Recently read childhood hero (a la WIRED) Kevin Kelly’s hugely enjoyable What Technology Wants, a book that seeks to make sense of the ‘technium’ that wasn’t so much created by man as ordained by the physical laws of the universe.

The technium according to KK :

extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention, and more self-enhancing connections

KK places the ‘evolution’ of technology in the continuum of the universe’s evolution:

The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips wired up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same as the number of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain.

He calls Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near a mythic book and in some ways so too is Kelly’s:

Technology is not just a human invention; it was also born from life.

Interestingly kk spends much of the book studying the lives of luddites the Unabomber and the Amish in trying to assess technology’s impact on society (Kelly has plenty of respect for the Unabomber as a technium theorist). After positing that technology is in some ways a creation of the natural order (i.e. the big-bang ) with attendant built-in possibilities and outcomes, the book addresses the question of whether or not technology is a positive force. It usually comes down in favor albeit in a more balanced contest that one might expect from a co-founder of WIRED. The reasoning seems weak to me, coming down to a tautological ‘choice is good’ and technology offers more choice and therefore ‘technology is good’.

So how can a spoon possibly want something? It’s important to differentiate the complex system he calls the technium from the underlying technology. Similar to how we talk of evolution and markets wanting certain outcomes (and there are lots of issues with doing that!), kk talks of the technium.

Kevin’s tone is at once matter of fact and yet full of awe of the technological forces he describes. Towards the end of the book his wonderment at technology turns mystical and uses the kind of language that helps me communicate my post-religious worldview with my mother’s religious views:

There is even a modern theology that postulates that God, too, changes. Without splitting too many theological hairs, this theory, called Process Theology, describes God as a process, a perfect process, if you will. In this theology, God is less a remote, monumental, gray-bearded hacker genius and more of an ever-present flux, a movement, a process, a primary self-made becoming. The ongoing self-organizing mutuality of life, evolution, mind, and the technium is a reflection of God’s becoming.

Unquestionably one of my most enjoyable reads of recent times.

Kevin reviews the book himself over at cool tools.

Customarily great EconTalk podcast with Russ Robert.

My kindle highlights.

Whether or not Egypt flowers into a model democracy, whether or not Egyptians tomorrow live more freely than Egyptians today, today they threw off a tyrant. The surge of overwhelming bliss that has overtaken Egyptians is the rare beautitude of democratic will. The hot blush of liberation, a dazzled sense of infinite possibility swelling millions of happy breasts is a precious thing of terrible, unfathomable beauty, and it won’t come to these people again. Whatever the future may hold, this is the happiest many people will ever feel. This is the best day of some peoples’ lives. The tiny Dionysian anarchist on my other shoulder is no angel, but I cannot deny that there is something holy in this feeling, that it is one of few human experiences that justifies life—that satisfies, however briefly, our desperate craving for more intensity, for more meaning, for more life from life. Whatever the future holds, there will be disappointment, at best. But there is always disappointment. Today, there is joy.
– [Democracy in America - The Economist 02/11/11]

The moment of elated disbelief has not quite passed though the murderous neighboring madman, tone-deaf Gulf monarchs and cacophonous democratic debates of Tunisia and Egypt are quickly seeing to that.

For all the wonderful and consequential discussions of political process and system, it is the economics of Egypt that may be the country’s most pressing challenge.

A few characteristics of the required economic destination seem obvious (although I don’t know the Egyptian economy well enough to be certain):

Shrunken public sector.

Egypt’s legendarily bloated (6 million strong) and incompetent public sector is perhaps the biggest deterrent to economic growth. It’s the primary source of graft and a major source of inefficiencies in the economy. A smaller, better paid public workforce is needed alongside simplifying reforms to regulations and the tax system. Although the government undertook significant privatization programmes over the past decades, the government still has scope to reduce its direct role in the economy. The roles of the police and armed forces in the local economy need to be curtailed as well.

Subsidy free economy.

Unsustainable and highly distorting, subsidies will need to be dealt with to address the fiscal deficits. Probably makes sense to start with fuel ($12bn) and then tackle food (fuel. $3-4bn wheat not to mention associated terrible consequences to Egyptian’s well-being brought about by promoting bread based diets). Handouts to the needy can be introduced as the subsidies are wound down.

Export powered.

High unemployment, young demographics, proximity to rich markets (Europe, GCC) all point to the potential for export driven growth. The poor spending power of the local population necessitate an outward looking approach.

Corruption.

A cancer that permeates every layer of society deterring investment (foreign and domestic) and hindering growth. Transparency, free press, simpler rules and taxes, a well-payed public sector all have a role to play.

Infrastructure.

Though important strides were made over the last decade, much more needs to be done to upgrade Egypt’s urban, rural, coastal and air infrastructure. Tourism, agriculture and industry will all benefit.

Agriculture.

An important source of employment and a sector likely to enjoy secular growth over the coming decades, there will be opportunities to improve productivity and attract investment.

Tourism.

Woefully underperforming sector but important source of employment and foreign currency needs more agressive targets and should offer areas for quick wins once the security situation stabilizes.

Devolution.

I love the idea of Paul Romer charter cities sprouting throughout the mostly unpopulated country, but if that’s asking too much, there’s still much that can be done to encourage economic development in secondary and tertiary cities across the only large country to have become less urban in the last 30 years.

Egypt: After The Revolution from Marty Stalker on Vimeo.

My answer so far: Basically, no.

Been thinking about this question throughout my MBA so far, especially during my first year where I would often reflect at the end of a class on whether what I had learnt would have helped me make better decisions and more importantly avoid the stupid ones I made as an entrepreneur.

For the most part the answer was usually no. If I had to deal with VCs as an entrepreneur, my answer may have been different having taken the VC class at Haas (with legendary Terry Opdendyk and co: Sean Foote and Jerry Engel) but otherwise the accounting, strategy, marketing classes wouldn’t have had much of an impact. I learnt enough about the subjects on the job and was supported by very able people we hired. Much of what is taught is either too theoretical or too big-business focused in any case to be relevant to a start-up. Finance classes were useful to a degree in terms of getting inside the heads of (non-VC) investors and bankers and it’s the one subject that I found pretty difficult to learn on my own before b-school (and at b-school for that matter!).

Some of the domain-specific electives are helpful if you’re building a start-up in that space (particularly the case for the tech classes at Haas for instance or I imagine Finance electives at CBS).
The Gilt girls (Harvard MBAs ’04) seem to agree in their FT interview last week:

As an executive “you really can’t digest and memorise everything down to the nittiest-grittiest detail. [Business school] teaches you to take large amounts of information and helps you get to a decision quickly,”

Ms Maybank points out that even with the many resources available in business school the gut is still more important than the courses.

There’s a good Does getting an MBA make someone a better entrepreneur? Quora thread that’s still going with a few different opinions but generally speaking the consensus seems to range from nice but unnecessary to waste of time. The whole thread is worth reading, here are a few fave snippets:

Gummi Hafsteinsson:

You have to keep in mind the causal relationship here: a lot of (but not all) people who go do an MBA are not true entrepreneurs, it’s not that an MBA makes them more or less likely to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Jeremy Liew:

Also life isn’t just about becoming a better entrepreneur. I had a great time at b-school and met some of my very best friends there.

Which really resonated with me. There are plenty of great reasons to do an MBA, becoming a better entrepreneur just isn’t one of them.

Catching up on Middle East news as I prep for the upcoming Columbia Business School Chazen trip to Egypt and the UAE.

The Economist reports on Dubai’s strategic challenges as it continues to deal with its debt overhang:

Dubai is showing signs of recovery.

Certainly, the property market is still suffering. New apartment blocks and office buildings appear with few new occupiers to pay for them. The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building—formerly known as Burj Dubai but renamed in honour of Sheikh Khalifa, Abu Dhabi’s ruler, after the bail-out—is reported to be largely empty.

But the real economy is not doing badly. Tourists are returning. Trade is apparently growing, particularly with India and China, although sanctions have made it trickier to export to Iran. The expatriate executives who manage most of the private sector are defensive about Dubai. They focus on the positives: thinning traffic jams, lower rents. Local media provide a stream of good news. So what’s the worry?

Debt of course! Turns out we still don’t know how much is owed by the city-state, its transparency aversion remains.

Good to hear the ‘real economy‘ is recovering. I suppose things come down to how the Dubai – Abu Dhabi politics play out and here The Economist is probable more clueless than most (“Abu Dhabi was willing to help when crisis hit, but it is tightening its purse-strings and some of its own property companies are struggling“).
It is right on the longer-term implications though:

Dubai’s longer-term worry will be how to keep this edge in the face of rising competition from its neighbours, which are trying to build their way out of boringness. Abu Dhabi has its Guggenheim, Qatar new museums by I.M. Pei and Jean Nouvel (seearticle), not to mention the 2022 football World Cup.

Lost in all the Schadenfreude is how having the three of these dynamic cities jostling for leadership in the region is an absolute positive for the Middle East regardless who comes out on top.

Aside: I didn’t realize Sultan Bin Sulayem had been removed as chair of DP World! As I wrote back in March 2009:

Sultan Bin Sulayem I imagine will be one of the main losers when we get through this episode. DP World, Nakheel, Istithmar, Limitless are so loaded up on debt and so exposed to an imploding local property market (a bubble and oversupply both very much a consequence of Nakheel’s actions) that they alone probably threatened Dubai’s solvency. Unfortunately this all coincides with a global collapse in trade which will make life difficult for DP World – which is the Dubai World bedrock.

Related: Burj to Burj to Burj. AlAbbar to Zayed. Dubai’s Decade.

Knicked lots of these from Zachary Seward who does a far better version in the WSJ.

My Foursquare Checkins by WeePlaces.com.

Loved The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu: a history of US “speech industries”—as Wu terms any information industry

It begins with Alexander Bell’s telephone and tracks its path to commercialization noting that:

time and time again, it is investors as much as inventors who decide what our future will look like, and what we call genius might better be described as smarts coupled with capital.

The phone of course leads us swiftly to AT&T – the book’s central character or perhaps more accurately villain – and its archetypal leader Theodore Vail:

We must try to understand Theodore Vail, for his basic character type recurs in other “Defining Moguls,” the men who drive the Cycle and populate this book. Schumpeter theorized that men like Vail were rare, a special breed, with unusual talents and ambitions. Their motivation was not money, but rather “the dream and the will to found a private kingdom”; “the will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others”; and finally the “joy of creating.” Vail was that type. As his biographer put it, “he always had a taste for conquest … here was a new world to subjugate.”

Vail and AT&T appear again and again as themselves or reincarnated across all the media industries as does “the cycle” which takes us:

“from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.”

The cycle is the story of radio (RCA), Hollywood (Paramount / Warner), television (NBC) and the book’s open question is whether or not the inherently distributed Internet can be moulded to follow this tested arc.

Was the Internet truly different, a real revolution? We don’t yet know the answer. But here, at its origins, we can gain the first inklings of what might account for that sense. The evidence boils down to the idea that of its singularity, the computer and the Internet attempted to give individuals a degree of control, of decision-making power unprecedented in a communications system. These were systems whose priority was human augmentation rather than the system itself. The aim was therefore an effort to create a decentralized network, and one that would stay that way.

One of the joys of the book for me was the shedding of new light on how recent seemingly eternal American ideals of competition and deregulation really are:

We fancy having in the United States the most open of markets for innovation, in contrast to the more controlled economies of other nations. In truth, however, the record is decidedly uneven, even given to excesses that would shame a socialist, with the federal government, at the behest of an entrenched industry, putting itself in charge of the future. Fortunately for the Free World, while the Nazis may have beaten us to television, we nicked them out for the Bomb.

in the 1930s, the United States, once a nation of small businesses and farms, was dominated by monopolies and cartels in nearly every industry. As the economist Alfred Chandler famously described it, the American economy was now dominated by the “visible hand” of managerial capitalism.

Can’t be bothered reading the whole book? Try this Tim Wu WSJ op-ed, his Apple Vs Google framing at Slate or this Nick Bilton NYTimes Q&A.

My Kindle highlights are here. Tim Wu and Clay Shirky talk Wikileaks on NPR here.

Mediabistro on the new ad network from The Economist:

Stephane Pere, VP of the Channel, defines audience for us:

Don’t think I have blogged about FashionStake.com a neat startup in NY that my sister works at. Think Gilt Groupe and Kickstarter lovechild.

The founders are two super impressive current Harvard Business School MBAs (Vivian Weng and Daniel Gulati) and the company’s is backed by Battery Ventures.
Just heard the exciting news that Alexis Maybank (co-founder of Gilt Groupe, ex eBay) has decided to invest in FashionStake and I urge all you digital fashion types to keep an eye out on these guys.

Hasan Kazmi and Andy Umans, two good Columbia Business School buddies who I accompanied on the Chazen study trip to Dubai last Winter have finally had their essays published on the Columbia blog.

They summarize meetings we had with McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Abraaj Capital, Istithmar, Mubadala and try to make sense of our beloved little Gulf state.

Not sure I agree with Hasan‘s statement

A significant amount has been written about the debt crisis of Dubai World, the parent company of Istithmar. Many leading commentators and journalist have indicated that Dubai is on the brink of financial collapse. After our trip, I can safely say that Dubai is not going to collapse. There is no fundamental problem with the actual projects and investments; the problem is merely in how they were financed.

What does collapse even mean? Dubai’s finances are structurally broke, this isn’t simply a cyclical bubble pop, there’s more to it. The debt taken on over the past decade was enabled by the implicit expectation that Abu Dhabi would be there if (and more recently when) things soured. I can attest to this based on first-hand exchanges I had with bankers when I worked at the Dubai government – and that was back at the start of the decade.

Dubai will not collapse in the sense that the skyscrapers and man made islands won’t disappear (ok, the half-built islands might) but Dubai will I think emerge a fundamentally different place post-bubble. First and foremost it will never again have the kind of autonomy it has enjoyed since its contemporary birth. Now that the Abu Dhabi guarantee is explicit, the cousins up the coast will have a significant say in how the city-state is run.
Second the deleveraging process in Dubai has only just begun. It will take a while for the economy to work through the debt and real estate overhangs.
I would also argue that many of the investments Dubai made or announced were fundamentally unsound and not just victims of poor financing strategies.

Andy‘s history is for the most part spot-on, though some of the analysis

Dubai is the busiest port in the Indian Ocean basin after Singapore, far surpassing other ports not only in the Persian Gulf but also in East Africa and South Asia. We visited Dubai Ports World and toured their impressive facility. Their strategic plan calls for an increase in shipping volumes from 46.8 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in 2009 to 97 million TEUs by 2017. Despite its size, the port only employs roughly 4,000 people. If this is the economic driver of Dubai, one is left wondering why the emirate has built a city with a real estate capacity for a population of two million.

The investments in the port facilities in Dubai (great example of the emirate’s sound investments) need to be looked at in terms of the overall effect and potential they produce for the Dubai economy. The port may only directly employ 4,000 people but combined with the various free zones and other infrastructure investments it ensures Dubai position as the default regional base for international and regional businesses which translates into hundreds of thousands of jobs.

He’s right to highlight the importance of India to Dubai’s economy but the city-state ‘s geographic dependencies are more diversified that the article implies. Iran, Africa, Russia and the GCC are a few of the other important economic partners.

I take issue with this

Most expatriates we met have been in Dubai since no earlier than 2006, and most planned to leave relatively soon. Furthermore, it is virtually impossible to obtain a residence visa except by employment.

Firstly, there are plenty of entrepreneurs and expatriates that have made Dubai home for many years and decades. Secondly, in response to the visa statement, how does this really differ to other countries? There are immigration barriers to the movement of human capital everywhere you look in the world including the US where Andy is from and South Korea where is currently lives and works. If anything the barriers to entering and working in Dubai are amongst the lowest in the world (now the terms of the employment is another matter altogether).

He had a great concluding passage:

In contrast to its portrayal in the media, Dubai’s boom in the 2000s was a natural continuity of its historical success, built on openness and trade. As the Standard Chartered economist pointed out, wild as some of the real estate projects may have been, they were prerequisites for generating publicity and attracting skilled international talent. The McKinsey consultant compared Dubai’s overinvestment in real estate and infrastructure to American overinvestment in rail during the turn of the last century: It may have precipitated a financial crisis, but it left the country with excess capacity in transportation that spurred further economic growth. Dubai willcertainly need to be innovative, create new industries and attract a more varied array of people if it expects to fill its glut of office and apartment towers, but at the least it will likely remain successful in its bid to be the trade, logistics and finance hub of the Gulf. From that position, with competent leadership and a little bit of luck, it can continue to capitalize on its advantages to ride the wave of economic growth spreading throughout the Indian Ocean basin to a new era of prosperity.

Interestingly neither Andy nor Hasan talked much about the role of politics in the city-state’s recent missteps. The lack of checks and balances has been a double edged sword- on the one hand it has allowed an incredible transformation to take place over the last few decades, on the other it led to some very obvious strategic and financial mistakes that have in essence bankrupted the emirate and tainted what still is a hugely compelling case for a new type of Middle Eastern city.

PDFs:
Hasan’s report: Oasisi or Mirgae in the Desert.
Andy’s report: Dubai’s Bid for Sustainable Prosperity.

NYTimes, Bloomberg, and the WSJ all report the private equity don’s generous gift that will help Columbia build its new campus at the controversial Manhattanville project (see this Chronicle of Higher Ed piece for a good rundown of the storied Columbia – Harlem relations).

Apparently the search for an architect is on, let’s hope we end up with an interesting choice that makes up for the ugly current home – Uris Hall memorably called a ‘monumental offense’ in 1997 by David Garrard Lowe in the City Journal:

Uris Hall, he wrote, “is a characterless Brobdingnagian structure whose facade, with all the allure of a crematorium, bespeaks a place where people come not to begin their life’s adventure, but to end it.”

Christopher Szabla adds to the Uris-Hate in a 2005 Columbia Spectator piece:

… what looks like a smashed air-conditioner unit in the midst of their historic grounds. In this light, it defies belief that such a monstrosity as Uris Hall has been permitted to desecrate Columbia’s otherwise elegant landscape for over four decades now. With its flanks and crude rooftop looming arrogantly overwhelming Low’s graceful dome, its ballooning rear end projecting twice the length of an Avery or Fayerweather, this behemoth, more than any other architectural excretion endured by this university, mocks the spirit of Charles McKim’s classroom buildings. Its bombastic hauteur would be seen as tasteless were its Orwellian overtones not so frightening.
Indeed, architectural trends come and go, but Uris has been consistently unloved from its conception. Incensed students picketed its groundbreaking, and an architecture professor’s radio interview concerning the structure was confiscated by campus security, unaired. To add insult to injury, Uris was, in the 1980s, retrofitted with the addition of a bizarrely incongruent facade which de-legitimated whatever tenuous connection it may have once had to the monumental axis of columned buildings stretching from Butler to Schapiro. The building became, after this fiasco, beyond any justification, theoretical or otherwise. It is time that its aesthetic reign of terror be put to a swift and decisive end- it should be demolished with all the violence it has committed upon its surroundings since its ill-advised creation.

Here’s what the orginal bilding looked like – far more elegant than the current bizarrely incongruent facade.