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 Eightâ€? 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.

As I’ve confessed on this blog before, my own transition from the UK to the USA included a number of years as an illegal immigrant. I’ve never made this a central aspect of my professional identity, rather treating it as something along the lines of Bill Clinton’s ‘I didn’t inhale’ approach to some of his youthful indiscretions. But I did what I did. Amnesty in 1987 took care of my legal status, and I’m now a naturalized citizen.

In a fascinating article in today’s Financial Times, legal counsel Patti Waldmeir writes about the “massive absurdity” that the current laws immigration reform proposals are attempting to deal with – on the one hand US companies employ millions of illegal workers (ya can’t get no stinkin’ welfare if ya ain’t legal!) and the US government pretends it does not notice.

This is about to change. The Bush administration wants to end the charade. US employers will be asked to match 8 million workers with “woefully inaccurate Social Security databases” and be held liable if the numbers don’t match. Corporate America says the rules will cost $100m to implement.

Waldmeir concludes that the proposed rules are “an absurd new hindrance to the American dream” and “the US economy will continue to stand or fall by the hard work of its illegal immigrants”.

Hear hear.

Of all the ‘elephants in the room’ in the USA, the underclass of the undocumented workers and the crucial services they provide is one of the more obvious. Together with gays in the military; social security entitlements; a nuclear arsenal which can destroy all life on Earth many times over; 40m citizens with no health insurance and the bloated size of many automobiles and the bottoms which sit therein. All issues which define an age, but sit unexamined as part of the taken-for-granted world we inhabit. Not discussed in polite society and often too politically ‘hot’ for serious debate. Yet future generations may wonder “What were they thinking?”

Well, what do you think?

Jackie Wullschlager’s review of British Victorian artist John Everett Millais in the Weekend Financial Times brought me face-to-face with one of the essential elements of my heritage: the suppressed yearnings of the patriarchs of the UK at the height of their power for virginal innocence.

On the one hand Industrial Britain was all about iron & steel, grit & determination, mad dogs in the noon-day sun and gunboat diplomacy. The British in the 19th Century imposed their will across continents. They were men of action whose deeds brought them prosperity and the certainty that God was an Englishman.

Yet, as Wullschlager comments, Millais’s paintings illustrate how the Victorian sensibility was “obsessed with preindustrial innocence” which found expression, above all, in an infantilism which art celebrated by “arresting childhood on canvas.”

We’re talking little girls; sultry portraits of sweet things “whose ruby lips, longing gaze and flowing burnished hair make today’s teen models look chiselled and chaste by comparison.” Yearning virgins with a “subterranean sexual charge”.

But what possible relevance can the repressed sexuality of an imperial power obsessed with foreign adventures and fraught with fundamentalist alarm about moral codes have today?

I can’t possibly imagine. Can you?

One of the more interesting things about my job at Hewlett-Packard is meeting customers in the Executive Briefing Center. Sales teams from around the world bring customers to HP’s headquarters for a variety of reasons – to close a deal, discuss the latest technology with engineers or develop relationships with key executives.

Many of the meetings kick-off with a company overview and I’m one of a number of HP employees called on to give the the ‘HP Today’ presentation.

Since many customers come from across the country and around the world this can often be as much an update on Silicon Valley as it is specifically about HP.

In the last couple of months I’ve spoken to Catholic priests from Korea; MBA students from China; Japanese bankers; spies from Sweden (OK, “signals intelligence operatives” from Sweden) and bureaucrats from Britain.

I’m struck by the fact that for many visitors to Hewlett-Packard the experience of seeing how business is done in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area must be as strange as, say, a trip to Haight-Ashbury was for Midwesterners in the Summer of Love, 40 years ago.

The visiting delegations are homogeneous: Chinese engineers come from China; Koreans come from Korea; middle-aged Caucasian males come from IT departments across the USA.

They fly in to one of the most ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan, mongrel areas on earth.

Silicon Valley’s competitive edge is that it is a unique habitat for innovation and entrepreneurship. It all started with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tinkering in their garage in 1939 and the pace of change has been relentless ever since.

Unlike many regions, companies in Silicon Valley have access to a high quality and mobile workforce comprised of talented people from around the world. No one racial group is in a majority. This ethnic diversity fosters an equality of opportunity startling even by American standards — 39% of all residents were born in a foreign country. In contrast to the more rigid social hierarchies of Europe, the Valley operates a results oriented meritocracy where talent and ability are king. The region’s merit-based system of rewards encourages the best and brightest to knock themselves out in hopes of being part of the next new, new thing.

What is remarkable about the Valley is the lack of an identifiable landmark. Unlike instantly recognizable symbols such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris; Big Ben in London; Times Square in New York or the Ginza district in Tokyo, there’s no building or street which symbolizes the place. As Po Bronson remarks in his amusing book The Nudist on the Late Shift, it’s not the buildings or physical surroundings which distinguish Silicon Valley, it’s the people. And they are sometimes as wacky as the hippies in the Haight in 1968. There really was a programmer in one Silicon Valley company who chose to work the night shift so he could sit at his computer au natural.

Walk the corridors HP, or any company in the Valley, and you’ll hear as many accents from Asia, Europe and Latin America as you will from the United States. It’s something the visitors to the region would do well to notice. For it’s an undeniable fact that immigrants to the area are responsible for much of the wealth. Sun Microsystems was started by a German engineer getting together with an Indian businessman; Google billionaire Sergey Brin came from Russia, albeit at the age of six; dozens of other Silicon Valley companies were founded by Indian and Chinese immigrants.

Pascal Zachary argues persuasively that diversity defines the health and wealth of nations in today’s world. What he calls ‘mongrel’ mixes of people fare better than regions other regions, such as “the great monocultures of Germany and Japan.” Whereas Germany does have immigrants, they are mostly kept outside the mainstream, as guestworkers. The Japanese remain uneasy with the idea of absorbing outsiders into the mainstream.

There’s an amusing story when, back in the Summer of Love, Grey Line (aptly named!) started bringing mid-western tourists through the Haight to gawp at the hippies, the flower children held up mirrors to the bus windows. The mirrors reflected back upon the tourists the wonder, shock or fear they experienced when they saw the free thinkin’, free lovin’ tripped-out voyagers of the new culture (some of whom, like Cap’n Crunch, inspired Jobs and Wozniak; others like Stewart Brand were early into the web.)

It may be that, by visiting Silicon Valley, businesspeople from elsewhere have a mirror held up to their own culture.

A new book, The Great Speeches of Modern India, catalogs religious, economic and political speeches of the 19th and 20th Century. The author, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, presents a view of modern Indian history through the speeches of her leaders.

I have not been able to locate a convenient source for the book, but this review contains some fascinating commentary. He contrasts speeches by world leaders such as Churchill, Gandhi and Nehru, who wrote their own content, with today’s reliance on speech writers ‘ghosting’ the speech which began with JFK and Ted Sorensen. Modern politicians, he claims “don’t feel confident enough to handle the language in the succinct way a speech-writer can.”

Mukherjee observes the distinction between great speakers and great speeches:

Great speakers do not always make great speeches. The yardstick for judging the latter is whether the words retain their power with the passing of time. Nehru was not a great orator in the traditional sense of the term, his voice was not loud and words did not come in a torrent as they do with great orators, he did not pause for effect but he made many memorable speeches and coined phrases that have become part of the nation’s vocabulary.

Finally, he refers to the stunning address given by Vivekananda at the Chicago World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. The 7,000 delegates went into rapture and responded with a standing ovation that lasted for more than three minutes:

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. l thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions; and I thank you in the name of the millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.

Since India is one of the great sources of speeches given in the English language, this book, when it more widely available, will be a valuable addition to any speakers’ library.

In the final hours of the 2007 NSA Conference I sought out the person responsible for the Agenda – Ian Percy, CSP, CPAE.

This conference has been seen by more than a few as a radical departure from past NSA Conferences. Heated discussions took place in the hallways over everything from the agnostic tone of Randy Gage’s speech on Prosperity Consciousness to the tone of the five minute “Om” chant, and, as was humorously observed, the glazed-over tones of the NSA Youth singing in praise of Afghanistan’s largest cash-crop, the tall Poppy.

So I asked Ian: What have people been saying to you about this year’s conference?

To hear what he says, you know what you need to do. That’s right – click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:12 — 752.0KB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS