This is the other side of globalization: more and more cases of misunderstanding. However, it is not impossible to avoid them. All you need are a few keys that allow you to step into the other person's shoes. Here are ten such keys, covering some especially sensitive points met in the business world.
Following suit to the Guggenheim Museum, a number of Western cultural institutions have launched a series of spectacular offshoring operations, exporting their trademarks and their specific know-how. Playing somewhere between influence diplomacy and cultural marketing, museums and universities in the Western world are trying their luck in the new Paradises of the Middle East or Asia. What are the expected benefits and what are their strategies?
Further fueling the ongoing debate over the future of the news media and independent journalism, eBay founder and billionaire Pierre Omidyar last month committed $250 million to a news site co-founded by journalist and author Glenn Greenwald. Omidyar’s investment followed the announcement over the summer that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos had purchased The Washington Post, also a $250 million investment. The late Steve Jobs’s wife, Lauren Powell, and 29-year-old Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes are also pouring money into old and new media ventures. Could this new band of news media owners shape a technology-led business model that will be profitable and protect the integrity of impartial, ideology-free journalism? Ultimately the ball will rest with the consumer.
When was the last time you rented a DVD from a rental store or through some vending machine in your neighborhood? Faced with new consumption practices, the video industry is evolving rapidly. Business proposals, methods of payment and value chains must be reinvented. But how? The digital strategy deployed by Arte France Développement provides some pointers.
The emergence of a cognitive technology disrupts and rearranges the deliberative processes that govern the practices of a given community or society. Such a disruption can have an impact on the architecture of deliberation networks, on the organizations and individuals who participate in deliberations, or on the standards and conventions that structure them. Or it can have an impact on all at once. As for the current digital revolution, one can understand it better considering the previous great historical mutations, paying a special attention to the debates and criticism they have ignited in their day.
After the crucial passage from orality to writing, the invention of the printing press brought about an unprecedented reconfiguration of the circulation of information. The construction of scientific knowledge and political discussion was thereby disrupted, with a progressive expansion of reflection circles. Is the Internet but a new stage?
Construction is an age-old activity but the interest that architecture evokes -like the interest that other arts generate- is cyclic. Why? Today some reasons appear to be quite obvious: the growth of cities means increased construction, technological advances open up new possibilities, and the need for sustainable development calls for a drastic change in habits. All the ingredients are in place for an architectural creation. And this should be enough. But some countries, cities, and organizations still feel the need to express wealth, power, progress, or ambition through buildings. This desire does not ignore, at least in general, the functional aspect of construction. But it is no longer able to completely justify itself through this feature alone. Architecture becomes "a means of communication" and architects become "stars" like the great communicators. This article, a contemplation of forty years of private practice, does not judge this evolution. But it can help in understanding and eventually guiding it.
