Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Cuba, the Internet and Social Media

Last week I attended the Cuba, IT & Social Media Summit in New York City.  The summit brought together leaders in the field to discuss the use of these technologies and capabilities in Cuba,  today and in the future.  Many, but not all, of the participants were of Cuban heritage, either directly born on the island like me or whose parents were. 

The meeting was not political in nature.  I suspect that most attendees hold views similar to mine regarding Cuba, bemoaning both the repressive nature of the Cuban regime as well as the ineffectual, anachronistic US embargo.  But I don’t really know, because politics was not the primary focus of our discussions.

The key overarching goal of the meeting was “to empower Cubans on the island through technology, helping them to communicate with each other more freely on the island and with the outside world, to access information more freely, and to share information with the rest of the world.”  A second major goal was to start thinking about the future and specifically what is needed to bring Cuba into the 21st century technologically “once laws have been passed that allow the US and Cuba to trade more freely in technology, both in public and private enterprise, and by industry sector.”

A very good summary of the Cuba, IT and Social Media Summit, and in particular of its key conclusions and outcomes can be found in this entry of the blog El Yuma by Ted Henken, a faculty member in the departments of Sociology and Black and Hispanic Studies at CUNY's Baruch College.  (Yuma is a slang name often used in Cuba to refer to Americans.)  

The summit was sponsored by the Cuba Study Group, an organization founded ten years ago “to facilitate a peaceful reunification of the Cuban nation leading to a free and open society with respect for human rights, the rule of law and a market-based economy.”  Its key objectives include “respect for human and political rights and individual freedoms in Cuba, and denounce the violation of those rights and freedoms”; “substantive economic changes that improve the lives of Cubans”; and “discussion and critical analysis of ideas and formulate policy recommendations that facilitate peaceful change in Cuba.”

JumpStart NYC: Talent in Transition

As we well know, many talented people have lost their jobs as a result of our ongoing Great Recession, - the worst financial crisis we have lived through since the 1930s.  The US unemployment rate has doubled from 5% in December of 2007 to 10% in December of 2009.  The number is significantly higher, about one out of every six workers, when taking into account underemployed and discouraged workers who have had no success in finding a full time position.

Hopefully, the economy will soon improve and unemployment rates will start to come down.  But in the meantime, it is very important to offer those who got laid off as a result of the deteriorating economy as much help as possible in exploring and finding job opportunities.

In New York City, the crisis hit hardest in the financial services sector.  There are now over four hundred thousand unemployed city residents, many of them as a result of layoffs on Wall Street.  About a year ago, the Bloomberg administration launched a number of programs to help recently unemployed city residents.  JumpStart NYC is one such program.

The JumpStart program was initiated by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC).  Its key objective was to help people who lost their jobs on Wall street to apply their skills and abilities in opportunities beyond financial services.  Most of these people had previously worked for large firms.  A primary goal of JumpStart was to help them explore new career paths and opportunities in small and entrepreneurial firms in the New York area.

Economic Performance and Social Progress

I continue to be very interested in the study of highly complex organizational systems, that is, systems involving communities of people and the services they perform for each other in pursuit of collective goals.  Enterprises, healthcare systems and cities are prime examples of such highly complex organizational systems.

Advances in information and communications technologies are enabling us to better understand the characteristics of these systems.  We now have the ability to gather huge amounts of information about their behavior, which we can then analyze and model with powerful supercomputers.  This will enable us to better design and manage them, and in general, to make better informed, more intelligent and smarter decisions.

But, in order to properly deal with these highly complex systems, we must have a pretty good idea of the kind of information we need, the values we are optimizing around and the objectives we want to achieve.  While thinking about these matters, an article in the New York Times caught my attention a few months ago.

The article covered the release of a report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.  The Commission was chartered by French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008, and was chaired by Joseph Stiglitz with Amartya Sen as his chief advisor, both Nobel-prize winning economists at Columbia and Harvard respectively. 

The Commission was created to address the increasing concerns raised by leaders around the world about the adequacy of current measures of economic performance, which are mostly based on GDP figures.   The GDP is a basic measure of a country’s overall economic output based on the market value of all the goods and services the country produces.  If GDP is the primary measure available to government officials, they will make economic decisions based on optimizing or growing GDP, while paying little attention to other critical societal factors.

CNN, Latinos and Brand Values

A few weeks ago CNN broadcast Latino in America, a two-hour documentary that explored “how Latinos are reshaping our communities and culture and forcing a nation of immigrants to rediscover what it means to be an American.”  The documentary was reported by Soledad O’brien, a highly regarded CNN anchor and special correspondent who in 2008 reported the similar Black in America documentary. 

The US has over 50 millions Latinos, and by 2050 the US Latino population is expected to triple.  Latino in America portrays this incredibly complex, diverse, fast-growing community through a series of individual stories.  CNN calls it:

“. . . an ambitious documentary initiative [that] examines the growing diversity of America, revealing insight into a changing nation on the eve of the U.S. census that is expected to officially confirm that Latino Americans are the largest minority group within the country.”

It later adds:

“As the face of America changes profoundly, CNN continues to demonstrate that we are the only cable news network dedicated to delivering a diversity of opinions and coverage,” said Jon Klein, president CNN/U.S. “This landmark series will showcase dramatic personal stories from across the sweep of Latino-American society, and move the dialogue well beyond limited partisan discussions of immigration.”

Latino in America received a number of positive reviews, thanks in large part to the excellent work of Soledad O’Brien.  But Jon Klein’s attempt to move the dialogue beyond immigration has not fared so well.

Reflections on Smarter Healthcare Systems: Practical, Concrete, Expert Advice

On October 1 and 2 IBM held its second global Smarter Cities conference in New York City.  I subsequently wrote about the excellent talk, Great Expectations for US Healthcare, given by Dr. Denis Cortese, CEO and President of the Mayo Clinic on the first day of the conference.

The next day, there were break-out discussions in six key areas relevant to building a smarter city: transportation, education, public safety, energy and utilities, government services and healthcare.  I was co-moderator of the healthcare session, along with Dan Pelino, IBM’s General Manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences.  Our panel of experts included Dr. Cortese; Chris Coburn - Executive Director of Innovations at the Cleveland Clinic; Dr. Ronald Paulus - Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the Geisinger Health System;  and Dr. Armando Ahued Ortega - Health Secretary of Mexico City.  Let me summarize their practical and concrete remarks.

Designing a Smart Healthcare System

On October 1 and 2 IBM held its second global Smarter Cities conference in New York City.  The first such conference was held in Berlin this past June, and the third will be held in Shanghai next year.

As was the case with Berlin, the New York Smarter Cities event had a very impressive agenda.  It included talks by IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.  The agenda also included panels with governors, mayors, and leaders of cultural institutions. 

In addition, there were break-out discussions to enable participants to share their experiences on what it takes to build a smarter city in six key areas: transportation, education, public safety, energy and utilities, government services and healthcare.  I helped organize and moderated the healthcare session.  Our panel included Denis Cortese - CEO and President of the Mayo Clinic; Ronald Paulus - Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the Geisinger Health System; Chris Coburn - Executive Director of Innovations at the Cleveland Clinic; and Armando Ahued Ortega - Health Secretary of Mexico City.

Soft, Smart, "Pink" Power

I first learned about the concept of soft power two years ago or so.  The term was coined by Harvard Kennedy School professor Joseph Nye in his 2004 book Soft Power: the Means to Success in World Politics.  It is all about influencing behavior based on the legitimacy of your objectives without commanding it with threats or payment.  It relies on the ability to shape the preference of others through co-option, rather than coercion.

Soft power is particularly critical in our times, due to the nature of the conflicts in which we increasingly find ourselves, in particular, the global war on terrorism.  These conflicts are sometimes called the The Long War, especially within the US Military, as a way to describe our present global struggles against a variety of enemies spread around the world, which will likely last for decades.  These enemies are organized into small groups, distributed and very local - that is, living among civilian populations - but they coordinate, recruit and fund their actions around the world in a whole new set of ways.

Such conflicts have much more of the feel of a battle of civilizations or cultures.  The main objectives of the amorphous enemies in the Long War seems to be to destroy our very way of life and impose their own.  Thus, winning the Long War is perhaps as much about winning the hearts and minds of people and nations as it is about defeating, or at least containing, an enemy that is amorphous and often hard to find.

The Health Care Debates, Tribalism and The Golden Rule

Earlier this summer, I was in Berlin to participate in a Smarter Cities conference hosted by IBM.  I had not been to Berlin in a while, and was looking forward to seeing it, especially since it is one of my daughter’s favorite cities in the world.  I was not disappointed.  Berlin is a very nice city indeed, with lots to see and do, full of young people and positive energy.

But, you cannot visit Berlin and not be struck by its history, especially if you are Jewish.  Its Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe is haunting in its simplicity.  Newsreel images of Berlin Nazi rallies sweep through your mind.  And a question keeps coming up.  What happened?

Richard von Wesizacker, - who was mayor of the then West Berlin from 1981 to1984, and President of Germany from 1984 to1994, which included the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of  East and West Germany, - spoke at the conference on the history of Berlin. He reminded us that before the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, the city was the intellectual center of the world.  People everywhere learned German to be able to read the best textbooks and academic journals in their fields, much as they do now with English.  How could such an advanced civilization engage in such monstrous acts?

Numerous books have analyzed this question.  The answer that makes the most sense to me is rather simple.  Civilization is a relatively recent and thin veneer on human behavior.  People are capable of terrible actions against their fellow men, especially when they are under severe stress and are incited to blame others for their fears by skillful demagogues.

Lessons from the "Beer Summit": To Err is Human . . .

There are a number of important lessons, if not downright teachable moments, in the July 16 arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge Police Sargeant James Crowley, and the subsequent involvement of President Barack Obama when he said that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting Professor Gates in his own home.

Clearly, race relations, especially the long history of racial profiling by the police, are a major part of the backdrop for this case.  But perhaps, race acted more as the kindling that caused the relatively minor July 16 incident to flare out of control leading to Gates' arrest.  And then again, the race kindling caused the incident to explode across the nation after the President’s remarks on the arrest. 

All three principals in the case, Prof. Gates, Sgt. Crowley and President Obama, have excellent records when it comes to race relations.  Rather than playing key roles in a racially tinged drama, they are role models for how people should behave in a well-functioning multi-cultural, multi-racial society.

Looking at it in retrospect, the whole incident has the making of a Greek tragedy.  Three good, highly professional, and disciplined men, each made an out-of-character mistake and said and did things that they should not have.  Why?  Because like all human, our emotions sometimes get the better of us and get us in trouble.

Reflections on Empathy

I watched Sonia Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings with mixed feelings, ranging from boredom to anger.  I found some of the questions and comments so off-putting that at times I had to look away and turn the TV off.  But overall, there was a kind of fascination to the hearings, especially in what they told us about the state of the nation’s culture wars.

It was quite a spectacle seeing several middle-aged, white males lecturing Sotomayor about the irrelevance of race, gender and life experiences for a judge.  One such senator brought up Chief Justice John Roberts’ assertion in a recent school integration case that the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.  We also repeatedly heard references to Justice Roberts’ judges are like umpires dictum, declared in the opening remarks of his own confirmation hearings in 2005.

Who needs a wise Latina woman if life is that simple.  No wonder her Republican questioners forced Judge Somomayor to disown her wise Latina remark from a 2001 lecture at UC Berkeley's School of Law, where she said: “. . . I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”

A Kind Of 21st Century Age of Enlightenment

Cities have long been important areas of study in a variety of disciplines, including sociology, civil engineering, architecture and urban studies.  But such studies have recently gotten a big boost for a number of reasons. 

Foremost among them is the fact that our planet is becoming increasingly urbanized.  In 1900, only about 13 percent of people lived in cities.  We recently crossed a threshold, when for the first time ever, the world’s urban population now equals its rural population.  Moreover, from now on, cities will absorb all the population growth expected over the next decades while continuing to draw some of the rural population.  By 2050, cities are project to have around 70 percent of our planet’s population.

Something must clearly be done to help cities absorb all those people, and provide them the right infrastructure, jobs, places to live, public safety, education, health care and many other services, all the while being cognizant of the impact that this growing urbanization will have on the sustainability of the planet.  This is about as daunting a task as anyone can imagine.  But fortunately, advances in technology, science and engineering are providing us with all kinds of new knowledge, innovations and concrete tools to help us in this monumental undertaking.

Reflections from a "Mutt" on Empathy and Diversity

In his first press conference as President-elect on November 7, Barack Obama talked about the dog he was going to get for his daughters Malia and Sasha.  He mentioned that since Malia is allergic, the family is looking for a hypoallergenic breed.  “There are a number of breeds that are hypoallergenic, but on the other hand our preference is to get a shelter dog, but obviously, a lot of the shelter dogs are mutts like me,” he said.

Obama referred to himself as a mutt because of his mixed racial heritage.  But his remarks got me thinking about my own mixed cultural heritage.  My father Julius was born in a small town in Eastern Poland called Drohiczyn.  My mother, Rachel was also born in a small town, originally called Pruzana in Poland, now part of Belarus.  They came to Cuba in the 1920's and 1930's respectively, where I was born and grew up until the whole family moved to Chicago in 1960.  I thus combine the Eastern European Jewish background I inherited from my parents, with the Latin roots of my first fifteen years in Cuba, with my American heritage of the last several decades. 

My background is not all that unusual for many immigrants to the US, but it is right up there in the mutt, multi-cultural category.  My native tongue is Spanish, my parents native tongue was Yiddish, and since 1960 I have been immersed in English.  I learned Yiddish as a child, both from hearing my parents speak it at home and in the secular, Jewish school I attended in Havana.  I am fluent in Spanish, and speak it often with family, friends and colleagues, as well as with the large number of people living in the US for whom Spanish is their native tongue.

But, English is the language I speak best by far.  From my third year of high school on, my education was totally in English.  I use English almost exclusively in my work, except when I travel to Spanish speaking countries.  While I give talks and presentations in Spanish during such travels, I am clearly much more fluent in English.  I would be really hard pressed to write this blog in Spanish.

Reflections on Smart, Global Leadership

Soft power is a term first coined by Joseph Nye, professor of international relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  At its essence, soft power is the ability to shape the preference of others to get the outcomes you want through attraction and co-option, rather than through threats, payments or coercion.

In 2006, the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS) in Washington convened a bipartisan, high-level Commission on Smart Power chaired by Professor Nye and Richard Armitage, to "develop a blueprint for revitalizing American's inspirational leadership." 

“America must revitalize its ability to inspire and persuade rather than merely rely upon its military might.  Despite the predominance of U.S. hard power, there are limits to its effectiveness in addressing the main foreign policy challenges facing America today.  Many of the traditional instruments of soft power, such as public engagement and diplomacy, have been neglected and fallen into disrepair.”

The Commission’s report, released in November of 2007, concluded that

“The United States must become a smarter power by once again investing in the global good - providing things people and governments in all quarters of the world want but cannot attain in the absence of American leadership.  By complementing U.S. military and economic might with greater investments in soft power, America can build the framework it needs to tackle tough global challenges.”

A Gathering Storm We Totally Missed

I think that it is by now pretty clear that there is no simple answer to the causes of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. 

Plain, old-fashioned greed - that is, the pursuit of individual wealth, possessions and power - clearly played a major role.  So did the Wall Street's bonus system which practically encouraged its people to make risky investments so they can earn huge sums of money in a good year, without having to worry about the impact of their risky, short-term bets in subsequent years.

There is plenty of blame to go around: the management of the financial companies; the rating agencies; the regulators; the extreme anti-government ideology that prevailed in the US in the last several decades.  Our financial crisis is best seen as a systemic failure of massive proportions.

But, there is one group whose role in this systemic failure I personally find particularly troublesome: my own technical and research community.

Checks and Balances

The Founding Fathers is the name we give to the leaders who signed the US Declaration of Independence and participated in drafting the Constitution.  They set up a system of governance based on the principle of separation of powers under which the state is divided into different branches, each with separate and independent powers and areas of responsibility.
 
Critical to the success of this style of governance is a system of checks and balances, whose purpose is to prevent any one branch of government from becoming too powerful at the expense of the others, and to induce them to cooperate in getting things done.  The notion of checks and balances has become embedded in the culture of the country, not just as it applies to the federal government, but also to the balance of powers between federal, state and local governments.
 
It has proven to be a brilliant system of government.  Not only has it endured for over two centuries, but it has done so while adapting to the vast changes that the country has undergone during that time, including its massive growth in size, population and power; the vast diversity in the composition of its people; and the highly different political beliefs, social mores and market conditions it has experienced through all that time.  Its success is largely due to its built-in flexibility to adapt to vastly varying conditions.  If any part of the system becomes too prominent, the other parts react to limit its powers and bring the overall system back in balance.

Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution

On December 31, 1958 we were celebrating New Year's Eve in the home of a friend, about a block from our apartment on Calle 4 in Miramar, a nice, middle class section of Havana.  I was thirteen, in the second year of high school of our more European-like educational system, which consisted of six years of grammar school, followed by five years of high school.

The previous year, I had spent New Year's Eve gallivanting around Havana with friends, but by December of 1958 the political situation was very fragile.  The battle to overthrow the Batista dictatorship was in full force.  Havana was the scene of frequent bombings, shootings, and police roundups.  We could no longer venture around town to celebrate New Year's Eve.

The following morning, January 1, 1959, we all walk up to the news that Batista along with many high officials in his government had fled Cuba overnight.  Fidel Castro the leader of the Cuban Revolution that had been fighting the Batista regime for the last several years came to power, along with his brother Raul. 

They have ruled Cuba ever since, celebrating their 50th anniversary in power on January 1, 2009.

Life was never the same for me and my family.  Within a few months of taking power, the Castro government started its turn toward communism, nationalizing all private property, from large plantations and industries owned by wealthy Cuban families and foreign companies, to businesses of all sorts owned by middle class families, like my parents’ store.

Do Words Matter?

About a week ago we learned that an Ecuadorian man died from injuries incurred in a beating in New York City in what authorities say may have been a hate crime. CNN reported that:

"Jose Sucuzhanay and his brother, Romel, had left a party on December 7 at St. Brigid's Roman Catholic Church when several men approached them in a car in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, police said. The men allegedly began shouting anti-gay and anti-Latino vulgarities at the two men."

A month earlier, another Latin man, Marcelo Lucero was attacked by a group of seven high school students in Suffolk County and stabbed to death.  The Suffolk District Attorney said that "the seven students charged in the attack admitted they regularly beat Hispanics for fun.  He said one of the accused attackers, Anthony Hartford, 17, of Medford, told police 'I don't go out doing this very often, maybe once a week.'"

If such attacks against Hispanics are taking place in the New York area, among the most open-minded and diverse regions in the world, I can only begin to imagine what might be going on elsewhere in the US.  The picture that emerges is not very pretty:

"FBI statistics show an alarming increase in the number of hate crimes across the nation.  Latinos, the numbers say, have become the racists' target of choice in the last four years.  Since 2003, hate crimes against Hispanics have increased by a shocking 40%.  According to the FBI, almost 67% of crimes motivated by ethnic or national origin are committed against Latinos."

For several years now I have closely followed the immigration debates in the US.  I have seen, with considerable dismay, the negative, mean-spirited tone that powerful figures in politics and the media sometimes display when discussing immigration issues.  In particular, I have become increasingly alarmed at their mean-spirited, anti-immigrant words, especially aimed at poor Mexican immigrants.  Do these words matter?

Elitists and Populists

In a recent post, I wrote about the current meaning of political labels along the liberal - conservative spectrum, especially as they were used in the very long 2008 campaign for US president.  My personal conclusion was: "The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are alive and well when it comes to social issues, but they are increasingly irrelevant when applied to economic policy."

Another set of terms we heard a lot during the campaign were "elitist" and "populist."  Barack and Michelle Obama were cast in the role of chief elitists by a variety of political opponents and commentators.  The populist mantle was primarily worn by John Edwards and Mike Huckabee during the primaries, and even John McCain was cast as a populist toward the end of his presidential campaign.  But without a doubt, the role of populist-in-chief in the recently concluded campaign fell to the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.

The frequent use of these terms caught my attention.  I started hearing that Barack and Michelle Obama lived in the "elite" Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, where their daughters attended the "elite" University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, and that Barack Obama taught constitutional law for twelve years at the "elite" U of C.

Wait a second.  I lived in Hyde Park for almost ten years, from the time I arrived in the US from Cuba in October of 1960 to the time I moved to the New York area to go work for IBM in June of 1970.  I attended the Lab Schools for my last two years of high school, and then went on to study at the University of Chicago for the next eight years.  I think of Hyde Park as a very diverse kind of community anchored by the university, home to many different kinds of people.

Reflections on Political Labels

We have just concluded a very long political campaign that culminated in the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.  As is typical in such campaigns, you heard a lot of different political labels thrown around.  Candidates were called “extreme right-wing conservatives” and “extreme left-wing liberals” – depending on which candidate the speaker wanted to marginalize, at which end of the political spectrum.

Then, toward the end of the campaign, we were hit by a shot from left field.  Just as the Democratic and Republican conventions finished and everyone got ready for the final sprint to the November 4 elections, the world was hit by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  Over the next weeks we saw the Bush Administration implement a series of economic programs, collectively referred to as The Bailout - the largest government interventions in the private sector since the New Deal. 

What is going on, people asked themselves?  Has the Bush Administration - generally considered among the most conservative in the history of the US - all of a sudden embraced socialism in its final few months?  Or could it be that political labels, like “liberal” and “conservative” are not what they used to be?  Do they need to be re-defined for the 21st century?  Let me offer some reflections on the topic.

Participatory Governance

In early October I attended a small meeting on "Digital Media and Democratic Participation,” sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.  The goal of the meeting, as articulated in the invitation letter, was "to explore how digital media may affect political participation and civic engagement. The Foundation is interested in understanding how digital media tools – which enable new forms of knowledge production, distribution, social networking and collaboration – might influence citizen engagement, political activity and democratic participation."

One of the items on the agenda was devoted to networks, collaboration and participation.  I was asked to make some opening remarks as a way to frame the dialogue.  I started my remarks by discussing the evolution of governance in business and other institutions.  As I have been writing in my blogs, I believe that corporations and institutions in general are undergoing dramatic, positive changes in organization and governance.  

In the industrial economy that dominated the 20th century, companies were generally centrally organized, with a hierarchic approach to management where authority and information flowed down from small groups of executives in headquarters.  This model worked well when technologies and markets changed slowly.  But as technology and market changes have accelerated, along with global competition and opportunities, corporations have had to become more flexible and adaptable, which is leading them to embrace a more distributed, collaborative organizational style.

Wise companies recognize that the real expertise is out there in the wider world, with their employees in labs, manufacturing plants, sales and customer service.  To capture such expertise, they need these employees to become much more involved in the actual governance of the company, including operational improvements, strategy formulation and innovations across products, services, processes and business models.