Coverage of the Summer Olympics has included television reports of wonderful varieties Chinese cuisine. As the 2008 Games approached the Chinese government took it upon themselves to provide approved translations of menu options on offer in local restaurants.

This, according to an article by the wonderfully named Fuchsia Dunlop (a name I’ll never tire of!) in the Weekend FT.

She lists the literal translations of many Chinese dishes found on restaurant menus:

“Chicken without sexual life” (a young chicken)
“Iron flooring cremation” (cookies baked on an iron griddle)
“Pock-marked old women’s bean curd” (stir-fried tofu in hot sauce)
and “the fragrance explodes the cowboy bone” (no other translation given - my imagination runs wild…)

Lost in translation

At the root of these amusing lists is not some Chinese inability to grasp the basics of English translation. Rather, the lack of congruence between Chinese characters and roman script impedes clear communication:

You can only go so far in borrowing from Chinese because beyond a certain level you have to know the actual Chinese characters to understand precisely what you are talking about. In Sichuanese cuisine, for example, there are two cooking methods that would both be transliterated as kao, but you can’t tell them apart unless you see the actual characters. The different characters for “salty” and “umami” are both rendered in the Roman alphabet as “xian “

The inability of one civilization to render the finer points of its culture into words that would be clearly understood by another is not limited to cuisines. Many social and cultural nuances are lost in translation - business arrangements; educational systems; humor, love, marriage and death. It’s made apparent when we see the literal English used in these menus. Official attempts to provide a standardized alternative are equally limited. Fuchsia Dunlop explains how these are:

…a pale reflection of one of the world’s most marvellous cuisines. Lyrical descriptive terms - like feicui (jadeite) for greenish foods, and guaiwei (strange-flavour, used for an intriguing combination of tastes) have been lost in the translation, and mapo doufu has severed its connection with the lovable pockmarked old dame of Chengdu. As Raymond Zhou wrote in the China Daily, this standardised translation is “a double-edged sword. It removes the ambiguity and unintended humour . . . But it takes away the fun and the rich connotation too. It turns a menu into the equivalent of plain rice, which has the necessary nutrients but is devoid of flavour”.

As with food, so with business. Corporate communications either lose their flavor or suffer unintended mis-translations in the journey from West to East and back. This is all part of the rich tapestry of human life. Give me an exploding cowboy bone any day over the stark accuracy of the standard translation.

Wimbledon tennis has concluded for another year, the Tour de France is rolling through the French countryside, the boys of summer are playing on baseball diamonds and the world awaits the start of the Olympics in a few weeks. Sport is filling the airwaves and, as I’ve noted before, is a common topic in business circles.

The proclivity for senior executives to attribute their success in business to lessons learned as a team sports player is discussed by Lucy Kellaway in Monday’s Financial Times.

Kellaway reports that a recent survey of British business leaders found that

Nearly half of the chief executives of the biggest British companies have won awards for their sporting prowess - twice as many as have any academic trophies. Most of them were captain of football or rugby at school or at college and quite a few went on to play for their county.

Executives credit the teamwork learned on the playing field for later business success.

Kellaway is not convinced. In her view, sports encourage delusions of grandeur, a stifling conformity and an inability to communicate clearly:

Sportsmen and CEOs also both make a hash of the Queen’s English. Each generates its own jargon and then feels compelled to borrow the jargon of the other. Sport is responsible for some of the most grating phrases in business, including ballparks, level playing fields, stepping up to the plate, bench strength, getting to first base, raising the bar and playing hardball. Footballers, meanwhile, are starting to talk like management consultants: David Beckham now says “going forward” every time he opens his mouth.

Finally, she points to the problems women have getting ahead in the business-world being exacerbated by the jock culture of boardrooms dominated by the ethos of the locker room.

I’m not a sports fan myself. And look, I’m not a CEO. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The saving grace for businessmen using sporting cliches is that they are marginally less offensive than military ones. Despite the fact that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

Sci-Fi legend Bruce Sterling (Heavy Weather, The Difference Engine, Distraction and other great novels) is one of the cyberpunk gang of authors who have seen through the more pollyanna views of ‘cool new technology’ to warn that innovation can potentially create disruptions in everything from the climate system to the social system.

I’ve been a fan of his since coming across Heavy Weather in the mid-1990’s. Climate change was not cool back then. We’re so much older than that now and the planet is so much warmer.

I was delighted, and honored, when I ran into him earlier today at the FiRE Conference in San Diego and he agreed to be interviewed for Professionally Speaking.

I really had no idea what he’d talk about. The last thing I expected was a discussion on the Mafiosi-like features of the European Union bureaucracy in Brussels. In fact he’s planning to set his next book in Europe. To hear him explain why he finds modern “post-national” Europe so fascinating, and why he predicts the view from across the Atlantic will soon “return to the slightly paternalistic attitude of American’s as poorly educated hay-seeds,” click on the podcast icon below.

 

 Interview: Bruce Sterling [9:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve noted before that there are precious few women engineers in most American companies. This, despite women being in a majority on campuses, as they beat out their male counterparts in the increasingly competitive college admissions process. Indeed, women are substantially represented on the lower rungs of the career ladder in technical and engineering departments.

But the story changes as they reach their mid- to late-thirties. Over half of all women voluntarily quit their jobs. What gives?

Monday’s Financial Times has a detailed analysis by Columbia University economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett who identifies five factors forcing out female engineers:

1. Many are turned off by male behavior. A reported 63% of women in science and engineering experience sexual harassment.

2. Women feel isolated.

3. Many lack role models and no-one to mentor their career progression.

4. They prefer not to embrace risk-taking career gambles.

5. Finally, they are caught between a rock and hard place when it comes to maintaining 70+ hour work weeks AND managing child and elder care.

Hewlett offers some sound advice for companies who wish to maintain their pool of qualified female engineers and scientists past their 30’s. Failure to do so, she points out, is a national issue:

“In the US alone, reducing female attrition by one-quarter would add 220,000 qualified people to the science, engineering and technology labour pool.”

Someone in the news here at HP Labs is April Slayden Mitchell, who works on video for mobile devices.

April is profiled on a wonderfully quirky blog called DollyMix (Thought Candy to stimulate your ladybrains) which kicks off a series of interviews with “geek girls” by asking her why there are so few women in the technology industry. She offers sound advice to girls still in school who are thinking of a career in science or engineering:

Take as many computer classes as you can and don’t be afraid to ask questions and get involved – even if you are one of the only girls. Also, while you are taking those engineering and math classes, focus on your writing and oral presentation skills as well. The ability to communicate clearly with others through both spoken and written word can only benefit your career.

Geeks with superior communication skills will always have an unfair advantage over their more insular colleagues, men or women.

In one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read in a long time, Simon Kupar’s analysis in the Weekend FT links the relative popularity of different sports to successive waves of globalization.

Soccer and cricket’s appeal around the globe originated in “Sport’s first wave of globalisation … in the late-19th century, when British sailors, merchants and missionaries spread British games like viruses.”

This was followed by “a century of stability. The Indians played cricket, the US resisted soccer, and Melbourne favoured Australian Rules football, which barely existed even in other Australian cities.”

The Pitch is Flat

The second wave of “sporting globalisation” in the 1990’s with cable TV broadcasting Man United to China, India the US and Japan. It’s a global world and, to paraphrase Friedman, the pitch is flat.

Soccer has the broadest global appeal.

The lack of goals, lampooned by late-nite TV comics in the USA, is part of its appeal. One astounding piece of information which Kuper unearthed concerns an unlikely fan of the Gunners:

Fans wait so long for a goal that when one comes, it prompts an unloading of joy found in no other sport. Osama bin Laden, who watched Arsenal several times in London in 1994, remarked that he had never seen such passion as among soccer fans.

The universal appeal of soccer was vividly obvious during a 2004 family vacation in Thailand and Laos. My 11-years-old son wore a Man United shirt and got high-fives from tut-tut drivers in Bangkok. Each evening in the streets of Luang Prabang he played in a pick-up game with the local kids, reveling in the shared language of soccer:

Cricket, while not as universally popular, has taken root in those areas of the world influenced by the British Empire: India, the West Indies and Australia.

Both sports spread on the backs of the British Empire, and have outlived the decline of that institution.

The Gridiron

So what of the sporting influence of today’s Imperial power, America? Is there a spread of States-side sports around the planet which follows the traders and the troops?

No.

It’s not through want to trying. As John Cleese remarks, one difference between American and Britain, is that unlike the Baseball World Series, when we host a World Cup, we invite other nations to play. (The other difference, noted at the time of the Monica Lewinsky affair, was that when you meet our Head of State, you only have to go down on one knee…taa-boom!)

Estimates are that of the 93m SuperBowl fans in 2005, just 3m were outside North America; that year the World Series attracted 21m viewers in North America and less than 1m elsewhere; the last game of the NBA finals, also less than 1m.

Contrast this to 100m Chinese who stay up late to watch two Chinese players in an Everton vs. Man City game.

Why American sports don’t travel well

Kuper’s article lists a host reasons:

• Players of over 70 nationalities compete in the UK Premiership leagues vs. almost no foreign players in the NFL
• More American kids under 12 play soccer than baseball, American football and ice hockey combined
• American sports arrived late to the party - soccer was well-established
• American football is infernally complicated “as confusing to most non-Americans as cricket is to Americans.”
• Broader cultural artifacts which travel well are often British, not American. The six bestselling novels of the past 100 years are all British: four Harry Potters; one Agatha Christie and one Tolkien (Middle Earth holds more appeal than Middle America).

Yankees Go Home!

Most telling, from an economic and political standpoint, is the fundamental difference between the British Imperialists of the 19th Century and the current neo-con ones. In a passage worth quoting at length, Kuper nails the reason for America’s lack of moral standing among many in the world today. These are issues that any American executive speaking overseas would be well to be cognizant of and tailor their message accordingly (not least by avoiding clichéd sports analogies common in America board rooms, such as “quaterbacking a deal” or “gameplan”):

The difference between British and American empires was summed up by an American lawyer who worked for the British government in Baghdad. He said that when American officials wanted an Iraqi to do something, they would generally call him into the Green Zone and, if necessary, ”bawl him out”. Sometimes this worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But the Americans only summoned Iraqis when something needed fixing, the lawyer said. By contrast, British officials were always inviting Iraqis in, for parties or just for chats, even when there was nothing particular to discuss. This is how the British used to rule their empire: by making long-term allies.

”European imperialists spent large parts of their lives immersed in the cultures of the countries they had colonised,” explains John Gray, professor at the London School of Economics, ”learning the languages and often forging enduring alliances with local rulers. As well as subjugating and exploiting their colonies, they also ruled and lived in them.”

Few Americans today do, notes Gray. The US does not govern any countries. Under the British empire, Nelson Mandela learned British sports at school, but in the American empire, that sort of thing scarcely happens. In fact, American troops in Afghanistan have been reduced to wooing the natives by handing out soccer balls. (The exercise failed: Allah’s name was found to be printed on a ball, blasphemous on an object designed for kicking.)

There’s much more in Simon Kuper’s article, such as an observation that the two most famous archetypes of the Englishman abroad are the gentleman and the hooligan.

Great stuff, well worth downloading and reading in full.

Meanwhile, Go Patriots (of all nationalities…)

Can humor cross frontiers? Do Americans laugh at the same thing that tickles the English funny bone? Would German humor amuse the French, if only as an oxymoron?

I clearly recall when I came to the USA for the first time in the mid-1970’s being confounded by the “humor” of Don Rickles and Johnny Carson. I did not find them at all funny. The English and Americans seemed worlds apart when it came to what each culture found amusing.

Boy, was I wrong.

If I had been asked to say which brand of English humor was the least likely to appeal to American sensibilities, I would have guessed Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I still find Rickles and Carson deadly dull. But Python is a global hit. So what’s going on?

A new series at the London Southbank Center, Laughing in a Foreign Language, explores the cultural relativity of humor in a global age, asking

if humour can only be appreciated by people with similar cultural, political or historical backgrounds and memories, or whether laughter can act as a catalyst for understanding what you are not familiar with.

The event showcases over 70 works including videos, photographs, and interactive installation, investigating the whole spectrum of humor, from jokes, gags and slapstick to irony, wit and satire, as well as questioning what it means to share a sense of humor and what it is that makes an individual laugh.

I caught a discussion of the event on a BBC podcast of the Today program. A couple of comedians I’d never heard of debated the point. It was claimed that whereas mainstream humor was often culturally specific, there is a significant alternative niche which transcends borders. As Python, and later, Seinfeld, showed, the globally hip recognize each other’s jokes.

Laugh and world laughs with you. Xenophobe’s, meanwhile, cry alone.

That was then…this is now

The founders of Fairchild Semiconductor (est.1957) in the company’s production area. Back row, left to right: Victor Grinich, Gordon Moore, Julius Blank, and Eugene Kleiner. Middle: Jean Hoerni. Front: Jay Last and C. Sheldon Roberts. Facing the group: Bob Noyce.

This photo shows the “Traitorous Eight” who left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor — using $3,500 of their own money they developed a method of mass-producing silicon which changed the world.

However, the founders did not stick around. Although most breadwinners in the 50’s looked for employment for life (my Dad worked for Rolls-Royce his whole career) these guys practiced the serial monogamy that was typical of executive life in the Valley from the get-go. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, as well as several others, got the “eleven year itch” and left to form Intel in 1968.

There are a number of interesting things about the photo. Firstly, they are all white males, wearing ties and pressed shirts. Their hair is short. They are spookily conformist in their cult-like attention to Mr. Noyce. OK, so it was the 1950’s. McCarthyism ruled. But consider by way of contrast this photo from the 1940’s of Dave Packard with a couple of HP staff, notice that he’s seated alongside, not in front of them. And, hey! One guy has a check shirt on.

Both of these photo’s show that, as the world has changed, so has leadership style in Silicon Valley.

It’s not just a matter of personal grooming. The tech industry innovates relentlessly. Product life-cycles are shorter than ever. As with machines, so with people. Broader social changes have obviously taken place alongside the technology.

Look at the Fairchild photo again. There were no women in the executive team at Fairchild in 1950’s California. Today, 40% of HP’s top executive committee are women. Two of HP’s top managers are foreign-born. In fact, nearly 40% of all the current residents of Silicon Valley were born outside the USA. Things were different back then. Many of today’s successful high-tech companies were started by immigrant entrepreneurs. A number of these successes are profiled in a wonderful new book They Made It! by Angelika Blendstrup.

Back in the 50’s it appears from the photo that the women who were employed at Fairchild Semiconductor were dutifully engaged in mind-numbing assembly work. Today, there are almost no assembly plants left in the Valley. Manufacturing is sourced off-shore in Asia, where legions of women from the rural hinterlands labor at the same jobs their enfranchised sisters used work at in California sixty years previously.

At least they don’t have managers perched at their elbows while they continue with relentless heads-down production. The Fairchild photo begs the question “What defines ‘work’”? It looks as if the women are ‘working’ more than the men, but their rewards would argue otherwise.

A time of transition

Bob Noyce was instrumental in putting the “Silicon” in Silicon Valley. He inspired legions of colleagues at Fairchild and later Intel (although there are reports he and Andy Grove did not get on well.) Here’s a moment in history where he mentored the young Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer:

Management and leadership style in the Valley has moved on. Some argue the HP Way is a thing of the past. Companies today are more a loose network of employees, contractors and self-branded individuals. Tempus fugit.

The conformity of the 1950s made for a particular leadership style (and makes the courage of Hewlett & Packard in bucking the trend more astonishing.) It was probably easier back then to issue edicts that were obeyed. Today’s leaders swim in different waters.

How do leaders today inspire and motivate? Let me know if you have pertinent examples.

Writing in the UK Guardian, speechwriter Philip Collins argues that there is a lack of “grand causes” in developed nations to match those which formed the backdrop to the oratory of Churchill, King, Havel and Mandela. A drab political landscape gives rise to dull speeches. The lack of commonly accepted touchstones such as the Bible or Dickens limits the ability of British politicians to match the assumptions of their audience to the language of their speeches.

Collins’s challenge to speechwriters is to not let this become an insurmountable obstacle:

But, for all that, it is still possible to write well rather than badly. Some things are axiomatic no matter what the countervailing forces: strive to be clear, avoid anything you suspect of being a cliché. Don’t use the phrases community, fast-changing world, agenda, stakeholders, hard-working families, unless you really do have a gun to your head. Remember that you have to answer why they should care before you regale them with a list of your achievements. Don’t write for yourself and people like you; they already agree. Don’t caricature the opposing view: the audience can tell.

Solid advice.

And as the wheel of life turns, coming crises will undoubtedly become grist for the mill for stirring speeches of the near future. All change!

I’m sitting here in Nantwich Library with my Mum & Dad. Showing my Dad how to write a blog entry which will be published on the Internet for anyone in the world to read.

So this is the message I have composed on Friday November 2, 2007. This weekend it is Bonfire Night in England when everyone celebrates Guy Fawkes trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament.