cool global BIZ

Equal-Opportunity Humor at Saturday Night Live, Aiming at Tech Types and iPhones

 

 

"Saturday Night Live" skit, "Tech Talk iPhone 5." Video courtesy of NBC and Saturday Night Live.

 

KILLER SKIT ON NBC's "Saturday Night Live," skewering precious tech types who whine about their new tech toys when Chinese laborers suffer to make them. Like all SNL skits, it starts out slow and goes on too long, so skip to 1:00 minute in the video to get the gist. Nice little touches, from the performers' subtle accents to the Chinese erdu playing sappy violin notes. And Fred Armisen is a comic genius.

The New Global Business Diversity Goes Beyond 'Political Correctness'

 

MORE THAN A decade ago, I met an executive for lunch at a business club in a wealthy U.S. suburb. As we entered the club, the conversations grew oddly hushed. Heads turned sharply. Diners shot glares at me, as if I were a street person. The brusque maitre d’ looked blankly through me, as if I was invisible, while warmly greeting my lunch partner. My face flushed.
 
Clearly, dark-skinned folks – even a tax-paying, God-fearing American in a business suit who spoke perfect English – were not welcome there. How would the club members have reacted if I had a “foreign” accent? Women barred from all-male private clubs, or white males targeted by anti-foreigner sentiment while travelling abroad, know the feeling.
 
Luckily, times have changed in much of the United States, which is still the world’s model for business and cultural diversity. Today, a new global business and workplace diversity is dramatically changing the corporate world here and rippling overseas to modern and emerging countries alike.

Traditionally, the diversity practices of U.S. companies focused mostly on legal compliance and federally-required hiring data – a product of the civil rights era. The result? A more diverse workforce in the United States. But as the pace of globalization quickens, more U.S. and global business leaders – AT&T, Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Cisco Systems, Unilever, Renault-Nissan, American Express and others – are raising diversity to a higher level than ever before and broadly redefining the concept.
 
Rosalind Hudnell, corporate director of diversity for Intel, calls it 'the new calculus of diversity' in an interview, while Ernst & Young CEO James Turley and others describe it as a new global mindset. 

BOOKS: Fusion Entrepreneurs: Cross-Cultural Execs & Companies Revolutionizing the Global Economy by Edward Iwata

 

Updated Sept. 2012:  Fusion Entrepreneurs: Cross-Cultural Execs & Companies Revolutionizing the Global Economy, a new e-book by award-winning American journalist Edward Iwata, can be found at Amazon's Kindle Store, Apple's iTunes and iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Diesel eBookStore, Kobo, Mark Coker's Smashwords, the Sony Reader Store, and other e-book retail and library channels.*  Fusion Entrepreneurs is distributed by Smashwords, an independent e-book distributor in Silicon Valley.  Thank you for reading and supporting all digital and traditional authors, bookstores, and publishers.  Readers keep our craft alive.  

 

(Cover art by Edel Rodriguez, an acclaimed Cuban American artist/illustrator whose work can be found in the Smithsonian Institution, private galleries, the New Yorker, Time magazine and the New York Times.)

 

* Note:  If you're new to e-books, ideally you'll need an e-reader device or tablet (an Amazon Kindle, a Barnes & Noble Nook, an Apple iPad, etc.) from your favorite e-book retailer. Or you can download free reading "apps" (small software applications) from the stores right into most laptops, desktop computers, and mobile devices.  This will let you read e-books bought from those stores.  Like anything else, this is only confusing the first time for non-techies.  After you get hooked, it's smooth as butter.

 

Still Valid Question: How Long Will Silicon Valley's Legendary Tech Economy Last?

 

"Four Tubes in a Row "by Mike Cohn, under a Creative Commons license on flickr.com.

 

Editor's note: Will Silicon Valley's technology-driven economy continue to grow in the coming decades? Or will it wane as technology spreads globally? This week's rosy job outlook in the valley provides false hope for the long run. Can't ignore history. Even the greatest industries one day hit a plateau and fade like aging ballplayers. Here's a revised post on the topic from last year, when tech stocks rallied and fired up the broader market.

 

AS CISCO SYSTEMS, Intel and other U.S. tech titans spearhead another economic recovery, I wonder how long Silicon Valley and the U.S. tech realm will reign as the world's preeminent force for business growth and innovation.

Tech watchers have long debated the question, and time-honored "Whither Silicon Valley?" stories by the media surface every 5 or 10 years. (I plead guilty to writing a couple myself, including "Tech Industry Struggles To Cope With Its Losses" in USA Today, when many thought the growth of the New Economy and the dot.com boom would never end.)

Global Digital Revolution Begets Evolution: iPad Baby Puzzled by Magazine

 

"A magazine is an i-Pad that does not work." Video courtesy of UserExperiencesWorks' channel on YouTube. UserExperiencesWorks is Jean-Louis Constanza, a media and Internet entrepeneur in Paris, France, and CEO of Orange Vallee.

 

MY PREVIOUS POST states the obvious: that the old legacy media long ago lost a generation of readers, and must focus like a laser on a new generation (teens and tweenies). Sorry, I wasn't thinking far enough ahead. They need to focus on babies and toddlers. This viral video by French entrepreneur Jean-Louis Constanza shows "how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand for digital natives." Anecdotal, real-life research that trumps any marketing study. Amazing. This baby's iPad generation will read, think, create in a whole new way in the post-Gutenberg era. The global digital revolution has begat digital evolution.

 

CoolGlobalBiz, October 30, 2011

 

Walmart & Facebook: Global E-Commerce Convergence of Old & New School Giants

 

IN THE EARLY days of e-commerce, circa the 1990s, a business debate arose over whether brick-and-mortar stores or online Web sites were better for consumers. The debate seemed almost pointless. Retail outlets and online sites offered the best of both worlds, and it was only a matter of time before all felt comfortable using both. Change takes time; the technology for bank ATMs existed in the 1970s, but customers didn't feel comfortable using the machines for at least a decade.

Does the Passing of Apple's Steve Jobs Mark the End of U.S. Dominance in Innovation?

  

HERE'S A FRESH contrarian view that looks at the symbolic impact of the death of Apple's Steve Jobs. (Economist, "Steve Jobs and America's decline.") The passing of fabled innovator Jobs could foreshadow the demise of America's global leadership in technology, contends the Economist. Not the death of U.S. innovation, but the end of our long-running dominance for more than a century. The Economist writes:

 

"Of course, it would be foolish to count out Apple, much less an entire economy, because of one man’s death. (But Apple's) success long ago decoupled from that of the broader economy. Written on the back of my iPod are the words, “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China.” It was classic Jobs: reframing an issue, the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs, as something inspirational rather than discouraging . . . .

"American global business leadership used to be personified by the likes of General Motors, Caterpillar, General Electric and Eastman Kodak. As they lost market share to foreign competitors, shifted employment overseas or flirted with bankruptcy, the focus turned to technology companies like Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard (which have suffered layoffs and shrinking stock-market value) . . . .

"Americans' entrepreneurial self-esteem is now embodied by Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. These are indeed fabulously innovative companies with world-beating business models. Yet one wonders if they are increasingly the exception, not the rule, and if the passing of Mr Jobs is simply the most prominent example of a broader decline in American entrepreneurship . . . . "

  

My questions: In the coming years, will a new breed of global business visionaries emerge to carry innovation to the next stage, to benefit everyone? Will innovation beyond Silicon Valley -- in the sciences; biotechnology; business services; health care; energy, defense, chemicals, auto manufacturing -- be enough to sustain a more diverse U.S. economy this century? And can U.S.-born innovators and entrepreneurs grow their companies globally, while staying faithful to our economy, our workforce and our nation?

 

CoolGlobalBiz, October 10, 2011

 

Digital Media Diversity: Think Differently, Leap Past "Intellectual Apartheid"

 

Watch live streaming video from onlinenewsassociation at livestream.com

Recent workshop on diversity in the U.S. digital media. Retha Hill, director of Arizona State University's New Media Innovation Lab, moderated the panel during an Online News Association convention in Boston, U.S.A. Video courtesy of the ONA and LiveStream.

 

SCANT PROGRESS IN digital media diversity, according to this panel last month at the Online News Association convention in Boston, U.S.A. No surprise that diverse editorial coverage and hiring in the new media are as weak as in the old legacy media. Beyond a few large media companies with diversity programs, much of the online media is a walled-off, gated community. While open to diverse new technologies, many remain closed to the diverse, flesh-and-blood people around them.

Greatest Legacy of Apple's Steve Jobs: His Uplifting Message to the Next Generation

  

   

"Steve Jobs" by Jonatas Brisotti, under a Creative Commons license on flickr. Brisotti is a photographer based in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

 

LATE APPLE CO-FOUNDER Steve Jobs may have been a business and cultural icon, a brilliant technologist who built cool products for middle-class consumers. But his greatest legacy won't be the sleek computing devices that Apple sold to the developed world, nor the billions of dollars in stock-market value that made rich investors richer. Rather, his most lasting legacy -- beyond his personal family life -- will be the spiritually-uplifting message that he offered during his 2005 graduation speech at Stanford University. His words will be recalled long after the last iPhone rolls off the assembly line:

 

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become . . . . "

 

• Stanford Report, "You've got to find what you love, Jobs says."

 

CoolGlobalBiz, October 6, 2011

 

A New Era of Global Culture, Spirituality & Compassionate Business

 

CoolGlobalBiz is an independent, non-partisan blog that explores the cross-border fusion of culture, spirituality and compassionate business. Every few generations, we're rocked by economic and cultural upheaval, from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Now we're at the cusp of another major epoch, an era of quickening change, innovation and cultural diversity. The seasons are turning, turning. For better and worse, the new world is here.

This blog was founded in 2009 by Edward Iwata, a California-based journalist, former USA Today business writer and author of the e-book novella The Billionaire's Gift: A Spiritual Business Parable and the business e-book Fusion Entrepreneurs: Cross-Cultural Execs & Companies Revolutionizing the Global Economy. Thanks very much for reading.

Email: Info "at symbol" CoolGlobalBiz.com.

Twitter: "at symbol" EdwardIwata.

"Tower of Babel" by Peter Brueghel the Elder, from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.