Monthly Archives: December 2013

Random Thoughts

The Age of Questioning

50 years after the 1960s, another age of disturbance on a global scale seems to be here. This time, although similarly imbedded with human societies’ underlining differences and contradictions, it is triggered not by any open war, but by the massive accessibility of the modern technologies to every corner of the world. Here come the suspicion, curiosity and new awakening to the age-old basic questions and answers.

Almost every establishment is being questioned. The roles of the government are seriously being questioned(from the structures to the laws and actions: the Wall Street rescue, the healthcare, the tax and wealth disparity, the NSA, …). The worldwide economic systems are being questioned after the latest crisis. The structure and functions of the corporations as the main employment and social vehicles are being questioned. The long touted ways of how science and research are conducted are being questioned. …. We no longer can live in peace with what we were told or what has been working in the past, including the social norm, tradition, value and belief, the existence.

The big bang of modern technologies facilitates the questioners and questioning process. Scarcity-enabled technology innovations of the poorer countries are challenging those of the richer places M-PESA, etc). Bitcoin is challenging one of the core threads of human civilization: the currencies. MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses)  movement is challenging the esteemed system of college education. 3D printing is challenging how every little thing can be made, including medical replacement parts. The coming of human robotic surrogates is likely not too far from what’s been showing in the movies. Many more … A gigantic wave of changes are coming, to each culture, each country, each organization, each profession and each individual.

This is an age of questioning,  alongside of which may be confusions and disturbances, but this is definitely an age of innovations, an age of entrepreneurship and an age of many new beginnings.

Reference articles from the web:

General

A Little Christmas Cheer

We want to send to all of our friends and blog readers a little cheer for the holiday season. Wish everyone a very cheerful and productive new year ahead in 2014.

TriStrategy still has a long way to grow its business or firm up its niche offerings. In the past year, it had its ups and downs, but our network of business contacts and friends are continuing to grow, as well as the audiences to our voices on business. TriStrategy has gained more experience and exposures in different industries and various IT areas. Today businesses cannot be done without technologies. The problems facing the IT industry as a whole or IT department in each different company are all very similar in nature. The real differences are at the leadership, at the people and talent level. A company who has the culture of respecting talents, adopting longer term views, with better decision-making process has the edge to move faster and further ahead.

It is also a very encouraging sign to see that people are getting more realistic regarding industry fashions. Less buzz words, more practical considerations and implementations. For example, regarding the suitability of “agile/scrum methodology” in one’s IT department, more questions are being asked. Cloud computing also runs its own adoption course with many companies setting up private clouds first before evaluating and moving to public cloud with some specific position of values.

In industry wide, mergers and acquisitions are more frequently seen; some were done strategically for the purposes of quick modernization of one’s IT infrastructure and process to transform an old-fashioned business. Automation both in business processes and IT processes are more actively discussed and planned. Mobile access and design are included in almost all solution offerings. Efficiency and cost-saving are the primary goals for many IT departments, especially when companies are facing the slow-growing US economy and fast-growing global competitions.

TriStrategy will keep its open and global mindset to lead the flow of business innovations, for ourselves and for our respectful global business clients. We will continue offering smart, effective and creative solutions to businesses’ tough problems.

Business Lessons Learnt

A Strange Coffee Culture

Perhaps no other retail business can better illustrate the small-to-big retail growth process than Starbucks – from a single store in 1975 to 18,000+ stores in 30+ years, limited lines of retail products in the offering, heavy brick-and-mortar dependency, a decent sized corporation, yet trying to grow in global scale with scattered and outdated IT infrastructures and a questionable culture.

Starbucks has long been known for its infamous “consensus building” culture. Seldom the employees who left the company had anything more encouraging to say about its culture. A former Starbucks senior officer, an ivy-league graduate with degrees from both Princeton and Yale Law School, who left the company and now heading a Seattle startup company, said recently “With such a culture, nothing can be done there.” No wonder in their IT department, almost all projects run late or over budget. Yet their culture, on the other hand, is very calculating to the pennies: Most of the coffee beans to the stores are supplied from Mexico or Southeast Asia, the cheapest areas to get those (not Ethiopia as you might think); they drive hard bargains with landlord; every employee has to report allocation and hours; and extremely penny-wise to use consultants/contractors. Inside the company everyday, everyone are running around with lots of meetings, most of them are for those “sync-ups”- almost everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing so that they can have a say. All managers, no matter how remotely related to a project, request to be invited to every project meeting. Even when they can contribute little, they want their presence known and respected. Layers and layers of “sync-ups”, but can never be synced up enough for any meaningful decision to be made timely. Of course prep after prep meetings for one senior management meetup. Every minute thing needs consensus or sync-ups. There is no accountability, only plenty of superficial niceties on the surface.

In such a culture, rarely competent people can tolerate or be tolerated. Then what left are less competent managers and people in survival mode and who do what they can do the best: fear-driven behaviors(for job security), self-serving, cover-one’s-own-butt, micromanagement, in-fights. They have high focus on money saving, but can’t see that the largest costs are right in front of themselves- the penny-wise-pound-foolish ways they run their business, organize people and make decisions.

In November 2013, Starbucks lost an arbitration lawsuit with Kraft for $2.76B for its corner-cutting contract practices. Recently, the company is also over the news on the unfair pricing over the coffee offerings in China, their fastest growing region. One can say these were the results of being cunning. Yet, most of their business are still done in the very old-fashioned manual-labored retail ways. Their IT infrastructures and processes are far from ready to support the needed global efficiency. How far can they go in today’s changing world?

Coffee business is a low-entry business. Starbucks is not the first one who invented the popular combination of “espresso + foamed milk” and they will not be the last to use it. A culture that encourages mediocre dominance, to the best, can only perform mediocrely in the long run. Everything changes and no company will last forever.

Global Business Environment

The Evolution of Internet and Mobile Markets in China

The internet and mobile markets are fairly global and universal in many ways, but in China, “Chinese-characteristic”, as many Chinese leaders describe their economic development models, indeed applies to their internet and mobile market evolution. Compared to the western progress, Chinese market has been through more of a leapfrog mode and bypassed many middle stages.
 
It all comes with the cultural. More and more Chinese business people and entrepreneurs have realized the distinction. Once they combine the technological innovations from other parts of the world to their own characteristics, a unique Chinese market is born. They hope that one day these unique offerings will be accepted by the west and other parts of the global- to the realization of a full circle of technology innovations and influences.
 
Evolution Stage One: Mass Internet and the information sharing age

Internet entered China rather late. The national infrastructure that supported the mass internet access has come into scale only in a little over one decade, thanks to the trans-Pacific fiber optic cables(first put into service in 2000), western investment and technology support, as well as Chinese government’s open market policies. Quickly the penetration flourished within such a large population who are so eager and curious to know everything outside after being labeled as “closed and backward” for centuries. The dominating scenes of the earlier age of this stage were those overnight internet cafés on street corners filled with smoke and younger people. Then high speed cables, desktops and laptops quickly entered common households at affordable prices, including remote cities and areas, and for all generations.
 
Evolution Stage Two:  Social media and Ecommerce

Chinese like to stay in touch and chat.  In the old days, everyone sat by street corners or in someone’s yard, now they have moved online. Local chat tool QQ enters household vocabulary. Text messaging runs everything. Sina, Sohu, Wangyi(163.com), Baidu, Alibaba, …, one after another internet startups became the symbols of a golden age of Chinese entrepreneurship. Weibo, WeChat (or Weixin, from Tencent), etc, offering similar functions to US Twitter, Facebook, etc but tailored to local Chinese, all flourished quickly in China, reaching millions of Chinese users in a short time window.     

Most Chinese love to shop for deals too. With the modernization of the banking and credit card industries, online shopping which was way lagged behind the US or Europe, all of sudden is catching up in lightning speed.  Transactions over one Single’s Day on 11/11, a fairly new thing from Alibaba, immediately eclipsed the entire US Black Friday sales. This year in 2013, Alibaba processed $5.75 billion total sales on one Single’s Day while American spent a total of $1.9 billion on Black Friday and Thanksgiving online combined.  China is easily on the way to become the world’s largest e-Commerce market. Remember this is only with 40% of the internet penetration in China at this time,  where still mostly the young, educated, and those living in cities, know how to shop on line doing e-Commerce transactions.

This is a stage that many people in China may have become too eager to jump start a new internet-based business or invest in one. Watch for some of the bubbles from the quick evaluations. It is still a growing market and growing process, far from maturity.

Evolution Stage Three: Mobile internet and new mobile devices with special chips or sensors.

This is the stage that’s been currently forming. Wasting no time, Chinese are catching up fast on what are available and advanced in the US and other places. Well, more and more, they start to value what they have locally and what could be truly “Made-in-China” too.  China is quickly becoming the world’s largest mobile user market as well. It’s the fastest revenue growth region for Apple (IPhone and IPad), faster than Starbucks coffee and all fast food chains, and it is the key contending market for almost all device makers.  Nokia used to lead here, but now Apple, Samsung, Google, HTC, LG, etc, nearly everybody, A local mobile phone producer and startup Xiaomi (named from a very Chinese-characteristic idiom in WWII) in August this year was valued at $10 billion USD just after three years in business. News just came out that on November 28, 2013 (the US Thanksgiving Day), it sold 150,000 smartphones under 10 minutes just through WeChat media alone.

Many of the young entrepreneurs in China today have finally realized the uniqueness of the China market in internet and in mobile. Robin Li, the CEO from Baidu and a Peking University graduate, mentioned about it in a recent Bloomberg interview and many talked about it in high-tech conferences with Chinese entrepreneurs. For Mobile Internet, it’s an entirely different platform than traditional internet. Mobile search is different than desktop search; many applications are going to be designed especially for mobile internet. This is a space everyone can compete on even ground nowadays. 

High-tech industry evolves around the synergy of software and hardware. China is where many new devices are going to be made and new ideas are coming from. Even for many US companies, thinking about trying and implementing new ideas for mobiles, China is the first stop.  Years of activities as the “world’s leading factory” have left enormous experiences, expertise and experimenting spirits in China for “making everything possible”.  With the increasing demands for more smart sensing devices and customized applications, agility in China’s manufacture capability will play a key part in leading the innovations on providing new chips (China is also the major silicon manufacture destination), new sensors and new applications for smart mobile usages. This unique Chinese-characteristic advantage has already been realized by the local entrepreneurs and they just need to organize their ideas.  

Evolution Stage Four and onwards:

What’s next? A truly innovative indigenous high-tech industry for China, or the world’s largest software, internet and mobile market? It could all happen in coming decades if not sooner. To become so, China needs invest in foundation software and technologies.  Open Source provides a golden opportunity for the young and ambitious Chinese entrepreneurs to start on an even platform with the world and invent new without being labelled as “copy-cats”. A leading industry needs a well-formed self-evolving system. China hasn’t done much about forming their own sustainable high-tech management or innovation systems. They need that journey, with a lot more dedication, patience and longer-term planning than the current market and society have been displaying. Playing catch-up can only go so far as to stand side-by-side by your peers, but to lead forward, it needs the vision, the boldness and a good support system. Fortunately money and investment is no longer a thorny issue for many existing or becoming entrepreneurs in China. A new dawn is reckoning.

Reference news articles:

  • A Single Chinese Company Dwarfed All Of America’s Black Friday And Thanksgiving Online Sales In One Day:

http://www.businessinsider.com/alibaba-dwarfs-americas-black-friday-2013-12

  • China’s Xiaomi sold 150,000 smartphones in under 10 minutes… using a chat app:   

            http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/11/28/chinas-xiaomi-sold-150000-smartphones-10-minutes-using-chat-app/