The Hindu Business Line : It's enough to be perfect enough

PERFECTION is not an easy goal to achieve. Often elusive, the quest is enough to ruin a company, which is what HP realised. At Hewlett-Packard - `the revered computer and printer company that helped create Silicon Valley' - they never wanted to ship a product until it was perfect, even if it meant they missed the market opportunity. Then came the realisation that what was needed was something perfect enough. And that is the title of George Anders's book on Carly Florina and the reinvention of HP. "A definitive account of the most dangerous year in Florina's life, chronicling her daredevil bid to remake HP with a record-shattering $20-billion acquisition of Compaq", states the blurb. More:

There was no time for nostalgia. As soon as one device came to market, a new team of engineers began devising a better model that would make the first one obsolete. Shortly before Christmas one year, employees gave Hewlett and Packard a mischievous gift for their ranch: a fertiliser spreader packed full of product manuals for old or discontinued HP products. Other companies could start museums lauding past efforts. At HP in those days, the future was too exciting to allow any sentimental looks backward.

The company didn't need a myriad of unconnected divisions. That approach was driving customers crazy. Major customers such as Ford Motor and Boeing were grumbling that HP pestered them with dozens of separate sales teams, each pushing a narrow line of products, rather than addressing their total needs in one unified conversation.

Florina decided to reorganise HP into quadrants, instead of letting each division handle its own research, manufacturing, sales and marketing.

HP was strong in Unix-based servers, weak in the Windows NT market, weak in storage, strong in consumer PCs, and feeble in Dell-style direct selling. Compaq was just the opposite. Put the two companies together, and the combined line-up looked a lot stronger than what either company could do alone.

Furthermore, the McKinsey consultants identified at least $2.5 billion a year in costs that could be pruned out by fiscal 2004 - largely by eliminating duplicate spending in key business areas. The companies fit together like a zipper.

"Technology is more than an engineer's game," she said. "That's where Microsoft has been brilliant. If you think about technology companies that have really led, they didn't fall too much in love with the technology."

If you are looking around for companies to take over, read this.

Enough is enough

ICE age, stone age and now it is the engineered age, where lab workers can reprogram human embryos to make children smarter or happier. "Enough" by Bill McKibben is about staying human in an engineered age. The book confronts the most basic question - "Will we ever decide that we've grown powerful enough?" Read on.

A sixth of the American population lacks health insurance of any kind - they can't afford to go to the doctor for a check-up. And much of the rest of the world is far worse off. If we can't afford the fifty cents a person it would take to buy bed nets to protect most of Africa from malaria, it is unlikely we will extend to anyone but to the top tax bracket the latest forms of genetic technology.

On the same day in November 2001 that Advanced Cell Technology announced it had cloned the first human embryo, a group of Israeli scientists made an almost equally stunning declaration. They had used biological molecules to create a tiny, programmable computer - so tiny that a trillion of them could `coexist and compute in parallel, in a drop the size of 1/10 of a millilitre of watery solution held at room temperature. The computer hardware consisted of naturally occurring enzymes that manipulate DNA; it could be programmed to perform simple tasks by choosing particular software molecules to be mixed in solution."

The holy grail of the nanotechnologists, the thing that makes the futurists' eyes light up and twirl around, the mechanical equivalent of germline engineering, is the so-called assembler. An assembler would be a machine roughly the size of a strand of DNA, able to move individual atoms around and put them precisely where you wanted them. With a programmable assembler, you really would be able to build anything. Probably, the first thing you'd build would be more assemblers.

According to a recent report by the research director for SmithKline Beecham, enough sequencing data are already available to keep his researchers busy for the next 20 years, developing early-detection screening techniques, rationally designed vaccines, and so on.

If you're designed for piety, the temptations of the world may barely arise. Because, of course, those tensions are inefficient, like feathers on a chicken. They keep us from being all one way, one thing. From specialising emotionally. But that inefficiency, that tension, that tug in different directions is what we call consciousness. Machines don't have tension. Consciousness doesn't make us better than robots and rhinoceri. It just makes us different. It just makes us human.

Enough?

(Books courtesy: Landmark www.landmarkonthenet.com)

May I help you?

IS the telephone an important part of your job? Do you work in a telemarketing, teleservice, reservation or catalogue centre, an e-tailing, fund-raising or collection centre, or a help desk? Kris Cole has tips on how to make each and every call a first-rate experience in the small book "Call Centre Communication". The handy publication provides inputs on how you can quickly find out what people at the other end of the line want, as also on how to deal with angry, argumentative or annoying callers. A few excerpts:

Your contacts can't see your friendly smile, your pleasant expression or your sociable gestures. Your careful grooming or attractive appearance can't help you create a favourable impression, either. All you have is four invisible qualities to create the impact you're after: your voice, your speech, your vocabulary, and your manner.

Research shows that your telephone voice expresses between 70 and 86 per cent of your message while your words themselves convey only 14 to 30 per cent of your meaning.

How much strength, power, and passion do you speak with? That's your vocal energy. Who wants to talk with someone whose voice is as limp and lifeless as a jug of wilted flowers? Voices with vigour and vivacity are gripping. Your contacts will respond far better if your voice sounds lively and dynamic than if it sounds feeble and flimsy.

Avoid `fillers' such as `I mean', `ya know' and `ummm'. Professionals don't need them. They're unnecessary and make you sound uncertain and immature. Weak words and empty sounds and phrases destroy your contacts' confidence in you.

`But' blocks; `and' builds. `And' shows you have listened and heard. It acknowledges and extends on what your contact has said. With `and', you're working with your contact's comments; with `but' you're dismissing them. `And' helps prevent arguments because it allows two points of view to stand. Sometimes, you can simply substitute `and' for `but'.

A book of homework to make call centres communicating centres.

(Book courtesy: EastWest Books (Madras) P Ltd. ewb@vsnl.com)

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