Image credit: mtime.com

Chen Kaige’s new movie Caught in the Web is surprisingly good! Wendy and I went to theater yesterday to watch the film. I am deeply shocked by the rare deep thoughts and humorous illustration of the subject. I’d highly recommend everyone to see the movie. It is simply one of the best one I saw in the last few years.

The Theme

The current Chinese society is at a very tricky time if you look at the long history of China. The conflicts from different groups of people, the conflicts between traditional value system to the newly created one, and the deep impact of Internet, new media, social, and mobile – everything is evolving in a much faster pace than any year I have experienced. The confusion of the new generations (well, every new generation is always confused, for few hundred years), the social tension, and understanding, all mixed together to orchestrate a pretty decent scene, for artist, novelist, writers, journalis, directors, and actors to catch, and to illustrate.

Disappointedly, the art circle does not pay the due attention to all the themes of China. Wendy and I went to see another movie, Painted Skin, the other day. Not a bad movie, but it just does not has any connection with the current society. I am not saying all movies needs to be a realistic reflection of the current stuff, but the percentage of the type of movie as Caught in the Web is lower than I think it should. For the director, Chen Kaige, I believe it is more valuable to take movies like this, via The Promise (无极） or Sacrificen (赵氏孤儿）.

Besides looking at the reality, and took the courage to face the society, and pin-point the pain of many people, the movie went deep enough and mentioned wide enough aspect of the current Chinese society. Here are some of them I noticed.

Seeing is Believing

I believe this is the core part of the message is delivering. Opening Weibo, or web in general, the Netizen has never been so united and well orchestrated to rely love or hate of a real living person by one photo or video or short 140 description. The power of the web has been release to a new peak (Sir Tim Bernes Lee should be proud, and I just saw him in London Olympic Opening). However, the real story is never fully understood.

The story in the movie is a variation of another well-know story told by Convey in Seven Habits. A father sitting in the subway allowing his two kids to be noisy, and disturbing. Everyone thought he did wrongly, but no one knows his wife, the kids’ mother just passed away one hour ago, and he don’t know how to tell the kids.

By taking part of the story, and dramatically show it to the public, causes deep problems. Although not to give excuses to the wrong behavior, to understand what is behind the wrong behavior makes justice of the society. The movie is pushing everyone to think: What is the story behind the murder? what is the story behind this stealing? What is the story behind the good deed? The mechanism and curiosity of what is behind is widely lacking, and systematically prohibited and removed from the current media. But how about the me-media? What is the responsibility of the twitter or weibo poster’s responsibility besides showing one photo or video clip?

Privacy Concerns

I guess original title of the movie maybe 人肉搜索 (Human Flesh Search), and renamed to 搜索. It is about taking a lead and the crowd contribute, and finally expose all the private information of a person to the Internet. The moral and legal boundary of the action is still controversial, and blur.

The privacy of almost everyone involved (except few) was put online and many of them are not the fact. To expose someone’s privacy is the de factor penalty the netizen can do to a criminal offense, or victim, even without the need of sentence. Although it causes some positive impact considering the current legal system is broken, and it becomes a natural substitution, I believe the hope will still be building the legal system vesus the penalty of the many.

Although I don’t think it is categorically, constitutionally, absolutely wrong in any circumstance to expose one’s private information like national ID, I do believe it is something worth a lot of protection.

Others

The movie also covered a wide range of topics, including:

• Neutrality of Media
• Career challenge of an intern
• PR un-written rules
• Water Army
• The other woman 小三
• The general practice of plant on journalists
• Discrimination
• Private communication/recording protection
• Money vs love dilemma
• Career fighting in offices
• Housing price, and hardship of normal people in cities

When I was filling out US Nonimmigrant Visa DS-160 form (my visa expires again), and I saw the following questions.

Have you, while serving as a government official, been responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom?
Yes No

I know there are many government officials need to say Yes, but I believe they can just lie and choose No.

Another one:

Have you ever been directly involved in the establishment or enforcement of population controls forcing a woman to undergo an abortion against her free choice or a man or a woman to undergo sterilization against his or her free will?
Yes No

There are more people on this. There is a huge organization called Planned Birth Committee doing this, on daily basis. Will they answer Yes?

Have you ever renounced United States citizenship for the purposes of avoiding taxation?

Yes No

This one will be interesting. Re-consider to immigrant to USA. To get in is easy. Get out is troublesome.

My early wakeup practice went bankrupt today, after 4 days.

I wrote Jet Lag Builds Early Raiser before:

Jet lag is good thing for me. Whenever in US, or back to Shanghai, jet lag drives me wake up earlier and then I became an early raiser for some days. Thus I have enough time to write more blogs (helping me to get clearer idea about my world, and comprehend the message I got). It is just like an effective “Raise Early” medicine. But the problem is, the effect gets less significant along the day, and I will fade into normal life.

Is there any way to simulate jet lag?

I also wrote other entries on this topic: Early Wake Up, Blogging and Early Wake-up, Trip Progress: Wake up Early in the Morning.

This is the fifth morning after I got back. 5:08 is too early for me (the sun rise time), and I felt sleepy in the afternoon. I waked up at 5:08, stand up, walked out of bed room, and felt asleep at the sofa in living room. When I wake up again, it was 8:00 AM.

What it Tells When Something is Hard to Do?

I started to wonder, if something is so hard to do, like waking up early, like losing weight, or get rid of procrastination, is there a reason behind it? Is it because it is not the nature way, or there is some hard boundary there (like you can not lose weight lower than a certain number, because that is what a living person’s boundary)? If we fail, is it because of we are fighting against a law?

Taking procrastination as example, Richard Hamming mentioned that don’t fight against all type of procrastination. Great scientist are those who procrastinate to shave, or to pay bills, because they put effort into more important things that requires a big chunk of time. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Analysis of Wake up Early

I believe the boundary is the daily sleeping time the body needs in long term (you can twist it by few days, like before an exam, but not long). Let’s say, it is 8 hours per day. There must be another boundary that pulled me back – the go to bed time.

The social activities and family, and eating time all affects that. For example, if we really can eat dinner at 5:00 PM instead of 7:00 PM, and there is a way we follow the society to really shutdown at 9:00 PM (by shutdown, I mean there is no Weibo activities, or no emails), we definitely can shift to the 9:00 PM to 5:00 PM schedule. This has been proved by travelers. When we were in Hangzhou, we really went to bed at 9:00 PM – actually we were bored at 7:00 PM already. Among all the social interactions, Wendy is the biggest portion that impact my schedule. I just cannot fell asleep everyday.

If the social environment does not change, especially if I cannot get agreement with Wendy to change together, I am actually running against head wind, and the effort accumulation is big enough for me to give up.

Other Things? Like Losing Weight?

How much is enough? Whether we should eat three meals or two? When to have meals? What to eat? All of this is actually much more influenced by our society than we can imagine. We don’t decide by ourself, the social environment does.

I never said we cannot change, or we should not fight, but to realize that we are heading against head wind makes us smarter to choose how to react.

One of the best way is to move. To find an environment that we feel suite our needs better, and shape ourselves, by the environment we choose. If not, choose a micro-environment, or build one.

So, the next step is not to fight harder – it is to change the social interaction.

I waked up early in the morning (5:30 AM), and drove to the french concession. The best time to visit Shanghai is very early in the morning. Here are two buildings. One is at around 140 Fuxing West Road, and the second is on the Wukang Road. Looking at the buildings, and you just feel beauty out of it.

I have been in Shanghai for 17 years (I cannot believe it), but I suddenly realized that I haven’t really been to Shanghai. A visit to the Bund and Nanjing Road shocked me. I haven’t ever been there! Never!

Suffered (or enjoyed) from my jet lag pattern from the States, I waked up early in a very comfortable way (not tired, and not sleepy, and just waked up) at 4:00 AM. After writing some blog post, I packed my bag and grabbed a taxi and threw myself to the beginning of the Bund.

Maybe because of the nice weather/blue sky, which is rare, and definitely because I came here earlier in the morning (too early, at 5:00 AM), and I saw the city in a completely different perspective.

Shanghai without PEOPLE!

The key characteristic of Shanghai is people! It is crowded, noisy, and sometimes chaotic, but not so in the early morning, especially in summer when it gets sunshine very early. Just FYI, the sun raised at 5:06 AM today.

When the taxi runs on the roads in Pudong, flying across the Nanpu bridge, and dived into the alleys of Puxi, there are nice buildings, many trees, but there was no PEOPLE! That created a magic view of the city, and reminds of the days in Silicon Valley (well, it was just yesterday). Imagine, if you put the density of people in the China Town of San Francisco into silicon valley, it would be completely different.

Shanghai that is CLEARER

One of the problems to have a lot of people is being dirty, especially in a city that throwing garbage along the way and spitting are national sports. In the morning, the streets are newly swiped, and the street cleaning cars just passed the alleys and streets. It is much beautiful to have blue sky and no garbage on the road.

Shanghai that is a GYM

There are at least three stages of morning in Shanghai. The first stage is empty stage with literally no one on the street. Before business people and office workers and tourists rush into the city, there is a unique stage: the exercise stage, when older people play all kinds of sports activities in the street, even on the famous Nanjing East Road.

Here are some of the photos I took randomly on the street. Below: dancing.

Below: Taichi.

Below: Fan dancing.

Below: Chi Gong.

Shanghai as a SMALL TOWN

Shanghai is a big city, but in the morning, Shanghai seems to be a small neighborhood. Look this photo and tell me where it is. It is the busiest part of Nanjing East Road, the world famous shopping street. There are phenix trees and there are wide pedestrian, and it is just nice.

Finally, I wrapped my short trip of about 2 hours from the Bund to the People’s Square. The Tomorrow Square (JW Marriott) is the stop sign for the trip. I updated the photos in a Starbucks – free WIFI, and re-think about the image of Shanghai.

Maybe, this is the impression for many tourist, because they get up early, and that is very different from my daily perspective. No one, even the person who lives here for their whole life, can claim that they really know a city. So always challenge ourselves, to see more and in a more different way.

I was born too late – 450 years late, and I don’t know what it looks like in Florence at Renaissance. I heard at that time, in every coffee shop, and in every room, there are people talking about painting, sculpture, music, etc, and there are some greatest artist, like Michael-angel, emerging in those days in Florence.

I meat with a great CEO in his office. Very impressive. He summarized the duty of a CEO and that is very true. The framework is strategy, priority, and people.

I had great time with AG yesterday (I let not to disclose the name before checking) at Red Rock in Mountain View. It was such an inspiring talk. Among them, there is a story about decision making.

In Italy, I got 3G network for one month, unlimited data and 5 EURO calling at 12 EURO (10 EURO in Venize). In the bay area, I am going to get T-Mobile 1.5G monthly plan at $25. It seems the world bandwidth cost is getting down, except China, right now.

I visited the Microsoft Zizhu campus, and met with many old friends – I didn’t expect to see about 10 persons who joined Microsoft around my joining, and they are still there after more than 10 years.

I was a little bit sad though to see the current Microsoft is more like the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus, than the office in my memory. The building quality is not good enough, and that surely does not justify the long distance from the downtown.

I am quite amused by Alexis Madrigal’s story How Google Can Beat Facebook Without Google Plus. This is one of the best article talking about the deep reasons why a product succeed or fail.

California City

He mentioned California City, CA. Although it is the largest city by land in CA, it only has 15K residents – 1/10 of the number in residential area I am living. The California city has all the infrastructure a great city needs to have, but, it is just an empty city. People gather because of other people, not the infrastructure.

Websites face the same problem. Most websites have in place before the first 100 visitors come to the site, but the problem is, the only problem is, people!

But by most accounts and third-party research, the service is growing its number of users but not their engagement. People are “on” Google Plus, but they are not really ON Google Plus. The infrastructure is there. The street signs are there. People own plots of land. But there’s nobody actually visiting town. To make it obvious: Google Plus is the California City to Facebook’s Los Angeles.

Basically, people are saying, Google+ is a ghost town.

Considering the same thing on other websites, including my own, the core of the sites are people. Internet connects people. When the real people are there, the infrastructure supports, not the other way.

Time on site

Time on site is an important indicator of how people use the product. Google+ has 3 minutes per month. Facebook has 405, Pinterest has 89, and Trumblr is 89 too. (src)

John Herman even mentioned that Google+ “looks like a cubicle farm and smells like a hospital.” How can a product smells like a hospital?

Why John Herman describe it as a hospital? Because of the clean and clear interface? The technical thinking behind it?

A website is built for people to “USE”! Use means spend time on it. Use means getting back frequently, not by accident, not by clicking links that they randomly run into.

Seamless is a Bad Word

When I talked with my friend in Google about Google+, I heard the word Seamlessly often.

You search, and your search queries get to G+ seamlessly. You use Picasa, and your photos integrate into G+ seamlessly. You do x, and you do y, and all these things are synced into G+ seamlessly.

Seamlessly means unconsciously. Seamlessly means they are not intentionally using the site. That explains why classifieds search does not work, and many aggregation sites does not work, because people don’t have the intention to have their content shown on the page. They have no idea about what they share when they “unconsciously” share it.

A community is not about content aggregation. It is about consciously participation. If people see what others are saying, and post intentionally, that is the core of the community.

This is a pretty dumb statement. Everyone knows it. Everyone says it. Every textbook have it. Every leadership session talks about it. Every…..

But common sense is not common, and some times it does not make sense. (Jian Shuo Wang’s invented the second part of this phrase).

I sat down with Quanzhan this noon to afternoon to talk about the talent. It is not surprising for a research organization of Tencent, talents are the No. 1 priority. The selection standard,  the talent, and the retention are something that makes a great workplace and a winning business.

Recently I spend well more than half my time on talent recruiting, and to get wisdom from people who are good at it. That is the No. 1 job of a CEO.

BTW, does any of my blog readers know anyone, or you think yourself is someone we are looking for, please let me know by sending me email to wangjianshuo at baixing.com. We are looking for people in the following area (most of the jobs are in technical field, with some other roles).

1. Anti-fraud. How to fight again fraudsters on a classified site.
2. Search. The in-site search, and the organization of hundreds of millions of posts generated by our users.
3. Platform. The way to structure the site in a way to allow internal and external developers to be more productive.
4. Payment and monetization products.
5. Marketing and industry experts in one of our main categories.

If you have a feeling that you may be the right person, but not sure, just sent a note to hr at baixing.com. Feel free to put me on the CC line to make sure I read it.

If you see this message, it means you are reading a website created by WordPress.

After considering moving from MovableType to WordPress, to actual migration,  I am finally there! Congrats to WordPress. You just won me from the MT camp.

The Chinese government always have more methods to control whatever they want to control. They can control how many child you are allowed to have, and it is not surprising to see how many houses you can buy.

According to the House Purchase Restriction order:

1. For local residents who already have one apartment, and non-local residents who have been paying tax for two years, they can only purchase another one.
2. For local residents with two or more apartments, or non-local residents with one or more apartments, they are not allowed to buy any houses/apartments.
3. For anyone who buy second apartment, the down payment have to be as high as 60%, and the interest rate has to be 10% higher than average.
4. Tax for transfer of houses purchased less than 5 years are significantly higher.

There are many other restrictions. These are the powerful rules to keep buyers out of the market, and the house market kept flat and down ever since.

Here is the challenge. Just as scaling the organization, as I grew, well, to 30-some, the relationship network I accumulate over the last 20 years started to reach a scale that is hard to manage the old way. Maybe that is the reason why time flies faster and faster. Think of Yifan – he only has about 10 person relationship he needs to manage right now (at the age of 4, parents, grandparents, teachers, and a girl-friend). I have at least 1000 people in my address book that I had once kept pretty close relationship along the way.

Stay with the Past

Although it is so nature that when we move on, the old relationships fade out from the horizon. High-school classmates, past colleges of old companies. There is actually not too many reasons to re-union, but the past is always what defines us today, and science research shows staying with the past makes us happier.

Communication

Communication won’t happen automatically, unless you design it to happen. I have friends who hang up photos of his friends. It is a good way to remind people of the persons they care about. Out of sight, out of mind. If there is a way to keep people in sight, it is easier to keep them in mind, and makes the connection easier.

Electronic Tools

There are Facebook or other tools, but they are not helpful if the person is out of mind. I have to say the most impressive offline event I saw was Carroll’s tree trimming party. There is friend who comes to the party in the last 43 years! A tradition like that will greatly help to keep people connected.

What a CEO should do? I have to recommend an article from Ben Horowitz again (the second time in a week): How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs.

Here is some note I took away from the reading. You should definitely read it too, by yourself.

According to Ben, he thinks the CEOs should do two things:

• Does the CEO know what to do?
• Can the CEO get the company do what he knows?

This is very broad and “empty” statement at the first glance, but Ben explained it in a very good way.

First one

About the first one, “Does the CEO knows what to do?”, Ben suggested “One should interpret this question as broadly as possible”. Basically, it is like: CEO needs to know everything. Don’t laugh. It is actually very true. The CEO has to have insights of many things, from the office arrangement, to hiring, to marketing, to technology, to finance. Knowing what to do is about consistently keeping thinking about what’s behind the surface. It is tough, but … exciting.

In particular, the story – the question “Why”…

The other interesting part about know what to do is to make decisions. What Ben contributed in this idea is to clearly point out that CEO needs to make decisions with very limited information, always! The expectation to understand more about it is just not realistic. That actually gave me great relief about the situation I am in.

Second One

The second one is about getting the company do what he knows.

It turned out to be organizational capacity, get things done culture, quality of hiring, and the work environment. It is not surprising that Ben mentioned the Netflix culture building slides.

For Baixing, as a company with 50+ full time employees, we tried very hard to build a great company, and with great result. We are trying so hard to make sure the people are the core of the organization, and build the culture to help people to perform within it. It takes years of experience to get it…

Disclaimer: I am trying to tell a joke – a humorous way to illustrate the problem of Shanghai’s traffic. Do not treat it as a tourist guide. It may cause serious danger, damage, or death.

Traffic rules you have to follow in Shanghai.

1. Yield at Red Light. Red light in Shanghai does not mean stop. It means yield. When pedestrian observe red light at cross street, they must stop first, look left and right to make sure there is no cars, and they cross the street. BTW, do the same thing for green light.
2. It is Illegal to Use Pedestrian. Always choose the section without zebra to cross. Don’t touch the zebra with your foot.
3. Horn when you see people on Pedestrian. This is to show your respect.
4. The First to Mover Has the Right of Road. When you are turning right to merge into the main road, be fast to rush into the road, to get the road first to claim the right of road, and the upcoming traffic has to full stop to yield. The even better way is to rush into the road before looking left for upcoming traffic, to make sure you get the right of the road every time.
5. More to come…

Yifan wanted to visit IKEA, so we went there, the new store, which is opening on June 23, 2011. Here are the photos.

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang on iPhone 4

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang on iPhone 4

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang on iPhone 4

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang on iPhone 4

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang on iPhone 4

Photograph by Jian Shuo Wang on iPhone 4

The store is bigger than the current IKEA Xujiahui Store. At least it has three stories. The parking area is better, and with better transportation system – the Middle Ring Road provides even better access for bigger areas in Shanghai, and I hope the nearby road can avoid the traffic jam IKEA Xujiahui Store brought to the area.

I decided to try life without coffee, tea or spicy food from two weeks ago. So far, I feel great.

I said good bye to Starbucks or Coffee Beans and enjoyed water and orange juice more often.

I also tried to sleep earlier and to try to think more and doing more important but less stuff. By giving some constrains to life, do we lead a more spiritual live?

I will share my answer after I practice for more time.