Whether your kid is barred from having any fun at all, attending play dates (for what, to play?), or going to bed before midnight for fear of missing out on extra credits … or not, won’t change America’s standing as the most industrious and innovative – speak most competitive – nation on earth. Say, how bad can it be, if even our Harvard dropouts (sure, throw some Stanford preemies into the mix too) continue to launch industry-defining, multi-billion-dollar companies that soak up every software engineer in the Western hemisphere who can as much as fog a mirror? The issue, of course, is that there won’t be enough American scientists and engineers to around in order to fuel America’s celebrated and inexorable industrial growth engine.

But China’s talent gap is closing fast, the battle lines are drawn for all the brains we can get in business, and better shape up if your pedagogy entailed plunking the spoilt rugrats down in front of Baby Einstein and entrusting the rest of their rugrat lives to a sub-standard educational system. Behold the Tiger Mom! There is a whole triple concerto-for violin, cello, and piano-playing cadre of scientifically-trained elite engineers lurching for your kids’ lunch box. Here’s what you do: first, you panic. Then, take ‘em out of Kindergarten Mandarin class – for that won’t help either. Finally, go growl like a tiger and join in the battle cry of practice drills, public shaming, and wretched insults in the name of achieving amazing success for your sprout.

On the face of it, Chua’s “battle hymn” mémoire is a charming but insipid ode to the joy of non-permissive parenting (imagine a typical tigerish, middle-class striver, Sino-Anne Hathaway-type, wishing for nothing more than to impart on her daughters a winning start in the lottery of life – while trashing a dollhouse during a piano recital lacking in poise and calling her offspring “garbage” just to reinforce the point). The booklet’s central claim that an Asian child’s stereotypical success is due to superior Asian parenting is substantiated by anecdotal assertions that the relentless pursuit of academic excellence, the original ‘practice makes perfect’ mindset, respect for authority, and intolerance of mediocrity are all Chinese inventions (yes, yes … along with paper, printing, gunpowder, and the bloody compass).

By contrast – as sharp as a tiger’s claw – us pampering, mollycoddling, non-straight-A-grades-tolerating, and video game-allowing (yikes, even Wii-provisioning!) Westerners have long lost the upper hand in raising a formidable youth (harking back to when Mrs. Buffett would grill young Warren mercilessly on the ins and outs of asset allocation, when William Henry Gates III was shuttled back and forth between classes in BASIC programming and predatory business practice, and – here’s a shocker – when Richard Branson, Jr. was purposely left stranded at both street corners and rock concerts to find his way home, palpably by his very own mother in her attempt to teach that little dyslexic devil a lesson or two in self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship …).

To sum up, ever since the fall of Constantinople (in 1453) or Bill Clinton’s more contemporary publication of “My Life,” has Western parenting been on the decline. If you’re in your teens today and you ain’t Tiger Mom’s perfect little cub, or if you haven’t been raised by a pushy Korean um ma or even an old-fashioned nagging Jewish mamah, chances are you’ll have to struggle mightily to make your mark in the world against the onslaught of better educated and more motivated youngsters from afar. And if you’re a parent, in particular one of those ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ organic brassica-eating Montessori-Albert Schweitzer-ites (all non-competitive Barney and Friends-embracers-cum-spawners, as far as the Tiger Mom is concerned), you’re probably just jealous that your lesser fry hasn’t been playing Carnegie Hall at the age of 14, or you’re put out perhaps that this puerile 4-year-old of yours is still waving back at the Teletubbies.

If you belong to a book club that’s boycotting Tiger Mom’s nasty little trade secrets, fret not, mon soeur. Here’s what’s coming at you, without wishing to cause undue worry: there’s a continent’s worth of overachievers – waiting to pounce upon your children’s future jobs (like the hordes of Suleiman the Magnificent laying siege to the gates of Vienna in 1529). You must get up and unplug the Xbox right away and furthermore chasten your child to never Google a school problem’s answer again, but rather derive it from first principles like all applicants to Tsinghua University must be able to do, at the risk of getting beaten with the bamboo stick (how does a cell phone work, what is a microprocessor, how does your body absorb fat from food? … you get the point). That literary invention called globalization has obviously bound together the American and Chinese economies for the foreseeable future; while Amy Chua’s foray into popular literature has helped to politically desensitize the debate as to which culture can and will produce the brainzillas necessary for economic world domination.

It is now neither taboo to identify with extreme parenting nor to be loudly alarmed by the high, and mostly stress-related, suicide rate among China’s young people. When a group of teenagers from Shanghai posted top scores in an international test of practical knowledge in reading, mathematics, and science administered by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), Chinese mothers could feel vindicated, especially with the United States taking only 17th place in reading and coming in even lower in math and science. The question, of course, is not whether Chinese mothers are superior, along with their offspring, or whether Americans somehow wouldn’t wish to give their kids a winning start in life, but rather whether the US educational system is fit to train enough winning young adults in the future.

Some contend that education in this country is as broken as our health care system and would require a similarly complex overhaul, while costing the kind of money to fix that nobody is willing or able to pay. Moreover, with inequality sharply on the rise (the widening chasm between the rich and the poor within the country), what is emerging now and here is an unfortunate tale of two Americas. The inequitable distribution of wealth is closely mirrored by the unequal access to the kind of education befitting a Tiger Mom’s aspirations. Rich people pay for private schools and tutors or move their families into ZIP codes with excellent public schools (which in good/expensive neighborhoods resemble gleaming halls of learning that feed their graduates to the Ivy League; whereas students in bad/poor areas must enter their brain hospice through metal detectors). Two recent books on the subject of inequality, “Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich” by Robert Frank and “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making” by David Rothkopf, have shone a spotlight on unequal educational opportunity as a worsening social indicator, as the rich are getting (far) richer, while the poor are staying (relatively) poor. (Although it is unclear how exactly it is that inequality causes all sorts of social ills – from failing school grades, more teenage pregnancies, higher crime rates, to greater obesity – it is certain that the rising tide of America’s wealth boom has not lifted all boats.)

America’s ability to produce “Outliers” (as in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success”), individuals who will achieve extraordinary success in life is unparalleled. This will happen with or without Tiger Moms, with or without the “10,000-Hour Rule” (if you ever wondered how Mozart became Mozart, go spend 10,000 hours practicing a specific task and see what will happen). And in your blogger’s humble opinion, right after you’ve aced your reading, math, and science tests, other leading indicators for future employment success are “uncommon intelligence,” a passion for learning something new, and a knack for entrepreneurship. How to drill those into your kid’s head? Don’t ask the Tiger Mom. A new “Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Perhaps, for America must figure out how to transform its educational system to provide democratic / meritocratic access to top-notch learning to the majority of its people, not just a few. Always remember, there are far more Chinese Tiger Moms than there are people in the States, and not even our outliers and cognitive elite will be able to compete against them alone.

In a professional context, I have noticed that IT leaders are ringing in the New Year with two items seemingly topping the list of their department’s make-it-happen resolutions: the respective implementation of a mobile strategy and a social media strategy for their businesses. While every business may have unique objectives and requirements for how to capture an increasingly mobile and social network-based audience, there are a number of common themes unfolding. Here I shall highlight one that has garnered strong interest in particular from a number of our clients in the retail sector: the “fusing” of the physical and the virtual worlds. In short, 2011 may yet be the year that will see the blending of brick-and-mortar with bits-and-bytes, as many consumers today are “glued to their smartphones and living on Facebook,” as a CIO client of mine recently put it.

Here’s what’s having the CIOs at global retail companies as excited as the residents of Wisteria Lane at the arrival of the UPS delivery man: today, shoppers with their smartphones in hand are browsing the aisles of brick-and-mortar (B&M) retailers with the ability to look up any product information on the spot, including competitive pricing typically from Amazon.com. However, not all paths lead to Amazon; with powerful new mobile applications, merchants now have viable marketing tools to attract and entice customers with in-store specials tailored to the individual. For B&M retailers the future of one-to-one marketing may just have arrived. And if you’ve seen the movie “Minority Report,” you’ll know what I mean.

Think of the smartphone as a “bridge” between the physical and the virtual worlds. Terms like “mobile tagging” or “object hyperlinking” refer to smartphones’ ability to recognize an object and to call up information from the Internet that is specific to that object. This is accomplished through image recognition (a computer science technique that is becoming ever more effective), the reading of a QR code (a format that is fast gaining in popularity, especially in Europe and Japan, and is promoted by Microsoft in the U.S.), or the scanning of the ubiquitous barcode.

For example, when you see something of interest in the “real” world – say a product or an ad – you can take a snapshot with your camera phone, and the phone, equipped with the right app, can recognize the product and allow you to “interact” with “it” right then and there. Scanning a barcode while in a store, can give a shopper real-time access to price-comparison data; reading the QR code printed on a magazine ad can bring up the advertiser’s web page directly on the handheld; and a number of apps can visually recognize book covers and other items just to bring up the corresponding shopping cart at your e-tailer of choice. Regardless of whether this interaction is enabled through image recognition or code scanning (or other emerging techniques for object identification), it is my belief that people will increasingly use their smartphones to take pictures of physical objects (shopping goods, print ads, display windows, movie posters, showcases, billboards, etc.) or “check in” at physical locations (à la Foursquare, Gowalla, and shopkick) in order to instantly obtain object- or place-specific information from the web.

With a purpose-built mobile app, a person’s smartphone will not only “know” the shopper’s location but also “carry” detailed, yet hopefully anonymized consumer data which can be used by nearby merchants to issue precisely targeted specials and preferred pricing offers by sending coupons to the phone. These digital coupons are then scanned from the phone’s screen at checkout and thus redeemed. And for extra credit, every time a consumer snaps an item or registers at a location, there is an opportunity to capture a meaningful piece of marketing data: the voluntary and self-motivated signal of interest at the time and place of encounter with any particular merchandise, commercial, or store location. Marketers consider a compilation of such indications of interest a powerful predictor of future consumer behavior, second perhaps only to a shopper’s past purchase history. And, of course, with access to such consumer information in real time – i.e., if products, ads, and storefronts “knew” something about you – that encounter becomes that much more meaningful, as the product pitch can now be tailored to your preferences.

Finally, who knew Coleridge (Jr. nonetheless) had a thing for IT budgets which are customarily cut at the beginning of the year: “The merry year is born like the bright berry from the naked thorn.” Beautiful, of course. Perhaps just as beautiful as being able to stretch your budget to do more with less and to implement some impressive mobile- and social media strategies without going for broke already in the first quarter. Our company Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com/) has helped many traditional, brick-and-mortar firms devise and cost-effectively implement such strategies – with flexible access to highly skilled IT professionals located offshore. Please feel free to contact me (christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com) should you be thinking about building mobile apps and social media platforms to influence and captivate consumer audiences. Talent Trust has a ten-year history of creating successful technology solutions for delighted clients such as Accenture, Agilent, Autodesk, Brady, CMA CGM, CompuCom, Continuous Computing, Critical Mass, Elan Computing, eMeter, Euro RSCG, GE, IBM, Major League Baseball, Manpower, McAfee, Medtronic, Suzuki, Taylor Corporation, Verizon, Zynga, and many more.

“Once upon a time, children, there was an ancient and advanced civilization – perchance an alien one – that came before us, as our ancestors here on earth. That was of course a long, long time ago. Theirs was a race of scientists, inventors, and builders whose discoveries, inventions, and building feats would be unimaginable and all but inconceivable for us today. Their ingenuity was boundless and their ambition endless, and so in their desire to attain more knowledge, fashion greater inventions, and build bigger things, their race had ravaged the earth, depleting its resources in order to fuel their zeal and unrelenting industriousness. Lest you wonder, they were not evil – no, they were not; you might even call them human, for you could say that it was in their nature to discover, to learn, and to strive for ever more. So then the earth lay barren, as the aliens had mined all the ore it had to give, and the time had come for those who came before us to leave this world. An entire civilization had collapsed under the weight of its own advancement, and as their people were boarding the evacuation crafts to set sail for other worlds, their leaders vowed to protect future races from a similar fate. And so they tore down their cities, dismantled their laboratories, and disassembled their machines, and cast away all remnants of their scientific knowledge and technological might deep into the mine shafts, the holes they had drilled into the heart of the earth. The aliens also left behind a small group of sentries, including some of their finest computer scientists, who selflessly remained on this planet so they could guard the knowledge and technology that was kept hidden inside those mines, silently waiting to be unearthed again maybe in a distant future. When the alien ships had departed, the earth was in great pain and started to cry, and so it rained for thousands of years, flooding the plains with raging rivers and covering the abandoned mines under yawning oceans, and at last the earth healed itself, recovering unwearyingly until today. Yet the sentries too would wait patiently – over eons of generations, if necessary – for any future civilization to form, grow, and evolve. And they would carefully watch the progress of these new specimen, and only when they were deemed ready and responsible in their use of it, would they be given access to that knowledge and technology. For that was the stated mission of those who stayed behind, to prevent future people from following their very own path of curiosity, discovery, and the ensuing endless cycle of invention and creation of things that would require more and more resources to consume, and that would lead, yet again, to the destruction of the planet. Yes, they would bestow upon those yet to be spawned by an arbitrary chemical flash of the universe, the wisdom and the tools necessary to advance to civilization. But in an orderly and sensible fashion, without rushing nature or committing rash judgment, like you would never dream of giving a matchbook to a child or letting Ricky Gervais host the Golden Globes ever again. And yes, these sentinels are still amongst us … but you cannot see them, for they are hidden in plain sight, whilst they sit on every (heck, almost every) desktop and live in practically every home … they’ve been protecting you like only a parent would, and they remain your guardians forever more … they call themselves … … … Microsoft.”

Mr. Ballmer … sorry, sir, I believe we just lost the children (more like: Steve, man, you had to fly a whole B-2 bomber squadron over these poor kids’ heads!). Only Reggie has the good form to excuse himself to visit his urologist, but all the others in Ms. Maidstone’s gaggle are now toiling catatonically between Medieval boredom for a complete lack of comprehension and a state of bare and phalanxed fear, because there’s a grown man pounding his white-knuckled fists on a lectern that isn’t there, while yelling something about “Your Potential. Our Passion.” Even the part-absentee Reggie would later conclude that today’s classroom visitor – though hardly prepossessing vis-à-vis his physical attributes – had this maniacal energy about him – curiously, even when talking about mundane things like windows – that would make Shaka Zulu look like yet a well-adjusted individual.

Steve Ballmer really did try hard to regale the children. His story had a number of admirable if not charming qualities and was undoubtedly as multi-layered as a Windows 7 upgrade. How coincidental that the master of blood-, sweat-, and tears-soaked chants and the powerful CEO of Microsoft would escort such themes close to your blogger’s own heart:

• Be as advanced as you must, but without ruining the Earth for our children;
• Alien technology is cool, but alien archeology is not, for it means you’re a member of the “looking it up on Google” entitlement club that eschews knowledge from first principles;
• Science and technology are the wayfarers of our cultural evolution; and finally the motto:
• “Number two will never do” … as a certain portal technology has become the victim of its own success with many implementations no longer easily manageable, and a new version of an industry-leading comprehensive collaboration platform now available to delight both administrators and users alike.

SharePoint – of course! – is what your mother used to refer to as the quintessential “portal,” a collection of web-based collaboration elements, process management components, search modules, and document-management functions. With SharePoint you can easily host web sites that access shared workspaces, information stores, and documents, as well as control host-defined applications, such as blogs and wikis. Users of the system can just as easily manipulate so-called “Web Parts” controls to customize the portal or interact with any of the content pieces, such as item lists and document libraries. But just like our allegorical alien race which succumbed to its own success, SharePoint has been so successful in its adoption that many SharePoint implementations have over time grown massive and unwieldy with too much content and too many users and with generally too many options for users to interact with that content. SharePoint customers getting burdened by the management of an implementation that has become too popular and gotten out-of-control, can now look to Microsoft’s brand-new release to reevaluate and reorganize their environments, making them a lot more usable and far easier to search. Le Portal est mort. Vive le Portal!

Microsoft bills its latest version of SharePoint as the “Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web,” and SharePoint 2010, which went RTM on April 17 and is launching globally this week on May 12, represents a huge improvement over its predecessor SharePoint Server 2007. Some of the new feature highlights include:

• A new user interface, including the new “Office Ribbon,” providing the proper context for any task for both administrators and users;
• A function called “Web Edit,” allowing easy site customization, with SharePoint 2010 now being more like a wiki and with sites being presented as pages rather than lists;
• An integration point called “Silverlight Web Part,” allowing rapid integration of rich Silverlight applications;
• A feature called “Rich Theming,” allowing simplified site skinning;
• Enterprise Metadata Management (also known as the “SharePoint taxonomy”), enabling a centralized taxonomy;
• A new “services model” makes the “Shared Services Provider” of the 2007 release redundant, allowing administrators to decide whether services are run against a central farm or live on a local server; administrators can be delegated for specific applications, and permissions can be set at the application feature level;
• Updated data connectivity service for creating, deleting, and managing external-source data, from say Oracle or SAP;
• Improved search with added flexibility, redundancy, and scalability through multiple indexers, increased crawl frequency, performance, and volume / load-balancing among crawlers;
• Improved security through a new authentication model – based on standard protocols, including SAML, WS-Federation, WS-Trust, and “managed accounts” – supporting a wide variety of identity managers;
• A new “health analyzer” extends the “best practices analyzer” of SharePoint 2007;
• Central administration through a browser-based dashboard and flexible PowerShell-scripting options;
• Workspace caches changes and synchronizes them when users go offline and reconnect to the SharePoint site;
• Upgraded databases are presented with their visual elements from the older platform, including helpful “2010” and “prior” modes, while server administrators can mark databases as read-only during the upgrade, allowing users access while locking databases against changes until the upgrade is complete;
• An easy upgrade path for both farm and server administrators who can now upgrade a number of databases in parallel by running multiple PowerShell sessions (including alternate-access mapping in order to direct traffic between a SharePoint 2010 farm and an existing SharePoint farm, using an HTTP “302” redirect for more “gradual” upgrades).

I invite you to contact me (christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com) should you or your company be thinking about using Microsoft SharePoint, whether it’s to build a new site or to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to 2010. Our company Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com/) has helped many of our clients successfully implement 2007 as well as already make the most of 2010’s new metadata features: migrating and tagging content, designing efficient, reusable taxonomy structures, and moving (often ultra-heavy!) content between sites and file servers.

At this point, I’m particularly proud to be able to reference one of our largest and oldest SharePoint clients, our valued customer and long-standing, multi-year partner, Agilent. Agilent Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis (http://www.chem.agilent.com/en-US/Pages/Homepage.aspx) is a leading global provider of instrumentation, supplies, software and services to the life science and chemical analysis markets. With revenue of $2.2 billion, the group accounted for approximately 38% of Agilent’s $5.8 billion of total revenue in 2008, and its 5,000 employees serve more than 25,000 customers in more than 100 countries. Agilent engaged Talent Trust to provide SharePoint developers and publishers in a remote staff augmentation model. These remotely stationed contractors are spread across five strategically chosen offshore locations; they work under Agilent’s direct supervision and form a virtual extension of the client’s Colorado-based SharePoint team. The Talent Trust-provisioned personnel is charged with helping develop and maintain Agilent’s Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis global web presence, which is implemented in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; the group is also charged with all related SharePoint publishing activities to update the commerce and catalog sites. Agilent had a dual objective: to create a dedicated SharePoint maintenance and publishing team with offshore leverage for critical cost savings; and to distribute that team across three main time-zones in three different continents and with the associated differential language capabilities to be able to achieve a hyper-productive 24×7 support organization as well as offer region-specific, localized support to its constituents (customers, suppliers, employees). For this multi-continent distributed team to function as a cohesive unit – and, just as importantly, following Agilent’s best-practice prescriptions for external publishing at all times – a common body of standard training, performance management, and process workflow had to be created and implemented, whereas strict and continuous adherence to globally-consistent taxonomies and common practices are deemed key success factors.

No, globalization would be a simple and straightforward matter if we just called it global trade (and indeed, if it was just that: worldwide import/export), and if it wasn’t for such complicating factors as the vast inequalities accentuated but perhaps not caused by putting us all on an economic Mercator projection, an equal free-trade footing. In the good old days, it used to be fair and equitable: you’d send a nutter like Marco Polo off on his Silk Road to scam the Kublai Khan with some cheap Venetian costume jewelry, and the fool would come home with spaghetti – home being Italy, mind you! Let’s call this one “Bucket A”: arguments for or against the notion that the world’s haves and have-nots will benefit very differently from the effects of globalization. If the upper left-hand corner of your paycheck says “The World Bank Group,” you’ll likely be a naysayer, arguing that global inequality has risen as a function of increased globalization for a number of factual reasons that are measured in something called the “Gini coefficient,” and the explication thereof would stretch the scope of this blog as much an A-Rod-professed monogamy. Know that your blogger – like most civilized people – categorically condemns the exploitation of impoverished workers and joins with militant fervor in the persecution of all exploiters of child labor (if you can, check out our friend David Arkless’s and his company Manpower’s support of http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/ – a rather worthwhile cause!).

Some of the other, softer, and more academic arguments brought forth by the anti-Davos crowd (rash boarders, by and large, who eschew après-ski and raclette with Angelina Jolie) have to do mainly with agriculture subsidies in rich countries (thereby lowering the market price for poor farmers’ crops), the non-existence or at best weakened state of labor unions in destitute regions, and – oh behold, the Bugaboo! – the rapid growth of offshore outsourcing. In “Bucket B” we shall lump all arguments either in favor of or opposed to the notion that globalization will revert all “things” back to their normal mean. And all these things are purportedly economic, technological, political, cultural, social, and perhaps even ecological in nature (you can appreciate how complicated a well-rounded treatment of globalization can get – and most of them alas are as cohesive as Destiny’s Child). Think of it as the global equilibrium point, where say a big media company in the States is outsourcing all of its IT development to India, where the Indian IT developers – because of these two interlocking economic trends called global wage arbitrage and purchase price parity – are making a respectable middle-class living, allowing them in turn to tune into, as it so happens, their client’s satellite TV channel to watch the admittedly timeless episodes of Rachel and Friends, thus sending about $1.50 in revenues back to Burbank, California for each $1.00 spent on outsourcing. The labor savings and the incremental foreign revenues are strengthening the firm in the U.S. such that it can afford to hire more domestic workers. A spiraling win-win scenario, or so it would appear, were it not for the pesky competition all now filing into Bangalore, tilting the local supply-and-demand ratio towards ever inflating wages. Over time, as you would expect, the Bengaḷūrus will be able to command the same level of pay as the good folks back home in Burbank. That’s what “mean reversion” means in this case: everyone’s making the same rupees and watching the same TV shows (where the largest common denominator will, thank heavens, also be the lowest one – watch out Slumdog, here come Jessica Simpson’s hair extensions).

Aforementioned Buckets A and B deal with resource re-distribution and societal re-shaping, respectively. It is perhaps intuitive that according to the KOF (ETH Zürich) Index of Globalization, Belgium, Austria, and Sweden rank first among the world’s most globalized nations (and that despite ABBA!), while Iran, Burundi, and North Korea are plotting away in impressive isolation. Cynics will contend that although the driving forces behind globalization are well understood, corporations (mostly again in rich countries) are in the driver’s seat, and thus it is hardly surprising that globalization will follow a corporate, and almost by definition, opaque agenda. Others point to the “avengers” of globalization, those that are part of a nation’s diaspora, the reverse exodus of Western-trained workers back to their country of origin (such as the legions of highly educated and very successful Indians in Silicon Valley, for example, returning home to start new businesses in India). And of course, there are those who watch Roy Rogers movies on TCM and eat lots of apple pie and claim that the United States will never fall behind, because we – and nobody else! – have the monopoly on innovation. (I’ve got something innovative for you, and it’s not the Xbox 360: here in the States we’ve got more massage therapists entering the workforce every year than computer scientists; and we’re now graduating more social workers from our colleges than engineers – of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with massage therapy or social work, quite the contrary, but you shouldn’t then wonder why someone moved your cheese all the way from Chennai, or why there are as many Indians on the list of the top-ten richest people in the world as there are Americans.)

I’ll close with a contention that may well be controversial: our conception of globalization is about as relevant today as Paul Bremer’s last lecture in the Sunni auditorium at Baghdad University on why “Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Globalization has been a decidedly Western concept ever since the Greco-Roman world established trade links with the Parthians and the Han. It’s pretty evident that the Chinese and the Indians – the only two countries with more than a billion people each which together make up nearly 40% of the world’s population – find our notions of global connectivity, integration, and interdependence about as quaint as a Quaker’s chuckle. Bucket A, Bucket B, pro or con, it really doesn’t matter. You might as well try to explain to an Indian “classical” musician the difference between Mozart and Miles Davis or insist to a Chinese that opera is all about stout white men crooning Verdi. Give it another 30 years, and China will produce 40% of the world GDP, with the U.S. (15%) and the EU (5%) lagging emphatically behind. With Chinese economic hegemony and supremacy in hardware, and India’s leadership in software and an unrelenting focus on scientific and technical education, and a potential coming together of two powerful allies at the purposeful exclusion of the United States, the economic, political, and social constructs of the West have lost their relevance as far as the Dragon and the Tiger are concerned (notwithstanding the tragic reality that both countries will still have to lift hundreds of millions out of abject poverty.)

Please feel free to contact me (christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com) should you or your company be thinking about establishing an offshore presence in either India or China. Our company Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com/) has a ten-year history and successful track record of doing business in both countries and helping our clients successfully navigate some of the challenges of globalization.

Despite such notable policy failures, as not even trying to win the hearts and minds of the few people left breathing after each raid (and in sharp contrast to say 21st century U.S. military strategy), there was most definitely some method to the madness. Viking attacks were as agile as any Ken Schwaber (“father of”) Scrum. Runic inscriptions on the Kjula runestone and the Inchmarnock “hostage stone” as well as excavated evidence near Roskilde Fjord show that the Vikings had a Dark Ages version of a project methodology. From stating long-term objectives (demographic, geopolitical, securing food supplies), spelling out short-term deliverables (repeatable and best-practice pillaging across the Baltic coastline), to specifying means and tools (a chain-mail hauberk or equivalent armor made of metal platelets, conical helmet featuring a protective nasal bar – sorry no horns on the sides, circular shield of stout limewood, swords, spears, and the dangerously “bearded axe”, and finally, one heck of a bad attitude).

The contemporary writings of Alcuin of York, also known as Alcuinus or Ealhwine, would portray the Norse raiders as self-organizing teams that were adapt at responding to change, as opposed to following a plan; amenable to collaboration but disdainful of contracts; they were leaning more towards being individualistic rather than being process-oriented; and had there been software in their days, they’d definitely prefer it to be a “working prototype” over comprehensive documentation. The Vikings as ideological brethren of today’s Agile software development teams? How preposterous! What would that say about the interplay of process and discipline (or the respective lack thereof) which is so crucial to Agile? And is there perhaps an element of “chaos” that might serve a certain purpose, after all?

In Agile software development, discipline without process is blind, while process without discipline is empty (to borrow from Kant’s famous dictum). Discipline and process are indeed intertwined in Scrum which is an iterative framework for Agile software development and project management. Work is structured in cycles of work called sprints, iterations of work that are typically two to four weeks in duration. During each sprint, teams pull from a prioritized list of customer requirements, called user stories, so that the features that are developed first are of the highest value to the customer. At the end of each sprint, a potentially shippable product is delivered.

When Jeff Sutherland created the Scrum process in 1993, he borrowed the term “scrum” from an analogy put forth in a 1986 study by Takeuchi and Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review. In that study, Takeuchi and Nonaka compare high-performing, cross-functional teams to the scrum formation used by Rugby teams. Ken Schwaber formalized the process for the worldwide software industry in the first published paper on Scrum at OOPSLA 1995. Since then, Scrum has become one of the leading Agile development methodologies, used by Fortune 500 companies around the world. In short, Scrum is made up of three roles, three ceremonies, and three artifacts. The three roles are: the Product Owner, who is responsible for the business value of the project; the ScrumMaster, who ensures that the team is functional and productive; and the self-organized team. The three ceremonies are: the sprint planning meeting, daily scrum meetings, and sprint review meetings. Lastly, the three artifacts for prioritizing and tracking tasks are: the product backlog, the sprint backlog, and the “burndown” chart.

There is no (more) denying that Agile software development is more successful than traditional project management for software delivery (e.g., a sequential software development process like the waterfall model). Just like it’s a historical fact that Viking attack were messy but effective. In the past, the Agile community used to defend its own “messiness” (we’re not code-slinging cowboys, but a little creative chaos is a good thing) and try to prove its effectiveness. Nowadays, Agile has become so mainstream that its leading practitioners are at pains to explain how it is still different – especially when deployed at large project scales – from previous process improvement methodologies. After all, once the hullabaloo and proto-Norse shouting had subsided, was a Viking formation really that different from say a Roman legion? Having run a number of larger Agile projects myself for our clients at Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com/), I can offer up three observations for why Agile is indeed different and better:

1. Just by virtue of being an “improvement process” alone, it forces you to define the things that you wish to and need to observe, measure, and effect. Even if you didn’t follow through on the rest of the methodology, you’d already have gained an advantage by creating a “map of key observables” in the software development lifecycle.
2. Agile really won’t work unless you’re very disciplined – no mystery there, as you’d have to be more disciplined to compensate for less process rigor. But furthermore, it is discipline that matters: a regimented approach to team training (otherwise nothing will work); closely controlled and strictly enforced adherence to scope; a rigorous way to do effort estimation; and an open and honest peer-based culture of information sharing. Yes, all of this takes tremendous discipline on a daily basis that will naturally accrue to the benefit of your project and IT organization.
3. An explicit acknowledgement that software development is both an inherently creative and collaborative process. Just putting the words “software,” “creative,” “collaborative” and “process” in one sentence will give you a clue that there’s a creative spark at work here that’s a) difficult to manage and b) the cause of consternation for “traditional types,” as predictable schedules have indeed become a thing of the past.

As an aside, the odds of surviving a Viking attack, especially if you were a book of hours-illuminating or medicinal Rosemary-plucking monk ca. 793 – 1066 A.D., were about as low as a George Carlin joke. However, here’s what you can do to increase your chances of living to fight another day: a buddy system is always recommended, though an early-warning system (sentries stationed in equal spacings along the seashore) is deemed to be even more effective. Brush up, if you can, on your dönsk tunga (the “Danish Tongue”), norrœnt mál (Norse language), or Old Gutnish, a peculiar Gotland dialect, for these brutes didn’t speak English at the time, and translators were typically the last in line to meet Odin, Thor and gang. If you can muster the courage, it will be to your advantage to use long-range weaponry such as the English longbow or a crossbow, as your Viking opponent will prefer to slay you in hand-to-hand combat, which he believes to be infinitely more honorable than distance-killing (take that for a fact, Mr. Rumsfeld). And whatever you do, don’t feed their cute little birds of prey – they’re raptor gryphons trained to eat your eyes out.

And to follow through on the other title teaser: you must adhere to a very specific process when apprehending your felonious fellow man, if you’re not acting as a sworn law-enforcement official. Notify authorities if you can; evaluate the situation clearly; say “Stop;” inform the suspect that he’s under citizen’s arrest; try to convince him not to leave until a police officer comes; be firm and matter-of-fact; in the U.S., a Miranda Warning is only required if you are both detaining and questioning the suspect at the same time; for clarification, you do not need to read the suspect his rights if you first question and then detain him; call the local authorities and identify yourself to the police when they arrive; try to stay calm at all times. This is, of course, an example of a process flow that is bound to get you in trouble – and probably end up looking like Rihanna if you try to do this at home and home happens to be Queens – if you’re not agile and you don’t have the discipline (or in fact the guts) for follow-through.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma (a formal study, again, of why two people might not cooperate even if it’s in both their best interest) and, conversely, other counterintuitive behavioral models that attempt to explain for instance why people might collaborate (to contribute, say, intellectual “property” into the intellectual commons) even if it’s not in their best interests, have become intellectual staple diet for Social Web connoisseurs. Our company Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com/) does a lot of work for Fortune 1000 companies that wish to implement effective “Web 2.0 strategies.” I put that term in parentheses for no one really knows what it means, except for Tim O’Reilly (who invented it) or Carl Jung (who would have described it as the act of individuation through socialization by means of solidarity networks, but Carl unfortunately is long dead).

Most our enterprise clients wish to harness the web’s social-media sphere as a way to expand their business (be it to grow their brand, widen their customer reach, or deepen their relationships with business stakeholders). If you think you can do that by just sticking a “Share it on Facebook” or “Digg it” button up on your corporate site you belong in a fossil collection, a Barock shrine, or a Tibetan monastery. It’s ironic for me to say so (for our company provides the technical talent behind many a successful Web 2.0 implementation), but Web 2.0 has a lot less to do with technology than with psychology (no, not psychiatry, and apologies, Oliver Sacks). If you want to make your brand attractive to millions and millions of people who live the Social Web, if you want to connect with them, to garner their attention, and to take them on a journey towards your product or your service offering, you must start to play the game. For starters, throw out your Ajax For Dummies (or say “asynchronous JavaScript and XML” three times in a row), and pack your Nash equilibrium, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, and your favorite body piercing jewelry and head over to our friends at social gaming powerhouse Zynga (http://www.zynga.com/). They’ve just changed their company slogan from “More Fun Than Robert Downey, Jr.” to “Connecting the World Through Games.” There you go. I promise you: play one of their fabulous games and you’ll get what Web 2.0 is all about.

Don’t worry – you don’t even have to like “computer games.” Try out Zynga’s Mafia Wars, and yes, you’ll just either love it or hate it (there’s no in-between, just like with anchovies, the London Tube, or Michelle “Bombshell” McGee). You might not even stand for the glorification of violence, vindicta, and organized crime, although the theme of the game is of less interest to us here, and it might as well be about finding seashells on a beach or blue helmets in a Sri Lankan refugee camp. What’s impressive is that Zynga has just nailed the psychological underpinning of the individual as an integral part of a social network. There’s an amazingly effective reward system. There’s compensation for everything. Behavioral modification and forced decision-making against the ever-present timer. There are rituals and archetypes. There’s always the “mob” (the collective unconscious) and the Complex (do I have enough friends / Mafia members, enough stamina / energy to kill, enough money / reward points, etc.?). The process of individuation is particularly powerful, where players become literally more “whole” by virtue of strengthening their profiles, attaining special powers, and recruiting more players. And yes, there is also the fetish which can be cared for or cured, as the case may be, by – in any event – buying lots and lots of little items from Zynga.

And the lesson here? Needless to say, without state-of-the-art web technology, none of this would be possible. But technology is just the enabler. Psychology – as in the psychological substrate of a successful social game such as Mafia Wars – is the driver behind any viable Web 2.0 strategy. The overlap between social gaming behavior and social media marketing is just striking. Imagine: getting your customers to self-select a particular affinity group, to connect with like-minded individuals, and to recruit them in significant numbers to make for geometric growth; or, for your customers to enhance their profiles (invaluable marketing data) for the purpose of sheer self-expression, validation in front of their peers, or to earn reward or “reputation” points. If you want to connect with millions of customers, forget about your social media icons (we’ll stick ‘em up for you later) and focus on what drives the individual in the social setting. Learn from the leader in the social gaming arena and play some more of Zynga’s Mafia Wars or contact me (christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com) if we at Talent Trust can help bring some cutting-edge expertise to your Web 2.0 marketing initiative.

Obviously there are tried-and-true means of approval for company-official communications (such as press interviews and news releases, research publications and white papers, web postings and company tweets, etc.), and similarly, companies have established guidelines – ranging from the commonsensical to the perhaps perplexing – for how employees in their private realm may or may not communicate about their employers. For example, proudly wearing your Adam-and-Eve costume minus the foliage on your Facebook Page right next to that official high-res image of the company logo will sadly not earn you the honorable mention with Personnel which you’d always hoped for (although even HR was impressed by the photorealism of your “In the Footsteps of Mel Gibson in Cancun” travelogue). However, that clear delineation between private and corporate citizenship apparently gets blurry when an employee is asked to participate in a purposefully informal communication “medium” such as another person’s (personal) blog. And although this particular blog attempts to serve a professional purpose which is to both inform and entertain in equal measure and to tackle topics with a certain professional theme (the future world of work, with a clear focus on IT), it is still “my” blog. That means it is merely a mechanism and channel for me to express my opinion which is, by definition, something personal (even if it’s professionally done or with a commercial intent), for only individuals have opinions but corporations do not (they instead issue statements, release reports, or create marketing messages, etc.).

I believe that’s the important test between the private and the corporate “you” as far as social media “connectivity” is concerned (where say your VP title and company affiliation can easily “follow” you around into your personal sphere): if it’s a matter of opinion, even if it’s your professional opinion, it’s indeed a private matter (even if and because your opinion is now public). Blogs make for a good example here, as corporations don’t write diaries either. Blogging is about the dissemination of opinion to the public, but it has nothing to do with publishing proper; it has nothing to do with real journalism (Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., you’re safe, for now); it has nothing to do with the exacting standards of academic research, etc. Blogs are personal opinions that – thanks to Web 2.0 – may spill into your professional life like coffee onto a tie, for all to see. In fact, I know quite a few people who draw that distinction in their daily online lives by conducting all their personal-information sharing via Facebook, while strictly segregating their professional networking via LinkedIn. And if you see a little blue tweety bird fluttering from one to the other just let out that mean ol’ cat.

Back to the story of the temporarily suspended case study on implementing IT solutions at massive scale for Web 2.0-shy Fortune-500 companies. Being in principle a man of principles, I tell my man that I’d rather read Of Mice and Men backwards than not to move forward with publication. He then reminds me of that theoretical particle physicist at CERN who couldn’t help himself this month but make his professional opinion be known, without, however, checking with his boss first: “there can be little doubt that black hole production at the Large Hadron Collider would be an unacceptable and irresponsible risk.” Poor fellow ended up in a black hole of his own making, and we wouldn’t want our corporate friend to share a similar fate. See y’all again next Wednesday.

I enter his office, and I might as well – judging from the computational horsepower on display – be stepping onto the trading floor of the Chicago Merc or into launch command at Cape Canaveral, were it not for the costly collection of Bonsai, carefully manicured and magnificently cared for (its continuous cultivation, he says, reminding him daily that the devil is in the details, that one’s job is never quite done, and that the locus of all the action is these days – where else? – in Asia.) Pleasantries and pastries are quickly consumed, and he gets straight into it by asking me a straight-forward question which I have my reasons to skirt (first mistake), and rather than answering instead I just tell the man not to worry (second mistake). These admittedly hollow words have barely passed my larynx, when he retorts in his trademark 140 Decibels “‘cause-you-evidently-didn’t-hear-me-the-first-time” wail (which happens to be the sound intensity of artillery fire and is clinically classified as “nearly deafening”): “What do you mean ‘don’t worry’? I always worry. Worrying is what I do for a living. If I’d stopped worrying, we’d all be screwed, our business partners included, such as yourselves!” Ouch!

This high-octane executive and Bonsai cultivator (no, timid and taciturn are not the words that leap out at you to describe his professional demeanor) does worry a lot. About where, for instance, a company the size of his – that, in a good year, would have to add the entire revenue line of a smaller Fortune 500 company just to meet its annual growth target – will find the most cost-effective and sustainable supply of both human and material resources to allow for future, profitable growth. By background, our man is 1/3 applied mathematics professor (in a former life, of course), 1/3 proud company-lifer and procurement careerist, and 1/3 street-fighter – a mixture that would normally appeal to me, were it not for the middle part, where I find myself invariably on the receiving end of this consummate procurer’s incessant worrying about how to squeeze ever more costs out of his global supply base (whereof our company is proudly a part). (As far as world-class professional worrywarts go, it must be said that our friend is leagues apart from the phlegmatic fretting of say a Woody Allen; but still, asking him to “lighten up” on his patented procurement anxiety that anything in this world that can be bought, ought to be bought for the cheapest price possible, would be like asking Frodo Baggins to shave his feet, dispense with that peculiar Hobbit habit of having second breakfast, or stop that premonitious whining about gloom and doom by some monoscopic flame-ball in the sky – in other words, unlikely to happen.)

And all I was asked to provide was a detailed forecast of all the hot IT skills in all the different geographic markets so that this one procurement strategist could better gear his formidable world-wide skills acquisition machinery for optimal world-class results. If I knew the full answer to that question I wouldn’t even tell my own mother, for this is real leverage, having a window of time to be able to build up a privileged on-demand skills pool in the hopefully correct anticipation that these skills will soon be hotly in-demand. The “don’t worry” comment was meant to imply that indeed our company Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com/) does very much exactly that: the analytical forecasting and anticipatory sourcing across a very large number of IT skills, functions, and disciplines and across all applicable geographies. Since Talent Trust operates as both a demand- and supply aggregator, we have uniquely powerful insights into what technologies and related skills are on the rise or demise, if a “bleeding edge” programming language is turning “leading edge” overnight, or if a specific legacy skill-set is turning red-hot again for lack of available talent (e.g., try COBOL-with-PowerBuilder). And since we operate a “virtual bench” of trusted partners – all highly specialized, mid-market IT firms in various low-cost countries – we have significant operational advantage when it comes to very rapidly mobilizing these hot skills (e.g., Ruby on Rails, PHP 5, Flex), because we are not constrained by any single organization or geography. In fact, our network (which we call the “Talent Trust Alliance”) has the breadth, depth, and ready availability of IT talent no single supplier, no matter how large, can match. Think of it as a whole forest of Bonsai vs. the single giant oak tree. Yes, our friend does like that analogy, and now he gets my meaning that by virtue of partnering with us, our clients will automatically enjoy the benefits of tapping into our dynamic knowledge of the marketplace for skills, be it onshore, nearshore, or offshore. So don’t you worry, my friend, after all.

Although my foray into micro-journalism has been greeted by my corporate host with admirable support (and I’m no longer called a “mean dodgeball player” who doesn’t answer his client’s questions), I’m reminded that there is a special circle in hell reserved for NDA-violators, and so I shall refer my reader to a recent public-domain but nevertheless very useful ranking of hot IT skills in the market (this one courtesy of IT Business Edge and Dice.com):

1. Informatica
2. Virtualization
3. ETL (Extract, Transform and Load)
4. Python
5. Service-Oriented Architecture
6. Sybase
7. WebLogic
8. SOAP
9. Data Warehouse
10. SharePoint
11. MySQL
12. E-commerce
13. JavaScript
14. VMware
15. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
16. Business Analyst
17. ITIL
18. Ajax
19. Perl
20. Business Intelligence

(Finally, an editorial note before the Comment section swells up like an English complaint box: the title of this blog is barefacedly lifted from George Lakoff’s 1987 seminal work in cognitive linguistics called “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.” Its readers will ask themselves what the terms we use reveal about the way we go about doing the things that involve said terms. This happens to be an important insight for anybody trying to do proper forecasting and trending involving qualitative measures. A good read.)

Please, meet Philip Sanner, Herr General-Direktor (let me translate for you: director-general) of Elan’s Central- and Eastern European operations. Elan, of course, is the single largest pure-play – as they say – IT staffing firm in Europe, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Manpower, the global leader in the employment services industry. Sanner’s (please call me “Philip”) purview encompasses a business territory that once, over centuries past, was home to such pleasant sports as: the laggards of the Völkerwanderung, the last Roman conquerors-turned-ill-advised-tourists of Germania, the always charming Visigoths, the Carolingians, the on-and-off-again Huns, various Ottoman invaders ca. 1683 and ca. 1960s-1970s, and – needless to say – some of the most undesirable males the 20th century had produced.

Philip is part of the $16 billion business firmament of Elan/Manpower. Philip is a terrific business leader, and his team loves him, for he is firm but always fair, likes to lead strictly by example, and brings out the best in them. He subscribes to some unusual motivational methods though, normally observed at organizations such as the United States Navy SEALs or the British Army Special Air Service; when a mollycoddled German middle-manager publicly labors under the misapprehension that coming in second at a sales contest is the same as being “second winner,” he’s promptly enlightened by his director-general that “there is no such thing as the second winner, only the first loser.” Lovely.

I’ve personally known Philip “number-two-will-never-do” Sanner for over five years, and I’m proud to say we’re solid business partners and also friends now. We’ve launched a joint line of business called “global resourcing” or “remote staff augmentation” that is getting healthy traction across his territories, providing Elan’s clients with highly skilled IT professionals located offshore (for more information about the Elan-Talent Trust partnership see the ‘Harness Global Resourcing’ section at http://www.elansolutions.com/ as well as the dedicated services site http://www.elanglobalresourcing.com). I’m now sitting down in Philip’s palatial regional head-office here in Frankfurt – which, in terms of size and grandeur, makes Pope Julius II’s private study look shoddy by comparison. I’m always looking up to Philip, not only because he is one of the more successful IT staffing leaders in Europe; or because he rules his territories with an iron fist befitting one Götz von Berlichingen, every German’s favorite kick-ass knight; no, I’m craning skywards ‘cause Philip is an implausibly imposing 2.1 meters tall, as such barely meeting Frankfurt’s traffic height limitations for bridges and tunnels, and would have made a most respectable ‘Potsdam Giant’ under Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia.

By background Philip is an Entrepreneur with a capital “E” – and as opposed to most of his colleagues who are regular employees who may well be entrepreneurial (small “e”) in their respective jobs, he’s built real businesses from scratch, all in the IT staffing space, the last one of which he’s sold to Elan now eleven years ago. He joined Elan’s management ranks in ever-increasing roles of responsibility, while keeping his Entrepreneurial passion for the business, and he exudes the confidence of someone who’s been in the biz for twenty-odd years and seen it all, or – someone who’s just sold every self-doubt in the world to Mephistopheles himself.

But today Philip is even more buoyant than usual, though his habitual outer calm – which makes any funambulist appear fidgety – scantly betrays his excitement at having just sold a 200-person outsourced Level-1-2-3 support center deal to one of Europe’s largest technology firms. The center will be located in an Eastern European country where the client already has “strategic assets,” which is euphemism for owning a very large building with not nearly enough clever people in it, and a local hiring manager with little hair left to pull out, for the competition for IT talent has become fierce across Eastern Europe. That’s when we sit down to discuss the state of IT recruitment in different countries and to discern different staffing options for the client engagement at hand. And that’s when I decide to turn the discussion into an interview of sorts, where I’m asking the questions, and Philip is providing the answers, and this hopefully for the benefit of our readers. (As an aside, the interview is conducted in English, and although Philip’s English is excellent, to the American ear he sounds exactly like you-know-who from Hogan’s Heroes; an accent – he explains – he’s had since he was twelve and that he’s carefully cultivated ever since – for personal branding purposes, he says – not to be mixed up with your run-of-the-mill Cambridge grads roaming the mean streets of Frankfurt.)

Christophe: Hallo Philip, you’re the archetype of the modern German business man: with more degrees than a thermometer, you speak more languages than the good people of Babel, and you run out of passport pages faster than one can say “Welcome to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Herr Sanner.” Dispensing with all jokes now, how much do you actually travel per year, what countries do you visit, and how do you divide your time?

Philip: Well, although we’ve only recently begun to set up an office infrastructure proper throughout Eastern Europe – at this point we’ve got two main offices in Poland and two offices in the Czech Republic – we’re starting to see promising signs of growth throughout the whole region. Just as a caveat, put in context with the rest of Elan, Eastern Europe is still very small and nascent but clearly a region with lots of growth potential. In addition to Poland and the Czech Republic, Elan is active in Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia. Not to bore you with geography, but this leaves all the following countries untouched: Hungary, Slovakia, and Slovenia (in what we call “Central Europe”), Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia (in “South-Eastern Europe”), Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (the Baltic states, although we’ve got pretty good representation up there through our parent company Manpower), the “Transcaucasias,” i.e. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and finally the former Soviet states Belarus and Moldova. I’ve personally been to all but Azerbaijan and Moldova, and unless you’re boarding a good 100+ intra-European flights per year, you’re not going to get a grasp of the business in all these different countries. Lucky me, I guess … Let me just add that you should think of our Poland- and Czech-based offices as regional “hubs of excellence.” Clients with high-volume staffing needs (500+ people) in these and also adjacent countries come to us for strategic advice, established fulfillment capabilities, and a deep understanding of local market dynamics. Although we’re the market leader in both Poland and CZ, a close collaboration with our strategic clients is still required to drive successful outcomes.

Christophe: If you had to make a short-list, which are the top countries in terms of demand for IT skills?

Philip: They are in order of greatest staffing demand: Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Slovakia. Note that we at Elan would consider Poland and Russia as already mature markets for IT staffing.

Christophe: And what about the top countries now in terms of supply of IT skills?

Philip: Definitely Poland and CZ again as well as the Ukraine. What these three have in common is an educated, flexible, and rapidly-expanding workforce. All three countries posses well-established, efficient, and remarkably practice-oriented educational systems so that they can produce new and especially relevant skills with – please pardon my saying so – “hungry” individuals eager to learn the latest and most in-demand skills at a rapid pace, thereby shifting quickly towards new and emerging technologies.

Christophe: Along similar lines, which countries are on your “favorite list” when it comes to supplying IT workers for “cross-border” deployment (meaning as travelling guest workers in other countries on finite-term assignments) or for near-/offshoring (in other words, the resources remain in country but do the work remotely for a client in a different country altogether)?

Philip: In that regard both Romania and Bulgaria top the list – both are super-hot right now for both Microsoft and SAP skills – closely followed by Poland. We literally have a plethora of IT services and support centers in Kraków. Manpower’s big American clients, for example, are setting up shop in Poland and CZ with just remarkable speed – ramping up to 3,000 employees per center is pretty much the norm within a very short period of time … you ain’t seen nothing yet, as I believe you boys would say over there, until you’ve seen what Elan can do for you here. Obviously both Poland and CZ are not the cheapest places in the region, but American firms in particular are hoping that long-term investments will help offset and indeed reduce upfront operational spend and will yield significant improvements in overall IT efficiencies.

Christophe: Please excuse my saying so, but as far as political and legal systems are concerned, the whole of what we call Eastern Europe is to me just like my mother-in-law’s Hungarian Goulash: it all looks the same, it’s pretty clumpy and sticky, certainly not for the faint-of-heart, and you shouldn’t have too much of it, and you really don’t want to know what it’s made of … Any truth to that? How would you navigate the different sets of country laws?

Philip: Tricky, specially for the uninitiated or, as you say, the faint-of-heart. Don’t do it, if you haven’t done it before. Developing and implementing local trading procedures are just absolutely key. This is never easy under the best of circumstances and particularly challenging as “flexible IT hiring” and related workforce management practices represent a hybrid between HR and the procurement function. If you’re thinking about programmatic training, high-volume hiring, outsourcing, temp-to-perm worker transitions and other types of work transfers, a deep – and I mean “substantially deep” – knowledge of local legislation and labor laws are required.

Christophe: Speaking of the letter of the law, which can be intimidating when that letter is part of a foreign language, what Eastern European countries would you rate as being the most “Western-friendly”?

Philip: Not surprisingly, Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary are the favorites here, as these countries represent parts of many clients’ fully and globally integrated resourcing strategies. Through historical and cultural ties, they are closely aligned to such Western ‘powerhouses’ as Germany and France. Furthermore, these countries have a perhaps surprisingly – at least to some in ‘the so-called West’ – effective approach to human capital management. They just “get it” when it comes to servicing the demands of next-gen hiring managers: here it’s all about the stability, predictability, and rapid mobilization of talent pools.

Christophe: How is this now for a ‘loaded question’ – your advice to anyone looking for a reputable resourcing partner in Eastern Europe?

Philip: My mother used to spank me harder as a child when I would eat all the cookie dough! C’mon, is that all you’ve got? Seriously, you’ve got to do your due diligence. And I mean solid due diligence with multiple reference checks. Be careful to include in that check-list overall and of course specific technological capabilities and not just price as a differentiator. You are in the quality business – picking a quality partner will ‘pay back.’ Sound business processes and underlying systems are important as well. Make sure to pick a partner with a strong management team, matching cultural values – yes “values”! – and someone with the right and relevant business expertise. Someone you can relate to as a business partner, as you would say in the West, except they’re here in the East.

Christophe: I think I like your mother. Second to last question: if you had one country to pick in the region, which one and for what reason?

Philip: I’m hesitating, really I am … OK, it’d be Poland for me. It’s just the location, it’s so easy to get around, and it’s safe. The workforce there is adaptable, and they are able to identify technology trends early on, and they can ramp up new skills and capabilities very quickly. Their language skills are remarkable: English, German, French – all top. And the Poles are the most effective social networkers I know – I mean using Web 2.0 for recruitment purposes. Listen, if you’re not on LinkedIn, you definitely cannot be Polish. And, please, let’s not forget about kuchnia polska: where else would you go for your fill of Bigos and Pierogi?

Christophe: Final question, as promised: your favorite travel destination or story?

Philip: I’ve tried to re-classify France as an emerging market for Elan so that I could spend more time in Paris at Le Marche des Enfants Rouges – that didn’t seem to fly. Just give me the wine, the food, the cheese, and the Bohemian way of life, and I’d be a lucky man!

Christophe: Philip, you already are a lucky man! Congratulations on all your success in Eastern Europe, and I thank you for this interview.

iMoses didn’t descend from Mount Sinai with a “magical and revolutionary” tablet (at a price tag that still beggars belief) in order to change the fate of humanity or His untethered 4G children (in Steve’s appendix to the Decalogue, however, it clearly states that “Thou shalt not be caught reading a Kindle, for thou shall look like a total douch,” like the pale, pasty kid on the beach next to all the bronze, sculpted bodies evoking that stark visual contrast between Amazon’s pastel-colored “Original Wireless Reading Device” and the iPad’s supremely sleek back-in-black design). No, the iPad won’t change your iLife, you must still be kind to your nagging iWife (although there was a good one about the iDesperate iHousewives, its pointe lost completely in the seeming novelty of adding Apple’s trademark “i” to just about everything), and moreover, the Pentagon is not about to license Jobs’s patented “reality distortion field” to squelch the quagmire in Afghanistan, as this week’s rumor mill would have you believe.

Instead, let’s review some “news you can use,” in case “starting at $499” is not enough to get you off the settee:

• Wall Street predictions for how many iPad tablets Apple will sell in the first year vary widely, with a range from 1M to 10M units;
• There’s a pre-order limit of two per customer, even for businesses which is surprising (I guess one for the “magic” and the other one for the “revolution”);
• Be cautious when making an impulse purchase at 9:00 a.m. this Saturday, as only the WiFi model will be available at first, and buyer’s remorse may beset you when tablets fit for 3G cellular service will be shipping at a later date;
• Try to imagine what you’re going to do with your iPad; a comScore survey found that people would use it equally for web browsing and email, reading digital print media, and watching videos and playing games;
• Thus far Apple has only allowed few established publishers – including Time Magazine, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. – pre-launch access to its device, and thus there will be only a handful of big-media applications available this weekend;
• Business models among the print media companies are still all over the place, with some charging the equivalent newsstand price for the same content, others offering premium content taking advantage of the iPad’s seductive multimedia capabilities but also at a cost premium, while again others are billing for monthly subscription;
• Advertisers are, albeit cautiously experimenting together with the media, with the Wall Street Journal, for example, selling advertisements for about $100,000 per month;
• A few software development issues persist for third parties, including the automated iPhone-to-iPad-app conversion process that involves “pixel doubling” and has proven a challenge for developers rushing to get their iPhone apps adapted to the iPad’s much larger 9.7-inch screen;
• There are other technical gripes too, especially around the iPad’s notorious incompatibility with Adobe’s hugely popular Flash technology which Steve Jobs couldn’t help but calling “buggy, littered with security holes, and a CPU hog” (there you have it, Google, why bother integrating it with Chrome then?);
• And on that point, if you really cannot live without your favorite Flash sites, there’s HP’s upcoming big spoiler with the help of a touchy Microsoft Windows 7 called Slate which “runs the complete Internet” (completely just for emphasis, that is).

One more thing …, as Mr. Jobs would famously say (who, incidentally in the eyes of your blogger, is the best CEO in the world today, running one of the most innovative companies ever): please feel free to contact me (christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com) should you be thinking about building an iPad app for your business – for helping you find just the right people with that leading-edge expertise at competitive offshore rates is our business.