JP Rangaswami (Part 1)
JP Rangaswami, head of innovation at BT, describes the implications of new technologies with reference to economic theory.
Transcript:
Q. It would be good to start by trying to define the sort of social or technological change that we are talking about, the things that influence your work -- you were talking about Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law, was it? Can you explain what those ideas are and the ideas most dominant in your thinking?
A. Okay, I guess the direction I am taking is actually that it has been over 40 years since we have had Moore's Law, which fundamentally said that we would see price performance double every 18 months or so and that has been marching particularly in the sili-(semi-)conductor and integrated cicuit type space, the chip set type spaces. We also had Metcalfe's law which was postulated maybe 30 years ago which got us to understand more about network effects -- how the value of a network grew according to the number of members it had and why it grew. Then more recently, at least in the late 80s, we had what was originally called Gilder's Dilemma which became Gilder's Law later, despite being trashed during the crash. I still believe the concept of band width becoming virtually free is a key enabler of some of the incredible productive gains we see.(?) What has not happened during that time is any real change in man's longevity. So we have this sort of tension of the amount of information that the available has increased dramatically. The time given to being able to deal with that information has stayed fairly constant which means the kind of environment I work in, understanding about information, how it is created, how it flows, what comes in the way, how people can enrich it, how people share it, what are the rights and wrongs about it -- that is what keeps me awake at night -- not as a problem but like other people have been fascinated by music, I am fascinated by information.
Q. (2.33) What does that mean for, I don't know, the way we live our lives? How are we seeing people sharing information in different ways?
A. I think the whole notion of sharing starts becoming important -- there's a guy called Rish Byra Kosh who first raised in my head -- probably it was a fertile ground for him because I was trained as an economist but he was the first person I read who classified information as an extreme non-rival good and I tried to get into what that meant and it took me down whole different part saying okay for every form of property we have there are alternatives for state support for protecting it and owning it. Yes, the state can help me own a piece of land but I could help hire my own private army and protect the land myself, I could dig a ditch and put wild creatures into that ditch and mote myself and protect it or I could actually errect fences with sticks at the top. There are many ways I could protect physical property. When it comes to intellectual property, and information is effectively intellectual property, none of these things is available so the sheer concept, that I have to depend on a state and a law to protect something that is intellectual property, began to intrigue me. What was different about this is that I needed to go is to the teacher and say, 'Please, Miss. He is stealing my homework.' That is how it felt. There is something fundamentally wrong about it and the more I looked at it saying you can not do it as a economist, the marginal cost of reproduction is zero. If I have information, like I am talking to you right now, and I share an idea with you, I don't lose the right to use that idea because I have shared it with you. It is non-rival in that sense. Through everything I understand as civilisation, before the written word existed, people shared things through conversaation, people sat at their teacher's knee or father or mother's knee and you conversed and there was not a tax in that conversation and there was not a sense of saying, 'I know something and I am going to be a bigger person by not telling you.' I am reminded of a complaint random aside -- Kenny Dalglish, when managing Liverpool Football Club. He was asked when he brought Ian Rush back from Juventus, 'You appeared to have kept it a complete secret when Rush went to Juventus and when you brought him back -- how did you do this?' And he looked, only the way Dalglish could look, at the guy in the audience and he said, 'Simple. I didn't tell anyone.' What is strange about intellectual property is you want bragging rights about the things that you have and yet you don't want to share it. That is much closer to 'look at what I have, yah-boo sucks' and that is definitely how people created this whole series of laws which they now call intellectual property. It is not that you don't want to pay for something that creates value. Most people I know are very comfortable with paying for the work of an artist, the works of an author, the works of a musician. What they appear to object to is the way the enjoyment of that and the ability to create more value out of that -- stop sorry.
Q. (6.44) That is all right. If You could continue with that sentence -- people are happy to play with that idea~...
A. One of the things that really gets me about intellectual property in all its forms -- music and books and magazines and film -- is that people don't generally want to steal what that content is people are quite happy to pay for value received. What they don't like and what a lot of the current angst is about is the complexity of being able to to share this information, to be able to move around, to mix it it, to enrich it, which has always existed in the past. So when I look at information and how it flows I am including all these cultural elements as aprt of what makes information up and where I feel that Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder have done more incredible things to be able to -- the outcome of what they prejudiced has given us opportunities to be able to to do things we have never been able to do before but we run the risk of losing it all because of corrupting and polluting the paths such flows will take. It is one thing to say I have brought in this form of digital rights management in order to prevent somebody from stealing my contract, when that same set of pollutants means that when your daughter gets hurt in a accident in Singapore, you can not get the medical history over to her quickly enough, even though the technology can do it and as a result she seriously ill, or even dies, that is going to put a different cast on what we have done. That why I spend such time trying though look very carefully at not polluting the paths. That is a direct corollary to say, if I believe information is valuable but it is invaluable in abundance, it is not valuable in a scarcity, that is what one of the things that has really alerted me about this whole field of information -- what it is to invert what used to be scarcity economics and say what would it look like if we practiced abundance economics. This is not me talking. A number of economists have done quite alot of stirling work on this.
My favourite example was what Prince did with his last CD, saying the guy has a CD coming out in the shops, two weeks before that he did a deal with I think The Daily Mail and he gave his new CD away free. When you look at what you get in the Sunday papers, it is usually something 50, 60 years old and if it has not run out of copyright, it is not valuable. So they try to make you feel good by giving you something not worth much in the first place. Whereas what Prince did was say, 'Hang on a second, I am going to give you the CD I have not yet released,' and sure he got paid by the paper whichever it was, but the premise was interesting Prince had a tour coming up and he sold out on that tour. The tour was a roaring success not just in terms of pre-sales but the merchandizing and everything that went with it. This guy understands what he is doing. Digital copies of his music are abundant so why charge that -- give it away. But he is scarce. There is only one Prince. This world only has one Artist Known As, or whatever he wants to call himself now. So people pay for the rare thing, the scarce thing, rather than create artificial scarcity. The artificial scarcity never makes sense because it is like metering air. That is the sort of concept and people sure will try it but that is because we are looking at scarcity economics to say no one pays for anything unless it is scarce -- I am going to make it scarce. That is cartels, what people have tried to do with diamonds, oil, air line prices, you name it. That can not be a just way of proceeding.
Q. (11.30) So in today's world information is like air?
A. Yes. I think it was Don Marty, at one of the Linex journals, who said information wants to be 5.99. The premise is: sure, there is a price to pay for information. Someone has to pay for creating an infrastructure for storing it, for being able to move it around, for being able to access it, for being able to get to it easily, for being able to enrich it, bring it back because there are lots of things we want to do with information. We we want to search for things and we have to get better and better tools for searching. We need to get better at being able to subscribe to things. I think RSS is one of the critical, yet simple, technologies in the last decade that have transformed how a knowledge worker can work. Now you can subscribe to things, you can pick up feeds, you can get alerts so much more easily. But at the same time as being able to search for information and to syndicate or subscribe to information, we also know we need to be able visualise it better where the information overload type problem doesn't go away. If you don't have far better ways of being able to to look at something. But we have gone so far away from the text of the past. Now you have people who use heat maps, people who look at something like the London tube map and say what a wonderful way of being able to represent a lot of information in away someone else can comprehend. You get contour maps. You have people that come along and provide fractal ways of representing stuff, 3D visualisations. There is a lot interest now in saying as the quantum of information has increased, as the flow has increased, how can we use tools to be able to simplify our access and our comprehension and I love the tools that are coming through.
Q. (13.37) It is a total challenge to what value is in today's world and maybe in a company as well -- a company is based on its experience and often a big storage of IP that they keep protected it is terrifying to think that letting go of that would be okay what about a KHEPL company or someone making victims all all their SR-L value is resident PEUS?
A. They think all their value is in it. I am just questioning saying there are also a whole pile of generic former companies making fairly good money. Peter Drucker used to assert the job of a company is to have clients, customers. Yes there is a profit motive but 'people make shoes not money' I think was his favourite phrase. If you make shoes and you make shoes well enough someone is going to pay you money. If you make it at the right kind of cost you are going to make a profit as a result. The profit itself is not a maximization play, it is an optimisation play because you have to in my submission play you have to look at the social consequences of what you are doing, you have to look at the environmental consequences of what you are doing. You optimize across a variety of factors, human and social, rather than managed by spreadsheet. I think that, you know, all companies, as we move out of the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution into the information age, they are beginning to realise that land, labour and capital, as they knew it, are not the core factors of production. The factor of production everyone is screaming about is the human capital element: the knowledge and the wisdom. In the past, that knowledge or wisdom you used to be able to walk away because it was not shared, it was not persistent, it was not accessible. It was just in people's heads. So because you could not capture it, you could not value it. Now we have tools that can capture it, that can make the information shareable, that can make it enrichble, that can make it retrievable. That changes all the rules. So I speak to quite a few people in the large pharmaceutical companies and they know the world is changing over there because the function of the walls they had to build, the artificial scarcities they had to build, was a function of how they got funded and how they applied what it is they did. If they got paid -- earlier, the sheer cost of the number of trials they had to go through, how they went for so many things that never never made it to the mainstream means they had to recoup those losses. Now when the bank makes its losses in Bolivia and then charges you an extra per cent interest for its losses in Bolivia, you are not going to be particularly happy. In a way that is the what what the pharmaceutical industry could have been doing all this time because it is seeking to recoup the losses of all the things that went bad through trying to charge an articial premium on the things that worked. I do not think that is sustainable over time because now we have the capacity to tap into the wisdom of crowds to get these things right. You can use predictions markets. So the cost of failure is much much lower all right. Any sort of open sourcing, peer production model that taps into this sort of movement, this democratisation of power, actually reduces the cost of failure sharply because you are able to take out the things that won't work very early in the cycle then you don't have to pass that cost of failure on by using artificial means of trying to lock in customers later. No customer likes being locked in. That is slavery. We thought we got rid of that hundreds of years ago. Even now we seem to allow ourselves to be locked in. It is all about being connected and not being channeled. People don't understand the difference between those two terms. Henry Ford was famous for saying 'any colour you like, as long as it is black.' Being given choice but out of a set of choices that somebody else makes for you isn't really choice. Choice comes when you can decide what it is you are going to choose from itself. Channeled is like the difference between being able to walk around which to me is like you are connected to the capacity to transport yourself and being told here are the tramlines for your life. You will follow them and that is all you will do.
We are trying to do that with information. We are trying to do that with firms and the impact of Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder, coupled with the lack of movement in the longevity of human kind has meant there are now a war for talent. There is real battles for simplicity and convenience. It is not just an age of instant gratification. It is not your children that say 'Why does it take so long for this mobile phone to power up?' You, yourself, have reached a level of intolerance of apparent wasted time. That is why any firm trying to change its customer experience, one of the things it will focus on is the cycle time it takes because they know people don't like wasting time.
(A short adjournment)
Q. The whole next day from the excite excitement of this whole it was they very nice father and son pair watching the game
A. It is a great story.
A. What is it 25,000 supports.
Q. The interesting thing is the SPWEGS of the fans there before and the other load of people who did not know which team it would be bought it and it was very interesting the SPWREBGS and they have now voted in a board and they are the people that take the issues to the form and put them to vote and lots of the board are people from the old football club it is not like a shit -RDZ -RDZ PWUTD back to the?
A. (20.44) You were saying that you know, given where I am, what I do, you felt that what you were hearing was radical. I am questioning that in a strange way. I think, even if I go back to the writing of Peter Drucker, Shumpeter(?), the writing was already on the wall. The difference was the technology was not there to be able to allow it to happen S.o. what we have been seeing over the last 40 years is the capacity of being able to to communicate more easily. Now the cost of storage has gone down to almost nothing if you look at the cost of a disk or the capacity to store -- I was reading only a few days ago the amount of storage a traditional iPod now has would have cost $100,000,000 20 years ago. That is the sort of scaling that is taking place. When you have those kind of returns on your hand, when you think about what it would cost your father to make a international call ...
EVIDENCE OF JP RANGASWAMI (2)
A. When you even thing think of the mid 80 and what it cost to have a mobile phone on your hand and now they are almost disposable items the changes in the the cost of processing information of storing it, of enriching it, of being connected are at the core of what you are seeing happen. So I think people who worked in firms have always wanted to be able to say we need to be able to do this. But if you go back to Ronald Coarse and his theory of the firm papers, I think in 1937, he was talking about a firm existing because of transaction costs and what we have been having is sense of being able to take away a number of those transaction costs. Our search costs have shortened, our contracting costs have shortened and, as these sort of costs have reduced, we are able to to do things we were not able to do before. Now Drucker was saying new costs are emerging -- the kinds of costs of dealing with regulation and law in ways those firms in the 30s did not. But the nature of information technologies we have now allows firms to be able to to experiment with new ways of managing and looking at what happens in a globalised world. What happens when communication is so ubiquitously possible, right, you are always on everywhere, any time -- these things do make a difference. So the kind of things I am postulating are not of my personal radical making. These are the works of fairly revered economists, thinkers, management theorists over the years, but what they put forward as constraints have now slowly been removed. So one of the the classics the death of distance -- what it means to be able to -- I could not have imagined 30 years ago the ease with which I could find something I was looking for in a US shop or a French shop. Just last weekend I stayed in a hotel in Dublin and what actually happened was I was using Twitter and I said I intend to come to Dublin with my family who had never been to Dublin before the Saint Patrick's weekend. I could not stay for the day but we were going to get a weekend out of it so I asked my twitter friends, 'Any recommendation of a hotel to stay at?' They recommended a hotel and for love nor money could I get into it, until somebody else said have you tried this travel agent and I landed up using a French travel agent to book a hotel in Dublin while living in London through information gathered through a community of peers using a 140 character messages and the net result was I got rooms booked in a hotel that had appeared to have none booked at a price that was a pittance compared to what the rack rates(?) were, eminently affordable in what was a perfect location for my 22 year old daughter and 15 year old son almost bang on the banks the Liffy and it did not stop there because I said French company can do that then I'm really in a death of distance world. Let me try because we are going to on family holiday later to Miami. Are they going to be able to do this, pull the same trick and you know what? I got something like a 40 per cent discount on any other rate I could get. I do not understand it other than to say search costs have reduced. Transaction costs have reduced and that is because of what a guy who used to run Mackenzie Japan, Kanichi Ome, and he wrote in the late 80s, early 90s, a seminal book called the Borderless World that we should watch for 3 things to happen: the impact of globalisation, the impact of disintermediation and what was then called the internet -- because the web did not even exist -- and that brings me back to one of the other reasons we can do these things in firms that we could not otherwise. Originally, when you look at modern computing at a personal level, you had people like Doug Engelbert and Alan MacKay do some great things in the late 60s about the concept of the window, the mouse, the pointer, and what it gave you the chance to do was to manipulate structured information. But you were only consuming it not producing it. You could move things around that someone else had produced. It look took nearly 15 years later, with things Visicow (5.12) Wordstar and Storyboard and things like that to being able to say actually, as a individual, you could now produce structured information. So you had some sort of disaggregation taking place -- that you could actually write a document yourself, not right on a piece of paper give it to someone else to type it on a machine, but that you could actually go for something you wrote yourself. It was WYSIWYG, as they call it -- what you saw is what you get. You did not have enormous cost of saying I'm going to write it in a code that then has to be interpreted by something else?
In a similar way, what the last ten years have done is the web started giving us the right to consume unstructured information. Now you don't have to remember. You could use probablistic capacitator rather than deterministic. I can not remember but what you put into Google, you don't put something like ZP41CP as a (inaudible) code for something. You start almost natural language, asking a questions and refining it. That is what everyone has been talking about doing. What blogs and wikis and twitter and owl have to do is take it one step further, which is what YouTube does, what Flickr does. The cost of participation is now so sharply reduced that you can produce something cheaply. Right. Even the cost of producing the cost of the film you will be making out of this will be reduced from 20 years ago. The ability to merge it with other elements, to enrich the context. To be able to shape it. All these things can now be done using equipment trivially priced compared to what the entry costs would have been even two decades ago. So everything they are involved in says that the more Metcalfe, Gilder have given us participative tools. I don't like terms like user generated content. Content has audiences. Audience is such a broadcast term. It is saying all of you shall sit in these sets, which shall be numbered in this way and the programme will begin at this time and end at this time. Whereas we are talking about time shifted, place shifted, editable,, changeable, mutatable and that is a whole new world that makes a difference to what a firm can do, makes a difference to what a government can do, what a country can do -- because we now have the capacity to put so many of the tools of decision making, so many of the tools of managing information in the hands of the individual. I think it is fantastic.
Q. That was a amazing stuff. Do you want to change lens.
(A short adjournment)
Q. You have able to to radically increased or enhanced by this technology that allows them to give?
A. (8.25) Like I think the the -- this is taking a very side ways view of what has been happening here: I do not think human beings ever intended not to share. I think sharing comes with being human. When we lived without having a written culture, people shared, people passed things on. As we spoke about earlier by saying you sit mother's knee, your teacher's knee, grandad's knee whatever else, a lot of thingd were passed from generation to generation to generation by word of mouth. No taxes were paid for that. No attempt to put rights management on what you could do with that. If things were to be passed in secret -- and sure some things were passed in secret -- nobody else tried to make money out of saying 'Look at me, I am so smart, I have this I am not going to share it.' That was not the form of behaviour. There were secret formulae and potions and whatever else but for the most part people were very, very happy to share with each other. It is when you start thinking of what you share as being a source of power as we had with when the printing press came long and people said, hang on a second, the power of a whole group of people, which was vested in that kind of information is going to be taken away and you had a tax when something as simple as the same sort of message came along when a photocopying type context was built. Again there is going to be loss of power if people can reproduce information more cheaply. And someone tried to tax photocopiers. There was a tax attempt on empty cassette tapes, again for a very similar reason. But fundamentally human beings were not brought up not to share. It is just that the cost of sharing was quite high and if the cost of sharing is high you do not have incentive to share because there is a trade off. I am happy to be able to help you with almost anything if the cost of my helping you is relatively low. Carry on.
Q. Explain something like this thing TKOUFP SUFG we are looking at I am going to man chest I tell people they say come stay with me for plea free 1500 every night why on AO*ERT do people want to do that for free to each other?
A. Because I think something happened in the last 50 years which I can not drive the initial reasons for. It could have been the impact of two world wars. The first half of the previous century was characterised by a lot of pain and torment in different ways and then people discredit the 60s as this sort of let it all hang out sex, drugs, rock and roll but I also see the 60s as I remember the period -- quite young during that time -- with lot of fondness as people started questioning what kind of values they had. Values of community, values of openness transparency, values of being able to altruism. There is a pay it forward type mindset for many, many people, because, if you look at what drivers a human being has and I am reminded of the works of a guy called Nittin Noryan who wrote an book called driven, which I think articulated what people now originally called Masloe's experiment of needs much more vividly for me. Needs for a human being are not sequential or hierarchical. There are multiple needs that happen at the same time. They happen in parallel rather than sequence and Noryan has called in Driven, he put forward this theory that a human being has a drive to conquer, to defend a drive to learn and a drive to bond. These four act in parallel and there is always been a bonding drive in human beings and it is part of that bonding drive that gets people to share. Learning has almost always been associated with sharing as well, even if it goes down to the origins of the world wide web. It was about academics wanting to share papers and move them around. For some reason over the last 150 years we have corrupted this capacity to share and what modern technology has done is regenerated our capacity to share and many many people are asking how come the open source version works this way. It seems counter intuitive but one of my favourite passages of reading over the last couple of months or so the journal called the edge asks the question 'What did you change your mind about in the previous year?' Someone I read quite a bit of called Kevin Kelly. Kevin replied he changed his mind about Wikipedia because to all intents and purposes it made no sense. How could you take a bunch of amateurs who know nothing about anything, give them the tools to produce something normally produced by scholars with more letters after their name than you could shake a stick at, now suddenly producing something that was valuable ad useful. The sheer breadth of the exercise was shocking. It didn't matter how many things you tried to discredit it with when the reality is today I would rather look up Wikipedia for a lot of things, knowing its limitations and weakness, understanding that people can try to scam them. Having a quick look at the revision history, seeing the chat environment to say, what else can I found find out? Looking at the notes. I think Kevin made a very interesting point, made by a few others people earlier I can not remember them right now, which is if you keep the cost of correcting something lower or at least as low as the cost of damaging it, good will ensue so much of what we now see as participative tools. In the past what used to happened was the cost of correcting it was greater than the cost have doing the damage. (15.37) So in other words whether it was painting graffiti on walls -- what was the cost of cleaning up the graffiti compared to the cost of doing the graffiti in the first place. In any social environment, where the cost of doing the damage or doing evil or doing bad was lower than the cost of correcting it or doing good, you knew what was going to win over time and that creates like a tragedy of the commons effect. Free loaders can exist, people can exploit exploit what other people give. Whereas in something like Wikipedia, the thing that stood out from all wkis was that if you empowered everybody the cost of correcting it was trivial (or triple?). That is where I think this participative technology, social softwear as people call it can transform individual lives, firms, government and it is not all about sort of broad capitalist attitudes. I think it can affect some of the things people really care such as health education education, welfare. I could even see the capacity of us to seek to solve some of the more complex issues we have -- AIDS, global warming issues. We are now able to tap multiple disciplines in ways that you avoid heresy or bias creeping in. Linus' law for the open source movement is very clearly stated, I think Derek Raymond said that about Linus Torvolts "given enough eye balls all bugs are shallow." That is true, you know, not just in softwhere when you speak about bugs. But the bug could be about information. The whistleblower type concept. If you put the facts out and you have a fact wrong, given enough eye balls, it will get corrected. It can be about policy. It can be about medical plans because the cost of being able to test whether something is right or not and getting active feedback (inaudible) from an empowered populus -- and that empowered populus can be your staff your family or your citizens, the attitude that everybody else is stupid bar you which seems to characterise most of the hierarchical structures of the past is fundamentally insane. It creates such a divide. Many, many firms seem to spend a long time saying the most important asset they have got is the human being. We are going to human resources department. We are going to invest in the human, develop the human being, train the human being, but when push came to shove they ran it by spreadsheet. We are living in a different world now. THe value of the human being, the connected human being is coming through.
Q. Lets talk about what allows that to happen football is actually pretty KPHRAEUTD and organise the full running of a football club is that the modern we are looking for where every person is someone is that could KREUB value directly in many different ways not only if their job is to not being REUBGTD in many ways what is the sort of new modern of it?
A. I think that, you know, we would be as wrong as past paradigms to be able to say one size fits all. Symphonies would not be created unless there were conductors Forgotten d leaders and composers. Sistine chapels would not have been painted unless you had someone with the vision to being able to then use his students and supporters to be able to help. But there are many many creative things that require someone to lead. Leadership is not going to go away and leadership of people with vision and the abilty to lead is not going to go away either. But I think that leadership now who is has to come with a humilty that has not always existed in the past and we will learn a lot more about servant leardership as it is called. One of my favourite writers on leadership Max Duprey used to say a leader's job is to provide strategy and vision and to say thank you. In between he is a servant and debtor. I am very taken with those models. Because as human capital become scarce, the values and ethics the company stands for will become very very important in being able to attract that talent or retain that talent.
(20.30) So firms are going to have to change and how firms change to allow nonhierarchical movement, more lateral communication, the breaking down of si-laws, a lot of it comes down to saying we have modeled these things on six hundred years old finacial models. We have then improved on them by putting in 150 year old agricultural models and 100 year old industrial models. We tried to run firms as if they were designed assembly line. It is not just in firms. One of the most appalling places to me and I am still getting my head round it is in education and hospitals. The culture of saying you centralise where all sick people go sounds like that is because you wanted to run hospitals cheaply rather than that is because you wanted to run hospitals really well. Disaggregating that and saying we have to create ways of having people connected at their homes and much much better mobile equipment to take to their homes rather than saying we need to do this in a assembly line form. I am sick of hearing about legionaires disease or MRSA -- people go to a hospital to get well or get ill but if you put all the ill people you knew in the same place and they are vulnerable and their immune systems are weakened and their defences are are down and then you are surprised people catch something, this sounds a little counter intuitive. It is not easy because funding a knew type of infrastructure is not trivial. Particularly when we have brought up models that are scarcity based rather than abundance based, particularly when our thinking is assembly line. Schools exist to say I am going to have bells ringing and registers and timetables -- these things don't sound like human and individual and creative. They sound remarkably like trying to create an assembly line of people where the standard deviation between pupils is as low as possible. Human beings were born different. You and I have different finger prints for a reason. Guess what we are two different human beings. We need to celebrate that diversity that difference and we need to have the tools to be able to leverage what each individual is capable of doing rather than force us to become an cookie cutter world. I have no interest in a cookie cutter world.
So is the firm will change because firms were forced to become assembly line models when the land labour carpet capital approach as to what were the factors of production ruled where you were talking about pile them high, sell them cheap, pile them high, make them cheap before that. But today it is not those things that are the scarcities. THe scarcities is human capital and when you switch to say that many other things are far more abundant and the problems we have are to do with human capital then you start valuinging human capital differently and valuing the human being differently and I do not think people have ever got used to the kind of talent we have coming forward as the demographics change who is interested in working in traditional firms, stops long before -- how many people do you know of 18 whose immediate thought is they want to work for a really big firm -- how to did the term rat race beginning and how do eople feel about that today.
(24.33) I will tell you what, I have already been saying to people when you hire someone tomorrow, if you tell them you can only work here if you use company pen, they will look at you and laugh and they will go somewhere else. When you tell the person by the way you can not use that laptop, you will have to use company provided equipment, they will say hang on a second it is not my computer, it is my device to carry my photographs, to carry my music, to communicate with my friends, it is my phone, my photo album, my video recorder ... What do you mean you want me to leave it alone at home. If you want me to come here and work for you, you need another think here. We are reaching that stage. The same will be true when you go to a conference ten years ago it would have been anatoma to turn round and see a man or woman in that conference room with a laptop in front of them rather than staring intently at the person in the audience. THat is changing. Now when I speak at conferences, most of the time every person over there has there laptop open. The modern generation do things we have not yet got. You imagine which one is the more honest person: the guy sitting in a busy meeting pretending to listen to you very intently while surreptitiously looking at his blackberry or the person who is actually listening to what you are actually saying while googling some of the references you are making and taking notes and posting onto his the blog what it is you are saying. Which one is more engaged. The guy with the laptop in your face or the person with the black berry under the table. You call it.
A. What if we ...
