New and shiny buildings are the ones that attract most of the attention in Hong Kong. But older buildings are also remarkable. The new towns in the Hong Kong New Territories (such as Fo Tan and Sha Tin) and some residential lots in Hong Kong Island and Kowloon are worthwhile a visit. They are usually from the 70s and look all more or less the same: apartment towers, multiple levels of public spaces for pedestrians, a park and a playground, a shopping mall, parking and roads at the ground level. I have seen similar examples in Western cities but most of them become urbanistic nightmares. The model seems to work much better here, maybe because of the habits of its people.

Shopping in Tai Po

Very early in the morning, the parks get invaded by old people practicing their tai chi and sometimes playing music. Then you see students getting to schools and parents to their offices. Later in the day, the public spaces get used by a mix of people: elderly, mothers living at home, workers getting a break, teenagers. In the evening, people do sport in the parks, play football, jog or simply chat. The shopping malls attract the younger crowd, not necessary to shop, also to hang around or have an afternoon snack with their friends. The towns and residential lots are always lively and feel very safe. I’m sure they also have their urbanistic problems and that life is far from being perfect here. Maybe the liveliness in public spaces is nothing but a consequence of the very small flats that families can only afford here in Hong Kong. It remains that the social cohesion and the coexistence between generations really transform the space.

One of the many small gardens between apartment buildings

Playgrounds all look the same in Hong Kong, but are always very well maintained.

The community buildings feature typically a series of local facilities: kindergartens, dry cleaners, second hand shops and so forth.

Older generations seem to play an essential role in this equilibrium; they are the ones who have the most time and incentives to appropriate the public space. Far from being inactive people without any function in society, their everyday activities seem to help maintaining a neighbourhood that is useful to the whole community.  I wonder if there are others reasons why these residential lots and planned towns work somehow better than in other parts of the world.

Volunteers and employees from the Expo received some training and can say key sentences in English. English is manifestly new for them and the very young employees at the entrance of the Expo were quite shy when reciting the sentences. But they were very happy to help westerners. They did much more than simply following the instructions of their trainings. It was true hospitality. Great job guys!

The queues were the most playful and most instructive part. They look at first like a nightmare; some queues can be 4 hours long with a temperature above 30 degrees. Chinese people don’t respect queues; they push constantly one another and try to get in front of you. But as unbelievable as it seems, the system works. You need to fight for your position every minute, every turn in the line is a battlefield, and you should not show any pity for old women who are by the way the worst pushers. If you follow these instructions, you will stay at a fair position in the queue. Everyone does the same. What I realised though is that the mood is playful; people are excited until the end of the queue, which would not be the case in a disciplined queue of westerners. People speak a lot and fighting for your position helps you not being bored in the very long queues. They were some fights between women at some occasions, but the crowd was very quick at separating them and laughing at them. The limit between playfulness and angriness was very subtle but strongly reinforced by the crowd. Not that I would like to be in such a queue if there was a fire or an accident, but in normal conditions, it works pretty well and is the occasion to meet verbally, or at least physically Chinese people.

Chinese people were also very well informed on the most interesting pavilions. There was no improvisation here and everyone knew exactly where he wanted to go. The weapon of mass destruction however was the fake passport that people could buy on the site. It became for most visitors the main objective of the Expo: collect the stamps of all pavilions to get their passports complete. The only opportunity left for a quieter expo was late in the evening, between 7 and 10pm, when queues are getting smaller and faster, but not for all pavilions.

Overall, I had a good time and could still manage to see around 30 pavilions in 2 days.

Mozart: a talent detected in his early childhood

I attended few weeks ago a seminar organised by the Philosophy and Management association in Brussels. It was all about talent, and how the way artists work and manage their career can be a source of inspiration for talent management within business organisations. Pierre-Michel Menger, French philosopher and research director for the CNRS, presented some of his researches in the sociology of work and art. The expertise of Pierre-Michel Menger in both fields led him to very interesting observations.

He first discerned two types of work:

• the ‘labour’: an effort, constraint with a predictable outcome
• the work as a discovery of yourself, the masterpiece of your life. Success in this type of work is more a derivative, not a predefined goal. It is unpredictable.

The later work is influenced by philosophies from the 19th century emphasising the infinite depth of consciousness and the infinite possibilities opened to us. Because of it’s unpredictability, it is a type of work that involves a lot of risks. The prestige and satisfaction you get from the realisation of a masterpiece is immense, but the risk to fail is in equal proportions. Artists are facing this risk in a hyper competitive environment. Differences in revenues between artists is huge, the small number of successful artists take most of the resources, leaving a small portion of revenues to the vast majority. If you look at just the financial situation of an artist, choosing such a career might look like a bad evaluation of the risks. But it doesn’t take into account the non-monetary value of a potential huge gratification, a relative autonomy and the diversity of the tasks involved in the job.

What influences the likelihood to become a successful artist (at least in the narrow sense of social recognition and monetary compensation) is not clear. There is something about artists that cannot be measured, cannot be put in an equation. It is not enough to make studies, work hard and accumulate experiences. You need to have ‘talent’. The same applies to business. Sure, you can find people able to perform a task by looking at their past experiences and by using rational criteria. But how can you detect the collaborators who will go far beyond, surprise you and develop considerably within the company. How can you make sure to invest more in these people and less in the others? McKinsey invented a marketing term to describe the 10% of your employees who will bring the most to the company: ‘talents’. Talent management is controversial and relates to the many meanings of the word ‘talent’.  Pierre-Michel Menger proposes to define talents as people you cannot isolate using predefined criteria or reading their CV. It helps to stick to this definition and to not take into account all the other meanings and judgements that the word ‘talent’ implies. He argues that the only way to detect talents is to compare them between each others. This is why competitions and awards in the art world are so frequent. The jury don’t know themselves what they are looking for, and the outcome is unpredictable.  It is after comparing the contestants that they can see who has a little something more, a higher potential. This is also why I think you start to see more and more contests and game-like workshops in business (hack day for developers, unconferences, Dragon’s Den kind of internal events), to detect talents you could not screen using a formal HR equation.

I think that this approach raises many ethical dilemma.

• On one hand, I want people to judge me on rational criteria that I can understand and act on. It is a system that protects all of us against arbitrary decisions and favouritism. On the other hand, I also want to be judged for who I am and for my talents, independently of any predefined list of criteria.
• Whatever your boss says, it is reassuring to know that he doesn’t judge you but only your work and your performances. With the concept of ‘talent’, suddenly your boss wants to know what you do in your spare time and wants you to reveal yourself, so that he can detect the ‘talent’. It is a much more personal relation. It surely benefits some people, but not necessary everyone. The opposite leads to the same problem but the other way around. You might have a quality that you know could help your career, but an employer looking only at short term figures and performances might not realise it.
• Is it right to invest more in the 10% of ‘talents’ in your company instead of using that money to raise the general level of expertise of the team? To use an example from Pierre-Michel Menger, if a talented researcher wins an award for a paper he wrote, his reputation will get a boost which will convert probably to a higher salary. But the paper he wrote is most likely based on data that ‘average’ workers collected. Is is fair? On the other hand, if there is no incentive for researchers to excel and be noticed, people will stagnate and become demotivated.
• Even small differences between people of the same level in a specific field, like music composition, can generate disproportionate inequalities. If more is invested to a young ‘talent’ who is a little better than the other children of his class, he will quickly gain more experiences and have more chances to explore his talent. He will then have a reputation, which will encourage people who don’t have time or the knowledge in music composition to hire him instead of someone else, which will give him even more experience, and so on. The ‘talented’ person might truly be exceptional, but was it because of his initial tiny competitive advantage or because of the investment from the community? Does it make a difference? Maybe humans are like bees and need an arbitrary hierarchy for their society to work. (Simply accepting this image of the bees is way too sympathetic with established power though.)
• As it has been pointed during the workshop, talent belongs to the category of work that is unpredictable and can be asserted for sure only a posteriori. Is it legitimate to try detecting talents beforehand? This argument is interesting but theoretical.  Of course, people will always try to detect talents, it happens since the beginning of humanity. And even if it is an inexact science, it probably lead to better results for the community than not trying to support its future ‘talents’. Even if it is not always fair for people.

How to resolve the dilemma depends on your vision of society. If you believe that there is a real opportunity for people from all backgrounds to display their talents, then selecting talents by comparing people between each other on non measurable criteria is legitimate. If on the other hand, you perceive the world as being a constant exploitation of the masses by few people in power, every privilege not based on measurable merit is a potential discrimination. Both extremes are false, the world needs both talented artists and hard workers. I personally believe that the key to resolve the dilemma is to offer multiple ways to succeed, in many different ways, with the help of many different groups of people. Diversity lowers the probability of generating systematic discriminations and enables many understandings of what talent means.

If you are preparing an award or competition in your organisation, you need to understand why you the feel the need to do so. If it is at least partially to detect talents, I hope that the points above will help you design the process in accordance to your values and goals. Don’t simply replicate what has already been done, enable participants to show their talents from a difference angle, the winners might not be the ones you expected.

What is the role of corporations and consumer research in this relationship? Consumer research is culturally agnostic, it doesn’t defend anything else than the interests of its commissioners, that is their  financial return on investment, most often achieved by pleasing their customers. It is these customers who are arbitrating on cultural symbols and practices, not corporations that are merely playing with cultural meanings at their own risk. The book Ethnography for marketers (a guide to consumer immersion, by Hy Mariampolski) defines the techniques now widely applied in corporations to better understand their customers. Better the customers are understood, better the services they get, better are also the intangible benefits they get from brands and marketing campaigns (such as being able to identify with a brand, use it as a symbol of belonging to a group). But as I explained in a recent lecture about the heterotopia of Walt Disney World, the risk is that cultural assets valuable in the mediation of our reality, but less attractive for brands, could slowly fade away in the profit of less effective meaning systems, more in tune with consumerism and manufactured consumer lifestyles. By observing customers instead of people, customer researches are influencing our perception of existence. It is a little like quantum theory, you cannot observe something in culture without influencing it. The issue is not commerce and its consumer persona, but the lack of other narrative forces. Or maybe even worst, it is the incapacity to recognize the significance of other systems of meaning simultaneously at play in our lives.

In his book “Vinyl Leaves, Walt Disney World and America”, Stephen M. Fjellman analyses Disney World and how it incarnates a postmodern society based on consumerism. Here is a summary of his thoughts.

In the introduction, Mr. Fjellman makes a reference to the book “Brave New World” from Aldous Huxley. The book describes an utopian dictatorship of happiness. “A good way to make sure that people police themselves is to get them to believe essentially the same stories about what the world is and why the way it is is good, true and beautiful. The world needs to be described, and it needs to be justified by arguments about nature, philosophical principle, history, or the gods. People will find their place in such a world. They will learn what hopes they might reasonably hold for themselves.” The argument of Mr. Fjellman is that it is exactly what our society is trying to achieve, not necessary consciously, but as a matter of fact. His description of Disney World might seem harsh, but it doesn’t contain any anger – the author seems actually to be a fan of Disney World – it is just a realistic description from an anthropologist point of view, not trying to point out guilty corporations, but just stating the facts and how society works.

A Disney shop

Disney is a major corporation that has a vested interest in promoting a consumerist society. Disney World is not merely a collection of fantasies for children, it is actively advocating the utopia of happy consumerism.  “Our lives can only be well lived (or live at all) through the purchase of commodities. As the commodity form becomes a central part of culture, so culture becomes available for use in the interest of commodification, as a legitimation for the entire system. We must be taught that it is good, reasonable, just, and natural that the means necessary for life are available only through the market”.  In this context, here is how Disney world is defined: “Walt Disney World produces, packages and sells experiences and memories as commodities.” Visitors know that when going in Disney World, they get into a place where all their activities are controlled and conditioned (e.g. queues, soundtracks all over the parks, visual magnets like the Cinderella castle) . They know that their experiences and souvenirs will be manufactured and probably not so different from the ones of another visitor. But they still buy the package because they know they will get a very enjoyable experience.

Queues in the Epcot Test Track ride sponsored by GM

Stephen M. Fjellman notices the following:

• Rides are often experiences during which the visitors are inactive. The only way for visitors to do something, take part in the magic, is at the exit, when they land to the souvenir shops. What is purchased then is not only the souvenir, but the only mean for the visitor to take an active part in the magical experience.
• The sentence “If we can dream it, we can do it” from the EPCOT Future world is ambiguous. Who is the ‘we’? Mr. Fjellman argues that the first ‘we’ means us, but that the second one most probably means ‘corporations’. EPCOT is promoting the pursue of new technologies for human good (if not, goods), but even if we dream it, most of us will not build the new technologies, only the corporations having the ability to do so will. So, the message is actually to trust corporations and their technologies.
• Often at Disney World, rides about the future are actually about the past future: the future as it was imagined few decades ago (e.g. space mountain, Spaceship earth). This paradox is tolerated by the otherwise perfectionism of the Disney imagineers because it achieves one objective: provide reasonable credibility to the statement that corporate technology is good for humanity.  Real future technologies are too controversial, old ones are better suited.
• Animatronics are part of the Disney World experience since its creation. Why are they so important to Disney? The idea to imitate humans with robots could be seen as frightening. But again, the goal of Disney is to promote industrial consumerism. Many of its rides are sponsored by corporations such as GM, Exxon and Kraft. All are heavily involved in high technology. So, the human face of animatronics and their harmless appearance makes technology friendly and acceptable to consumers.
• The Disney movies and the Disney rides often alternate scaring or frightening scenes with cute and happy ones. Bruno Bettelheim made the point that this technique used in fairytales is useful for the kids education, it is a “symbolic presentation of difficult and dangerous psychosocial contradictions”. But the goal of Disney is not to educate kids, it is to make money.  Scaring children to then make them happier is a good way to sell more cinema tickets and merchandising .

Vinyl leaves from Animal Kingdom

How come these kind of messages are not consciously detected by visitors? According to the book, it is thanks to cognitive overload and decontextualization.

• Someone is constantly overloaded by stimuli in Disney World, “it is with the overriding of visitors’ capacities for making discriminations that Disney metathemes may take effect.”
• Disney World is a patchwork of enchanted medieval castles, colonial history, future technologies, Moroccan markets, zoos, characters from Disney cartoons, American presidents, rides sponsored by car manufacturers, Mt Everest, astronomy, dinosaurs and so on. It is the world summarized. But the trick is that if you remove an element from its context, it loses a lot of its meaning. “By pulling meanings out of their contexts and repackaging them in bounded informational packets, decontextualization makes it difficult for people to maintain a coherent understanding about how things work.” It is then easier to tell the Disney history: “Idealized United States as heaven, history is decoration. Colonialism was fun, the colonized cute (but a little stupid). How nice if they could all be like us – with kids, a dog, and GE appliances – in a world whose only problems are avoiding Captain Hook, the witch’s apple.”
• “The Disney strategy is to juxtapose the real and the fantastic (real birds mixed with fake sounds of birds), surrounding us with the mix until it becomes difficult to tell which is which.  A kind of euphoric disorientation is supposed to set in as we progressively accept the Disney definition of things. We are asked to submit to a wilful suspension of disbelieve in the ostensible interest of a complete entertainment experience.”

I personally love Disney world. I agree with the analysis of Mr. Fjellman, but after all, this is not so shocking for someone already leaving in such a consumerist society. What is much more worrying is the trend to build everything like Disney World: hotels, cities, even museums. The risk is to forget that Disney World is only one vision of an utopian society of happiness, a corporate one. Life is so much more than that.

Do you think this article is fair to Disney World? Would you like to defend the park against some of the claims made here? Or do you think the reality is even darker?