Management consulting as corporate crossover

In practice, biomimicry aims to implement new technologies and methodologies that copy ideas from nature. This philosophy of science immitating nature has proven fruitful and useful in a huge variety of areas, from structural engineering to swarm robotics. Arguably, at a very deep level, evolution itself is an idea worthy of attempted imitation.

Genetic algorithms are a field of research wherein man develops software intended to produce other pieces of software, and the production of this software is to be guided by processes that mimic evolution. This is a very grand idea that to-date has produced no real-world benefits. I don’t know how relevant it remains in academia either, but the idea itself is certainly captivating! What I do know about it, I learned in an undergraduate course in 2003. This may be blasphemy, but I learned about evolution itself from genetic algorithms.

The core evolutionary idea in genetic algorithms is that each generation begets a new generation. The first agent of evolution is inheritence: each new generation looks like the last. That’s true of nature to some extent, children look like their parents, but it’s not the whole story (if it were, the whole story wouldn’t be very interesting). It’s also the case that children look like their mother and father, so there’s a kind of genetic mixing going on there – this is called crossover, i.e. chromosal crossover. Finally, the third agent of evolution is mutation.

In the biological perspective, these are constrained in some ways, in particular crossover – most species have two parents, so genetic material is “remixed” from 2 parents. In the computational perspective, this constraint need not apply, and the entire population may engage in a massive informational orgy to share their code with every member of the next generation – it’s really up to the creator to set these rules. The other two agents, inheritance and mutation, are pretty straight forward and similar in the computational context as the biological context.

For the past year or so I’ve been contemplating a career change. Management consulting caught my attention for many reasons (long story short, I’ve decided not to pursue this right now, but I might give it another shot a bit later). For the past year I’ve had my eyes and ears (and mind) peripherally on the topic of management consulting, and in particular what kind of role it really serves. It occurred to me that there are evolutionary parallels.

Let’s set the scene with inheritance. We keep the good, throw out the bad… this could apply to ideas, strategies, structures, whatever. Inheritance is really ingrained in human nature. We maximize the good, minimize the bad, and we don’t really like changing things for the hell of it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Whatever happens, the next generation inherits a lot of the features of the current generation – this is unavoidable. An Australian stolen generation reference seems appropriate here.

Next, let’s consider mutation. This is disruptive, usually triggered by an external agent, e.g. a natural disaster, an environmental change, political upheaval, etc. I believe another agent of mutation is inspiration. A good idea (maybe even a bad idea) can be disruptive. Perhaps innovation is a vector of mutation, albeit one that man has some control over (perhaps more money for research leads to a higher rate of discovery for disruptive ideas, hence more mutation).

That leaves crossover. Basically, crossover mixes and matches elements of the current generation to produce something new, ideally something better. A good strategy for an optimizing crossover controller would therefore be to take the best ideas from everything and combine them in a sensible fashion. Such a controller would need two things: very deep sight across a very broad horizon, and control over the very nature of things. If that sounds like a scary degree of omnipotence and omniscience, you have been paying attention, but rest assured I’m not implying I believe McK and BCG and Bain and ACN have that kind of vision, reach, control, and certainly not a frightening disposition. But let’s consider a few things about these organizations:

• They work in every major economy in the world;
• They work on every major economic issue in the world;
• They work with every major corporation in the world;
• They work with major governments, and even non-profit organizations;
• They have access to CEOs and other leaders in all these major organizations.

As single entities go, management consulting firms have an astounding level of access to information on how the world works (of course, it’s up to them to translate this information into insight, but that’s where their hiring requirements come in). They can see what works where, package these ideas in some way (Powerpoint slides, internal wikis, whatever), and these then serve as the fodder feeding the “hive mind” that is the heart of a major consulting practice (the “hive mind” phrase I borrow from a consultant in Zurich). Taking ideas from client to client (never violating confidentiality requirements of course), backed up by robust analysis, may be the bread-and-butter of management consulting. However, if we are talking about a “crossover controller”, there is one major problem that consulting firms have: they can get the information and they can produce the slides, but they can’t make the CEO act on anything. You could say, management consultants have the omniscience, but not the omnipotence.

Way back when I was working on assignments on genetic algorithms, I made an observation that stuck with me till today, due to the simplicity of the conclusion. I observed that a system with heavy emphasis on crossover (with a commensurate reduction in mutation) usually did not achieve as good a result as a system with a bit more mutation after a very large number of iterations. However, a crossover-heavy system does get a good result very quickly, and it produces a population of results that are mostly very good. In contrast, a more mutation-centric system will find a champion eventually, but there is a very big quality spread throughout the entire population. What balance would work for you?

grouponomics

A company may agree to provide a big discount on a particular product/service, provided you buy in bulk from them. However, for certain products/services such as spa treatments, people are unlikely to buy 50 servings in advance (caveat: I know it is popular for some places to provide package deals where you sign up for 12 treatments for the price of 10 etc, so I guess we’re talking about a larger scale than that… sales volume of 50-100+).

That’s where Groupon comes in. That’s a portmanteau of “group” and “coupon”. I like portmanteaus, I think they’re fun! Anyway, Groupon gets together a bunch of strangers and presents the combined force, translating buyer power to a better deal for all the members who wish to participate in the particular deal. Sounds like the cooperative has come full circle! And the idea has taken off in Malaysia with quite a few startups around this very idea, the most well known probably being Groupsmore, which has just been acquired by none other than Groupon. Price undisclosed, but still, not bad for 5 months work!

This new-skool cooperative 2.0 model was discussed on The Edge’s TechBeat podcast, and one of their panel was awfully skeptical about the whole thing. He was approaching it from the perspective of someone with a family stake in a restaurant business – and this is especially germane because other than spas, restaurants seem to be the other popular business segment in Groupsmore’s catalog. He could not understand why any restaurant that wants to make a profit would participate in such a programme because the discounts offered have to understandably be very substantial in order for most consumers to bother with the hassle. The panel sort of concluded that it would only make sense to new companies in need of some promotion. True enough therein lies the value of Groupon to businesses: promotion.

But promotion of course is not solely a requirement for new businesses. Groupsmore, for example, boasts a young user base (college students mainly) so any established business that has an older crowd but wants to expand into the younger market could call on Groupsmore’s legion of college kids. Nevertheless, this is an expensive form of promotion (since it would turn every transaction into a loss-leader… on Groupsmore the smallest discount rate I’ve noticed so far is 30%, and the highest is a whopping 90%), so it’s not the sort of thing any business would like to run on a recurring basis.

So the comments on the podcast seem noteworthy, and the crux of their discussion is this theory: Groupon (and their clones) do well when there are a lot of new businesses being set up.

big tent collapsing?

I remember 5 years ago getting into conversations with people like Nathaniel Tan on the virtue of ideology in politics. To be blunt (and I was!) I didn’t think PKR could last the test of time because it lacked ideology. Nik Nazmi called PKR’s approach “big tent politics“. It was a catchy idea, and it’s easy to be tempted by that approach because it doesn’t exclude anyone.

The problem is, it’s just not sustainable. The tent is coming apart at the seams, the latest stitch to break being Sabah.

The defection rate suggests that PKR is the weakest link in Pakatan Rakyat. DAP and PAS are far stronger, demonstrating superior political discipline. It’s no coincidence that both PAS and DAP have more going on in the ideology department. PAS’ ideology is obvious: Islam. DAP’s ideology historically has been Malaysian Malaysia, though this may be slightly attenuated today.

Bottom line: ideological depth begets political discipline.

cause celebre, engineer edition!

When I posted this sometime back, I didn’t realize more than others were interested in the notion of celebrity engineers. EETimes has a blog post provocatively titled “How we can maybe get some engineers as celebrities?“

I think maybe the solution is to think along the lines of consumer experience rather than engineering. User interface is one such aspect of engineering. People can “touch and feel” that aspect of engineering devices, but the general public are unlikely to get too worked up about internal workings of the devices that they come to expect will always “just work”. A phone will always be a phone. How do you differentiate it from an engineering standpoint? Call quality… multitasking capability… peripheral features (i.e. GPS, camera, etc)… user interface. It seems to me like of those, the aspect that one can most easily tailor to fit user taste with minimum threat of mimicry is the UI (sure UI elements can be mimicked, but in principle Nokia does not want their UI to look like iOS).

So if Apple decided to make a celebrities out of their UI design team, I think that might work!

The mighty mighty RM

Conventional wisdom in these parts is that the RM is going to keep “strengthening”. This sentiment is pretty good for morale. But does that mean I should be bringing all my money home? My recent work escapades have left me with bank accounts holding small amounts of AUD and CHF, and laypeople all over KL tell me I should bring that money back to MY because by leaving it overseas, I am losing money.

This sentiment is fueled by the papers, that keep trumpeting the RM’s rise against the greenback, and they (the papers) are probably justified. Check out the MYR/USD trend over the last 6 months:

The trend over the last 3 months is particularly captivating. But the story is a lot less clear when you consider some other major currencies:

Long story short… I’m keeping my cash where it is for now. That includes the RM that I’m earning at the moment.

There’s trouble in Khazanah’s corporate responsibility

This is a whinge on something I just read in Khazanah’s Silver Book.

Some background on the Silver Book: Khazanah Nasional Bhd initiated a GLC Transformation Program to steer the so called G-20 of Government Linked Companies. This program was broken down into a number of specific areas, including Performance Management (the “blue book”), Procurement Best Practices (the “red book”), and Corporate Responsibility – the Silver Book. The Silver Book is supposed to lay out “principles and guidelines for GLCs to create benefits to society as an integral part of their corporate strategy and core business”.

See The Silver Book Appendix  pg 10. To identify what counts as a “contribution to society” one is supposed to begin with the following question: “Is the primary intent of the contribution to benefit society?”

The concern I have is the implicit relationship between intent and contribution, for numerous obvious reasons. I know this is a tall ask, but I think it’s worth going for a more top-down approach, i.e. translating desired contributions to some specific program areas, which can then trickle down to – dare I say it – some specific KPIs.

Just thinking aloud here. Intention does not imply contribution.

A simple model of roundtable participation occupancy

My current job description includes the organization of a series of roundtable discussions with various stakeholders including government, civil society, and corporate leaders. I’m given a target (e.g. we want 5 people for this session) and a list of people to call (partly sourced by me), then I make invitations in the hopes that I can meet the target. It’s not quite so simple of course because there is a latency between invitation and RSVP. To motivate the development of this occupancy model, let’s consider the following scenario:

Bob has an event in 10 days and he needs 5 participants; Bob gives out 5 invitations today; in 8 days Bob gets 3 positive replies. Now Bob has 2 days to find 2 more people, and get them to say yes. Not good.

The obvious approach to get around this is to compensate by inviting more people as a safety buffer. In doing so there is a risk that you may get too many participants – let’s assume that’s tolerable (usually a “good problem to have” anyway!). The question is, how many do you invite to achieve a desired target?

Let

where

• p is number of participants;
• l is a coefficient describing the attractiveness of the venue;
• m is a coefficient describing the attractiveness of the inviter;
• n is the intrinsic probability that invitees will be inclined to attend; and
• i is the number of invitations.

Considering my situation, l and m are constant because it’s always the same venue and it’s always me making the invitations. For sake of the following discussion, let and . That leaves just the intrinsic probability coefficient relating the number of invitations to the number of participants, which means to achieve a desired number of participants one has to invite is .

So what’s the value of n? I have some data to figure this out, from the outcomes of the roundtables I’ve already organised. None of this is statistically significant, but that’s never stopped the publishing of a blog post before, so here goes nothing…

It turns out that n varies for different segments. The limited data so far suggests the following:

• For corporate types, ;
• For government types, ; and
• For NGO types, .

In lay persons terms, for corporate types if you invite 10, 5 will show up; so if you need 10, invite 20. Similarly for NGO types if you invite 10, 8 will show up, etc. These numbers are broadly in agreement with my preconceived notions of how difficult it is to get these various groups to attend what could be harshly described as “talk fests”.

One serious short-coming with the model is that timing is not a factor; e.g. it’s now approaching a national holiday and it seems for at least one organization this is their most busy period of the year so they had to decline my invitation.

And yes, this is all meant to be light-hearted ;-)

voter registration gone postal!

In the last Malaysian General Election (March 2008), I was still studying in Melbourne. A the time I believed that I would physically be in Melbourne on election day (an unexpected family emergency actually brought me home to Kuala Lumpur on Election day, but that’s moot for the purpose of this post – I believed that I would not be physically present in KL on election day).

Malaysian election laws are restrictive when it comes to overseas Malaysians; for the most part, if you are Malaysian, you must vote physically at your voting district. There are a few exceptions: e.g. Malaysians in the foreign service, military, and students overseas. I belonged to the latter category, i.e. a Malaysian studying overseas, so I was technically allowed to vote via postal ballot.

The challenge was not a legal one… it was logistics.

To make a long story short, myself and about 50 other students in Melbourne (that I know of) attempted to register ourselves for postal ballots. We organised this through Malaysia Hall in Melbourne. The timing was tight. We needed a particular set of forms to do this registration, and by the time Malaysia Hall got hold of the forms it seemed virtually impossible to meet the Election Commission’s (EC) deadline to register for postal voting. To their credit, Malaysia Hall did their best: they faxed all the paperwork back to the EC  in Putrajaya, and couriered the forms back as well.

And so that was done, and the election came and went, and noone got their postal ballots. Noone really kicked up a big fuss about it, because frankly noone really expected the system to work! So we got over our token frustration, and forgot all about it, believing that all the paperwork just ended up being disposed of somehow.

That’s why it came as quite a shock to me when, at the suggestion of a friend who is an electoral reform activist, I checked my current voter registration status online, and saw this:

Locality

121 / 00 / 01 / 801 – PEMILIH TAK HADIR

Instead of “PEMILIH TAK HADIR” (which literally translates to “non-present voter”) it should read my street name. I checked with another of the 50 of us who attempted postal ballot registration in Melbourne, and she too is in the same situation. I therefore assume that everyone who attempted postal voter registration that day, is in the same situation.

Here’s what I think happened. The EC received our forms, but they got them too late. The General Election came and went, and when things settled down, they got round to processing our forms! It was our intention to vote postally in that particular election, not to vote postally in the NEXT election! But the EC did precisely that. At least that’s my theory.

The most pressing question on my mind is, what happens in the next election? Do I get to vote at home or not? And how does one “de-register” from postal voting? (This question I have my activist friend trying to figure out for me, failing which I’ll make a call to the EC myself).

And in the back of my mind, I do wonder, how many other Malaysians who were like me, anxious to vote in a critical General Election to the extent that we went through the postal voter registration song-and-dance… then forgot about it… without realising that their well-intentioned actions may cost them the ability to vote in the next election. I hope they are at least aware of the fact that they may not be registered as postal voters, because certainly nobody notified me, I had to check it up on my own to find out.

liking gone mad

Many who like Karpal Singh like Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad? I don’t think so, Facebook.

ich bin zuruck, nicht in zurich

This blog has been neglected for some time because I’ve been bouncing around timezones. I got to the end of my postdoc stint at the University of Zurich, and so I reluctantly said goodbye to the friends I met there and got rather attached to (which surprised me since I had only been there a year – I wonder if Zurich has a transient-expatriate side which encourages the foreigners to be especially open to human connection, which leads everyone to be more welcoming than usual, then again maybe I just got lucky).

I then visited Paris (obligatory, since I had been in Europe a year and had never been to Paris before!) en route to London, where I caught a 13 hour budget flight out of Stanstead into Kuala Lumpur. My escape from Stanstead was possible only because my flight was south-bound: all north-bound flights were grounded thanks to Mt Whatsisname, the Icelandic volcano.

Got back to KL, did a quick trip to Melbourne Australia to satisfy an immigration requirement (but unfortunately had to give up my seat at TEDxSydney because there just wasn’t time for me to rush off to Sydney as well). Now I’m back in KL, wondering what’s coming next. I’ve got some interviews lined up (also in different timezones). But I’m in no rush (although I do hope the Swiss Frank gets it’s act together soon since without SFr I am in the poor haus).

Leider, hier meine Deutsche ist nicht so praktischer… but I am slowly teaching it to my friends. Lesson one: zu teuer (useful when we are out shopping together).

I decided to add another category: my life. Correspondingly, I renamed “soap box” to “real life”, to go with the flow n all. This month priority number 1 is gyming. Maybe blogging should make the priority list as well…