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.

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.

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.

Although General Accepted Accounting Principles(GAPP), currently the most commonly used set of accounting rules in the US, has been adopted for years and numerous regulations well govern the details of financial reporting, surprisingly things are not always clear-cut and in fact very complicated. Even the most straightforward P&L Statement (or Income Statement) can often times be misleading. Investors often want to see the breakdowns of the revenues and costs by various business units, countries or regions, product/service lines, which could offer the most telling information on the growth trends of the company, the effectiveness of the management and their strategies, especially for new investments or specific competitive markets. However these information are often left vague, missing or poorly calculated. Companies can choose to enhance or hide any of these information. Revenues and various costs can be mixed or distributed differently among business units or product/service lines, or just simply put in some obscure bucket. For example, Amazon’s cloud services AWS, which holds the No.1 market share among all global Public Cloud Service providers and considered their fastest growing business sector today(although less than 10% of total revenue), is only listed in “North America, Other” category on their quarterly reports combined with several other smaller lines of investments or services. This may not be intentional and Amazon is definitely not the only large company having this issue for undisclosed reasons. Some may result directly from the challenges of corporate finance governance and reporting process. The calculations of various costs on P&L reports could be even more interesting, especially when it comes to services where both new and traditional product-line activities are linked or unlinked based on internal decisions.

More confusions exist for a corporation reporting from operations in multiple countries. Since International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and US GAAP are inconsistent in many ways, companies have to convert themselves, not just on currency fluctuations, to make into one roll-up report. IFRS is broadly adopted by 100+ countries today, especially in European countries. China and Japan are also trying to convert their accounting rules into it. Thankfully in recent years, increasing calls for actions have raised the urgency of this issue and internationally organized efforts for the convergence of the international accounting standards are under way.

For corporate finance departments, sometimes the difficulties to get a simple, clear and unbiased roll-up financial report on some simplest concepts of revenues and costs from a certain area of the business frustrate even themselves. The challenges often come from the complex corporate structure and the diverse systems used to store and track the business data. With numerous data entry points, multiple legacy source systems owned by different groups, interpretations and controls of scattered and inconsistent data by different reporting personnel, the cumbersome and often manual reporting processes, etc., it’s totally time-consuming, costly, exhausting and error-prone to produce either the near-real-time market reports or the final earnings.

TriStrategist believes that technically the progress of the Big Data technologies today could trigger a revolution in the near future on corporate accounting and finance reporting. Efficient Big Data analytics could almost immediately render many old systems obsolete as any financial or business data in any granularity from any market could be allowed in raw data formats and collected generically and instantly for all factors of the business. They will be saved in the simple, unlimited repository in the cloud, as one source system only. With some straightforward and intelligent rules built-in (the true meaning of the data will matter, regardless of different standards), these data can be processed instantly in parallel, analyzed in very little time, and passed down to various downstream channels to form reports or visual views, either for aggregated periods or real-time volatility.

It seems a perpetual dilemma on where the boundary should be, of having the laws in place vs. letting the innovations roam freely. On one side, technologists typically fear regulations as innovations can only flourish without too much restrictions. On the other side, historically the appropriate laws could potentially level the competition fields so that small players can join and compete as well. For some cases, new laws are apparently needed in order to allow certain innovations to become commercially viable, for example, drone delivery. US FAA does not allow any commercial drone to fly over the US airspace and it could take years to change the stance. As a result, Google had to test their first drone flight in Australia this year and Amazon did theirs in Canada. In 2011, several years before the appearance of its first model, Google did push Nevada State to pass the law to allow driverless cars to test on the streets, but for drones, it hasn’t been that lucky.

It appears, either for the laws to restrict or promote innovations, the law setting process for many technology fields have been slow and inadequate, especially with today’s speed of innovations, as in robotics, drones, driverless cars, and many other instances. Commercial businesses have been the primary drivers for watching the laws, calling for the laws, initiating the debates or fighting the fights to either promote innovations and business or to get more freedom of access. The gap may exist not only in current legislative systems and processes, but also in legal educations. When many businesses need lawyers for new-technology related fights, either in the US or internationally, it’s simply difficult for them to find good lawyers who can understand the nuances of their technologies and at the same time know the related laws.

It may be promising to notice that today’s law schools and legal science departments are very busy paying attentions to technologies, either trying to apply technologies in their daily studies and practices, building applications or simply learning the basic technology concepts. Some law students start to fear that comprehensive applications that can walk through the basic laws by logical steps may even replace some of their jobs in the future. It is quite possible, but on the other hand, future complex laws and issues related to emerging technology innovations will be constantly demanding new types of tech-savvy lawyers.

Aided by today’s computing power, great development and excitement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have generated great debates on the role of technologies in our future, essentially the power balance of intelligence machine, man and nature. This is not just a scientific or technological debate topic, at its core a profound philosophical one.

At present, several hundred sectors of the human brain have already been mapped. With exponential growth rates of scientific and technological advancements of the modern time, the enthusiasts have good reasons to predict that machines could one day replace the entire functions of a biological human brain or even surpass it in intelligence – the predictive capabilities. Brain cells could be replaced by cell-sized nano-chips that could run faster, process more information than biological ones. Future possibilities seem limitless. Some even predicted that eventually “human machine beings” could control the fate of our entire universe.

The concept of a future human with numerous embedded tiny machine chips in the brain is as disturbing as the notion that the fate of the universe could be controlled by future strange beings. It would be a pathetic image of the human fate even if immortality seemed touchable. Human brains have biological shortcomings, but machines will not be short of bugs or short-circuits either. So are we expecting the future of our transformed species, or of all living species, in a constant upgrade process, and a few privileged would always carry the newest chips coded with more power and fantasies? What would a world of existence be then? Extremely boring or incessantly warring?

Humans are nature’s creation and nature’s creations always come with myriad forms of mysteries beyond pure logics. It’s quite doubtful if machines can reproduce every bit of human experience, connectedness and response with the outer world. Although technological innovations always astound us with their speed and far-reaching effects, nature magnanimously surprises us more. Whenever we reach a breakthrough in science and technology, another profound unknown is often standing there, long waiting. Such as in the study of particle physics, whenever we thought we had reached the end of the mysteries of creations, the picture often became more elusive to us.

There is less doubt that man-made machines could one day harness the power of anything that can be realized by logics and patterns, but great doubts definitely remain if any human or machine being’s creation will present itself in the harmonious way as nature has done. Ancient philosophers from thousands of years ago, in Taoism, Buddhism, etc., had long discovered the Way, the natural flows, the harmony and rhythms that nature displays and requests, the ultimate wisdom of the universe. They did it simply by looking at the vast space and distant stars, and submitting oneself as one tiny being in the immense universe to humbly receive the wisdom and inspirations from nature.

Nature, with its majestic, magical and awesome, has given us the yin and yang, the essential life elements of air, water, earth, fire, wood and metal, enhancing yet counter-balancing each other. Nature deserves our respect, our reverence, our modesty and awe. Human is just one of the millions of species on earth and very likely one of the countless species in the universe. There could well be other more intelligent biological species in the universe that we have not met yet. It is the harmony with nature that we should ultimately seek in every one of our endeavors, not superiority or dominance, so that we can hope to extend the life span of our beautiful planet for many more generations of human species to live on and enjoy in peace.

History has repeatedly reminded us the consequences of human arrogance, overzealousness and conceit with our perceived power over nature, when men confused “exploration” with “domination”. The sudden decline of the once most powerful Egyptian Empire around 2100 B.C. in the middle of the infatuation with pyramid building; the mysterious disappearance of Mayan civilization after all the impressive stone structures in the jungle; the Great Famine of China followed by the Great Leap Forward campaign which cost more than 30+ million lives over a few short years at the turn of 1960s …. If the legend and prophecy of the Island of Atlantis were true, it would be another nature’s sounding alarm to the human race.

If the boundary of our farthest intelligence and imagination is called a singularity, TriStrategist thinks that it is not any technological limit that men couldn’t reach, nor any law of physics. It is the realm that after exhausting all the knowledge and intelligence that men and machines have accumulated, we could no longer perceive the slightest hint from nature about its next balancing force that could be imposed on us. That is the true singularity and likely it won’t be pretty.

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.