Conversation about status symbols over cinnamon infused apple crumble

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A mixture of sweet and sour apples render
a nice balance to the flavour of this cinnamon infused creation.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013

It was over a delicate apple crumble dessert served with whipped cream and cinnamon, in the plush setting of the Bar and Billiard Room at Raffles Hotel in Singapore, that the importance of the use of status symbols in Asia was explained to me as a series of unhappy events that a Nordic company experienced in its early years in Singapore, during the late 1990s.

Different views of what defines success

Asia and Scandinavia have different views of what defines success. They also have different ways of showing social / organizational affluence, a lack of understanding on either side on the effective use of such status symbols could well lead to an awkward situation of miscommunication, some small, others needing nothing less than a crisis management strategy.

Some ten years ago, part of how Nordic organizations expanded their operations was to send a core-team of top Scandinavian managers to oversee initial functions in Asia. Chances are, this modus operandi has not changed much since then. Continue reading ”Conversation about status symbols over cinnamon infused apple crumble” →

Organization identity and the dialogic process of recreating corporate values

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In SvD 19 April 2013, Näringsliv.
Conflict and powerplay between Volvo Cars and Geely as presented in the press.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro 2013

’Five conflicts stirring Volvo in China’
Just recently this headline in large fonts headed the front page of the business section of one of Sweden’s most respected morning news papers. It was obvious that something had changed.

As one of many who keep a keen interest in the economic and geographic spatial reconfigurations of the global automobile industry, I did not expect a smooth process of acquisition of Volvo Cars by Geely from 2010 onwards.

Research literature charts a five times more likely narrative of a failed attempt at mergers and acquisitions than one of success. In the case of the Swedish then American owned Volvo Cars being acquired by Chinese Geely, language, culture, values and outlook on life per se are but the tip of the ice-berg to the multiple foundational layers of differences that need to be disentangled in this corporate marriage. Continue reading ”Organization identity and the dialogic process of recreating corporate values” →

The global trade winds of the Swedish East Indiaman Gotheborg III

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Kent-Hallgren-490a

Photo: Kent Hallgren.
The Swedish East Indiaman Gotheborg III in GP 11 April 2013.
Text © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013

Though I’ve been in Sweden for just about a decade, I wonder if it is only I who have grown tired at the consistent gloomy headlines of the local Swedish newspapers when writing about the Swedish East Indiaman Gotheborg III, the latest headlines reading – No more sailing for the East Indiaman.

I wonder if this sensationalization of headlines is but a low end marketing attempt to attract readership since there is a general consensus of the ship itself being an entity of high interest. But what these pessimistic headlines reflect however, is a probable trend of lack of confidence in what is considered a good investment for the city of Gothenburg, and a business opportunity that can generate great dividends to all. Continue reading ”The global trade winds of the Swedish East Indiaman Gotheborg III” →

Malted oat cookies and the concept of Flow

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Malted oat cookies.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013

Sunday afternoons are the perfect occasions for reflection and relaxation and my favourite occupation at such times is to bake something. Maybe to enjoy with the afternoon fika at home or maybe to share with my office colleagues by Monday depending on the amount of damage control needed to let the remainder look good.

Today my thoughts as always covered a wide circle, making pit stops at such seemingly disparate topics as the ASEAN countries free world trade negotiations, the ongoing election in Italy and the joint Volvo Geely research centre that is being planned, ongoing events that in part shape the world we are all living in.

The common denominator was the question of human innovation and motivation, as covered by Professor of innovation knowledge, Bengt Järrehult in a recent article. As I see it, nothing is given and we are all part of the process in which we all create the future together, step by step and by our own choices.
Continue reading ”Malted oat cookies and the concept of Flow” →

There is [increasingly] no spoon

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Keanu Reeves in the science fiction-action movie The Matrix (1999).
The small boy is played by Uri Geller. Or not.

Admittedly, I like broad sweeps and this is going to be one of the broader that I take. But please bear with me. We’ll eventually be back to the bar of single origin Ecuadorian dark chocolate. Promise.

First we will need to go back a little bit in time to a scene in the 1999 movie, The Matrix, where a little boy flexes a spoon, bending it at will. He then looks up and says, ”There is no spoon”.

Now, that is a point of view I will try to demonstrate that is increasingly worth being considered. Continue reading ”There is [increasingly] no spoon” →

Complex systems theory and the biological organization

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An abstraction of Michael Conrad’s (1970) Biological Organization on Clare W. Graves’ (1980) Levels of Existence.
Text and Photo © CM Cordeiro 2013

In reading about self-organizing structures for the relevance of theory applied to the field of international business (IB), I thought the ideas expressed by Michael Conrad in his paper entitled, Statistical and Hierarchical Aspects of Biological Organization (made accessible via NASA) was interesting when also applied to the theoretical constructs of Clare W. Graves’ Levels of Existence.

Conrad discusses the differentiation and uncertainty associated with the organization and variability in a biological organization’s compartmental structures, that are expressed in terms of certain entropy measures. In his paper, he tries to ascertain the most efficient operative level of a biological system, landing on the principle of static equilibrium that he uses vector models for representation. Continue reading ”Complex systems theory and the biological organization” →

Lateralizing of influence between states as a means of preserving power

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The evening’s contemplation… the opening paragraph of Joergen Oerstroem Moeller’s article, “Economic Integration: the Future for Asia” in the Diplomatist’ special issue published on the occasion of the ASEAN-India mid-December 2012 meeting in New Delhi.

His article addresses what in my view is the need for a heterarchous organizational structure in state / regional governance, as a system to manage heterochronous developments within and between states. Where and how heterarchy can be effectively accomplished and operationalizable is a discussion point.

Throughout his numerous articles, Moeller’s perspective is consistent – lateralization of decision-making may on the outset seem a dissipation of power, but in reality, it could be the only way to preserve power. What is perhaps needed is a re-conceptualization of ‘power’ in the contextual understanding and recognition that the world shares one destiny.

“Over the last half century economic transactions have jumped out of the nation-state box and take place globally, while the political systems put in place to control economic activities are still mainly national and domestic. This schism between international economic transactions and national political systems exposes the impotence of policy-making and thereby undermines the legitimacy of the political system in the eyes of the citizens. This spills over into skepticism about the advantages of economic globalization. The choice for politicians is to share decision-making with other nation-states or to lose influence, which is difficult to explain as it looks as giving away powers while in fact it is the only way to preserve power.” ~ J.O. Moeller, 2012.

Joergen Oerstroem Moeller is Senior Fellow, Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Diplomatic Academy. He was former Danish Ambassador to Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, Australia and New Zealand. He is also author to one of my favourite reads, How Asia Can Shape the World -From the Era of Plenty to the Era of Scarcities (2011, ref. video panel discussion of the book at SMU Singapore, chaired by Kishore Mahbubani).

On managing heterochronous developments in Singapore

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Attilio Rapisarda:

Hi Cheryl,

Interesting article: thanks!

I am very interested in learning about the reasons why people in service & knowledge-based societies are reluctant to marry and have children.

I believe that a fundamental reason is the changing economic value of children: from assets to liabilities.

In rural societies, children were ”energy”. In our modern societies, children not only start being productive increasingly later in life but are also less willing to provide for their elderly parents. Labour markets’ demand for ”flexibility” also means that children find it harder to be physically close and economically solid enough to serve their ”filial piety” corvée. Some people will find that the wish to have children should not be based on economic incentives and should rather be based on ”love”.

Still, as you have pointed out in your article, having children for ”love” is a relatively recent idea in our history. Traditionally, political or economical reasons based the decision for marriage and children. Also, although humans are certainly capable of acts that transcend individual interests, they generally are driven by the satisfaction of practical needs, just like any other mammal: food, shelter, accumulation of resources.

I think that such shift on how children are perceived – from ”asset” to ”liability” – reflects a reality that is more certain, stable and lasting for potential parents than any of the incentives the Singaporean government is currently proposing. For this, I believe such incentives are destined to failure.

I wonder whether we are in a situation of ”heterochrony”: two systems – the productive system and the reproductive system – that evolve at different speeds. The societal forms subserving the reproductive system evolve at a much slower pace and we are now stuck with forms of marriage and family that fit the rural productive system but not the knowledge-based one.

Continue reading ”On managing heterochronous developments in Singapore” →

A multifractal system perspective of culture in international business

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A plot of a multifractal wavefunction at the Anderson transition in 3D can be found as Fig. 1 of Vasquez, Rodriguez, and Roemer’s (2008), ”Multifractal analysis of the metal-insulator transition in the 3D Anderson model I: Symmetry relation under typical averaging”. arXiv:0807.2217v1 [cond-mat.dis-nn]:

Coming from a social sciences background and continuing in the line of transformative theories, I could liken the wave particle duality to researcher’s interference, where the act of observing would in itself render a certain bias to the data collected and observed phenomenon simply because the observer becomes an entity to be considered in that which is being investigated and studied. Related then to this uncertainty principle is how in the field of international business, the concept of culture which is one of the most sensitive of concepts to be influenced by researcher perspective, where each researcher embodies his/her own values and belief systems, continues to be dominated by the western cultural dimensions construct in an era of increasing globalization and of advancing information communication technologies that render a blurring to traditional geographical boundaries. Social media platforms for example create an entirely new type of virtual landscape, bringing together people from different parts of the world, with different languages, values and beliefs.

Jason Padgett’s wave particle duality.

It is to this extent that culture, that has thus far been studied as national averages and have had differences as a measurement of complementarity in the success or failure of a foreign enterprise entries, should perhaps be re-conceptualized in terms of a fuzzing of boundaries to include a multi-levelled perspective that works across groups of individuals that share a common motivation system, regardless of nationality for example.

It is in this light that the multifractal system to the study of culture in international business might cast light beyond the Yin Yang concept of culture, where the latter eastern perspective of culture, if not taken in its original sense from the book of I-Ching (Book of Changes), of being an infinite system of duality, but reduced to simply duality of properties, would further contribute to a dichotomous point of view of the theory of culture i.e. if not west then east.

Social Network Visualisation: e-mail between the members of a project. Every square depicts a participant. Its colour indicates which departments he/she belongs to. Grey lines indicate that there’s at least a weekly frequency between the two linked participants. Source: Orgnet.com; Infovis.net.

Groups of social networks for example, regardless of national boundaries, may exhibit similar values and belief systems in a complex spatial structure much like those found in social networking theories, where individuals are characterized by not just a single (i.e. nationality or race for example) independent characteristic value but rather a set of values that belong to different contextual ”multifractal” backgrounds through a space-time dimension.

Transformative theories – when international business can benefit from quantum mechanics

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Jason Padgett and Q.A.T

Pictures from Jason Padgett and Q.A.T.
Text and Photo © CM Cordeiro 2012

An evening thesis:

Beyond the eastern Yin Yang perspective of culture, visually represented above in a metaphoric nomogram, is the concept of a pluralistic, aperspectival view of the concept of Multiculturalism, that to some extent, I would liken to the “most favoured nation” (MFN) clause following bilateral trade agreements in the norms of GATT and WTO, which is that of reciprocity and non-discrimination. What I find interesting in these visual representation from quantum mechanics is how the aperspectival fallacy often referred to as “aperspectival madness” is negated / neutralized via a heterarchial construct – an organizational construct deemed most advanced and most difficult to achieve, that I would to some extent, liken to multilateral trade agreements in international trade and a true understanding of Multiculturalism that encompasses the reductionistic view of the Yin Yang concept, though not vice versa.

Bibliography
Van Den Bossche, P. 2008. The Law and Policy of the World Trade Organization, Text, Cases and Material, 2nd edition. Cambridge.