Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Umair at HBS

Back in 2005 I invited Umair Haque to come speak at an employee-only 3-day lecture series in Sony. He gave a wonderful presentation about edge-economies, peer production, and how Sony could – if it had the guts – be an industry leader in democratizing innovation. Hack-able Aibos and an open-API for Cybershots were just the tip of an iceberg. You can read public versions of his presentation as The New Economics of Media and The Atomizing Hand: The Strategy and Economics of Peer Production.

In organizing his visit, I received a lot of push-back from superiors because they felt the content of Umair’s talk was too … ‘amorphous’. Too ‘vague’. They couldn’t grasp it. It was too new, using terms and concepts previously unheard of. I argued that Umair was on to something; that I may not be able to explain it in detail, but that was the point of inviting him and letting him speak. Sony’s engineers, marketers, product planners, etc. needed to be exposed to agenda-setting thinking.

The challenge was that I had never met Umair before in person, and only knew him through his blog posts. Blogging was just being accepted within Sony as a viable medium for sharing information, and this became the first time anyone in Sony had invited a speaker – from another continent, no less – to present to core Sony employees essentially based on blog posts. On top of that, I was just some young English-speaking staff employee who used a 12″ PowerBook in Sony Headquarters :) Anyone who has worked inside Sony knows how difficult it is to bring an unknown “outsider” to an official event, let alone one cloaked in secrecy even to internal employees. So to bring Umair – known to nobody in Sony, and found only through clicking links and landing on his blog – to Sony and share his economic perspectives in person, was a big deal to me. It was a big risk too, politically more than anything else.

So imagine my delight in finding out Umair is now at Harvard as “Director of the Havas Media Lab, a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs, and firms experiment with, craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation.”

Good luck Umair, and post some videos take with that Sony HD handycam you made off with :)