Comments

What a weird thing. Those who are not part of the online gaming community (READ: Old-er people) would find it hard to believe that a secondary market for virtual online characters can exist... much more be traded.

I guess anything's possible nowadays and I'm sure more things are coming into play in the future especially taking into account that the internet is just a decade old.

Posted by Dennis Balajadia at December 12, 2005 10:17 AM

Outsourcing religious services has been going on for donkey's years in Hindu circles.

Many hindus in the US and elsewhere outside India don't have temples and priests and so on near their homes. As they grow older, they tend to want to participate in such rituals as they were used to in India. So they would write letters to relatives in India or the temple priest in their hometown to do a special "archana" - a ritual offering to the idol of the temple. The archana costs a small amount, that was sent by bank draft or money order.

This was not just limited to expatriates, but also Indians in India working far away from the place they were born/raised.

Nice to see how practices spread.. and are re-imagined.

Posted by Arun Sadhashivan at December 12, 2005 10:46 AM

Yes, what Arun says is true.

Secondly, what is happening here is that the Amercian society / kids are behind the curve..

Posted by /pd at December 12, 2005 10:55 AM

It's a really slick move designed and implemented by U.S. educators. American kids outsource the easy rounds of the game to the Chinese. This means the Chinese aren't educating themselves and will start to go backwards in the education stakes. Meantime, the American kids are really getting stuck into their homework and then, when it's done, they address the hard stages of the game. It's a triple whammy: time for homework, develop imagination and ability doing the hard rounds and tie up your competitors in non-value added, repetitive work!

Posted by Mark JF at December 12, 2005 11:09 AM

We are beginning to see some recycled Daniel Drezner posts here lately. Must be a wavelength-synchronicity thing, I guess. Drezner posted this the other day and there are some good comments there, including at least one from an American participant in this rather bizarre gaming trading economy. He made the point that he can pay a Chinese kid $30 to do something that would cost him 100 hours to do himself. (Slow learner?)

As for the outsourcing of prayer, this is nothing new. People used to pay monks for "eternal" prayers for their salvation. That's the source of a lot of the old money in the Catholic church--people paying other people to pray for them, especially after they are dead. Sort of reminds me of the university endowment system.

Posted by Mike at December 12, 2005 11:41 AM

Tom & Co - Sorry I haven't posted a comment here in a while, MBA work has been a little overburdening to say the least but I do look in all the time (though one week holiday in Rome was great - anyone who hasn't been, if you think you've seen creative ways to tie together infrastructure inputs before, think again!)

This piece just makes me laugh Tom, especially in light of my current Macroeconomics year essay: "Credit rationing in China". I suppose I should assume from this that there need be no such thing as credit rationing in the Emerging Empire as they'll always find a way to turn a greenback?

... Thing is, if I reference the idea to the Tom Peter's website I'm sure that'll just fly!!

(BTW Tom, you elicited a somewhat passionate discussion in Organizational Strategy class the other day. We were discussing the merits of 'Good To Great' (Prof's favourite) and I mentiond that I thought it was OK but that it was just a little bit too much of a rehash of "Excellence" with more measures put in place to make sure the companies didn't go down the tubes ... to which he (I couldn't believe he would choose a syllabus book and then do this) agreed and CONCEDED that it was much less convincingly written and concluded "to be honest, you're right, "Excellence" was the best management book written".

All highly amusing as somewhat ironically I know you'll probably disagree!!

Anyway, there's a nice comment from me for once!)

Posted by Daniel M. Harrison at December 12, 2005 12:35 PM

Boomers' retirement on the USA west coast is being snapped up - Lake Chelan, WA [no state income tax] - now all $1M waterfront home starters - 55% increase last year alone in the greater Phoenix area.

Canada is too cold to consider. Maybe Palm Springs will swoon and one can scoop up a deal. Mexico seems risky - India maybe - Hawaii quite remote.

Posted by Sean at December 12, 2005 12:40 PM

I contact you to announce 4P to make new company.

there is 4P on marketing (product, price, place, promotion), and I thought there should be 4P on making company.

so I made 4P. Which is

person. What kind of person make company?
passion. How much you commit yourself to your new business
plan. What you gonna do?
pliceless. are they something many people cannot imitate?

If you have a time, I'd love to hear your opinion about the 4P.

thank you

Posted by ICHIZAWA at December 12, 2005 5:04 PM

clergy from afar? sounds odd, but maybe not as much as we think.

Catholics do confessions anonymously (priest is behind a screen)

is your best friend in another city and you receive advice and some good ole fashion empathy from them over the phone?

Chat rooms, relationship sites, tompeters.com!
relationships of all sorts are springing up.

(1940s.....customer service over a phone? are you crazy?

doctor's advice over the phone? Ask those first-time parents about that first croop experience at 2:00am if it was valuable

Over time and numerous chats, can you build a relationship over the phone with a priest?

Posted by Jeff at December 12, 2005 9:24 PM

I have a few minutes, from my perspective that is pretty
much it, if I am to frame it in a VERY basic western context.

Person (founder) - Equals Leadership, decides vision,
Instill core values + basic assumptions (foundation of
culture - the way we do thing around here).

Passion - create the necessary systems and structures,
that supports your business objectives (intrinsic rewards,
hierachy, etc).

Plan - Direction stems from Vision, generally is seen
to mediate the tension between microenvironment
(IO stuff) and resources, or should that be a strategic
intent. Some people have a beef with planning – depends
on how you handle it but there must be scope to include
implimentation opportunities IMO, not just a top-down
once a year thing.

Priceless? Resource-based stuff (I would rename this for
western audiences). IMO A model of innovation such as
(knowledge x imagination x judgement x action +
persistance, should be mandatory in BSCs or Nichijo Kanri)
i.e., continuous innovation, even 3M's stuff gets copied.
Corporate benchmarking, etc.

Sound corny, but sticking with the P's - how about
POWERBASE? or PLATFORM? – that upon which you
compete (but may overlap with plan).

BTW, In Japan I have heard the term 'hunting' and 'farming'
organizations, Is hunting 'Porters School' and farming
'Prahalad + Hamels' School of thought?

Posted by Edwin at December 12, 2005 10:03 PM

The videogame thing makes sense if you consider a 30-something paying for the service. They might not get more than 30 minutes to an hour to play a video game, and there are games out there designed for "lifestyle gamers," kids who have countless hours to throw at the "slog work" of videogames. I think this is a way to let people with not enough time get their entertainment fix from games.

Worthwhile or not, it's an interesting outsource.

Posted by Chris Brogan... at December 13, 2005 5:50 AM

Outsourcing by the church and game companies points to a simple reality that someone is always available to do the jobs no one wants to do. Since boomers did not save for retirement they are attracted to opportunities to live outside the US where cost of living is much lower. Ultimately these three trends point to our avoiding something in our lives. I find it somewhat refreshing that we are recognizing our limits and finding new channels to fulfill the need. Are there long term implications to these trends? Absolutely yes but what trend in America has ever been long term?

The Pundit

Posted by Frank Szewczyk at December 13, 2005 8:24 AM

And let's not overlook this as an opportunity to provide commentary on the video game developers who clearly aren't satisfying their customers. If the games were really well designed (Design is everything in an experience economy, no?), they would be compelling from start to finish. No need to outsource level 1-3 to China...

The thing is, these kids aren't outsourcing their entertainment - they are outsourcing the boring / easy / introductory parts they don't care about... and they are sending the video game industry a message. I wonder if anyone is listening...

Posted by Dan at December 13, 2005 8:27 AM

Dan: When betanews.com cut this infonuggut, I understood that the Americansm Kids had reached that level of gaming and needed to go further.. however for them to go further they needed to partner with other gamers who had gone past their own skill levels.. and that could only be found in the far east players..

WoW has over 2.5Million MOOG players from the far east.. Nope I dont game, I just monitor social dynamics

Posted by /pd at December 13, 2005 9:57 AM

Great comments Jeff - maybe we could introduce phone text confessionals :-)

I recently heard research in Finland showed that 25% of Finnish girls had ended a relationship through a text message. In business we really need to think about the implications of that type of customer bevaviour don't you think?

You are right to raise these issues - a group of us are currently developing and writing a paper called "The New Local" which touches on the new world of virtual communication and what that means for the word 'local'- a fascinating project.

Posted by Trevor Gay at December 14, 2005 10:10 AM

"And let's not overlook this as an opportunity to provide commentary on the video game developers who clearly aren't satisfying their customers"

Dan, that was such a perceptive comment I wrote a piece about it on my blog (you got a reference).

Great stuff.

Posted by Daniel M. Harrison at December 14, 2005 12:32 PM

Hey, thanks! Nice blog, by the way!

Posted by Dan at December 14, 2005 12:57 PM