The Hindu Business Line : Connected we survive

We the people. Business, the remix. The dividends of collective genius. The power of us. Peer producing the future. Please register to participate. Your input needed here. Profiting from collective anarchy. Harnessing the power of your peers. The new world of collaborative production.

These are some of ‘the great suggestions’ that the authors of Wikinomics ( www.landmarkonthenet.com) received, on public online discussion, in the first 48 hours of posting their request for subtitle ideas.

“Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of,” declare Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in the introduction. “And when these masses of people collaborate they collectively can advance the arts, culture, science, education, government and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways.”

Wikinomics, the name the authors coin for the ‘new art and science of collaboration’ is more than open source, social networking, so-called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, or crowd wisdom, they explain. It is about ‘deep changes in the structure and modus operandi’ of the corporation and the economy, “based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally”.

These changes, among others, are ushering us toward a world where knowledge, power, and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history, predict Tapscott and Williams.

In that new world, “value creation will be fast, fluid, and persistently disruptive. A world where only the connected will survive.” To join that economy, all you’d need are: “a computer, a network connection, and a bright spark of initiative and creativity.”

Disruptive economics.

‘Kicker’ in presentation

A persuasive presentation is a persuasive event, not a slide show, says Josh Gordon in Presentations that Change Minds ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). “Put your audience first. Start by thinking about what you need to do to persuade them, not what you want to put on your first slide,” he advises.

The book has tips for more than a dozen presentation situations, such as selling a new idea, changing a perception, building trust, offering a solution, and making a financial case.

One of the anecdotes Gordon narrates is of how Steve Jobs used a ‘kicker’ (theatrical surprise) to create excitement in his 1984 presentation, when introducing the Macintosh. He had begun by calmly reading the first verse of the Bob Dylan song, ‘The Times They Are a-Changing’, and it was followed by ‘a fast-paced multimedia show with music from the movie soundtrack Flashdance rewritten with Apple lyrics. Then it was back to low key as then-CEO John Scully presented the company financials’.

Next came Jobs, again, the evangelist, “who walked onstage with an unidentified case and placed it on a table. He began by recounting the history of the computer industry with Apple as the David battling for business against much larger computer Goliaths. His passion so fired up the audience that when he finally lifted a computer out of his mystery case and the name Macintosh glided across a large screen behind him, the crowd erupted into an enthusiastic standing ovation that continued for several minutes.”

The kicker was to follow. As the applause died down, Jobs commented that he had done enough talking and now it was time to let the Mac talk for itself. “To the total surprise of the audience, the Macintosh, using a prototype voice synthesis program said, ‘Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I’d like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: ‘Never trust a computer you can’t lift.’” Again, the auditorium thundered with applause…”

Persuasively presented insights.

Play the quant game

“A number of quants are at dinner, and start discussing compensation. They want to calculate the average compensation among themselves, but are too embarrassed to disclose their own salaries. How can they determine the average compensation of their group? They do not have pens or paper or any other way of writing down their salaries.”

This is one of the many brainteasers taken from www.wilmott.com, as an example of possible job interview question. “Some of these questions are simple calculation exercises, often probabilistic in nature…some have a ‘trick’ element to them… and some require lateral, out of the box, thinking,” introduces Paul Wilmott in Frequently Asked Questions in Quantitative Finance ( www.wiley.com).

Here is another teaser, involving ants. “You have a circle with a number of ants scattered around it at distinct points. Each ant starts walking at the same speed but in possibly different directions, either clockwise or anticlockwise.

When two ants meet they immediately change directions, and then continue with the same speed as before. Will the ants ever, simultaneously, be in the same positions as when they started out?”

And yet another, about four switches and a light bulb: “Outside a room there are four switches, and in the room there is a light bulb.

One of the switches controls the light. Your task is to find out which one. You cannot see the bulb or whether it is on or off from outside the room. You may turn any number of switches on or off, any number of times you want. But you may only enter the room once.”

Engaging.

Netvarsity

Virtual universities, which operate through the Internet and other telecommunication technologies, replace or compensate both the campus-based and home-based learning environments, writes V.C. Kulandai Swamy in Education for Knowledge Era: Open and Flexible Learning ( www.vivagroupindia.com).

An example is the FernUniversitat of Germany; its Virtual University Learning Environment (Lernraum Virtuelle Universitat) provides ‘information, registration, payment of fees, distribution of learning materials, library services, lectures, seminars, submission and evaluation of assignments, taking exams, learner-learner interaction, both synchronous and asynchronous communication, and conferring of degrees’.

A recent example, closer home, is the Tamil Virtual University ( www.tamilvu.org), which “aims at providing Internet based resources and opportunities for the Tamil communities living in different parts of the globe as well as others interested in learning Tamil and acquiring knowledge of the history, art, literature and culture of the Tamils.”

Educative.

Tailpiece

At a bookshop:

Customer: “Is there an SMS grammar guide?”

Attendant: “RUCraC?”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in