: Every single item in the database is a key-value pair. Redis is one of such examples. Additional functionalities can be added to the pair such as specifying a type for the value, as “string” or “Integer”, etc.. Google acquired Firebase in 2014 as a real-time database for developers. It’s in fact a JSON-based Key-String DB. JSON can be returned through RESTFUL client-side code. The sample usages of Firebase are real-time chat rooms, control notifications, etc.
– Wide-column stores: Examples are Cassandra and HBase. These open-source data models are optimized for data stores across multiple clusters and fast query performance over large datasets. They are widely used today for analyzing Big Data. HBase is also available in Mcrosoft Azure HDInsight service offering.
Because many of these NoSQL data structures are based on JSON or BSON, developers can write object-oriented code against the data objects, which in turn can be easily integrated into other application logics.
Fractal CoastlineThe discovery of fractals and Chaos Theory in mathematics was profound. All of a sudden, seemingly unruly and complex layouts can many times be explained by a simple and elegant equation, be it the pattern of tree leaves, a landscape of coastline erosion, or the turbulence in a hurricane. Following the simplest and least-resistance paths, nature creates the unthinkable. That’s nature’s mechanism of selection and scale out.
The laws of nature can often mysteriously find their ways into complex social arenas. The unsolvable paradoxes in today’s corporate and business environments (For example, see TriStragegist’s earlier blog on Challenges to Today’s IT Managers) indicated that some fundamental changes are needed in leadership and management space of modern businesses. From surveying 43 global CEOs and 400+ young employees, the Wolff Olins Report of 2015, drew some similar conclusions. As the report noticed, “Employees are now more confident, more mobile, more demanding, more idealistic in some cases, and less willing to be company people. Employees, more than ever, are individualists.” Leaders, in response, need become “more the shaper, the connector, the questioner.” “What is clear, as leaders forge their own new models, is that the old ways no longer work. CEOs can’t fall back on best practice. They have to be original. Leadership, more than ever, needs creativity. And achieving the impossible needs the most radical kind of creativity.”
TriStrategist thinks that one of such creative solutions to a modern corporation’s management dilemma has already existed in many forms. That’s the concept of “Self-Management”, which allows employees as individualists to manage their own work and ideas, and collectively a corporation still runs its organic, dynamic and healthy growth. Creative ideas and smart practices can quickly replicate themselves in such a setting, comparable to the way fractals can grow from something simple into complex yet elegant self-growth patterns.
The mere concept of self-management could scare many managers, but the trend may be inevitably coming. With the progress of current age of modern technologies, repetitive tasks are gradually eliminated by automation, and complex endeavors increasingly need a collaborative team of diverse talents from different areas, who are more the creative individualists than the rule-followers.
Will the concept of self-management lead to the disintegration and chaos of a corporation? That may depend on the future definition of a corporation and its condition setting. Future competent leaders are more than ever in demand, but their functions will be more to create the conditions for the healthy growth of a group of self-managed individuals to jointly accomplish complex tasks or common goals, and maintain the cohesiveness of the group in the process.
For self-management to work, a corporation first needs to be super-flat so that ideas from the individuals and small teams can organically grow. To achieve high goals and complex tasks that require large collections of skillful individuals, an organization needs to have the right processes and tools in place so that team collaborations and communications are smooth, intuitive and without barriers. The organization also needs meaningful data-driven measurement mechanisms. As Peter Drucker mentioned, “What measured improves.” Each self-managed individual will understand clearly what success means to him/her and to others. With these, a corporation of collective self-managed employees can function as a cohesive yet dynamic organization.
Such a concept in fact has already been seen in practice. Google is a great example. From their founders who prefer contrary thinking and doing, Google’s management practices have demonstrated many creative and daring ideas for future organizations. A few notable ones are flat organization, smaller teams, data-driven decision-making, talent hiring, impact-focused grouping, and ample freedom for employees to manage their ideas and time. A 2014 book on How Google Works, written by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former executive Jonathan Rosenberg, provided us a glimpse of Google inside. They in fact illustrated how the basic home-grown concept of self-management worked in Google. Conditions and restrictions of today’s society certainly have limited the effects of some of these ideas and the increasing size of the organization has added more complications, but Google’s unusual success and trend-setting records in many cutting-edge technologies and business models nonetheless demonstrated the power of these modern management concepts.
As the modern society comprises more the individualists, the concept of self-management may likely be the only way for any organization to grow and scale out effectively.
The world is definitely different now. Your smartphone never leaves you, even as an alarm clock for your morning. You are now wearing smart watch and of course watching smart TV every day. Friends from Asia nowadays all pop up on WeChat. Your college, high-school, middle-school classmates all over the world, whom you haven’t heard of (most likely have forgotten) for decades, all started to send you invites to join the group chats or friends’ lists. Your remote siblings, relatives, even your 70 or 80-year-old parents who barely can maneuver a computer mouse, now happily send you a voice message any time or write messages in local languages with their fingers. …
It is indeed an intriguing time. As if our past, present and future are starting to merge and get all entwined in this technology age. You are very occupied, so occupied that can rarely find any moment of solitude. Modern technologies seem to empower us but at the same time diminish us.
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a Canadian thinker, philosopher and communication theorist, once said “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. ”
With so much happening around us every day and in such speed, we become oblivious of where we are or who we are. We can know so much about everything else, but so little of ourselves. In this age, everyone gets connected but quickly forgotten. We have no identity other than an icon or avatar on our smartphones, tablets or TV console. And everyone seems to be the same.
McLuhan also noticed, “For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.” It will become more challenging for us to remember that within the limited span of our lifetime, limited minutes in every day, we need seriously dedicate some time and energy to pursue what values most to us. We may be busy with many contemporary pursuits, conformed to many social norms, but there are also things in the world that are simply timeless or make one a unique self – which may only need a little solitude to take notice.
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