Only slightly bent

Most people have probably heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one of the cornerstones of motivational theory. While rightly critized at times, the model does serve to demonstrate at least one thing: even small disruptions on the lowest levels (like physiological) serve to bring our target very efficiently, even if only temporarily, back down from the “higher” needs.

An example: if you get a splitting headache, you’re unlikely to appreciate any activities involved in fulfilling your self-actualization needs. Remarkably fast, your #1 concern becomes that of getting rid of the headache. And it doesn’t even need to be a headache – a splinter of wood in your finger or even a rock in your shoe suddenly makes the physical needs highly pertinent, regardless of what self-fulfilling higher level need you are fulfilling when the ailment strikes you. Moreover, it doesn’t need to be an abnormal event – hunger or thirst accomplish the same thing.

I wonder if anyone’s ever done an expirement where for a week people could not have any lunch or snacks during the working day. And then measure the effects of that on productivity. That should prove that Maslow’s hierarchy works at least with regards to the lowest level. If for some reason the effects aren’t clear, try denying bathroom breaks and the case will be closed

Of course, then we also have people who never climb up from the lowest level or two.. How to get them to aim their goals a little higher?

It’s often said that Finland is a rather undeveloped country what comes to customer service – and I’m the first to agree. At times, however, some good things happen and you get either outstanding service and/or excellent bang-for-buck ratio. Below are a few of these gems that I’ve recently been very satisfied with:

KakkuKeisari. These people make cakes. We recently had a sizeable party and instead of making everything ourselves, we decided to order some cakes from this company. And man was that the right decision – absolutely mouthwatering stuff and at very decent prices, too!

Wrong Noodle Bar – they are to be credited with bringing one of the first (after Subway) healthy fast-food places to Helsinki some years ago. Now situated only near the Kaisaniemi subway station, they serve excellent noodle-based dishes and other good stuff. Fast, affordable, tasty and healthy – what more can you hope for from a fast-food joint? Compared to the Hesburger that is next to this place — well, I would like to think there is no competition really.

Stockmann department stores and the Academic Book Store. Rarely lets you down in terms of selection and never lets you down in terms of service. Quite simply the best all-purpose department store in Finland. And the Academic book store across the street is probably the only real bookstore in Finland. Enough said.

Citymarket at the Sello shopping center in Leppävaara, Espoo. I used to think the grocery department (Herkku) in Stockmann cannot be beat in Finland and thus use it as a reference level for other places. Now I’m not so sure about its unequivocal #1 place any more – this particular CityMarket (of all places!) in Leppävaara has one great selection of fresh meats and fish. And shopping here on a Friday afternoon is a much less stressful experience than Stocka’s Herkku.

Cafe Esplanad in downtown Helsinki is one great cafe. The portions are very generous, the food and the sweet stuff (oh the sweet stuff..) is excellent. They now also serve lunch. With the great food and very central location, the place is almost constantly packed – it’s no wonder that they’re looking to expand again, this time to the basement.

My wife’s always telling me how we should eat more salads. A good idea, but how to make a good salad? There are many steps, but for Caesar salad, good croutons are necessary for a perfect experience. And to get good croutons, you have to make them yourself. So here’s how.

Ingredients you’ll need

• good-quality, fresh french bread
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1/2 a teaspoon of salt
• one teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper
• dried oregano or some herbal mix (1/2 a teaspoon or so)
• two garlic cloves

How to go about it

0. Preheat the oven. Preheat the oven to about 200-225 C. Cover a pan with a baking sheet.

1. Shape the bread. Cut the bread into approximately 1.5cm x 1.5cm cube-shaped pieces (all of the bread; no need to avoid pieces with crust) until you have some 8dl of them.

2. Make the butter mixture. Slice the garlic cloves lengthwise once (no smaller!). In a saucepan, combine the butter, garlic cloves, olive oil, the herbal mix and the salt & pepper. Heat until melted. Remove from heat, discard the garlic and let cool for 5-10 minutes.

3. Toss the croutons. You can’t just pour the butter mixture over the croutons, just like you can’t pour dressing over a Caesar salad. Instead, you “toss” it. Place the sauce at the bottom of a bowl, adding the croutons on top. Then manually lift the croutons at the bottom to the top (manually as in do it with your hands). Repeat until all sauce has been evenly absorbed by the croutons.

4. Bake the croutons. Spread the croutons evenly over a baking sheet and bake for about 10-15 minutes at 225C until the croutons are golden-colored and crisp on the outside. Shake once or twice during baking.

And there you have them! I’m not really sure how long they’ll keep as they’re best used immediately after cooling down, but I would think a few days is fine.

I finished another book handling one of my favorite subjects, culture: Managing Cultural Differences: Strategies for Competitive Advantage by Lisa Hoecklin. The book is part of a series by the EIU – Economist Intelligence Unit and being published in 1995 it is not exactly brand new. One would think research on this area would’ve progressed by leaps and bounds since, but surprisingly no – most of what is in this book is still very relevant today. It’s interesting to note that the book is not about managing culture as such, but managing or coping with the cultural differences – an important distinction.

The book basically reviews the accepted theories and “best practises” in the field, albeit at a rather high level. Being less than 160 pages long, it nevertheless manages to introduce a lot of the classic results by people like Hofstede and Adler in a concise manner. What I found very nice is the use of a multiple case studies, mainly positive but also some negative examples. Also, the book attempts (and, to some extent, succeeds) to take a somewhat hands-on approach to the cultural issues and gives the often-lacking practical advise on how to tackle various issues. Of course, given the small size, there is limited amount of room for this.

One interesting chapter is about advertising across cultures. Speaking of USA, it’s aptly stated that “No other culture is as keen to make rules for everyone to live by.” Further, quoting in turn Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars, it is said:

The American ideal is of the Universal Product, reducible to parts (analysis) and infinitely replicable.
…
No wonder, then, that the United States excelled early at mass manufacture and mass marketing. And should we be surprised that as markets became more customized, more fragmented, more oriented to unique requests, America’s difficulties have mounted?

Indeed, this sounds right when one thinks of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. But what occurred to me is that the drive for a universal product apparently doesn’t reach everywhere – just look at what kind of chaos ensued in the mobile communications business with no set standards. Or then it could be the result of two interacting qualities gone wrong – extreme competition and drive for universality. Anyhow, the above quote reminds me of another point that the book makes – that markets are not becoming “globalized” in general. Only the very top-end and the very low-end markets can be thought of becoming more global, but the masses are not. Perhaps even the opposite is true; cultural differences may become more entrenched with advancing globalization.

Too many topics are discussed in the book to provide an overview here; what I did like is the soft, “we may not know best”-attitude. Indeed, some essential points are readily acknowledged and noted:

• Every culture tends to form stereotypes of other cultures, usually based on exaggerated forms of behaviour.
• However objective or uniform we try to make organizations, they will not have the same meaning for individuals in different cultures.
• It is possible to see that your own solutions may not be the only, the best or the most appropriate for the task at hand.
• Most models of the organization and many of the fundamental principles of management studies [..] were developed in the USA [..] and involve very particular assumptions about science, technology, human behaviour and research.

Talking of Trompenaars and Hofstede, someting very important is also spelled out:

It should not escape your notice that the two most prominent presenters of models of national culture in the past generations have both been Dutch and have both used bipolar dimensions as a means of communicating their models, each based upon a questionnaire research.

Despite being a decade old, I still enjoyed the book. When reading business success cases, it’s always funny to see how a company used as a role model no more than a few years ago is now doing very poorly. This book is no exception, which just goes to show that doing one or two things well – even if one of them is managing cultural aspects well – isn’t enough. But there’s plenty of evidence that cultural knowledge and appropriate behaviour – that is, managing cultural differences – is an increasingly critical success factor.

Overall, as far as business books come, I’ll give this 4 out of 5 points.

I’ve seen a few movies lately, but as none of them really stuck to mind as particularly outstanding or unforgettable I thought I’d collect the latest bunch here and give a mini-review of each. There have actually been more than this, but the rest were so ordinary that maybe they’re better off like this – forgotten.

Sideways is a story about two very different friends who head for the vineyards of sunny California for a week before the other guy’s wedding. In a weird way, this movie has some Finnish qualities in it. You may learn a lot about wine and you’ll certainly want to go on a wine-tasting tour yourself, but I was a little bothered by the lead characters. Basically, both are weird. The other happily finds what you could call life during the movie, but the other is just a stupid cheating liar who doesn’t really deserve the good things that do happen to him. Good acting, some juicy moments and overall a nice movie, but not quite as good as I had expected based on several reviews. I’ll give this one 3.5 out of 5.

Closer was an interesting look into the somewhat intertwined lives of two couples. While the plot is not entirely believable at all junctions, the characters are at least somewhat realistic in their, shall we say shortages. I got a little bit of a mixed feeling of the movie overall, however – there were elements of drama, comedy and romance, but not enough to really call it any of those. Goes to the “average+” category of 3+ out of 5.

What a Girl Wants was the kind of movie I would assume critics would bash. Entirely predictable with no plot twists to speak of, I still liked it. It was the kind of feel-good family comedy that there are too few of these days. Basically just good, clean fun. Very nice. Keeping in mind what it is and what it’s not, I’ll rate this 4 out of 5.

The Prince and Me was another romantic comedy that likely will not please the critics. Not quite as good as the above (What a Girl Wants) IMO, but still quite entertaining in its own class. I was somewhat bothered by “Eddie’s” extremely sudden change of behaviour in the beginning of the movie and the chemistry between the main characters wasn’t always evident, but those are somewhat minor details. Had some potential for a better flick, but was okay as it was. Perhaps 3 out of 5

The amount of crap (tangible and intangible) in the world is really amazing. We have a whole range of nice communication systems in the form of radio, television, phone, the Internet, a whole bunch of wireless things and so on, and what are all the mediums filled with? Lousy television shows, spam of this and that and other things that are not exactly signs of an intelligent species.

Back in the “good old days” of the Internet in early 1990’s, there was no problem with spam. There were no problems with the signal-to-noise ratio of the Usenet, IRC or most of the other services. In the interests of avoiding too much nostalgy, sure, some nice services like Google Maps were lacking but at least one didn’t have to put up with too much noise. Then more or less suddenly, “everyone” was online – and the S/N ratio started plummeting. IRC, for one, is basically useless these days with huge hordes of ignorant, arrogant and stupid people roaming about who have never heard of such things as online etiquette or manners. Same problem with Usenet. Same problem with… oh, forget it.

But the phenomenon goes beyond the Internet. Like I stated in the title, other things have a poor S/N ratio these days also (of course, a valid question that defies answering is whether things really were that much better before?). Anyhow, the situation presents us with one major problem and two questions. The problem is that locating the good-quality information is more and more difficult since it’s a much bigger haystack. Search engines such as Google certainly help us in locating information, but they have next to no information on what the quality of a particular piece of it is. So one must go through the time-consuming process of sifting through a huge pile of (re)sources to find the relevant gold nuggets that are worth keeping an eye on. While some good tools in the form of RSS etc have been developed to aid parts of this process, you will still inevitably miss something important from time to time.

The first of the two questions relates to keeping the idiots off all the mediums. I wish we had some kind of an infrastructure in place where only people who pass some kind of general sanity-test can contribute anything online. The second question is more philosophical in nature and one that I will wrap this post up with: what is it about humans that causes most mediums we touch (or, indeed, create) to eventually degrade into something with terrible S/N ratios?

Yeah yeah, I know. Therefore, please skip all the “but aren’t you adding to the problem?”- funny stuff and get lost

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