UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

Text All You Want -- A report from TED WEEK #UCLAAndersonTED

(photo by Swati Desai)

(Welcome to the UCLA Anderson Blog's coverage of TED Week. Our guest blogger for TED Week is Swati Desai, who will be tracking the various TED talks as we live stream them and also taking notes on various panels. For more information on the TED Week schedule, please click here. 

Swati is a UCLA alum (Anderson, PhD, 1992 and Engineering, MS, 1984) and the link to her website is www.swatidesai.com. 

What follow are Desai's notes on Thursday's session with linguist John McWhorter and Ajit Narayanan, a visual grammar engine inventor.)

Text all you want, you may be becoming smarter!

Do you believe that texting represents the decline and fall of writing as we know it? Or do you get annoyed at such implications? Be cautious, the answer may give away your age! Do you know that as far back as 1871, the Harvard University president complained about “bad spellings” of young people? Complaining about the decline of good grammar seems to be the thing to do as you get older.

Columbia University Linguistics professor John McWhorter says not to worry about such complaints because all you are doing is really practicing a new language ... call it fingered speech!

This ever evolving fingered speech has its own connotations, lol. Wait. I don’t mean Laugh Out Loud. That was in the olden days. Now “lol” means a marker of empathy. "Slash" is this all relevant to Andersonians? “Slash” is just another way of saying “that makes me think”. So by learning to text “properly” you may be becoming bilingual/bidialectal. Isn’t that supposed to increase cognition? Just don’t forget to retain your mother tongue!

Slash

~~~

Would you like to invest in developing a new universal language making Google search more effective?

This language also can turn your iPad into a communicator for the speech-impaired.

The rate of diagnosed cases of autism is increasing at an alarming rate. Autistic people have trouble processing and translating abstract ideas into spoken language. Ajit Narayanan has come up with a set of rules that convert pictorial representation of key terms into a sentence with words arranged in the right way. He calls this set of rules “free speech” which is underneath his iPad software used to help autistic kids to form complex sentences. He claims that this is a universal language because it uses pictorial representation as the building blocks. Since our brains process information using images of this type, learning a new language language for initiating Google search and by using “free speech” would be like learning your mother tongue. He has a start-up which makes the software to teach English to all types of kids.

Ajit speculates that using free speech would make Google search more efficient because then anyone can use Google search regardless of whether they understand English! Free speech would be used to initiate the Google search and also to translate the results back into the user’s language.

This is currently his speculation. Surely he is going to get to meet several interested parties at TED – the place where new ideas blossom. 

How do you finance artists by using social media and by directly connecting with the fans? A report from TED WEEK #UCLAAndersonTED

(Welcome to the UCLA Anderson Blog's coverage of TED Week. Our guest blogger for TED Week is Swati Desai, who will be tracking the various TED talks as we live stream them and also taking notes on various panels. For more information on the TED Week schedule, please click here. 

Swati is a UCLA alum (Anderson, PhD, 1992 and Engineering, MS, 1984) and the link to her website is www.swatidesai.com. 

What follow are Desai's notes on the Wednesday afternoon session featuring TED speaker Amanda Palmer.)

How do you finance artists by using social media and by directly connecting with the fans?

Anderson’s Entertainment Management Association examined this question by exploring musician Amanda Palmer’s provocative presentation about the way she secured funding for her next music project. Amanda “kick-started” her campaign using “crowd funding” by asking her fan base to help her out. She raised 1.2 million dollars with contributions from 25,000 fans by connecting with them on social media, on her blogs, her tweets, and by simply asking for their help while touring.

 Amanda has an exceptionally open personality and is willing to take social risks. This helps!

She says that the act of asking is connecting, unlike some other artists who think of asking as begging. She uses her tweets to inform her fans of her needs and gets help with all sorts of things such as food, accommodation, transportation, love, and appreciation!

Can every artist do crowd funding? Is this way of connecting now expected from them?

The Anderson panel seems to agree on the fact Amanda’s crowd funding is a very effective and new way of getting funding, but this may not work for everybody. It would depend on the artist’s personality, fan base, time they want to spend, where they are in their career trajectory. Student panelist Josh who is a musician himself points to the fact that connecting with the fans using social media is now expected from artists. He admires Amanda’s way of kick-starting the campaign but also would like to see crowd funding with any small donations fans can afford. Live Nation founder Chris Adelmann thinks that there is still a place for an intermediary person based on meritocracy who knows the business well. For an artist who would much rather spend time in the bedroom making music, they will need to use such a person to connect with the fan base.  Faculty panelist Sanjay Sood believes that social media connections worked for Amanda for the crowd funding because she already had a fan base. It may not work for someone who is raw or has a different personality.

The next obviously relevant question is this. Can this model be used for small businesses to kick-start their funding campaign?

The answer is yes! The biggest take-home lesson for small businesses from Amanda’s story is the importance of directly connection with people, especially with the availability of social media. Sanjay Sood points to the fact that informing people of what they are making by connecting with them is even more essential for small businesses with a niche market. Josh believes that kick-starting offers a great way for small businesses to test the markets for their products. Chris Adelmann notes that frontline connecting to another person in a directly is the best type of customer service. 

Ironically, the new way to connect with people is by using web-based social media, the very tool that is blamed on alienating people from each other.

Disrupt As a Means of Innovation -- A report from TED WEEK #UCLAAndersonTED

(Welcome to the UCLA Anderson Blog's coverage of TED Week. Our guest blogger for TED Week is Swati Desai, who will be tracking the various TED talks as we live stream them and also taking notes on various panels. For more information on the TED Week schedule, please click here. 

Swati is a UCLA alum (Anderson, PhD, 1992 and Engineering, MS, 1984) and the link to her website is www.swatidesai.com. 

What follow are Desai's notes on the Wednesday morning “Disrupt” session.)

Business Schools are typically thought of as being part of the establishment. But we know how the boundary between Innovation and Business blurs with the explosion of new technology invading every part of our life. This means being innovative about how to fund innovations and more importantly how to implement these innovations in daily life, in a financially meaningful way. If it means disrupting the flow of the mainstream, then let it be!

This may mean that you see an amazingly skillful yo-yo performance by a world champion, a couple of youngsters doing electrical skate boarding on stage, or see a video made with Google glass presented by a Google co-founder  -- all this in a span an hour – and have these performances mixed in with a law professor talking about changing the way elections are funded, a musician talking about raising over a million dollars in a kickstarting campaign using crowd funding, and an architect speaking about his Wikihouse of designs for anyone to download designs to make houses – what he calls a Democratization of Production.

This is TED for you.  Ideas worth spreading. How does all the above fall together in one session? The common theme is “Disrupt”:

Think about what you want to achieve, use tools that you are able to master, implement the tools in ways that may not be yet established, and in this process don’t worry about if you are disrupting the flow of the mainstream.  If you achieve even a fraction of what you want you are the innovator who promotes progress.

While using innovation in a “disruptive” way to get results may mean using small money to achieve big impact. For example, Sanjay Dastoor came up with the electrically driven skate board like device by using cheap battery and motor found in a toy store, hoping to change the way San Franciscans transport themselves from one spot to another. If they take to this new transportation system, it could mean big money with small investment. After experiencing failure with a big record label, Amanda Palmer, the musician, believes in directly asking for help from her fans for funding her albums and tours. She uses  social media to directly keep in touch with her fans asking them for food, accommodation, advise, and money when she is about to visit a place. She allows free downloads of her music in return for the love she receives from a few fans and feels free to do crowd funding, digital and literally with a hat! She has been successful in raising 1.2 million dollars in her kickstarting her album idea.

Professor of Law Larry Lessig has made big strides in promoting the idea that general elections need to be funded by small funders. He makes a compelling argument that the top 0.05% of the population controls the funding going into elections how this corrupts the flow of true democracy. These conflicting dependencies create economy of influence and feeds on polarization. He claims that American government is broken because of this conflict. All we need to do in this case is to promote the idea of banning big funders.

How do you think this would go with the current big election funders?

What would you like to see?

What is the Big Progress Enigma? -- A report from TED WEEK #UCLAAndersonTED

 

(Welcome to the UCLA Anderson Blog's coverage of TED Week. Our guest blogger for TED Week is Swati Desai, who will be tracking the various TED talks as we live stream them and also taking notes on various panels. For more information on the TED Week schedule, please click here. 

Swati is a UCLA alum (Anderson, PhD, 1992) and the link to her website is www.swatidesai.com.

What follow are Desai's notes on the Progress Enigma talks and the panel discussion that followed.)

By Swati Desai

Session 1: PROGRESS ENIGMA followed by Anderson Panel by Management Consulting Association.

If you want to know what TED 2013 moderator Chris Anderson is suggesting by “big progress enigma,” answer the following yes/no questions first.

1)    Are we going to make the same accelerated technological progress in the future?

2)    Is this going to lead to economic growth?

If you answered NO to these questions, you are in Professor Robert J. Gordon’s camp and with 14% of the TED attendees. If your answer is YES, you are one of the majority of optimists who are attend TED and also agree with part of the ambitious high-achieving Anderson community. Regardless of which camp they belong to, all speakers in the TED session and the associated Anderson panel have strong views on the implications of technological progress and growth to in our lives, especially as related to employment and the quality of life around us.

The Gordon side of this argument declares the death of growth as we know it. Innovation and technological progress will not continue with the same acceleration and it cannot sustain economic growth for a long time in the future.

Professor Gordon argues that the Economic Growth (measured by GDP per capita) in the US, the way we know it, is over. From 1800s till 2007, the U.S. has experienced about 2% growth. In fact, the standard of living doubled in a mere 21 years around the 1950s. Since 2007 the economic growth has slowed down to 1%. Not just that, Professor Gordon predicts that this sluggish growth will continue for most of the century. The brunt of this slowdown will be borne by the bottom 99%of the population. In their case, it will not be just 1%, but it will be less than 0.5%.

Why is he proposing such pessimistic views? He claims that the technological progress or innovation will not have the same impact as it did in the past. Out of our three industrial revolutions (e.g. 1) steam engine, 2) electricity, indoor plumbing, 3) computers), first two had a huge long term impact on our growth and productivity, but the third one fell short after the initial burst in productivity. Starting from a highly inefficient horse buggy, it took us only 80 years to build Boeing commercial jets, but we have hardly made progress in that field since then. This reduced power of innovations is further weakened by four headwinds cutting the growth even more: demographics (hour/person is shrinking), education (high cost, student debts), Debt (over borrowing, federal debt), inequality (bottom 99% has gone down further).

TED Week 2013: Tuesday panel

Check out today's on campus TED Week panel starting at 12:30pm! http://ow.ly/i4ucv  

 

TED Week 2013

TED is here! Join the conversation. 

http://ow.ly/i4bxR 

 

Yael Davidowitz-Neu, UCLA Anderson Class of 2013

"Innovation is about figuring out the most scalable way to adapt to a rapidly changing world"

Yael Davidowitz-Neu, UCLA Anderson Class of 2013, on what it means to Think in the Next.  http://ow.ly/hWgWo 

 

Lissa Poincenot, Philanthropist & UCLA Anderson alumna

UCLA Anderson alumna Lissa Poincenot ('83) advocates for and inspires victims of genetic blindness and their families. How will you Think in the Next? http://ow.ly/hTHSl 

 

Guillermo Penalosa, Executive Director of 8-80 Cities & UCLA Anderson alumnus

Thinking in the Next since 1984. http://ow.ly/hRTsp

 

Kyle Forrest, UCLA Anderson Class of 2014

“It’s important in this digital age to make personal interactions happen, as every personal interaction provides an opportunity to learn and grow, both professionally and personally.” 

Kyle Forrest, UCLA Anderson Class of 2014, on what it means to Think in the Next http://ow.ly/hOW9K