Content Log

Brainstorming at Fortune Brainstorm in Half Moon Bay, CA

Groucho Marx once said, "I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member." That was my original concern about attending the Fortune Brainstorm, a three day technology conference in Half Moon Bay California. I met one of the conference organizers, David Kirkpatrick at a couple of the World Economic Forum events and he is a very bright and insightful guy. But I thought it might be another one of these conferences where you spend a lot of money just to attend. Our marketing team convinced me otherwise.

Brainstorm last week was a very connected event with some very influential people. I recognized at least a quarter of them from Davos. The bloggers were also there in force with Robert Scoble, Om Malik and Kara Swisher participating as the first evenings entertainment. The subject matter was also generally more relevant that Davos as well given its proximity to Silicon Valley. Given how far I came, I used part of the time on Monday to do some interviews in San Francisco on our Alfresco Labs 3 launch, so I missed the opening sessions with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Michael Dell, Mark Benioff from Salesforce and Brad Smith from Intuit. The setting for most of this was somewhat intimate with main room laid out like a giant conference room with lots of Herman Miller executive chairs. (Herman Miller was a sponsor.)

The environment was set up like an office. So everyone ends up doing work.

Although this was a tech conference, some of the focus was on how relevant tech is. The level of discussion was what you would expect in an article in Fortune magazine. That level of discussion is good to understand how the big trends are moving to affect everyone's lives, not just those in tech. The first breakfast session that I attended was on Cloud Computing with Marissa Mayer from Google, Adam Selipsky from Amazon, Kevin Lynch from Adobe, and Zach Nelson from NetSuite. Cloud Computing is increasingly attractive from a cost perspective, but enterprise customers are still worried about security and reliability. Google does not allow encryption and Amazon does not guarantee recovery and recommends that you back up your data on S3. So I asked the panel when we can expect security AND reliability. Marissa didn't answer and the other panelists answered the part of the question that they wanted to.

Cloud Computing: Michael Copeland (Fortune), Charles Fitzgerald (Pi/EMC), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Kevin Lynch (Adobe), Adam Selipski (Amazon Web Services), Marissa Mayer (Google)

Mark Anderson hosted a session on the direction of technology with several CTO and technology leaders including Sophie Vanderbroek from Xerox, Padma Warrior of Cisco, and Bob Iannucci of Nokia. The discussion range as far as their technologies. Xerox is looking at collaboration and sees the future in intelligently understanding the content being handled in that collaboration in something called content-centric networking. This is something that Alfresco can get its head around. Cisco sees the internet morphing from a primarily messaging based platform to more of an entertainment platform. Video being a more natural form of communication will become more pervasive and that the real requirement will be more filtering rather than generating. Nokia took us on a cosmological tour of technology trying to show us that the bigger issues are around mobility and the data that affects our lives. In addition, data privacy will become one of the biggest issues to tackle.

CTO Forum: Mark Anderson (Strategic News Service), Sophie Vanderbroeken (Xerox), Padmasree Warrior (Cisco), Bob Iannucci (Nokia)

Vinton Cerf, inventor of the Internet and now at Google, kept sitting in front of me and always asking questions. It made it difficult to get a question in myself since the moderators would always move to another part of the audience. Get your own seat Vint!

Nicholas Negroponte showed off for the very first time a dual-boot One Laptop Per Child XO machine (the famous $100 laptop) that is now configured to run both the OLPC operating system and Microsoft Windows.

David Kirkpatrick and Nicholas Negroponte showing of the latest dual boot OLPC XO

In "How Green is Your (Silicon) Valley?", VJ Joshi from HP, Rob Lloyd from Cisco,  Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, and Michael Spliter from Applied Materials discussed the role that Silicon Valley can play in creating green solutions. By and large, as you would expect, IT makes things more efficient and eliminates the need for travel and face to face meetings. VJ kept it relatively small with the practical steps that HP is taking like making two-sided printing the default. Jonathan kept it big getting us to think about what will happen when IT services as a utility will be 10 times bigger. Jonathan Schwartz talked about MySQL's approach of no office buildings at all. But, I found Rob's and Cisco's point more insightful. When we start architecting our buildings (and homes) with information systems and controls in place, that is when we will really start to reduce our greenhouse footprint. Meeting rooms, transportation and environmental control facilitated by IT (and of course internet routers) will allow us to reduce transportation of ourselves and our resources.

Greening the Valley: James Manyika (Fortune and hidden by the Fortune sign), VJ Joshi (HP), Rob Lloyd (Cisco), Michael Spliter (Applied Materials), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun)

David Kirkpatrick is writing a book on Facebook called The Facebook Effect and used this position to interview new COO Sheryl Sandberg. She puts on a much more media savvy front than Mark Zuckerberg, but not quite as much out-of-the-garage appeal. It all sounded a little too glib. Apparently she used to work in the White House at some point and Google. I was surprised to learn that co-founder Matt Cohler had left Facebook, although he was attending the conference. She announced that he was becoming a partner at Benchmark Capital. I bet Peter Fenton had something to do with that. I had interacted with Matt in relation to some work that we were doing with the World Economic Forum and it seemed that at least part of his role at Facebook was now taken up by Sheryl.

David Kirkpatrick and new Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

At this point, my camera ran out of battery :-( I participated in a Lunch Lab on Healthcare facilitated by Marissa Mayer of Google and Zoe Baird of the Markle Foundation, but they did most of the talking. There were a few experts who got a word in edgewise, but I didn't really feel that I could participate despite having working with pharmaceutical companies on information management and classification for the last 15 years.

In World without Exits, Andrew Braccia (Accel), Danny Rimer (Index), Dana Settle (Greylock), David Siminoff (Venrock) and Quincy Smith (CBS Interactive) all talked about how there are no exits aside from acquisitions. Danny, one of the best investors in Europe and backer of MySQL and Skype, said that there are still acquirers for good companies. He said all of his portfolio that had been acquired since the beginning of the year had been enterprise software companies. Andrew said that he is telling his portfolio companies to hunker down for the next couple of years. I have heard such talk since 1994 before the big launch of Netscapes IPO.

Life on the Net 2018 was pretty interesting, although probably a little too diverse like several of the sessions at the conference. We had Larry Lessig - open source intellectual property specialist, Phil Rosedale - founder of Second Life and Half Moon Bay resident, Joichi Ito - chairman of SixApart. Larry's "the sky's falling and your privacy is gone" position was pretty scary. He said that the Patriot Act came in so fast that it must have been pre-written before 9/11. He said that he had sources that have told him that is exactly what happened and that there is an internet-based Patriot Act waiting to be put in place as a result of any sort of catastrophic disaster on the Net. Phil believes that virtual worlds of some sort will be the future of user interfaces to the internet because they are easier for older and non-experienced users to use. Obviously, we need more technology improvements for this to happen. Perhaps the biggest technical obstacle to be overcome is the notion of a single identity that is secure and non-repudiable.

The evening event started with a Tweet Out in the platform overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I now have more respect and interest in Twitter as a result of meeting so many Tweeters. Dinner was hosted by the government of Singapore and I met so many people that evening I can't recount it all. However, I didn't stay up so late that I didn't get a chance to get up early and take some pictures of the harbor I was staying next to. I waited too late to stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, but sometimes that can be an advantage, especially cost wise.

   

An early morning stroll around the harbor at Half Moon Bay.

I was up early enough to sit in on a breakfast roundtable on Programming for the Web and Social Networking. Now I thought this meant programming like programming a computer. They meant programming like NBC is setting up it's Fall line-up. Still interesting. I am getting a sense that there is still a new big wave of video and much richer content coming than just YouTube. And the opportunity to manage it, organize it, categorize it and monetize it will be huge.

Finally, I sat in on a real programming session with the Future of Code, featuring David Hansson of BaseCamp and Ruby on Rails fame, Grady Booch - early pioneer of Object Oriented Programming and at IBM, and Charles Simonyi of Intentional Software, creator of Microsoft Office and Space Tourist. They all take very different approaches to architecture and they spent a lot of the time telling each other that the others were wrong. They all have points and my biggest insight from this is what prejudiced guys they all are.

Neville Roy Singham (ThoughtWorks and moderator), David Hansson (37signals), Roger Simonyi (Intentional), Grady Booch (IBM)

Grady Booch: "There are systems built upon systems and then you have a lot of crap. But that's enough about the Bush Administration."

I missed the rest because I had to head off to Sun Computers, but you can read more below about Eric Schmidt and Neil Young. We had gone to meet with Jonathan Schwartz who had left the conference the day before. He said that although there were interesting things there, he does go to a lot of those things. I asked him if they were all the same. He nodded. Lucky guy. Living 5000 miles away from the valley, I don't get to go to that many events of this quality.


Philip Rosedale Doesn’t See Browser-Based Virtual Worlds As A Threat to Second Life.  Is He In Denial? - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

A glimpse into the future of the Internet - Tom Forenski, ZDNet Blogs

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg: Making money isn't a priority (except for her) - Nicholas Carlson, Valleywag

Liveblogging Eric Schmidt/Google Interview at Brainstorm - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

The best Fortune Brainstorm Tech Talk: Neil Young challenges tech industry - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

The blog editing system in action - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

Doing Davos Does Not Help Blogging

Me in a Davos collaboration session on building new resilience into business

Where I last left you, I was on my way to Davos and the World Economic Forum. I tried twittering to keep up with what was going on, but it's really tricky spending any time writing when you are at an event like that. In the central lobby area, there are only a few seats and I would always see Justin Fox, correspondent for Time Magazine, occupying some of the few sofas along with his wife and other "Young Global Pioneers" of the World Economic Forum. I asked Justin if he had been to any of the sessions, which he said he had, but it seemed like he was always blogging. It was good that he was there though. He had a Mac and I could borrow a recharge every once in a while.

A giant YouTuber addressing 1000 people in the WEF plenary hall, while the President of Switzerland sitting alone below him is probably trying to figure out what is going on.

Chad Hurley, founder of YouTube, apologizing for mistakenly showing the previously shown video for the video greetings from George Bush. Sorry George! (BTW, I doubt you will ever see George Bush at Davos. Alliances and Internationalism are not really his thing.)

That's the problem when there is so much stuff going on. You need to sit down and digest a huge amount of information, impressions, emotions and sheer overwhelmingness. The year before, I wrote one blog and missed so much, so I thought I should really just experience this and then write it down. Now I won't be able to get on with writing my blog properly until I do. So forgive this somewhat rambling post.

Robert Scoble interviewing Vinod Khosla. Scoble doesn't have a problem keeping up his blog.

About a week after Davos, a friend of mine asked me who I met this year at Davos. Ironically, the only person I could think of was Emma Thompson and a bunch of CEOs. So, I start where I finished last time. On the plane back from Zurich to London, I saw Emma waiting for her luggage and I just had to say hello. I asked her how she like Davos. Her response was, "Wasn't that amazing! I must write it down!" At the time, I thought yeah, me too and I will get to it on Monday. Five months later...

Loic LeMeur interviews Emma Thompson

( If you can't see the video, try: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIHnqEhAAA0 )

In reality, I met a lot more people. I met Tony Blair and Bono, which I thought was pretty cool. I tried to get up early(ish) and at 8am in the morning one day I just saw Blair walking down a white, glistening snow covered street with only a couple of people in tow. I just reached out as I walked in the opposite direction and said "Hello Mr. Blair." With a politician's instinct, he grinned, said hello, shook my hand and moved on. Bono came tumbling out of some party the night before along with Queen Raina of Jordan and her entourage from London, and few other celebrities. I was in an WEF IT Governors meeting where guys like Bill Gates and Michael Dell were supposed to be, but were probably at the same party. Being at Davos is part of being in elevated circles, but even the elevated circles have their upper levels.

Passing Henry Kissinger in the hall

Compared to the previous year, the US political events were far less overwhelming given the current presidential elections, but the global politics portions was at least as interesting. Hanging around after Condoleeza Rice's speech, I saw Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch also hanging around me along with Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan. I doubt they recognized me though. I was invited to a breakfast session with Purvez Musharraf, who was much more articulate and persuasive than I expected. I got some flack from some people of even attending, but I sat next to Jasmine Whitbread, CEO of Save the Children UK, who I figured if she was interested in different opinions of what was going, why could I be. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and the blogger Robert Scoble were there as well and you can read Scoble's account of what happened. I saw Gordon Brown in a couple of sessions, but at the time I was no where near as furious with him then as I am now.

Hamid Karzai in a rush. (So I just didn't have good camera with me. :-( )

Pervez Musharraf talking over a croissant at breakfast

Technology definitely took a back seat to Social Enterprise this year. Although there were still luminaries, some of which I got introduced to thanks to Brian Behlendorf (man that guy networks well), it was guys like Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus that took center stage. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, scoffed at being called legendary after being introduced after Muhammad Yunus, the man who created Microfinance. Unlike last year where Web 2.0 was a major theme, people who are trying to change the lives of people using the forces of capitalism and entrepreneurialism rightly were given the spotlight. Most of them you would never heard of, but they seem to really be making a difference in the developing world. One you may have heard of is Nicholas Negroponte, who I sat next to at a lunch after he mistakenly tried to steal mine. We have since exchanged emails about how Alfresco and open source might be able to help the One Laptop Per Child initiative. If open source can help serve up content to all those OLPC systems, so much the better.

Nicholas Negroponte with blogger Jeff Jarvis taking notes. Sorry this is a scary picture, but I was sitting right next to the guy when he was speaking.

Most people at Davos are business people. Emma Thompson apparently described the crowd on BBC Radio 4 as a bunch of gray, middle aged businessmen in suits. (Well excuse me Emma!) There were in all the sessions and the vast majority of them are extremely nice and sociable. It was pretty cool hanging out with the Accel guys, Joe Schoendorf and Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, drinking 50 year old Bordeaux wine. I shared a taxi with George Soros, who stole a place from my friend Magid Abraham, CEO of ComScore. Soros then had the misfortune of me plugging at him on the future of the dollar and pound. Eventually, he asked me what I did and I explained about Alfresco. George then said, "I *like* open source." So here's a scoop for you, George Soros is bearish on the US economy, the dollar, the pound and George Bush and bullish on China, India, and Open Source.

Nobel Prize Winner, Muhammad Yunus

I attended a panel on Strategy in a Networked World with Sam DiPiazza, CEO of PWC, Chris Conde of Sungard, Marc Benioff from Salesforce, Michael Porter, business professor at the Harvard Business School, and moderated by Tom Stewart, editor of the Harvard Business Review. I have met all of them and they are all nice, grey, middle aged and in suits, although Benioff stands out as being different. He is a bit younger, dresses more informally and is less likely to listen to what you are saying. I was in a collaboration session with him, business people from Cisco, HP, Sun and social entrepreneurs at the front line bringing in water, power and connectivity. Chris Gopalakrishan, COO of Infosys, actually knows a lot more about the 3rd world than most. Yet Mark was trying to tell him and others that the solution to poverty, disease and privation is a Web 2.0 center in villages running Salesforce.com.

Marc Benioff telling us how its gonna be

The dinners and parties continued to be the most impressive and fun part of Davos. The Accel party is definitely one of the highlights. One moment at this year's party that I really liked was being able to introduce Michael Porter to Tim O'Reilly. Tim definitely knew who Michael Porter was, but Michael had no idea that Tim was the one who started a lot of all this Web 2.0 stuff. If Tim O'Reilly came away impressed, this event must be something else. Also, I am hanging around talking to people waiting to chat with Larry Page and find I am talking to the CEO of Mattel. Good thing I didn't ask him about toys from China. One of the Accel guys introduced me to the video blogger Loic LeMeur and I said, "I know you! You're famous." Immediately afterwards is the Google party with absolutely everyone in there. I attended a great "Eat Local" dinner hosted by Chez Panisse owner, Alice Waters, and the theater director Peter Sellars. The food was absolutely fabulous and it was really nice to meet Alice since I have enjoyed her food since my days in Berkeley, although Sergey Brin got a lot more attention. The Nerd's Dinner was also fascinating with so many famous tech people, I couldn't possibly list them here. That I have to blog separately.

I tried to get a picture of Michael Porter when he wasn't moving his hands. I failed. He is very animated.

In the end though, it is the people who make you think that have the most lasting impression. As always, it is great pleasure to hang around Geoffrey Moore, from whom I always learn something. I was also very pleased to meet Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, and his wife. On the last night, I hung out with he and his wife and discovered he is a great jazz pianist. However, I learned about his next book about the Millennial generation joining the work force. The futurist Paul Saffo, the host of the Nerd's Dinner makes me feel like a real laggard. I am still in awe of Tim O'Reilly. Although I don't agree with some of what Tom Friedman writes, I still respect his perspective, which as influential when we started Alfresco, and I got to meet him this time and learn about his next book about Green Technology.

Don Tapscott, Author of Wikinomics

Finally, Bill Gates got me thinking a lot. His speech on what he is doing next was well worth attending. Bill's thesis is that if we can apply the principles of capitalism to solving the world's problems, we can eradicate hunger, poverty, disease, lack of power and climate change. Market and financial incentives alone are insufficient. We should all acting based upon self-interest and incentivized to work in that self-interest. Governments can help with tax incentives, but giving recognition to those companies and individuals are potentially more powerful. Companies should also be incentivized not to give money, but talent, which in turn provides recognition of the individual and organization making a difference. This recognition can be its own market-based reward since it will benefit the company in the competitive marketplace. This approach can be used to provide not just manpower, but solutions to accessibility of information, medicine and healthcare.

Bill Gates talking about what he is planning next.

Perhaps Google thought of this all along, but it seems like Bill has a point. As much as that pains me to say, clearly the programs and techniques that we have used in the past have not worked and we need to try something else. Maybe its time to try Bill's plan. I was challenged by one of the more liberal participants to not even think that. He said, "It's easy for him to say that. He's a billionaire. He made his money with blood money stealing from the poor children of the world." That's a bit extreme and I was just as culpable in this guy's eyes for even suggesting it, but I think it's worth exploring.

Mitch Kapoor

If you have gotten this far, well done. Now that I have this one out of the way, I can concentrate on blogging properly hopefully.

Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief of WPP, asking everyone to calm down.

Tories Demand Open Source

Computerworld and the Financial Times report that George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor (UK equivalent of Secretary of Treasury in waiting) has demanded that the government invest more in open source. He claims that open source can save 5% of the government's IT budget and £600M ($1.15B). Only 5%! I'm sure it can be a lot more than that.

Being a British software company, you would think that the UK government would be all over Alfresco as an open source alternative to American software. After all, governments all over Europe are adopting Alfresco for document management, records management and starting to develop web sites. Local and Central governments in France and Spain have been using Alfresco for nearly two years now. Even the US Federal Government is adopting Alfresco faster than the UK government. As John Powell mentioned in our BBC radio interview, the UK government has been shy about open source.

Two good buddies

Aside from being very conservative in outlook, the UK government has had a great deal of influence peddling from American IT companies. The near complete disappearance of software and hardware manufacturers has not been helped by the mishandling of projects like the massive £6B NHS computer re-engineering project. Tony Blair has not really helped with his desire to build a friendship with the richest man in world.

Open source probably represents the best opportunity to rebuild the industry that had been the pioneer in Information Technology. The electronic computer was actually invented at Bletchley Park in the Colossus project during World War II. The first business computing application was built to run the Lyons' Tea Houses and maintain stock. Virtual Memory was invented at Manchester University and Maurice Wilkes at Cambridge University invented stored programs and micro-programming for modern CPUs. In my particular field, it was two Brits, Codd and Date, invented relational database technology.

Enabled by the Internet and available to anyone in the world, open source can happen anywhere. However, it is more likely to happen where the government encourages the use of open source and saves money in the process. No special favors to British companies, but no special favors as well to the incumbents just because they are incumbent.

Arthur Schlesinger has just died - What does this have to do with George Bush?

A great historian died today. Arthur Schlesinger studied history and was part of history. I think the current grave circumstances of American foreign policy should require that any politician who participates in government or has anything to do with foreign policy should be required to also at least have studied history. The maxim "those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it" cannot be more appropriate.

Back in the early 1980s, I read Schlesinger's book, the Cycles of American History, just because the title intrigued me. As events in Iraq unfolded, I couldn't help but pull the book out of storage and re-read it. The unfolding events sounded familiar and it could more or less predict everything that has gone on the last few years. That is because it happened before. Not just because it happened before in Iraq (see the British) or (God Forbid) Afghanistan (see Russians, British and any other invader you chose), but it has happened in America.

Schlesinger's book descirbes a "Neo-con" (the term is anachronistic) plot that plunged a Cold War into a deep freeze as thawing relations between Eisenhower and Kruschev soured with the Gary Powers U2 spy plane incident. I am sure that the motivations of the intelligence officers who flew the plane before critical talks were well intentioned as were those who got us into Iraq with malformed intelligence, but the constant push and pull between Multi-lateralism vs. Unilateralism is and will be a recurring factor in American politics. There is a current of "we can go it alone" vs. "we are part of a larger world". This unilaterist phase that we are currently in correlates to the isolationism of the past.

Schlesinger's book also predicts the coming activist backlash that will result, which I am not necessarily looking forward to. These times can grow into the chaotic periods of the late 1960s that bring change, but also antagonism and unease that can last for decades. The blue states vs. the red states could be come a lot uglier. These cycles wlll come and go with each generation and the only thing that will change that is the pace of birthrate. Schlesinger's book was written in the Reagan era, but it rings true today. I can't remember Schlesinger's formula for predicting the period, but buy the book and figure it out for yourself.

Let me be upfront. I respect George HW Bush and the coalitions he built, but I think George W. Bush is an idiot and his disregard for the lessons of history cannot be more obvious. Whether you agree with Schlesinger or not, let's have our leaders take a test to see if they know anything about what they are about to engage us in. Forewarned is forearmed.

An American Entrepreneur in Europe

I was asked some questions about being an American entrepreneur in Europe by a major international business magazine. I wrote down my answers and I thought I would post them on my blog. This is related to my blog on Global Competition Workshop at Davos.

How long have you been based in Europe?

I have been in the UK since 1995 this time. I originally moved to the UK in 1987 to set up Ingres’ European Technical Center, but went back to California to set up a company in 1989. I didn’t believe you could start a company in those days in the UK. This was a hard decision for me, because I enjoyed living and working in Europe. I site visit to one of the capitals of Europe was much more interesting and educational than the site visits I was making in the mid-West of the US.

I then started Documentum in 1990 with Howard Shao. Once Documentum was up and going, I returned to the UK, but still had a large portion of the organization reporting to me, so I ended up going back to the US once a month until 2001. At that point, Documentum had become the leader in Enterprise Content Management, the stock prices was at an all time high, so I felt it was a good time to leave.

When you founded Alfresco in 2005, why did you decide to set up shop in Europe instead of the US or somewhere else?

We set up in the UK because it is hard. The UK is our home and we believe that all it needs is role models of success. All the elements are here in the UK to create great technology companies. Just like Silicon Valley, there are great ideas in universities like Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College (Britain’s MIT). There are mid-level managers working in European headquarters of American companies that aspire to greater things, have been trained to a world class level by Americans, and have been able to work independently due to the distance from the headquarters in the US. Venture capital is freely available, especially since the substantial changes in capital gains tax in the mid-1990s. All that remains are the success stories and examples to show that it can be done.

 

Also John Powell and I found it easier to start a company here than to continue to commute to the bay area in order to have the influence that one gets from being at headquarters.

Have you recruited other Americans to work for Alfresco?

Yes. Although I am the only American in the European organization, about a quarter of the organization is in the US in sales and marketing roles. This is a reversal of roles, but we are more sympathetic to role that remote people play and try to find other channels for communication and engagement. We are big users of Skype and use it to freely communicate with each other wherever we are. The nature of open source is that it can happen anywhere and tends not to have a geographic center. Since we allow people to work at home often, there is less of a barrier between people in the US, people at home or people in the UK office.

Is entrepreneurism on the rise in Europe? If so, why?

It’s funny that George Bush claimed that the “French don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” I don’t think he was trying to be ironic, but to a certain extent he is right. I know a lot of people who are dying to start a company in France, but real changes have to happen in employment laws and work rules before they can become successful. Business Objects is the only success story that I can think of and they had to move to Silicon Valley to really succeed. France is burdened with a high level of bureaucracy and the level of bureaucracy has been increasing here in the UK, but that hasn’t stopped ambition. I wouldn’t confuse the politics and industrial sclerosis that infects much of Europe with what is happening at the ground level of entrepreneurs and in areas that are more loosely regulated.

It is clear to everyone that Europe is falling behind in a lot of areas and people are particularly concerned about the emerging threat from Asia than even American entrepreneurism. They know that it requires something different and that start-ups are a powerful force of competition. With the laser like focus that can run rings around conglomerates, they know that it is a way to make money for them as well as compete. Also, there is no shortage of creativity in Europe. European universities and labs can create as many new ideas as those in America. The trick is productizing and marketing them.

The force of entrepreneurialism is strongest in countries that have strong university traditions connected to industrial development. Essentially these are the areas that created the entrepreneurialism that created the Industrial Revolution. There are lots of startups in new devices, telephony and new Web 2.0 properties in the UK, Germany and Scandinavia. The former Soviet bloc has been bursting with activity and is now starting to take a chunk of business that would be going to India. With strong mathematical and computer heritages in places like Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Belarus (where they used to copy American computers), and Russia, there is potentially a real factory of software that can be coming from the Eastern European countries.

However, some of the most powerful concepts to be turned into companies are around open source and Web 2.0 internet properties. That is because the internet has become such a leveling force in the delivery of information-based services. When starting Alfresco, we wanted to take what was a disadvantage, being in Europe, and turn it into an advantage. Much of the projects that have been successful in open source have come from Europe, such as MySQL and Linux. Skype came out of Europe as well. These types of companies don’t require lots of people, so they are not as affected by labor regulation, and the location of their services is completely irrelevant, even more so in a totally global market.

Do you know of other European-based startups that have Americans in top management slots?

There is a model discussed in the European venture capital community called the Israeli model. That is to take the ideas generated from the labs and universities and to set up sales and marketing operations in the US and keep development and operations in Europe. Amdocs and Check Point are examples of Israeli companies to do this. European companies that are following this model are hiring Americans in America. Other than that, most European companies are on their own relying on their own smarts and the training that have generally received from American companies.

This is not a whole lot different than the early days of Silicon Valley where a lot of the management was hired from the middle ranks of IBM or other technology firms east of the Mississippi. It took time, but the culture was self-developing after a decade or so.

Multi-disciplinary Collaboration at Davos

Photo of me outside the Davos Congress Center taken by Commissioner Annette Nazareth of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, who just happened to be passing by when I asked if she could take my picture.

It has been nearly two weeks since Davos finished, but I still haven’t written up all my blogs from Davos. It was the most intense intellectual experience I have ever had and I could probably write a book about it. Just goes to show, I need to change my style of blogging.

There are many reasons for the intellectual intensity, the plenary sessions with some of the most important people in the world, amazing people are standing right next to you with whom can you can just start a conversation, you have the world’s experts on panels discussing the most important problems in the world, and there are dinners on many eclectic subjects that attract people from all walks of life.

However, one of the unique aspects of Davos is the ability to attend workshops that bring together people interested in many subjects from different backgrounds. You can probably set up a one on one meeting with anyone if you try really hard. You can watch the talking heads say the same thing they said on television what they said at Davos. But where else can you work in a group of 4 to 6 people who are experts in there own respective field and may actually be able to affect some of the changes recommended by the group? Where else can you sit next to a major CEO and understand where he is coming from and influence his thinking in a somewhat unguarded environment? I think this is part of what they describe as the Spirit of Davos.

These workshops attract high-level CEOs, subject matter experts and political leaders and are facilitated by people who are some of the best people I have ever seen in these types of sessions. Workshops generally have around 36 people who break up into 6 groups of 6. It’s generally potluck who you get paired up with, but chances are they share common interests. The groupings are either by subject or by the leader of the group who might be an expert who might actually be a Nobel Prize winner. The sessions are generally a little over two hours long - the time slot of two regular sessions. A typical agenda would be to have experts discuss the scope of a major problem, participants breakout into groups to brainstorm on implications of the problem, groups share results with the whole, groups go back to brainstorm on solutions, everyone shares and summarize solutions. During these breakout sessions, we get magnetic tiles to summarize our results and many people create colorful pictures to convey the message more succinctly.

I attended four of these sessions and here are the links to my blogs on each:

• Demystifying Growth and Productivity which was really a session on Global Competition.
• Collaborate to Innovate to which I was invited to attend as a contributor by the Forum.
• Designing Sustainable Cities which is an area on which I am a complete novice, but I thought I would get a chance to harangue the Mayor of London.
• Living in a Connected World - Life in 2015  was so fascinating that I am still writing up my notes

The conclusions I came to from these sessions were that:

• Working with incredibly intelligent people is humbling, but very energizing
• Pulling together highly competent people from multiple disciplines creates off the wall ideas that just might work
• By bringing your own unique competence to solving a problem, you can interact with anyone, no matter how high or mighty, as a peer
• Most CEOs are actually good listeners, but have their own strong opinions - providing a new idea or concept from a completely different angle will at least get them thinking differently
• Communicate your own perspective with a story that is personal to you - it will come out as genuine and engage the other members of your team. Make sure it is a short story though
• With that many powerful and influential people in a room, it is tempting for some to grab the agenda - just see what happened to Sharon Stone
• He who has the pen sets the agenda, unless John Chambers or Arianna Huffington are in the room
• Try to carry on the conversation after the workshop is over - blog or email. Hopefully, WEF’s plans for electronic collaboration will carry over
• Try this at home - pull together people from very different competencies and discuss one of these big problems in a book club type of format - you might surprise yourself
• Workshops are the best thing about Davos

I'll bore you with one last blog from Davos on the Life in 2015 before going on to my regular ramblings.

Davos Workshop - Collaborate to Innovate

The “Collaborate to Innovate” session was attended by around 40 people, mainly CEOs and people who are keenly interested in innovation and collaboration. I actually studied the subject as part of a research project at Documentum where I interviewed 50 of Documentum’s largest customers over an 18 month period on how they manage knowledge in their organizations and how that helps build the top line of their businesses. The session broke up into 6 groups supporting three different types of innovation models. The open source model is probably the best understood with open and transparent development driving changes from the community. The marketplace model uses the transaction process to allow employees and customers to engage in dialog and participate in the product / service development process. The Al Qaeda model is about using a core cell to distribute values and objectives to loosely cells that can act independently and freely to local conditions. All of these were compared and contrasted by the moderators that included Tim Brown , CEO of IDEO, the company that has designed everything from the Mac mouse to the Palm V to power tools and office furniture.

During the overview session, I didn’t realize that I was sitting just behind CK Prahalad, one of the greatest thinkers on the subject of innovation, strategy and core competence. When I realized this, I went to go to whatever group he was going to. Of course I should have gone to the group on the open source model, but I ended up in the group on marketplace innovation. CK explained to us that he thought that they were just stylizations of the same model, which makes sense to me. He is currently working on a new book that discusses the core model which has extended from an internal looking model focused on product to one that has expanded into services and ultimately solutions that incorporates channels and now the customer, which is becoming increasingly more powerful in the market and innovation processes. Dov Baharav, CEO of Amdocs, brought up a good point that your current customers are not necessarily going to take you to new markets. We discussed that perhaps that required identifying the types of customers that will lead you into the markets. In other words, this is the Innovator's Dilemma. This was reflected by Mark Penn, an adviser to Bill Clinton, Tony Blair in his last campaign and Hillary Clinton in her Senate bid, in espousing the concept of Micro-targeting.

The task given our group was to come up with a new product or service in the Leisure or Fashion industry. Bruce Nussbaum, Assistant Managing Editor of BusinessWeek, was also in the group, and suggested we address the games industry. I thought that was a great idea since the games industry is going through a major change with the new architectures, such as Xbox 360 and PS/3, required years to develop new games, long after an accompanying film has come and gone. CK had been thinking about this subject already talking about how Lord of the Rings put previews out on the web of how the story would be developed and solicited input from the public. He contrasted this with the secrecy of the DaVinci Code, which bombed in the box office. We then went on to develop the idea further to present to the whole group, creating the idea of a new company that would allow the users of games and viewers of the movie to participate in the create of both. Characters would be reused between games and movies and contributed by users. Those who contribute would profit from the financial rewards of the game and film through a royalty scheme. We all seemed pretty pleased with the idea.

It came time to present the results and out of all the workshops, this was the only one that I saw that had voting. There was a correspondent from CNBC moderating the presentations, and although it was entertaining, it was a pretty nerve racking prospect to get up and get judged by a bunch of CEOs. By far the best presentation was by Bernard Liautaud, Chairman of Business Objects and John Powell’s old boss, who presented a fashion company that used Al Qaeda style tactics to buy and sell fashion items designed by local cells using carbon credits. It was funny and actually compelling to watch.

I came up after that and for the first time in a long time, I was nervous presenting. Well, you try presenting in front of a bunch of power people like were in that audience. I got no votes. But at least the idea was vindicated in the end by the two experts Tim Brown and a Swiss Economics professor as an idea they really liked. This was the only session that had voting as part of a very fast session and I don’t recommend other groups do that.

Davos and Designing Sustainable Cities

In the morning of the last day of the sessions, I attended a session on Designing Sustainable Cities. The reason I went to this one is that I thought that Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, would be one of the workgroup facilitators. I also thought that Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, who I met the night before at Claudia Schiffer’s Global Warming party was going to be there. Neither was there, Ken due to family commitments and Gavin due to family problems?, but this ended up being a truly multi-disciplinary session.

There were people who designed new cities in China, architects from the major architectural firms, product design people like Tim Brown, Hermann Requart, CTO of Siemens, and some of the Technology Pioneers, who have great ideas, but would never be involved in a session like this. The session had experts from firms who advise governments on how to design cities and upgrade old ones. One odd comment that one of them made was that Dubai was an example of a city that won’t be there in 50 years let alone hundreds. We broke up into groups around areas such as transportation, power, governance, housing and resources.

I went into the breakout group on transportation. What else would someone with a background in IT do? I did study renewable energy when I went to Berkeley, but that is so old. It turns out that Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, thought the same thing. He studied the area of transportation when he was working on his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford. Tim Brown was in my group as well and I was looking forward to hearing what he had to say. Our group decided to start a city from scratch and imagine what was possible from creating entirely new cities as is being done in China now.

Once Larry started talking about how Google was designing a new $1 Billion facility, that some dub GooglePlex, everyone would shut-up. Of course, when a powerful, super-smart billionaire talks about how he is going to solve some of these problems, one would shut up. The amazing ideas that came out were: when we want an item like a tomato, we should be able to get it with a few minutes and the transportation system should be designed around that; battery technology will evolve to the point where a battery will have enough power to move anything; ultra-light aircraft are the most efficient means of people moving from one place to another and that computers will be able to deal with safety issues; the Google complex was designed for efficient movement of people and things to the point of eliminating walls and other obstacles.

We then traded ideas with other groups in an idea of using “speed-dating” between groups. The idea is that each group splits in half and exchange people so that half of one group goes to the other area and half that group comes to yours. You exchange ideas on how things are inter-related. Obviously energy and transportation are inter-related. What I learned in this section is that Ultra-Light Rail is the most efficient form of transportation. Also pneumatic transport of goods and even people can be a very efficient form of transport. Sharing an infrastructure between transport and power can be cost effective, but one expert suggested that we have no wires going in and out of buildings, since it is possible to create completely energy self-sufficient buildings. (Yeah, right. Try doing that in England.) We thought we should also trade ideas with the group that handled buildings, but we ran out of time.

I learned quite a bit about these types of session in this one. I won’t name who, but someone in the planning business just took control of the pen to further their own agenda. Doing stuff like that is why Sharon Stone was not invited to Davos this year. Also, getting this diverse a group of people is fantastic and with the sort of energy that gets generated, you can solve just about any problem. However, two and a bit hours is nowhere near long enough to do anything about it. The rule of the game should be to blue sky given you can really think out of the box, but it would also be interesting to see how we can solve problems like those in London with such brain power. Finally, the conversation needs to extend beyond the Davos event to really take advantage of all the collective thought that has been created.

Davos Workshop on Global Competition

The first workshop that I attended at Davos was a session on “Demystifying Growth and Productivity” which was really a session on Global Competition and I was a bit tentative going. After all, I could attend two shorter sessions on equally fascinating subjects and this one looked decidedly focused on geographies with which I was not as familiar.

My table was led by the President of ABB’s Global Markets and attended by a Harvard Business School Professor, Tarun Khanna, who is an expert in the area of global competition. It turned out that I was an expert of sorts as well. Having lived in Silicon Valley in California and the Thames Valley in the UK, I had first hand experience in what works and doesn’t in the most imitated model in the world for global productivity and competitiveness. It also didn’t hurt that I got to experience Penang, Malaysia and Singapore on my Christmas vacation that gave me new insights on what really drives high tech competitiveness and what is driving investment into these two islands. One person was involved in the development of Dubai that has had a huge amount of development due to the fact that they have eliminated government assistance and intervention.

I learned a lot in this session, especially in that there is great confusion as to what works given that there are a lot of variables that go into competitiveness, such as tax breaks, government protection, education, institutions, free trade associations and good transportation. I was very concerned though at the level of support for protectionism presented in other names such as support and assistance.

There was a sort of softly spoken undercurrent in Davos that protectionism is the way to develop the developing countries by giving them a break. It showed up in a very non-aggressive way in this session. Pair that sentiment with a broken Washington, a multi-headed European policy and no wonder the Doha Round of trade negotiations is struggling.

Dignity and Spiritual Davos

Last Sunday, I attended the closing session of the World Economic Forum title "What is Dignity?" I expected the session to be held at the main Congress Center, but I eventually found it in one of the smaller halls in the main part of the building. There weren't many people there, perhaps 150 at most and many of them were speakers in the event. Most people were hungover, packing or on the sky slopes.

The session started with a film on the concept of dignity that used striking visuals and then held a discussion panel similar to others held at Davos and hosted by John Defterios. The mix at first was an eclectic selection of charities from around the world talking about the inhumanity around the world that is faced by brave people who have held their dignity. It started slow, but gradually picked up steam as the speakers became more emboldened and strengthened by their causes.

 

Crown Prince Haakan and John Bryant Hope

It really started to pick up when a young man by the name of John Hope Bryant started to speak. My goodness, I thought the art of oratory was gone until I heard him. He talked about his mentor, Andrew Young, being inspired by his mentor, Martin Luther King Jr. I could hear the power of Dr. King in his voice. He spoke of the dignity that he saw in the poorest of men in India and the lessons that it can provide America. "In order to have dignitiy you have to offer it first...You cannot call yourself a leader unless you are prepared to serve."

I heard from several speakers from many faiths and walks of life that what is required to bring dignity to everyone is respect, the ability to give something back to the world and for all of us to give dignity back. Dutch Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, saved from the Nazis, talked about bringing dignity and opportunity to the Palestinians. There were those that worked for the poor, disposessed, and disabled talking about our need to provide the means of dignity to others. The Crown Prince of Norway spoke passionately and emotionally about visiting an AIDS hospice where both a husband and wife had AIDS and they did not know what would happen to their small children or aged mother and asking him "Do all you can to make sure that this does not happen to anyone else?" His speech made me proud to be half-Norwegian.

That's me behind Crown Prince Haakan of Norway.

After all of this emotion, Defterios brought everyone back to earth by saying "I think Kleenex has a big market opportunity here."

One of the last speakers was Linda Rottenberg who talked about trying to inspire kids in Latin America with the story of Steve Jobs and Apple, since that is what inspired her. The kids told her, "What relevance is that to me? I don't have a computer. I don't have a garage." She is now focusing on helping role models in Latin America to present to kids in Latin America. It occurred to me that here is an area I can actually help. Open source can be done anywhere, even with Nick Negroponte's $100 computers.

Irene Khan, Amnesty International

Finally in summing up, Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said that this was more spirtual than any service that we could have in a church, synagogue or mosque and that we can go out with our soul recharged. (I agree.) She also said that this session should be the first next year. That this provides the foundation for why we are all meeting in Davos and it should be the major CEOs and world leaders listening to these stories. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the Forum, was in the audience and we will see what will happen. It was certainly a loss for the 2250 delegates who didn't attend.

In a forum that focused on connectedness and a network world, a human dimension seemed to be missing. Fairness was sort of a subtheme, but in an us vs. them sort of way. I think it helps to have discussions like this to put everything in perspective. I have never seen such an assemblage of power and influence and as much good intention behind it. However, missing this type of context makes it difficult to sustain.

In my own world, I can see the argument of dignity in a world that is starting to creep with spying, bullying, spamming, sexual explotiation and collaboration of terrorist threat. However, the internet and the new networked world is empowering, making it possible to make a living in the first world from anywhere in the world. It doesn't matter what you look like, what color your skin is or if you have a disability, you can still work and contribute to the world. I hope it is a track toward dignity for all.

Help keep me honest. Ask me occassionally what I have done in getting open source opportunities or even inspirational stories to those kids in Latin America. And ask yourself, what have you done today to bring a bit of dignity to the world.

Photos Copyright (c) 2007 Associated Press