September 25, 2010 | permalink
The New York Times examines the rising number of multinational executives relocating to Asia, taking special care to mention Cisco’s “Globalization Center East,” its four-year-old de facto second headquarters in Bangalore. The story makes two points especially worth noting: senior executives feel it’s necessary to spend time in the Pacific Rim (lots of time—the CEO of the German chemical company Henkel recently spent six weeks jetting across nine countries and logging more than 100 meetings); and an increasing number of executive functions are beginning to follow manufacturing and services overseas. They’re not necessarily being outsourced, but the term “outsourcing” itself—which implies there is a core to the company in just one country—is becoming obsolete.
The best testimony for both trends is given by Cisco’s chief globalization officer, Wim Elfrink. I met Wim in New Songdo last year for my Fast Company story about instant cities, and he was just as quotable then as he is in the NYT piece. Here are a pair of his quote from the story, contrasted with a quote and a relevant passage from Aerotropolis. From the NYT
“It’s not about costs and cheap labor. It’s about how can we get access to talent, how can we get access to growth and innovations, and how can we get access to new partners,” Wim Elfrink, chief globalization officer at Cisco, said in a telephone interview from Bangalore. “The demographic shifts and the massive process of urbanization here mean the region is going through a tremendous transition – and to be part of that, and to really understand it, you have to be here.”
In other words, there is no substitute for being there, either on a full-time or even part-time business. Even Cisco, which is trying to reinvent its management culture around its TelePresence, still relies of moving batteries of executives around the world by air. In Songdo, I asked Elfrink if he thought TelePresence would really kill the business trip, as some have suggested:
“The volume of travel won’t decrease,” he conceded cheerfully, “but it will become more efficient. My weekly meetings to go over numbers and projects are conducted via telepresence—why should I fly my folks in for that? But if we’re having a strategy meeting, we have to have dinner, go for walks, take breaks and be creative. People say that telepresence is killing travel, but it’s not killing it. It adds and it replaces.”
September 20, 2010 | permalink
I’ve only had them for two days, and already Aerotropolis galleys have escaped into their natural habitat—the Monday morning consultant express to Atlanta. If you spot it, ask to borrow it—otherwise, you’re stuck waiting until March.
September 08, 2010 | permalink
I’ll be speaking about smart, green cities at Columbia on October 1st. (I promise this is not a Dungeons & Dragons tournament.)
September 07, 2010 | permalink
• On Labor Day, President Obama unveiled a $50 billion stealth stimulus to be spent on infrastructure. It includes plans to pave 150 miles’ worth of runways and finally get around to upgrading the nation’s air traffic control to the GPS-based NextGen system. We’ll see.
• Kansas City’s aerotropolis: the new American wilderness.
• USA Today is slowly dying because road warriors don’t read it anymore.
• Bloomberg BusinessWeek profiles Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, “The Duke of Discomfort.”
• Terry Gou: China’s cheap labor pool won’t be exhausted anytime soon.
September 07, 2010 | permalink
(Originally published on FastCompany.com on August 31, 2010.)
Brazilians endlessly repeat the old saw that the world thinks of only three things when it thinks of Brazil: samba, carnivale and football. But its healthcare industry would like to add a fourth—surgery. As part of Brazil’s efforts to leverage both the tourists and the infrastructure investments expected in the wake of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, the country hosted its first medical tourism conference last week in São Paulo.
One of the speakers was Ruben Toral, the former marketing director of Bangkok’s Bumrungrad International Hospital who I profiled in Fast Company two years ago. Since then, the number of medical tourists leaving the United States for heart- or hip- or brain surgery abroad has risen from 540,000 in 2008 to an estimated 878,000 this year. And that will practically double to 1.6 million in 2012, according to Deloitte’s projections. But earlier this year Congress threw a monkey wrench into Toral’s grand vision for the “Toyota-ization of healthcare,” in which U.S. hospital groups would buy foreign ones and insurers like Aetna and United Health Group would offer patients discounts in exchange for outsourcing themselves and their bad knees overseas. It hasn’t happened, thanks to health care reform. Not because 47 million uninsured or underinsured Americans are suddenly covered, but because the legislation created so much complexity the insurance giants have curled into the fetal position.
Healthcare reform “sucked all of the oxygen out the industry’s hopes that insurers would engage,” Toral said Thursday during a break in the conference. “The un- and underinsured won’t be coming anymore. Instead, you’re going to see people with money leaving,” the same kinds of people who have been fleeing the long waits in socialized medicine for decades. “You’re getting the Canadian system,” in other words. “They’re better-informed medical travelers looking to meet their needs rather than head someplace that’s cheap. They’re going to be leaving for service. The industry is in the midst of transforming itself.”
August 24, 2010 | permalink
(Originally published on FastCompany.com, August 23, 2010.)
When did Silicon Valley become so obsessed with building cities? Last month it was Cisco’s SVP of strategy Inder Sidhu describing the company’s smart city play as the $36 billion company’s “biggest opportunity.” Then, at the inaugural Techonomy conference a few weeks ago, an all-star roster of techies, VCs, and scientists pondered “cities as solutions.”
Physicist and former Sante Fe Institute president Geoffrey West practically stole the show with his talk on urban metabolisms. Cities are like organisms, he explained, except they grow much faster and much bigger than anything living – in fact, there appears to be no upper limit to their size or propensity for innovation… or disaster. “Urbanization is the problem,” he said, “and it can also be the solution.”
These being Silicon Valley types, it was clear what that solution should be. “Copying 20th century cities in Dubai and Shanghai is crazy,” said former Sony chairman Nobuyuki Idei in yet another session. “We need… a city OS” – a single platform managing power, water, traffic, security and any other urban system you can think of.
Rest assured, Mr. Chairman, someone is working on it. But it isn’t Cisco, IBM, HP, Microsoft, or any other tech heavyweight. In fact, in the course of reporting my story on New Songdo City last fall, representatives of each company pooh-poohed the idea of a purpose-built urban operating system. They believed one would emerge eventually, albeit as the result of a messy convergence of competing standards – you know, the way things work in the real world. Leave it to a five-year-old start-up few people heard of to challenge that notion and to build its own smart city from scratch in the hills of Portugal near Porto – “PlanIT Valley.”
Living PlanIT (pronounced “planet”) is the brainchild of Steve Lewis and Malcolm Hutchinson, a pair of IT veterans who met when Lewis was still a top executive on the .NET team at Microsoft. Their ambition is twofold: to build a prototype smart, green city in Portugal that can be rolled out worldwide, and to drag the construction industry into the 21st century.
August 21, 2010 | permalink
Taken by my wife at Sea-Tac this morning.
August 21, 2010 | permalink
(Originally published on AdAge.com on August 16, 2010)
NEW YORK (AdAge.com)—A week after rogue flight attendant Steven Slater quit his job at JetBlue by cursing out a passenger and exiting the plane in the most dramatic fashion possible, he has become a folk hero, while the airline has so far managed to escape the public’s wrath.
“While we can’t discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation,” the airline wrote on its blog last Wednesday, “plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter. Like, the entire internet.”
This sort of thing was never supposed to happen on JetBlue. When the airline launched 10 years ago from its hub at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, it promised “to bring humanity back to air travel.” Founder David Neeleman recruited flight attendants from every industry except other airlines—Slater’s meltdown after a 20-year career would have embarrassed him.
JetBlue also appealed to a better class of passenger. A Delta Air Lines flight attendant once accused Mr. Neeleman of “stealing all the nice” ones. Upper East Side society types treated its flights to West Palm Beach as a flying jitney. But it’s hard to square that early, glamorous image with the (still-unknown) passenger who reportedly disobeyed Slater’s instructions, hit him in the head with her suitcase and then unleashed a stream of invectives. (Although several passengers insist Slater instigated it.)
JetBlue promised to be better than that. Its employees believed they were special—“all that Kumbayah stuff,” as Mr. Neeleman once called it. JetBlue wasn’t just a name; it was a brand. Is that still true, or is the Steven Slater incident a sign of dry rot? Has JetBlue become just another airline, as deserving of its passengers’ contempt as the others?
“It’s 10 years old, and the bloom is at least partially off the rose,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst for Forrester Research. “Like any business that ages, JetBlue has to figure out what it wants to be.”
Dean Crutchfield, chief engagement officer of brand-experience agency Method, is more succinct: “JetBlue was different once, but not anymore.”
August 21, 2010 | permalink
(Originally published on FastCompany.com July 23, 2010)
By now you’ve heard plenty about smarter cities and even a “decade of smart,” but what about a smarter courthouse? Or a smarter federal building?
Despite the flurry of deals signed by cities and even non-profits with the likes of IBM and Cisco (which announced a new pilot project around Akron, Ohio this week), the biggest score in the smarter sweepstakes is a government agency you’ve likely never heard of, the General Services Administration, and its real estate arm, the Public Buildings Service. The PBS is the federal government’s landlord and superintendent, charging rent, making repairs, and otherwise doing the utmost to cover its $8.6 billion annual budget and return a profit to Congress. It’s also been charged with going green in a big way—meaning it will have to retrofit and smarten up its aging buildings.
It won’t be cheap.
The PBS owns or leases 9,600 buildings across all 50 states, totaling enough square footage to fill every office building in Manhattan below Central Park. At the Realcomm “connected real estate” conference in Las Vegas last month, PBS officials were the belles of the ball, courted ardently by tech heavyweights and niche players alike as a potential gusher of contracts. They announced the PBS would become a “green proving ground” for smarter buildings, using its clout and its cash to make the technology companies play nice and create interoperable standards. They hoped to kick broad adoption into high gear. “This isn’t just the flavor of the month; this isn’t just a pilot,” GSA assistant commissioner Larry Melton told me afterwards. “This is the future of facilities, really. We have the ability to change the platform.”
August 20, 2010 | permalink
Finally, an in-flight magazine I’d like to write for.
American Airlines’ magazine lists the 10 best pizza parlors in America. United Airlines has a spread headlined “3 Perfect Days: Amsterdam,” presumably perfecting its 2007 article, “3 Perfect Days: Amsterdam.”
In the seat pocket in front of you on Safi, you will find an article on Kabul heroin addicts, photos of bullet-pocked tourist sites and ads for mine-resistant sport-utility vehicles.
The airline provides this insider’s tip about one of the city’s leading luxury hotels: “The rooms are individually air-conditioned, accessorized with amenities you will find in 4-star hotels abroad, sheets are clean, view from the room is nice, and–after the suicide bombing that took place–security measures have been implemented.”
Says Christian Marks, the magazine’s cheerfully blunt German editor: “I would like it to be a magazine where you can read interesting things, not just get brainwashed by some marketing agency that says you can’t show problems.”
One recent edition featured a long, approving piece headlined, “Live Entertainment in Kabul: Dog Fighting.” The writer says dogs in Afghanistan don’t fight to the death, just until one proves dominant. “They are usually pulled apart before they can inflict serious damage on each other,” the article assures passengers, despite the photo of two worried Afghans carrying away a limp black-and-white behemoth from the fight.
» Folllow me on Twitter.
» Email me.
» See upcoming events.
Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.
----- | January 22, 2024
The Future of Generative AI in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
----- | January 1, 2024
----- | August 3, 2023
CityLab | June 12, 2023
Augmented Reality Is Coming for Cities
CityLab | April 25, 2023
The Line Is Blurring Between Remote Workers and Tourists
CityLab | December 7, 2021
The Dark Side of 15-Minute Grocery Delivery
Fast Company | June 2021
Why the Great Lakes need to be the center of our climate strategy
Fast Company | March 2020
How to design a smart city that’s built on empowerment–not corporate surveillance
URBAN-X | December 2019
CityLab | December 10, 2018
The State of Play: Connected Mobility in San Francisco, Boston, and Detroit
Harvard Business Review | September 24, 2018
Why Companies Are Creating Their Own Coworking Spaces
CityLab | July 2018
The State of Play: Connected Mobility + U.S. Cities
Medium | May 1, 2017
Fast Company | January 19, 2017
The Collaboration Software That’s Rejuvenating The Young Global Leaders Of Davos
The Guardian | January 13, 2017
What If Uber Kills Public Transport Instead of Cars
Backchannel | January 4, 2017
The Office of the Future Is… an Office
New Cities Foundation | October 2016
Now Arriving: A Connected Mobility Roadmap for Public Transport
Inc. | October 2016
Why Every Business Should Start in a Co-Working Space
Popular Mechanics | May 11, 2016
Can the World’s Worst Traffic Problem Be Solved?
The New Republic | January/February 2016
January 31, 2024
Unfrozen: Domo Arigatou, “Mike 2.0”
January 22, 2024
The Future of Generative AI in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
January 18, 2024
The Promise and Perils of the Augmented City
January 13, 2024