30. 12.

My 2009 Roundup

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 20737 krát

It's that time of year where we round up all that went down over 2009, and all that'll be surging down the pipe during Twenty-Ten. So here's a very short summary of the excellent year which was, and a few tip-offs about the promising year which is to come -- despite the obvious onset of worsening economic conditions wherever you live.

Notable milestones:


  • China: So I finally managed to head on over to the People's Republic -- Beijing and Shanghai, specifically -- last month, the very two cities I'd been dreaming about since the beginning of the year. We didn't know where Vitamin C: Your Daily Dose On China was eventually going to lead when we'd commenced it during 2009's "Prague Spring," but it turned out to be quite the catchy little vidcast, except in China, that is, given its "Great Firewall." Even we couldn't access the best of what Vimeo and YouTube had to offer through our VPN in China. In any event, as of last count, we've completed almost fifty-five episodes, augmented by a handful of Vitamin C Road Shows in Romania and Switzerland which got us off our rubber butts for several weeks during 2009's spring and summer. I look forward to a packed 2010 for the moving image as we've recently upgraded our gear (now four machines and counting!) and juiced up our editing software (Final Cut Pro) that will allow us to take even more creative risks of the sorts you've become used to. I look forward to one additional China sojourn set to take place during early 2010 to -- Luke Skywalker-like -- tie-up some loose Chinese ends.

  • Romania: With 2009 being the extensive travel year it was, we also managed to spirit ourselves away from the Romanian capital for a couple of weeks in September during our swing through the fabled (and positively breathtaking) Transylvanian countryside (Brasov, Ploiesti, Pitesti, Poiana Brasov, Sibiu, and Sighisoara). The trip will remain one of my 2009 highlights because it reinvigorated my passion for Romania's resolute, courageous folk and offered me some insights into the vast diversity of Romania's society outside of Bucharest and about how dastardly its dictatorship was. We kicked back with the locals as we enjoyed some of the rural culinary delights and libations (palinca, tuica, and french fries, Romanian-style). I was delighted to discover how some Romanians who might have otherwise emerged from the Ceausescu era with tremendous emotional scarring somehow succeeded in maintaining their positive outlook on life, an astonishing revelation given the stereotypes people still hold about this talented, but deeply scarred, Balkan country.

  • Czech Republic: My love for the city of Prague remains fully intact, despite some autumn logistical setbacks with our creative studio. Thankfully, our local networks run very deep and the unplanned changeover lasted only a couple of days. A propos, too, I suppose, in light of what was taking place on the national scene as the money supply tightened and the Czech authorities announced an increase to the tax rate in order to stem the rapidly-swelling budgetary deficit. Some good friends lost their jobs, and other long-standing Prague expats pulled up stakes and left town. This otherwise placid Central European nation suddenly understood that it wasn't an island disconnected from the financial ravages of the rest of Planet Earth. Czechs sadly only woke up to this reality around March or April, and when it hit home, it stung with a bitter vengeance. I guess this means the end of eleven a.m. drinky-poos for all the local bureaucrats I see in the cafes who now suddenly realize you have to shake your moneymaker if you want to be somebody in this town. Prague will continue to play a part in my 2010, but on a drastically-reduced level. You shall, nevertheless, continue to hear from me my dear local friends. Our long ponderous chatty nights in our favourite watering holes and bistros will continue!

  • Canada: Looking forward to putting the finishing touches on a small Vancouver Olympic project we're completing as I type. As such, my flying schedule shows no signs of slowing down next year and I shall sadly continue being that profligate airborne polluter -- the worst kind! -- which pushed me into "silver" standing in at least two prominent frequent flier programs (yay, business lounge benefits!). I can't wait to get up the new photos from some of the Olympic venues.


Some other notable highlights throughout the year:

  • 1938 Media: Our association with Loren Feldman's 1938 Media was a great learning experience. Despite his shock-jock Howard Stern-esque style, Loren remains one of Web Two-Oh's notable celebs, with a keen eye on tech and business trends who sports a deliciously caustic tongue. I enjoyed spoofing him as part of his popular "Monday Matters" series this past Prague summer. We look forward to increased future collaborations.

  • Theoretically Speaking: New York's Vincent Ferrrari has been nothing short of a sage-beyond-his-years debating partner in this new debating show we kicked off during the fall. We've only managed to pull off three episodes this year, but things once things settle down in 2010 we'll have some more for you. Check out this clever clip Andreea did with Vinny.

  • 800-CEO-READ: Many thanks to the affable funnyman Wayne Turmel of The Cranky Middle Manager Show for introducing me to Jack Covert & Todd Sattersten's (formerly) truly excellent business book operation (go Milwaukee!). I'll be guest blogging for them from time to time on expat business trends as part of their new "8cr Global" series from Prague. If you're on my Facebook Wall or follow me on Twitter you'll be able to catch a few of those posts when they go live.

  • Aktualne.cz: I continue to guest blog at the largest Czech group blog, "Aktualne" (or, "current events"). Nice to receive some local feedback on the events of the day.

  • Blog: My website will be undergoing its third revamp early in 2010. Look out for more China stuff, more video, and more political punditry.


Wherever you are and whatever you've got planned, make sure to write down your 2010 goals and make them come alive over the coming year, and as always, I wish for you...the best of things...

29. 12.

Nixon and Mao

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 5714 krát

It's been a trying week chock-full of technical mishaps and PC operating system roadblocks that's prevented me from issuing daily dispatches, so kindly excuse the short delay. I've finally kicked the can and upgraded to Windows 7, and a very good riddance to the most annoying Vista! Since the summer of '08, I've experienced nothing but trouble with the latter -- from the very first week I'd been using it -- so I'm absolutely over the moon to see it go. How about you? Any Vista troubles you might care to share?


Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I was glad to crack open the mailbox recently to discover my Amazon copy of prominent University of Toronto professor Margaret Macmillan's popular Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, a detailed account of the preparations leading up to the historical February 1972 summit between disgraced former US President Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung during the former's visit to the PRC after more than two decades of complete Sino-US diplomatic silence during the height of the Cold War.


In that familiar vein which only the New York Times bestselling author can, Macmillan doesn't fail to deliver this time either, just as she had in her groundbreaking Paris 1919, a definitive account of the heady times and swirling events surrounding the fabled Versailles Peace Conference which closed out the then-Great War, the "war to end all wars." Just a few pages into Nixon and Mao, and I can already spot those familiar Macmillan prosaic flourishes, sticking to the main throughline as she supplies a bevy of behind-the-scenes action about those seemingly small anecdotal bits which never quite seem to make it into the headlines. If you're curious about the sorts of outfits the various players were wearing during those fateful days, or in the surrounding chatter by the foreign diplomatic corps then-resident in China at the time, the sorts of details which weren't accessible during contemporary accounts of the day, this book is for you. As Macmillan laces a few of these together, readers will gain a more complete picture of the momentousness of the occasion. Historical narrative, at its best.


One of the first things I did when I slit open the packaging was to flip directly to the book's central photo section for a glimpse of several -- yet again -- rare behind-the-scenes images that weren't published in the newspapers at the time which show the US entourage being lead all around Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, oblivious to the roiling ferment which had just recently died down during the worst three years of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The People's Republic of the 1970s was a nation living in abject fear of authority, evidenced by the diary entries of some key members of the US' travelling delegation describing the seeming other-worldliness of the Chinese people milling about the capital's streets during the early 1970s. Beijing of 1972 was a city full of low-rises, hutongs, and bicycles. Residents of the city were both forbidden from making eye contact with the motorcades speeding about the city, and from discussing things they might have witnessed as the Americans gradually reacquainted themselves with its former Chinese wartime ally which they had abandoned to her own Communist devices only two short decades previously.


Nixon and Mao is not a straight historical narrative play-by-play. Macmillan, as is her custom, furnishes the needed embellishing details about Nixon's concerted preparations in advance of his momentous journey, in addition to his on-plane habits and about the swirl of preparations as his aides funneled him as much data as the former President could handle while Nixon sunk himself into the material. The junket flew the trans-Pacific route in three stages (Mainland US-Hawaii-Guam) to ensure that the President would be as well-rested as possible for this history-making odyssey, the significance of which all present at the time were clearly aware. The 1972 trip was hyped in the media as being on a par with Marco Polo's 13th-century sojourn during imperial times.


If you're on the hunt for that unusual something to supplement your standard Chinese business reading, this could be it. So far it's been a page-turner.


I'll be back with more reflections as I make greater headway.

23. 12.

Marketing to the Poor

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 8244 krát

I just completed Max Lenderman's Brand New World: How Paupers, Pirates and Oligarchs are Reshaping Business, which somehow strikingly reminded me of Vijay Mahajan's Africa Rising: How 900 Million Consumers Offer More Than You Think, a title I'd polished off earlier during 2009.

The parallelisms between these two longitudinal studies especially dawned on me during Lenderman's final chapters where he delves fulsomely into the novel ways multinational (MNC) marketers have begun appealing to rural poor market segments. He describes how these strategies can then be applied in marketing to more affluent sections of the consumer public, suggesting ways to enhance the overall purchasing experience for tired Western customers and for companies to boost their brand loyalty.

Lenderman kicks his book off with a bit of a scholarly build-up, and you've got to first run this challenging gauntlet in order to grasp the crux of his overall argument. But the basic angle is that brands are losing mega market share to their aspiring competitors who seem to be honing the art of "experience marketing," one of Lenderman's pet pasions which he previous penned an entire book about.

"Experience marketing" is the act of creating sales experiences which are truly "win-win," where marketers can be lauded for doing something good for society and the collective, not merely lambasted for self-interestedly flogging product. It's an area where marketers can demonstrate their corporate social responsibility by taking active interests in the difficulties their customers might be facing. A good examples is the 2008 pilot project initiated by carmaker Hyundai to extend full money-back guarantees to their owners who were unable to meet their monthly payments on cars purchased under financing plans. Rather than being deluged by a raft of returns and a gargantuan loss of market share, Lenderman writes how the Koren automaker's gesture landed the company an immediate 2009 Q1 2009 15% upsurge in sales for the brand, far exceeding the manufacturer's gloomy conservative expectations.

Rural India, to wit, has become the battleground for many of these unusual "experiential" campaigns.

For instance, there exists the rural Indian fascination with all things Bollywood. Indian product marketers have thusly taken to the road in what are called "brand vans," complete with hired actors who re-enact famous Bollywood scenes or newly scripted encouters which are staged in front of expectant village throngs, actively making use of the product being marketed by demonstrating how the product comes come to the aid of the "hero" or "heroine" during the skit. Since rural Indians prefer to be shown how a product works, standard product appeals to its features or benefits are too abstract for this segment.

While this might seem gimmicky or inauthentic to a Western audience, in India this unconventional marketing technique has netted nothing short of windfalls for Indian consumer product companies, with examples listed in the book.

Lenderman understands that this marketing technique need not be taken verbatim from the Subcontinent's context applied directly to the West, but he hughlights the kernel of consumerist wisdom in what's going on down in India. If marketing interactions in the West can be tailored more personally and inclusively, disaffected consumers in developed economies might feel less put-upon. This new way of thinking about Western marketing, he explains, might be just the needed boost of genuineness to these otherwise contrived approaches. If marketers can somehow plant the seed of an idea that "this is how this helps us, but, moreover, this is how this helps you" it could convincingly shatter today's marketing and branding ennui. Shipwrecked as we are during these current economic crisis conditions, there is little doubt that brand-induced rigor mortis has firmly set in.

The author offers up a few prescriptions for how marketers can diversify their current approaches to break through the logjam:


  • marketing departments (along with their ad agency cohorts) need to brainstorm ways of selling stuff more personally to their target customers. Anything smacking of falsehood or inauthenticity will be immediately dismissed by a savvy 21st-century marketplace.

  • brands who do embrace the sales-marketing "win-win" will benefit in multiples, given the viral nature of social networks.

  • financial constraints which contrain the purchasing habits of poor market segments (egs. in India, across Africa, and in other parts of the developing world) from buying their way into more affluent lifestyles represent an opportunity, rather than a threat, to product manufactuters. Resource limitations can sometimes represent an advantage, as it forces brand leaders to do much more with significantly less.

  • marketers must appeal to the 2B-plus poor, underdeveloped, members of the planet, who shall quickly constitute the lion's share of their future sales. With the latter's rising affluence and aspirational lifestyles, class upgrades will be demanded, and product floggers who understand this will be there when the bell tolls. In observing the poor, their buying habits, and by understanding their unqiue situation, it will inspire creative new branding approaches.

  • marketers who opt to ignore this message will likely not survive the coming decade's market reshuffling.


Both of these books are quick, though deep, reads, and I highly recommend them.

If your marketing strategy is currently dry and lifeless, you might want to generate some radical new thinking with these two provocative titles.

22. 12.

Bomb It!

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 4855 krát

It took me an extra couple of days over this year-end Holiday Rush, but I finally managed to catch the entirety of Jon Reiss' BOMB IT!, an independently-produced, guerrilla-marketed documentary about the phenomenon of "tagging," "piecing," and grafitti writing all around the globe (US, The Netherlands, Germany, France, the UK, South Africa, Spain, Brazil, and Japan).

Truth be told, I never intended to watch this film -- in fact, I was somehow gently persuaded into forking out a "combo price" for the non-bootlegged DVD when I snatched up my copy of Think Outside of the Box Office, a new title on guerrilla film distribution -- also by Reiss -- a propos to something we're working on in China at moment.

Was I in for a surprise, and to think of all the special features I would have missed! By the second minute of the audio commentary, majordomo-ed by Reiss and Tracy Hanes, his very fetching producer, I had already whipped my Moleskine out and was furiously scrawling notes about aspects we'd like to put into play on our own project, such was the strength of the piece. Stefano E. Bloch, himself a "reformed" tagger, featured masterfully in a bonus section extended interview (positioned in front of a bookcase I'd give an eyetooth to own) waxing staggeringly eloquently about themes like urban gentrification, graffiti murals versus random senseless tagging, gangbanger pieces and sigs, making a living from your gallery fine art, and how all of this comes to a nexus in most large American cities.

Reiss and Hanes, in their own right, describe their own odyssey in the run up to getting the film green lit and "in the can" and about the cascade of tribulations they faced in the various cities they filmed in, sharing with us their experiences of:


  • feeling the rush of heading down into São Paolo's sewers in full Hazmat gear to record to graffiti writer Zezao speak about the blissful peace of mind he enjoys painting metres below street level and about the life prospects for one Brazilian family living amidst the gargantuan metropolis' human fecal matter.

  • sitting with expatriate Swedes Pike & Nug talk about their "bombing raids" in Berlin's Uenterbahn -- with a funny original clip showing a drunken Nug defacing a pristine German underground station using a basic can of black spray paint.

  • befriending some of the veteran Bronx taggers of the "Wild Style" crew (featuring Tkid), and what a quotidian existence was like in the Big Apple before New York tidied itself up, making public defacement of property into a felony offence with a 15-year jail term attached.

  • heading out into the São Paolo white night with resident favella graffiti writer Wagner, as he climbs up a towering billboard sans harness to apply his name on the advertisement's fluttering canvas margins.


Let's just say I devoted a whole mess of time to this single otherwise unassuming disc...

The takeaways were many, the lulls were few, and I felt completely justified in my purchase. I suspect Jon's book will be equally as engaging, and I'll be back with more insights on my read just as soon as I'm done.

And if I don't speak to you before then, PF 2010 (for my Czech readers) and Happy Holidays and many joyous, healthy returns for my friends, colleagues, and loved ones around the Globe.

(as originally appearing at http://www.adamdanielmezei.com/?p=795)

21. 12.

Panda Huggers vs. Dragon Slayers

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 5054 krát

Panda hugger? Dragon slayer? What in tarnation am I on about?

Well, it's connected to one of my long-standing pet projects, a field I've been spending a considerable amount of time on these past few months: the Sino-US relationship. Through my humble efforts, this here crazy Canuck is trying to help the two sides see clear through to each other's intentions in the lead up towards what's shaping up to be this century's new policy of détente.

Look, it's no secret I get most of my good ideas during exercise. Mornings, preferably, and ideally on the stationary bike. Like any garden variety ISTP on the Myers-Briggs Type Index, I don't waste too much free time faffing around doing idle stuff, so having said that my book du jour is Serge Michel & Michel Beuret's China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing's Expansion in Africa, a tale of China's expansionist policies on the majority Dark Continent. I've spoken about this book recently here, but the premise of China Safari is so mission-critical I felt it warranted an encore post.

Michel and Beuret make frequent references to the China "hawks" and "doves" in the US State Department. There are some leading Americans who feel a more robust global engagement with China is indeed unncessary, that softer methods are more appropriate in an effort to cajole the PRC into modes of behaviour which align more closely with US political interests in Africa (read: realpolitik). On the other hand, there are those hawks who claim that the People's Republic is surreptitiously ekeing out key global territorities in a reprise of the sorts of proxy wars we and the Soviets used to trifle with back in the day.

Let's deconstruct this, shall we?

Panda Huggers:

The name stems from China's popular zoological export. Such an individual has the following characteristics:


  • believes that China is a reasonable interlocutor and can be persuaded via "soft diplomacy" to cease encouraging or otherwise inducing chaos and bloodshed amongst Africa's warring tribes and nations (egs. Ethiopia-Eritrea, Chad-Niger-Sudan, Darfur, the Congo, etc).

  • believes that China retains a global competitive and sovereign right to prospect for oil and mineral resources around the world as part of its "peaceful rise" and that the developed nations have no right to interfere in this given their own abhorrent polluting pasts.

  • accepts that China is not altogether forthright about its ultimate political aims in Africa but as it simultaneously improves its African client states' overall infrastructures (egs. roads, airports, bridges, ports, and schools), China hardly mimics former European rapacious imperialism.

  • dimisses the global scaremongering about China's all-pervasive influence in African conflict zones, given that at only 4 to 5% of the total global trade in fatal small arms (compared to the US' approximately 25%), the PRC is hardly the dastardly Grand Game player as the US' hawks will readily claim.

  • likes to cite the overall "win-win" relationship in China's dealings with rogue states like Sudan, Chad, and Liberia, whereby the latter are raised up several societal notches through China's fiscal generosity through interest-free loans and/or outright credits. The classical, "Yeah, but look what China's done to improve..." excuse.


Versus...

Dragon Slayers:

This term finds its root in China's fortune-bringing mighty fire-breathing talisman. Such an individual has the following characteristics:

  • realizes that China has been aggressively hyperanalyzing European colonial history since the PRC's Reform and Opening Up period, and, as such, is aware that China has rather employed a decidedly more magnanimous approach to the "rape" of the African continent which effectively obscures the rising juggernaut's stated superpower aspirations.

  • understands that the US, bogged down in its Iraqi and Afghanistan military odysseys, has been devoting scant resources to its African Command (presently based in Stuttgart, Germany!) and is essentially powerless to stop China's African rollout.

  • knows that China is the living embodiment of Sun Tzu's classic dictum of "giving in order to bring your enemy closer...to make him unaware...only then can you strike." Dragon slayers know that China has been spoiling the Sudanese, the Nigerians, the Angolans, the Zambians, the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, the Egyptians, the Algerians, and many of the forty-nine other African states which China maintains official diplomatic relations with rotten, in order to brazenly buy its way into exclusivity situations for oil, uranium, bauxite, and other precious resource deals. Slayers also know that China desperately needs Africa's resources to ensure its resource security into the foreseeable future, given how the French, Italians, Dutch, British, and Americans have crowded the PRC out in their traditional Middle Eastern fiefdoms.

  • laments the fact that the US is once again "sleeping at the wheel" in Africa. Meanwhile, China has staked out all of the best claims and is winning friends and influencing people all across Africa and, consequently, in the UN. In comparison, the US will eventually seem like a carpetbagger when it awakens to the ongoing realities and will be only too late to put a stop to things.


The Final Word:

As I fashion myself as something of an amateur Sinologist, I'm tending towards siding the Dragon Slayers who seem to have a firmer understanding of the entrenched realities and the hunt for untapped oil.

Given what recently transpired at #COP15 in Denmark during the Climate Conference, what with the groundbreaking all-encompassing document the G20 somehow knew would never be inked in Copenhagen and how it only reiforces the West's seemingly incurable addiction to carbon-consuming technologies, China's leaders seem to have their collective heads screwed on properly. With China's annual market just for automobiles set to exceed 11 million units in 2011 and beyond and with a national market of over 100 million cars, China isn't taking any prisoners (nor chances) with its petroleum destiny.

So which are you? Panda Hugger or Dragon Slayer?

Of course, please let us know in the comments below.

18. 12.

Chinese African Carrots

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 11443 krát

For the world's China watchers, like myself, there's a new dynamic duo in town, the Swiss authors of Serge Michel & Michel Beuret who have recently signed their John Hancocks to their fresh-off-the-press China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing's Expansion in Africa.

So I've got the book and I've been meticulously working my way through it.

Safari is another of those stark assessments of China's involvement on the African continent, an investigative look into a region where only the world's most intrepid journalists and truth-seekers dare set foot. Amidst this ailing continent of near-permanent depravity, rampant corruption, easily-treatable chronic disease, and on-again off-again brutal, bloody war, there tread the seeming bravest of the brave: China's nouveau riche. Numbering in the thousands, these are the hopeful men and women who have cast out into the wide world in search of their fortunes across two massive continents to heed former Chinese supremo Jiang Zemin's call to "go abroad and make money."

Well, the jury is indeed out on China's questionable activities in Africa. There are those who laud China's efforts to raise the living standard of a people who find themselves repeatedly sidelined and babied by the planet's developed economic powerhouses. Others resent the Chinese for being less than candid about their real African aims, with the PRC dangling juicy carrots in front of the salivating self-interested African dictators and pseudo-democracies who are only too pliant to trumpet the PRC's apparent munificence while China uses the opportunity to further sink its tentacles deeper into the resource-rich African soil.

These competiting -- yet equally valid -- impressions of China's African master plan is what makes their involvement there at once so marvellous and terrifying.

But, tody, for the uninitiated, I supply a brief overview of what these two competing narratives entail, both for the Chinese and for Africa:

The "Pro-China" Benevolent View:

We live in an open world where even the most Machiavellian Chinese businessman or bureaucrat wouldn't deign to brazenly perpetrate the most crass of moneymaking schemes without at least fearing the censure of the globe's Africa watchers. This is the wellspring from which The Benevolent View derives its strength.

Basically, this view contends that since the late '90s, the Chinese people have heeded their leaders' calls to resume the nation's former leading role in the colonially-ravaged continent by spoiling their former "brethren" with financial incentives and infrastructure gifts as a means of uplifting the African people. This is the Chinese version of "big brother."

It's clear that the Chinese have an interest in perpetuating this porous myth, since it benefits them greatly. The staggering number of exclusivity contracts and resource concessions which African governments have offered up to the PRC on a silver platter as the latter have bequeathed their "no strings attached" cosmetic improvements and financial incentives to them have made Chinese mega-tycoons out of former paupers. In defending the actions of the Chinese, this is what Africa's leaders are wont to refer to as the China-Africa "win-win," or China's "sympathetic capitalism," which is 180-degree opposed to the way the Great Powers used to press their colonial influence in a former era.

What's generally hidden in all the cash-lending hoopla are the gory details. Few realize that agreements inked between Chinese and Africans stipulate that 70% or more of such infrastructure contracts -- including, among others, the improvement or wholly-new construction of bridges, roads, and rail lines -- must be helmed by Chinese construction firms, a non-negotiable condition before any aid or interest-free loan money can be deposited into African treasuries or before the first spade breaks dirt.

The second -- less pernicious, though equally exclusionary -- aspect of Chinese business in Africa deals with the workers themselves, imported, like the construction materials themselves, straight from China. Laborers are customarily holed up in secluded quarters, under 24-hour lockdown, with their passports stowed away under lock and key and away from the prying eyes of locals and investigative journalists alike (there is even photographic evidence of this in China Safari).

The "Anti-China" Villanous View:

China has made it patently clear that it aims to become the world's second superpower, and conducts itself apprpriately.

Africa plays a key role in their universal strategy, given China's resource scarcity for certain key resources -- namely crude oil and uranium (yellow cake) -- and watch as the Chinese ladle out aid and advantages in copious sums as a means of quite literally bribing their way into Africa's good graces. With the Americans, French, and Italians already having scooped up the key Middle Eastern and Persian Gulf territories, China aims to "hit 'em where they ain't" (sorry for the Babe-esque baseball analogy) in going after Africa's goodies. As the Chinese have come bearing (Trojan?) gifts, the Africans have been only too happy to award them with keys to the castle.

But all is not golden.

In Algeria, the Chinese are referred to as "Ali Baba" (you decide whether this is for their generous nature or for their thieving ways). In Senegal, Niger, Cameroon, and across other regions of the former Francafrique, frequent protests erupt and there are on-again, off-again boycotts of Chinese-owned shops and Chinese-dominated shopping districts, in addition to spates of kidnappings as the have-nots have been simmering on the sidelines as the Chinese have had their way with things.

In meetings with Africa's cabinet-level ministers and presidents, the Chinese have torn a page out of Sun Tzu's ancient playbook: keep thine "enemies" closer than thine comrades. Here's one example how the Chinese will typically attempt to endear themselves to their interlocutors during negotiation sessions: a Chinese delegation member will usually be assigned to study the preferences of their African opposite numbers. In one storied case, a Gabonese minister who was a fan of architecture and Greco-Roman history was shocked to receive a phone call from his Chinese opposite number shortly after the conclusion of a successful meeting discussing these very topics, with a exclusive invite to a European architecture exhibit the next time the minister was in Europe.

The "anti-Chinese" viewpoint explains that this is all a calculated attempt on the part of the Chinese to approach their ultimate aim, which is to overtake Japan as the world's second largest economy.

So which weltanschauung wins? Well, it's paradox. For even if the Chinese are as mendacious as some experts claim, the majority of Africa's population is gaining tremendously as it becomes -- yet again -- an unwitting pawn in a global game of realpolitik. The Chinese want this badly, and they're willing to do anything they can to secure their position in the world and they're in it for the very long haul. Free loans, scholarships, planes, trains, and automobiles. Whatever it takes to get to the top.

It's just that with the world being as open as it is today, it's becoming harder and harder to hide the harm and damage their "peaceful rise" is leaving in its wake.

17. 12.

#COP15 While the Ads Are Still Shilling

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 4231 krát

What delicious irony!

So I'm working my aging muscles at the gym this morning, buzzing in my zone, collected within my own thoughts and space, when on the overhead radio blares the news from the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark and then...followed by a sound bite from the Secretary of State -- Ms. Clinton -- about how "climate change not only affects the environment, but it affects our economy and our security."

Okay, fair enough, so her obsequious speechwriters and assorted other sycophant hangers-on are dutybound to sprinkle in the usual perfunctory claptrap and one-offs, the stuff of political doubletalk, and I can totally accept that. Like any dyed-in-the-wool political cynic, being compelled to listen to this aural rubbish is one of the tradeoffs of membership in an affluent society, a function of the daily Faustian bargain we make with our benevolent leaders in (insert your nation's capital) for all of the lavish goodies that are as near as a phone call away.

But today struck a chord within me. That Clinton sound bite I just mentioned? Well, it was immediately followed up with news about local discounts on monthly financing for SUVs, then another blurb about a 14% hike in prices at the gas pump -- y-o-y -- after the inflation rate rose 1% during November 2009, then another series of interminable ads about discounts on the iPhone 3G and 3G Plus if consumers only "act now" and avail themselves of a special rebate and the one about taking out a new cellphone plan before the Holiday Season in order to receive a $50 gift as a bonus.

I think you're getting the picture.

But this pithy complaint of mine hardly does the situation justice. The Guardian's George Monbiot was positively eloquent in his spot-on biting description of the global state of affairs in his scathing j'accuse against Western governments (and China, tangentially, what with its "peaceful rise") with his column entitled "This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity" from this past Monday.

Until we stop hearing molasses-like ads like this luring us to appease our junkie-like buying habits, that big show over in Denmark -- what with the daily talking heads, pontificating Western political blowhards, and cameo appearances by popular heads-of-state -- matters not a toss.

Agreed?

(as originally appearing at http://www.adamdanielmezei.com/?p=769)

16. 12.

What Matters Now, an eBook

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 4481 krát

In between the other stuff I'm doing, I've been gradually scrolling my way though an excellent new Seth Godin eBook entitled What Matters Now.


It's another one of those savvy Godin-esque compilations of short, meaningful entries from a veritable who's-who of the interwebs celebesphere that I'd heard about at Twitter and threaded within the folds of a recent Twist Image blogpost and podcast hosted by ueber-media maven Mitch Joel of Montreal, Canada.


Despite the work's brevity -- clocking in at a mere 82pp -- I find myself being somehow unable to just breeze through the posts as would normally befit something so tight. Sure, the sentences might be punchy, but the message is profound. I've observed myself reading a couple of paragraphs then suddenly leaning into my hardbacked chair exhaling, then pondering the universal significance of what all of it means.


You of course realize there's a delectable art to conveying something pregnant with such gravitas within the narrow confines of 300 words or less. It's quite a remarkable feat for those who can do it.


Which is why Gaping Void's Hugh MacLeod's contribution on "meaning" really had me going (now marking my third reading of it), but first a bit about the man behind the message.


Hugh's a cartoonist, so his preferred choice of conveying heavy ideas is through simplified graphical representations of what might take other creatives paragraphs of wagon-circling to describe. Rather than encapsulate some pithy, schmaltzy inspirational kudo in three tight paragraphs, Hugh's page ten of Seth's PDF depicts a nifty little cube with the following slogans forming the symmetrical sinews of a square. Here's a sampling:



  • "If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you."

  • "You have to find your own shitck."

  • "Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this Earth to climb."

  • "The best way to get approval is not to need it."

  • "You are responsible for your own experience."

  • "If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being 'discovered' by some big shot, your plan will probably fail."

  • "Power is taken."

  • "Put the hours in."

  • "The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props."

  • "Allow your work to age with you."

  • "Write from the heart."

  • "Don't worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually."


This novel take on a tried-and-tested technique moved me enough to share it here with you.


I'll be done with the rest of the PDF today and promise to share again if something busts through the haze once more.



(as originally appearing at http://www.adamdanielmezei.com/?p=764)

UPDATE: If your setup prevents PDF downloads, you can always view the eBook online here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/23711234/What-Matters-Now

15. 12.

Madame

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 26680 krát

What might China have been like had the KMT had won?

What if Chiang (Kai-shek) had played a slightly more offensive role than his traditional defensive game and taken the fight to Mao's Communists instead of laying back in wait, following Bruce Lee's famous dictum about water:

"Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend."

Well, I've been delving into this kind of thinking over this past week while reading The Last Empress, by Hannah Pakula, a new tell-all about the life of the illustrious grand-dame Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the famous Generalissimo of the same name. It's turning out to be one of the definitive biographical accounts of the spirit of the interwar period, in my limited reading experience of the era, and I'm enjoying every turn of the page.

Admittedly, I scooped up the book less for its rigor and verifiable historical authenticity -- though indeed it has been giving me something of a workout on my familiarity with modern Chinese history -- and more for insights about "Madame," as she has come to be known over the years, a rock of a woman who could be said to be as influential as England's Queen Mother (mother of the reigning monarch, Elizabeth) during WWII, a formidable figure in her own right who the dastardly Hitler himself even referred to as "the most dangerous woman in all of Europe" because she refused to leave London during the Blitz, visiting the pock-marked ruins of recently bombed-out buildings, thereby inspiring Londoners to resist the Luftwaffe's continuous onslaught. Madame seems to have been similarly influential in that she successfully convinced the US Administration at the time (under President Truman) to transfer billions of dollars in aid to Nationalist China -- I still haven't discovered what became of all this cash -- in an effort to resist the Communists surge, and ultimately failing effort. She was the eminence grise behind her husband in shaping the US' approach to the country the Generalissimo was lording over at the time.

Overall, I'm a huge fan of biography, though these sorts of books, being the meisterstuecker of the people who compile them, generally come in the two- to three-ton varieties. Hardcover, bound, chock-full of scintillating photography and fresh paper-scented crisp pages, are not exactly built for portability, mind you, so it's hard to tote them around for a quick read on the subway or bus or while in transit, therefore I'm loathe to buy one unless I know I'll be in a given place for an extended period of time.

As I make more headway in The Last Empress, I'll keep you posted of my gleanings -- of which I'm positive there are going to be many.

(as originally appearing at http://www.adamdanielmezei.com/?p=761)

14. 12.

Brand New World

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 75779 krát


Global brands like Nike, Apple, Adidas, Burberry, Gucci, and Tag-Heuer are justifiably very concerned about Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, and Brazilian product piracy, but according to author Max Lenderman, they shouldn't be all that concerned.



Really?! What's this, you say?


Lenderman does the yeoman's work in his new book, Brand New World: How Paupers, Pirates, and Oligarchs and Shaping Business explaining the nuances of another way of looking at the whole counterfeiting plague that will shock most mid- to large-tier brand manufacturers. Rather than suffer heart palpitations due to how much revenue brands might be leaking to the shanzai (Mandarin for counterfeit) collectives in places like China's notorious Silk Street Mall, they should rather revel how their brands are receiving even more exposure than they might othewise receive through standard marketing techniques and budgets.


In a recent brands study furnished again by Lenderman in his stellar book, Nike, Burberry, and Microsoft were showing whopping revenue gains of 45, 68, and 57 percent respectively since 2001 as a result of their greater "market mind share" from the proliferation of their knockoffs in Chinese and Indian consumer markets.


These are truly startling figures for what Lenderman refers to as no more than a handful of twenty-five MNCs who admit in statistical studies to being most concered by pernicious brand piracy. So the new consensus opinion seems to be: rather than scramble to bite their collective finger- and toenails down to nubs, brands should salute -- if not outright gooily embrace -- how their goods are proliferating throughout developing markets with a reach and depth not even their tried-and-true marketing efforts could ever achieve.

These remarkable gains are a fortunate consequence of the absolute Chinese disregard for intellectual property protection, and I doubt any MNC marketing wing could run scenarios which could accurate account for this phenomenon. Tell me the last time when a major brand marketer could tabulate metrics on revenue their firm might directly receive from rampant piracy?

If any of this is remotely interesting to you, I've been gaining all sorts of insights this past week from Lenderman's truly engaging study, his call to action for global manufacturers and marketers to stop, sit, and listen to the several other ways they might successfully counter the priacy threat, which in any event shows zero signs of abating.

In fact, in the case of Chinese shanzai violators, the more aggressive an international brand is about policing their universal brand equity, the greater the incentive is for the Chinese pirates to abuse it, almost akin to children cruisin' for a bruisin' from their parents. What Lenderman seems to be saying is that it's far from a lost cause; there are ways of working in concert with pirates, rather, by utilizing their rampant audacity as a kind of high-octane boost to the millions of dollars in marketing budgets already spent by mega-brands. With this reinvigorated perspective, suggest Lenderman, brands can cease burning through their scarce resources currently spent on global policing efforts to better spent them on doing what MNCs do best: rapidly innovating and prototyping, bringing exciting, useful new products to market quickly.


Brand New World is welcome infusion of pure oxygen during these current crisis times. Rather than despair at those who wantonly disregard your brand's inherent equity, there exist alternative ways to work alongside the violators by bolting your pre-existing efforts onto theirs, turning their profligate efforts into direct advantages for you, the innovator, changing the rules of the game yet again.


A coup even the likes of Sun Tzu himself would appreciate...





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