The Much Exaggerated Death of Europe

Philip Jenkins takes a less pessimistic view of Europe's future than many current observers.

Here's a lengthy report on his new book God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things Journal.

“Nobody can deny,” writes Jenkins, “that European nations in coming decades will have to take account of aspects of Muslim culture, or rather of the north African and Asian cultures brought by Muslim immigrants; but that is quite different from envisioning wholesale Islamization. . . . Yet matters are not so terrifying [as many contend]. While sections of European Islam in recent years have acquired a strongly militant and politicized character, we have to understand this as a response to temporary circumstances; moreover, hard-line [Islamic] approaches still command only minority support. In the longer term, the underlying pressures making for accommodation and tolerance will prove hard to resist.”

It's About Excellence

TOKYO (AP) — Toyota Motor sold more cars and trucks worldwide than General Motors in the first three months of 2007, marking the first time that Toyota has outsold GM.

Most auto analysts have predicted that Toyota will surpass GM this year as the world's largest automaker — a position the Detroit behemoth has held for 76 years. Toyota's global sales for the January-March quarter rose 9% to a record 2.35 million. GM reported last week that its global sales rose 3% to 2.26 million vehicles.

Toyota has steadily gained on GM in past few years, aided by a shift in the U.S. market away from SUVs and toward more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Toyota's U.S. sales, led by the Camry and Corolla, rose more than 12% last year and sales are increasing at a double-digit rate again this year. In March, Toyota's share of the U.S. market climbed to 16%, behind GM's 22% and Ford Motor's 17%.

In 2006, Toyota's global production surged 10% to 9.018 million vehicles, while GM and its group automakers produced 9.180 million vehicles worldwide — a gap of about 162,000.

It's no time to start popping the champagne, however, because overtaking GM is not Toyota's first priority, said Paul Nolasco, a spokesman for Toyota.

"Our goal has never been to sell the most cars in the world," Nolasco said. "We simply want to be the best in quality. After that, sales will take care of themselves."

Indeed, it is Toyota's reputation for quality and fuel efficiency that has lifted its global sales, including the popular Camry, Corolla and Prius gasoline-and-electric hybrid.

Beijing's War of Words

This story warms the heart of any English-speaking foreigner who has lived in China. From Singapore's Today newspaper:

A campaign to correct the notoriously goofy English translations on city signs in time for next year's Olympics could mean the end for the misnomers that have confused and amused visitors for years.

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Officials are taking aim at menu items such as "Fried Crap" and "Acid Food", and slippery-when-wet signs that read: "To take notice of safe: The slippery are very crafty".

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The campaign began last year to avoid causing confusion and possible offence when visitors from around the world descend on a city that has for years featured a "Racist Park" dedicated to ethnic minorities.

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But to some, the "pubic toilets" and "harsh browns" will be missed.

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"It's too bad. They give the city a little more character," said Mr Ian McCulloch, a Briton who studies Chinese at a local university.

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"It's almost worth a walk down the street just for that."

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Officials have launched several parallel campaigns — some aim to discourage spitting and queue-jumping while others encourage smiling and other civilities — in a bid to soften a city that has its share of rough edges.

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But the authorities have pushed the language effort as much as any other, sending out camera-wielding inspectors to comb the streets in search of offenders like "Deformed Men" on handicapped restroom stalls, and "liquor heads" seen on signs banning public drinking.

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Did You Know?

Here's a presentation that will really get you thinking. We all know technology is changing rapidly, but this will shock you when you think about what it will mean for us in 15 years...

"I remixed content from David Warlick, Thomas Friedman, Ian Jukes, Ray Kurzweil and others, added some music, and came up with the following presentation."

You have to go to the website and download both the powerpoint and mp3 files to then view it on your computer.

More Asian Exports Coming Your Way

"Only a decade ago did scientists in the University of California's Pacific Rim Aerosol Network help discover that the pollution crossing the Pacific from Asia was worse than suspected, with millions of tons of previously undetected contaminants carried on the wind.

In fact, on any spring or summer day, almost a third of the air high over Los Angeles, San Francisco and other California cities can be traced directly to Asia, researchers said.

'More stuff starting up over there means more stuff ending up over here,' said UC Davis atmospheric scientist Steven Cliff.

Usually, dust and industrial pollutants take from five days to two weeks to cross the Pacific to California."

Internet Boom in China Is Built on Virtual Fun

Interesting observations in this New York Times article about the different users and usages of the internet in China versus the US:

"Another distinguishing feature is the youthful face of China’s online community. In the United States, roughly 70 percent of Internet users are over the age of 30; in China, it is the other way around — 70 percent of users here are under 30, according to the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Because few people in China have credit cards or trust the Internet for financial transactions, e-commerce is emerging slowly. But instant messaging and game-playing are major obsessions, now central to Chinese culture. So is social networking, a natural fit in a country full of young people without siblings. Tencent combines aspects of the social networking site MySpace, the video sharing site YouTube and the online virtual world of Second Life.

“They have what I call the largest virtual park in China,” said Richard Ji, an analyst at Morgan Stanley. “And in China, the No. 1 priority for Internet users is entertainment; in the U.S., it’s information. That’s why Google is dominant in the U.S., but Tencent rules China.”"

Management is All About Talent Coaching!

From Tom Peters' blog, echoing management principles Marcus Buckingham has written:

"Earlier this month I had a bit of a rant about 'Servant Leadership.' The gist of it was: Military Officers and Business Leaders have the same role ... to ensure that all members of the value-creating community are the best they can be. That's an enabling service worth paying for. Today, as a leader, you serve those who choose to bring their talent to you/your organisation. They decide if you are doing a good job or not. They decide if you are worth your management package. They choose to stay or go. They determine if you/the company will succeed or not. Control ... forget it!

Some of my clients/colleagues over here think I've gone soft. Quite the contrary, actually. I think servant leadership is much harder than command & control/micromanagement/authoritarianism. Why bother taking the harder route? Here's the disquieting logic—if you think I'm wrong, please tell me:

Traditional Command & Control logic is based on the world as it used to be, rational, predictable, and stable. A world where well-defined processes produced predictably good results, and refining processes produced better results. It was a world where there was little scope for discretionary human value added to the execution of process. As a consequence, engaging people was unnecessary in a management culture conceived in the blast furnaces and assembly lines of the 19th Century. Unfortunately, relative to the social and technological changes in the last century, little has changed in management culture.

Future winners are turning the old logic on its head by making the value creators the heroes. (Think sports teams!) The future losers are those companies where doing well is about getting out of a customer value creation role and into management.

I'd propose that our role as managers is to ensure that each member of our value creating (read org successes ensuring) community is contributing to the maximum of their potential. If we are doing anything other than that, we should STOP IT NOW or fire ourselves for dereliction of duty. We are no longer process policemen but talent coaches. It's 100% a trust thing. We're in BIG trouble.

8 Basics of Excellence

On the 25th anniversary of his revolutionary book, Tom Peters reminds us of the eight basics of excellence. Though embraced in principle by many, they are still rare to find in practice. This year I want to rededicate myself to building a "people-obsessed" organization.

1. A Bias for Action. Call it 'implementation.' Call it 'execution.' It's the heart of both those key ideas. Too much talk, too little do. Problem-opportunity #1, 1982. Problem-opportunity #1, 2007. And a beast as one grows—and acquires.

2. Close to the Customer. Call it 'loyalty' or 'customer intimacy' or (God help us) 'customer-centric organization.' Though I'd move it down to #3 today (people #2), it's as fresh as ever and honored in the breach—again, particularly as giantism emerges. Come hell and/or high water, get close-as-hell to that customer, listen to that customer, and love up that customer for all you're worth.

3. Autonomy and Entrepreneurship. This was, more or less, our innovation piece. Let 1,000 flowers bloom—and then turn it over to Darwin. No autonomy, no accountability; no autonomy, no insane investment in new stuff.

4. Productivity Through People. Obvious—1982. Obvious—2007. But truly 'people-obsessed companies' ('talent-obsessed' today) are still rare as can be—we keep trotting out GE's people development process for a reason—we can't think of anyone else among the giants.

5. Hands On, Value-Driven. MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around (circa 1982 and HP). MBWA today!! Absent then. Absent now. Run a place by values-first leadership? Then. Now. Rare.

6. Stick to the Knitting. Misunderstood in '82. We bought Richard Rumelt's (UCLA) act—and I still do. He called the winning approach 'related diversification.' It ain't about sticking with a pat hand, however 'excellent' today—it is about hanging in with stuff you understand. Still a good idea—just ask the private equity boys (and girls), circa 2006.

7. Simple Form, Lean Staff. We pleaded for this in 1982, but we were not aggressive enough. And, of course, there were no Internet-run companies and no outsourcing. Still, the basic idea is fresh as a daisy—and rare as apple blossoms in January in Boston. (Whoops.)

8. Simultaneous Loose-Tight Properties. Confusing to some, gospel to a few (Bob Stone—the exec in charge of re-inventing government in the 90s, who accomplished a helluva lot more than most people realize). Idea: Stick with a few key values ... then let her rip! ("Change anything not 'below the waterline'" was the way W.L. Gore founder Bill Gore put it to us—and it's still working for his firm today. (Or I hope it is—I'm depending on GORE-TEX® when I go hiking in New Zealand at the end of this month.)

Of course there are a jillion ways to say any of these—but their simplicity was the trick. I could as easily give a speech covering these exact ideas with these exact words today as 25 years ago. For instance, when I recently learned that Starbucks founder Howard Schultz visits 25 stores per week and that former Goldman Sachs boss Hank Paulson used to call 70 clients right after New Year's just to "check in," I said—"MBWA then for the best, MBWA now for the best." (Hint: I will be giving some speeches this year with the so-called "eight basics" as my exact outline. Sure my increasingly noisy "women's stuff" will be fit into "close to the customer" and "productivity through people," but the basic outline will be familiar.)

Web 3.0

Here's a NY Times article that's pretty interesting. Not only connecting pages on the web, but studying them and drawing relationships and conclusions about human knowledge.

"From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. "

Those Big Emitters!

Uh oh...the Chinese are coming!

"China will surpass the United States in 2009, nearly a decade ahead of previous predictions, as the biggest emitter of the main gas linked to global warming, the International Energy Agency has concluded in a report to be released Tuesday.

China’s rise, fueled heavily by coal, is particularly troubling to climate scientists because as a developing country, China is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol’s requirements for reductions in emissions of global warming gases. Unregulated emissions from China, India and other developing countries are likely to account for most of the global increase in carbon dioxide emissions over the next quarter-century."

The Average American: 1967 and Today

Here are stats showing the material prosperity of Americans over the past 40 years. Yet they don't feel as well off as their parents. Why? One reason is we tend to compare ourselves with those who have more, not with those who have less, and those who have more nowadays have a lot more.

"Mr. and Mrs. Median's $46,326 in annual income is 32% more than their mid-'60s counterparts, even when adjusted for inflation, and 13% more than those at the median in the economic boom year of 1985. And thanks to ballooning real estate values, average household net worth has increased even faster. The typical American household has a net worth of $465,970, up 83% from 1965, 60% from 1985 and 35% from 1995.

Throw in the low inflation of the past 20 years, a deregulated airline industry that's made travel much cheaper, plus technological progress that's provided the middle class with not only better cars and televisions, but every gadget from DVD players to iPods, all at lower and lower prices, and it's obvious that Mr. and Mrs. Median are living the life of Riley compared to their parents and grandparents. "

300 mil and counting

The USA has just passed 300,000,000 people.

Check out the US population clock:

http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html

Pardon the Dust: Beijing Puts Its Games Face On

"For China, the world's most populous nation, it should be a giant coming-out party, as the 1964 Summer Olympics was for Japan and the 1988 Summer Games were for South Korea. For Beijing, the countdown to Aug. 8, 2008, has increased the already frenetic pace of transformation in this city of 15.3 million people and seemingly as many construction sites."

In China, Churches Challenge the Rules

I think we will see more and more individuals and groups like these churches who will challenge the Chinese government on legal grounds, following regulations while agitating for more rights.

"a growing number of congregations that began life as house churches -- unauthorized places of worship set up in private, often dilapidated homes -- have recently registered with the government, while continuing to spurn the rules of the official Protestant church in China. Like so many institutions in China, these churches now hover in a sort of legal netherworld."

China's New Legal Eagles

China's New Legal Eagles - Christianity Today Magazine: "'We pray that a Chinese Martin Luther King will arise from the church in China,' say Christian leaders of the new Human Rights Protection Movement (HRPM)."

What's the Matter with Liberals?

This article points out the bias of liberals.

They don't like the marketplace decisions people make when they have economic freedom, so liberals want to force everyone to make the right decisions with their money. On the other hand, which he doesn't mention, they hate constraints on moral issues. They don't want anyone saying what is right and wrong for others regarding morality.

Conservatives, on the other hand, don't like people making immoral decisions. But they hate anyone telling them what to do with their money.

In either case, it comes down to control, doesn't it? We want to control others' behavior to come in line with our values, but we resist others making us do what they want.

Christians shouldn't fall into either of these camps. Our leader taught us the values we follow:

"You know that in this world kings are tyrants, and officials lord it over people beneath them. But among you it should be quite different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first should be the slave of all. For even I, the Son of Man, came here not to be served but to serve others, and to give my life as a ransom for many."

From Will:

"Their campaign [against Wal-Mart] is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets.... Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots, and announce -- yes, announce -- that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by ... liberals.

Before they went on their bender of indignation about Wal-Mart (customers per week: 127 million), liberals had drummed McDonald's (customers per week: 175 million) out of civilized society because it is making us fat, or something. So, what next? Which preferences of ordinary Americans will liberals, in their role as national scolds, next disapprove? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?

No. The current issue of The American Prospect, an impeccably progressive magazine, carries a full-page advertisement denouncing something responsible for ``lies, deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses'' and of having brought ``great hardship and despair to people and communities throughout the world.''

What is this focus of evil in the modern world? North Korea? The Bush administration? Fox News Channel? No, it is Coca-Cola (number of servings to Americans of the company's products each week: 2.5 billion).

When liberals' presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas, liberals do not rush to read a book titled ``What's the Matter With Liberals' Nominees?'' No, the book they turned into a best-seller is titled ``What's the Matter With Kansas?'' Notice a pattern here?"

Building a Religion That Spreads

From Seth Godin's blog on Sept 6:

"We can learn an important lesson about ideaviruses from religions, because they are in many ways the original (and longest-lasting) examples of the genre.

If you want to build a religion that spreads, here are some things to build into it:

* Bias for evangelism
* Sharp distinction between insiders and outsiders
* Presumption that insiders are 'right' or 'blessed' or 'advantaged'
* Proscription against intermarriage without conversion
* Forbid one gender to work outside the home
* Central hierarchy that maintains the faith and settles disputes
* Offer significant (very) long-term benefits to believers

Very few organizations have the ability to deliver on all of these opportunities, but in the secular world, many brands do most of them. This works for Harley-Davidson (and certainly the Hells Angels). It works for the latest teenage trends. It works for some politicians. It even works for some computer operating systems and languages."

How Much Are Your Beliefs Worth?

Is there anything you believe in that you are willing to die for?

Most Westerners see the forced conversion of the Fox journalists in the Middle East as despicable because it violates human rights we believe in - individual freedom, including freedom of choice.

However, Mark Steyn comments below that most Easterners are not looking at the violation of the individual. They see the conversion as a sign of the moral bankruptcy of the West, that individuals don't have anything they believe in strongly enough they are willing to die for. Are they correct?

"...for the Fox journalists and the Western media who reported their release, what's the big deal? Wear robes, change your name to Khaled, go on camera and drop Allah's name hither and yon: If that's your ticket out, seize it. Everyone'll know it's just a sham.

But that's not how the al-Jazeera audience sees it. If you're a Muslim, the video is anything but meaningless. Not even the dumbest jihadist believes these infidels are suddenly true believers. Rather, it confirms the central truth Osama and the mullahs have been peddling -- that the West is weak, that there's nothing -- no core, no bedrock -- nothing it's not willing to trade."

Banned Chinese director to defy orders

Listen to the defiance in this statement. He is appealing to his personal rights, which will become a stronger and stronger motivator in modern China.

Is it artists that will lead the way in pushing for more individual freedom? They will probably give voice to it, but I think it is swelling up in the hearts and minds and stomachs of all this generation of China's pampered only children.

By the way, this also seems like a good way to guarantee his movie is a hit in the DVD shops around China! It seems like a little controversy helps in every culture, and maybe especially in one that is strongly controlled.

"'I won't stop making films. I will definitely continue to make films,' he told The Associated Press by phone.

'The ban is unreasonable. This is my personal right. As the film regulator for a region, you can ban my film from being shown in that area, but you don't have the right to stop a certain director from working. That is ridiculous,' Lou said."

Americans on Religion and Politics

Americans are strongly religious, and deeply engaged in political discussion. Most of the time, they don't know how to reconcile these two.

"Large majorities of Republicans (87%), independents (65%) and Democrats (60%) denounced efforts by liberals to minimize religious influence in the public square, including 70% of conservative and moderate Democrats. Just 38% of liberal Democrats expressed this view.

The survey also found that two in three respondents (67%) characterize the United States as a Christian country. A decade ago, 60% so described the nation.

Most of those surveyed (78%) also view the Bible as the word of God. But only 35% believe it should be taken literally."