My Brief Notes On The Avian Flu

This past week I was researching some telecom reports, and I happened to run across an outlier in the corporate mix that caught my eye. It was a Gartner report, entitled "Prepare for Avian Influenza: Our Interview With the World Health Organization’s Dr. David Nabarro" (sorry – subscription required).

Now I don’t follow the management consulting and other firms that specialize in risk management and human resources that closely, so I thought I would check their sites out for a peek. Marsh has some information on the avian flu here. AON has something over here.

Companies and organizations do not seem prepared. A survey by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions appears to indicate that 66% of companies do not feel adequately prepared (poll of 179 companies). Instapundit points out how hospitals could barely keep up with the normal flu here. When I step back from the business aspects and whether companies can withstand prolonged labor shortages of 30%+, etc, I am a bit more concerned that communities and families may not be prepared. At least I find myself not quite fully informed to a level that hits close to home, despite all of the press.

So I have started to make some mental notes from research reports, like those from Gartner, that hit close to home. Maybe readers will have other sources of info to share.

From the Gartner report (note Dr. Nabarro is the highest medical authority, the U.N.’s top official for global pandemic response planning), here are my key notes:

  • "in the last 200 years, there have been pandemics at intervals of every 30 to 40 years, on average" – so if even if one doesn’t have to be concerned about it, there could be an impact on one’s children or their children
  • "modellers are [saying] that it may be as few as 21 days from the initial appearance of the virus to it being a full-blown pandemic" – note that the increased mobility of people shortens the cycle-time of viruses spreading ; I ask myself, how and how fast would I personally react once something hit the continent, country, or city I live in?
  • Dr. Nabarro indicated he is not sure (because he doesn’t know enough about how corporations work) whether corporate CEOs should assign senior executives to coordinate their response to avian flu

It seems the World Bank estimates economic damage from an avian flu pandemic could cause $800 billion in economic damage. To put that number in perspective, Hurricane Katrina damages were estimated at $125 billion. A sickening of 90 million Americans as stated here – gee, that would be out of a population of 296 million Americans according to the CIA World Factbook. My wife and I can barely control flu in the household between kids let alone if one of every three people in the entire US is sick. What would you do?

I suppose after writing all of this down, I am not more prepared for an avian flu pandemic than I was before, but I do find myself at a heightened level of awareness. That’s probably at least one step forward.

Update (1/29/06): As an aside, raders have choices of stockpiling N95 masks approved by the CDC or apparently, Kimchi (which I despise the smell and taste of).

Perceptual Mapping: What Does Your Cell Phone Say About You?

Last week I was reading a detailed research report regarding cell phones in order to get a more structured understanding of the consumer marketplace as it relates to upstream B2B vendors.

Now in business school (e.g., in a marketing analytics course), one may learn about concepts such as perceptual mapping, a combination of numerical factor-analysis and marketing technique that may be used to graphically place vendor products in a two-dimensional chart, where the products may have many more underlying features which actually makeup the products. Wikipedia has a sample chart here, to give you an idea of what perceptual maps look like. What is nice about certain-types of perceptual maps is that the charts are borne out of people’s actual market behaviors or expressed preferences (as opposed to some ad-hoc or opinion-driven marketing method).

In the report I was reading, there was a picture of a less-frequently used perceptual map that grabbed my attention. Basically instead of products, the perceptual map placed cell phone features (e.g., calendar, push-to-talk, text messaging) on a two-dimensional map with the axes ranging from a) low- to high-technological advancement and b) high-entertainment to high-utility.

Based on the features (each a point) on this perceptual map, one could identify five primary clusters of points. These clusters were essentially viewed as market segments of mobile phone consumers and were divided as follows:

  1. Picture people (camera phone lovers)
  2. Gotta-have-it-all types (e.g., Motorola RAZR types)
  3. Plain old telephone people (basic phone users)
  4. Organized telephone people (e.g., like calendar features in the phone)
  5. Always on-the-road types (e.g., like productivity & synchronization functions)

It’s funny when you look at the high probability demographics for these mobile phone segments (and I will take some liberties here to boil down the paragraph of demographics to a few words – note: demographics match the listing order above and have *not* been written to be politically correct):

  1. females, without children, poor
  2. males, dumb, low income
  3. females, married, dumb, poor
  4. females, married, poor
  5. males, married, highly educated

I fall into the organized telephone or plain telephone crowd with my basic Siemens flip-phone. What does that say about me? I’ve never really cared too much about image, but what am I communicating to people by my use of phone? Is your ringtone a mating call in disguise? What does your phone say about you?


Update (2/15/06): Zoli, I can’t log into your blog to comment on your post since I forgot my login, but I have to say that the idea is creative. Why be canned in by what’s already been done? Maybe it’s the next category leader. 🙂

Continue reading “Perceptual Mapping: What Does Your Cell Phone Say About You?”

Black Cats, White Cats, & Diversity Musings In Consulting

This Martin Luther King Day I reflect upon my family’s white cat and black cat. The younger white cat picks on my much older black cat – can’t quite say that it’s a state of harmony, but at least there’s no blood. I enjoy both cats, each for different reasons.

The term "cat" is also used by musicians quite a bit. One of the (black) drummers that I am currently studying is Dennis Chambers. In his 1992 book, "In the Pocket", Dennis wrote, "One thing I liked about Miles [Davis] is that he finally realized that there are some funky white cats. A long time ago when I was coming up, if you wanted somebody to play funk, you hired a black guy. It was unheard of for a white guy to play funk. White guys were playing rock and roll or whatever."

Now the term cat is not really used to refer to management consultants. I’ve heard other terms used, such as "guns", "mercenaries", etc. What I will say is that the management consulting field tends to be a white male-dominated profession. When prepping for interviews with consulting firms during b-school in the late 90s, I recall looking at some of the brochures and websites of management consulting firms, seeing the non-diverse pictures of employees, and thinking something to the effect of "entering the consulting field is going to be a little bit of a shocker". Now I’m not the only person that has observed the non-diverse aspects of the management consulting field. For example, check out this message board post and this article.

Now the skewed demographic makeup of the executive ranks of Fortune 500 companies has been covered by many others. So perhaps the makeup of many consulting firms should not be a shocker. Whether the makeup of many consulting firms and corporate offices is right, I dunno, but I will say that when finding role models to follow within these businesses, I’ve often had to look at people who are nothing at all like me, when I would have preferred to have had at least a larger set of people to look at.

Leadership Is An Innate Skill?

I saw a recent post that raised the question as to whether leadership skills are innate (and cannot be learned). Leadership is a bit of an ill-defined term, so I’m not exactly sure about the context of the original discussion triggering the post, but at face value I have to say that innate skills can help but instilling a continuous learning process about one’s own leadership style (and that of others) can also help dramatically. What I share below intends to illustrate not only that one can build knowledge to help with leadership skills but also that one may find little progress on a day-to-day basis until one day when it all comes together

Two areas that created an “ah-ha” for me with respect to helping me recognize my leadership style were related to going to business school and getting support from a client executive to develop the business skills one of his line managers. Had it not been for these two events, I probably would have turned out as an engineer focused on individual contributor work as opposed to a person focused on business within the technology space. While either of the outcomes is perfectly fine, I am happier that I have found the business slant is more the “natural me”.

The first step in going to business school helped me to develop my leadership skills by explicitly forcing me to focus on thinking about and analyzing business issues, as opposed to passively addressing business issues while working on the job. Business school also gave me an extra level of confidence in knowing that I had spent dedicated time to try to improve my knowledge.

The second step may have occurred, in part, by chance. During a management consulting engagement I was involved with, I was sitting in a three-person, executive review meeting with one of the partners of my consulting firm and the president of the company. The upshot of the meeting was that one of the functional managers was not performing too well and both the president and the partner wanted me to coach the functional manager to help him take his management skills up by an order of magnitude or the functional manager would be fired. What followed from there was some behind the scenes work in analyzing how to approach the situation and then direct assistance with the functional manager to improve the business. After that particular client engagement, things started “clicking” for me, and I was able to get into both interim and direct management roles more regularly to foster my leadership skills.

The upshot of all this is that combining knowledge, practice, and a real environment to foster one’s management and leadership skills helped me to breakthrough and reach a new level (one-time, discontinuous improvement as opposed to gradual change). While the process of improvement may have taken many years with slow growth, I was suddenly able to get things to click together.

I have found similar discontinuous improvements in other areas of life. For example, in tennis, I remember going to tennis camp and getting a breakthrough on getting better control with my one-handed backhand. In drumming, I started to study a completely different style of music (jazz fusion instead of just progressive rock music drumming). The knowledge had to sit for awhile, but one day it all clicked and took me up a notch when I least expected it. If I hadn’t prepared for the time when the conditions and environment were right, I wouldn’t have reaped the benefits. Sometimes I think working on leadership skills might be in the same vein.

Mini-Review of the Judgment of Paris

Judgment of Paris, written by George Taber, is about the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976. When I first skimmed the book at the bookstore, I have to say it looked like a very dry read. That said, I found the book very interesting from the perspective of entrepreneurship, economics, and romance over a period of time that outlasted the history of most businesses (remember there are relatively few businesses that are over 100 years old). Three perspectives I gleaned from the book:

  1. Stories of Entrepreneurship – Dreams are nice, but reality is that winemakers often needed to get cash flow positive faster than the minimum of five or so some years to go to market with red wines. Thus, white winemaking became an early recognized business model of getting things rolling with its shorter (closer to two year) timeframe. Like the hopeful winemakers than envisioned getting their dream red wines to market while producing white wine in the near-term to build up credibility, entrepreneurs of today also find that they often need to get to cash flow sooner than later while making progress (e.g., to prove out their business models and build brand reputation).
  2. Backdrop of Macroeconomic Conditions Affecting the Landscape – As one might find today with traditional industries and functional areas getting turned upside by web 2.0 (e.g., PR world changed by blogging, brick and mortar bookstores displaced by Amazon.com), the rigid and regulated French wine industry was "overtaken" by entrepreneurs (that is, the entrepreneurs closed a big gap and redefined the game). Californian winemakers were not encumbered by regulations as imposed in France to make wines with 100% of such and such grapes, etc. The California winemakers were able to experiment by creating wines with blends of grapes (e.g., to mellow the taste), use refrigeration techniques in conjunction fermentation research conducted in the university, etc. They slowly experimented and chipped away at a problem of making serious wines. Although the US winemaking industry was almost decimated by the Prohibition era (and both the supply chains and demand chains took many years to recover), its was a combination of entrepreneurs and survivors (the cockroaches of the wine industry) that played a key role in democratizing wine and making it what we know today (as opposed to just a sweet, jug wine industry).
  3. Romance of the Senses and Commitment – I have never wanted to learn how to make wine before reading this book. This book romanticizes the process of love with wine more than I can describe. With the winemaker cross tasting barrels, walking up and down the rows of the vineyard and sampling the taste of each grape until the optimal 3-4 days of harvest, watching the weather with great hope, and then turning ecstatic when things come together or being disappointed when rain brings in the mold … When I think about the fact that some of the entrepreneurs in the winemaking industry violated commonly believed codes of startups by trying to solve both supply and demand issues (as opposed to just solving existing problems with solutions 1-2 orders of magnitude better than the past), well it just makes the book even more romantic for me.

The book is not for everyone, and I have to admit that had I not learned more about wines in the past year, I might not appreciate this book to the extent I do now. What I will say is that if you are interested in learning more about wines beyond tasting, this is a good book to explore. You may not get the same experience I did, but you may still find that by reading and exploring multiple sources of info that you get an enriched view of either people, wines, international history, business, and/or marketing.

Improving the State of Corporate Blogging

As much as it pains me to agree with Jeff Nolan on his post about corporate blogging here, I have to say that annecdotally I do not see an immediate tipping point for corporate blogging. From my vantage point, I see at least a couple of other factors contributing to the sad state:

  • There are very few "skilled" bloggers in any position of authority within a corporation – Despite the grassroots nature of blogging, people still need role models for corporate blogging. Unless a company is actively supporting blogging, there is a (tremendous) amount of baggage that blogging (whether right) carries with it in a professional setting.
  • Academic arguments on risk management are nice, but some corporations need to gain extra comfort level with their abilities to handle actual blog crises (or at least criticism in the blogosphere) – Ask yourself, who in your organization is a role model for handling this kind of stuff? Have they proven that they can take the heat (of any temperature) in the blog environment or is it just conceptual? I’d be surprised if people could name three people (off the tops of their heads) in their companies that could "handle" the blogosphere. Again whether right, I see it as a barrier to corporate blogging.

The environment and culture surrounding blogging sets the tone within a corporation (case in point: Malcolm Gladwell’s portrayal of how crime in New York was reduced by eliminating graffiti and the visible signs of vandalism).

One area that I am sensing positive feedback in the corporate environment is around serious use of blog reading. Perhaps it is because people can digest larger amounts of information in blog format as opposed to reading traditional new sources. Perhaps it is because they can glean leads and subtle insights from reading blogs. Or perhaps it is related to the richer link content in blogs.

So if companies are not ready to encourage corporate blog writing by actively seeking, reaching out to, and elevating the exposure of skilled bloggers in their own organizations, I would suggest that they support blog reading (and blog intranets as sandboxes at least). The ROI on gaining industry knowledge from blog reading strikes close to very immediately. I think that some managers are surprised by how much their workers’ level of knowledge comes up when they are encouraged to read quality blogs, like Om Malik, Daily Wireless, and Mark Evans (to pick a few from the telecom space).

Musings On Human Chimerism

This vacation I had a chance to watch some TV, in addition to spending time with the family, reading some books on wine and music, etc.

The most eye opening thing that I saw over vacation was some TV show on human chimerism, with at least two cases where people did *not* have any visible/physical signs of the genetic condition, but where they had two full sets of DNA in their bodies.

The term, "chimerism", comes from Greek mythology and refers to a multi-headed creature combining serpent, goat, and lion physiology (picture).

Now in human chimerism, there can be very visible markers. For example, in some reports of human chimerism (which is very rare as I understand things), people have documented checkerboard skin patterns on the chest where there is essentially a line going down the middle of the body, and where alternating squares (perhaps one inch by one inch blocks) of skin have light and dark pigmentation. To a casual observer, the checkerboard pattern may look perfectly square. In other reported cases, the person has adopted both male and female DNA. Again with a line going down the middle of the body from the head to the belly button, one half of the body may have male organs versus female. Surgery may be required to adjust the person to reconstruct the person as one sex or the other.

What blows my mind, however, is the case where the person looks and feels perfectly normal. As in turns out, it is believed that these people came to being by the fusing of two fully fertilized eggs as with Siamese twins, but because the cells did not split (say by day 4 of conception – don’t quote me on the specifics here since I’m doing off the top of my head), the embryo started to develop as one single baby with two *full* sets of DNA. Based on genetic, surgical, chemical, etc. research, it is believed that in these subset of cases that I am talking about, that while the person’s body consists of two full sets of DNA, any given organ may predominantly develop with one full set of DNA or the other (e.g., liver could have one full set of DNA from one egg, but the skin could have the full set of DNA from the other egg).

The cases caught on the TV show kind of blew my mind in terms of implications and how assumptions can be challenged. To make a long story short, two female chimeras from totally separate walks of life where shown to not have direct genetic connections to at least one of their children (by birth and eliminating possibilities of surrogate motherhood). One of the women was trying to prove that her kids were genetically hers, but DNA testing failed. Subsequent and more elaborate DNA testing showed that her kids adopted the DNA of some crazy combination of her father and her brother (this was after a court ordered that the birth of her forthcoming child be witnessed and have a forensic lab person collect blood, DNA material, etc. during childbirth – a DNA match between her and her child was negative).

DNA has often been used in courts of law to substantiate heinous crimes or to vindicate wrongly accused. DNA has often been thought of as having a one-to-one mapping with a person. Now the cardinality of the relationship may be challenged. (Note: to put some of this in perspective, however, the TV show stated that there may only be 40-60 cases [don’t quote me on number] of chimerism reported in the world, regardless of whether condition is physically visible)

Not a normal post by me by any means. But these are things that make me go …. hmmm. When I feel my (stereotypical) female traits coming through, well this discovery gives me moment to pause.

Update (2/21/06): See comments below on Siamese twins. It is likely that my reference to Siamese twins is incorrect.