stargeek
THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANTTHAT'S NOT
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 My last important learning before I left Ernst & Young was the astonishing discovery that almost none of what business presenters say gets 'correctly' understood, internalized, or learned by their audience. By 'correctly' I mean what the audience thought the message was, is almost always radically different from what the presenter intended the message to be. I base this conclusion on entirely anecdotal evidence: Throughout 2003, as a result of consternation about how so little of my presentations was sinking in, out of curiousity I began systematically debriefing with a few audience participants in each presentation I attended (whether or not I had been one of the presenters), as soon as possible after the presentations, and then fed back to the presenters what the audience said. The result was usually anger or stunned disbelief. Here are my totally unscientific findings from this 'research':
Lately most of my meetings have been one-on-one, so I've started to look at conversations with the same skeptical eye as presentations. How much do we get out of them really, and are they truly about communicating or actually about something else? So far I'm just listening to others' conversations, whenever I get the opportunity. Since I'm male, you will appreciate that this is very difficult for me to do! But I'm also finding out (as most women already know well) that it can be very entertaining, if you pay attention to the whole conversation and not just to the words being said. I'm starting to think conversations are as useless a medium for effective intellectual communication as presentations. It's too early for me to present any unscientific conclusions, but here's what I've observed so far -- I'd love to hear what you think about all this:
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 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
 The Linus
Pauling Institute at Oregon State University has a site with
useful information about 'micronutrients': vitamins, minerals, other
nutrients (like Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Co-enzyme Q10),
phytochemicals (trace chemicals in various plants), and the foods that
contain all these nutrients. For each nutrient, you can learn its
impact on the body, diseases it can help prevent or treat, where you
can get it, and interactions with other nutrients, foods and drugs.
The
entire database can also be sorted by disease instead of by nutrient.
Pauling was known, of course, for his controversial claim that large
doses of vitamins can prevent the common cold and other diseases. The site is very thorough, quite technical (but still comprehensible), and makes fascinating reading. Thanks to tudogs.com for the link. Speaking of health information, Health Central (the Dr. Dean Edell site) hosts the full (from what I can ascertain) contents of one of my favourite books, The People's Pharmacy. Learn how to make safe, effective treatments from natural, common ingredients that work better than most over-the-counter remedies. Find out which alternative remedies work, which are placebos and which are downright dangerous. |
 As promised in February, here's an update on the US employment data. After a lot of ballyhoo in recent months, the US Department of Labour has released terrible July employment growth data, and quietly revised downwards the employment data for the previous two months. The latest 'preliminary' (subject to additional revision) numbers for June and July are 131.24 and 131.27 million respectively. Even assuming a resumption of the very modest increase rate in the Spring, employment is unlikely to reach 132 million by the end of the year. This compares to 132.4 million when Bush 'took' office four years ago, and 135.3 million promised last January (though by one interpretation of his mangled speech, he was really only promising 132.5 million). This would make Bush the first president since the great depression to record an absolute loss in total employment during his administration. In order just to match the 150 thousand new entrants to the labour force each month due to population increase, employment should be rising by 1.8 million per year, and should now be nearing 139 million. What's worse, the quality of the new jobs created has been exceptionally poor. Rather than creating high value, knowledge-intensive jobs to replace the jobs offshored to lower-wage countries, nine out of ten of the highest-growth sectors of employment are low-wage, low-expectation jobs (food service, secretarial etc.) Most growth continues to be in part-time and temporary jobs. No surprise that so many have just given up looking for work. So much for trickle-down economics, and the promised stimulus of Bush's tax giveaway to his rich friends. Yet a recent AP-Ipsos poll reports 46% of Americans 'approve' of Bush's handling of the economy. Who are these people and what have they been smoking? |
 How can we ever hope to produce effective Expertise Finders when we can't even get people in our own organizations to keep their personal information up to date? That's a question many professional services organizations ask constantly -- the simple internal process of putting together a business proposal, solving a problem or assembling a project team is often, nightmarishly,
A decade ago I read a prediction that, by today, the Internet would have spontaneously (by a self-managed process) developed a database of every consultant in the world and a verification system to go along with it, so the big consultancies would all collapse, and customers would essentially pick their own consultant teams person-by-person, not limiting themselves to the employees of any one consulting organization. This hasn't really happened, because normally the customer picks only a project leader, a consultant (usually in a big consultancy but sometimes an internal person or even an outsourcer) who they then trust to assemble the rest of the project team. If the work's done well, the consultant will be rewarded for his/her choices, but no one really second-guesses those choices or the deeply flawed, sub-optimal way he/she makes them. We use similar processes to assemble project teams of other types of experts: We pick our GP but rely on him/her to refer us to specialists, and we pick a general contractor and usually rely on him/her to pick the subcontractors, for example. The process is fraught with the same suboptimization described in the bullets above. The traditional IT approach to building such a database doesn't work. It entails designing a form, a template of all the data elements about each expert that might possibly apply, and then forcing people to fill in and keep up-to-date all the relevant fields. That's essentially how most social software works, too, and it's proven terribly unsatisfactory. Last year I envisioned an Expertise Finder that would work by crawling people's blog content, penetrating corporate firewalls to find the best people in the world who had the desired expertise and creating a 'map' showing the most direct network path to those people (see sketch above) and how much their expertise costs. I expected that the technology gurus and Googles of the world would be able to build such a 'search' tool quite easily, and the real challenge would be getting the content, getting people to 'buy in' and post information about their expertise, and getting corporations to allow outside customers access to this information from their internal systems (or put a mirror copy on the public Internet). But so far all we have are Ryze and LinkedIn and eCademy (with its well-intentioned 'b2b Marketplace' and Google's Orkut, and they don't work that way at all -- they take the traditional 'form-filling' approach, and are better suited to finding work colleagues (or dates!) than either suppliers or experts. The groups hoping and tryi ng to develop such tools are sanguine of these challenges. Designers appreciate that information needs to be captured in (or converted to) a format useful to the expertise-seeker, which is not necessarily the same format in which the expert normally posts, or finds easiest to post, his or her expertise. And everyone ap preciates that trustworthiness of the content and the tool are paramount. . What do you think?
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 I have very limited patience with those who deny human responsibility for upper-atmosphere pollution and ozone depletion, or deny their impact on the geothermal dynamics of our planet, or the potentially disastrous consequences of the resultant climate instability on Earth's ecosystems. To me there is no intellectual difference between the Lomborgians who steadfastly refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence of human-caused global warming from scientists of unquestioned reputation, and the neo-Nazi holocaust denyers of Ernst Zundel's ilk. Unfortunately, the Lomborgians are heavily financed in their campaign of misinformation by Big Oil and other corporate oligopolies, who bear a disproportionate responsibility for global warming. Sooner or later they will, like Big Tobacco, be called to account financially and criminally for their negligent actions and fraudulent misrepresentations. In the meantime it has been expedient for George Bush, who received a huge proportion of his campaign moneys from these liars, to reward their thinly-disguised bribes by undoing almost all of the US environmental regulations and enforcement instituted by previous governments to try to limit atmospheric damage, and to exercise political muscle to prevent the ratification of the Kyoto Accord. By the time these regulatory reversals and delays are rectified, it may be too late for our planet.    Should you have to deal with these dangerous idiots, here is a short list of resources that you can call upon to understand and/or dispense with their ludicrous arguments quickly: US NOAA synopsis of US scientists' consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming Bill McKibben's article in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and cynical political expediency, of denial NASA's studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local climate change and instability Union of Concerned Scientists' consensus on global warming and warning< /a> on the Bush regime's distortion of scientific research to forward its own political agenda Fortune Magazine's article on the possibility and chilling implications of global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts Blogger Carpe Datum's brief but thorough explanation of the science behind global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists' connecting it to human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant instability (it includes the charts above) Each of the above sources have links and references to further studies. |
 Red Herring has published its list of the top ten technology trends to watch for 2005:
The innovation process at the top of this post is from Credit Suisse First Boston and is explained in more detail in my innovation paper. |
 Two weeks ago I reported on the upcoming June 28 Canadian election, and predicted that there would be a Liberal minority government, with the NDP holding the balance of power. Since then, groupthink has taken hold, and the anger that many Canadians feel about the incompetence of the federal Liberals to detect either wasteful spending or the 'sponsorship' fraud by some government workers, plus the anger of many Ontarians about the new Provincial Liberal government's reneging on promises to avoid tax increases, has led another 8% of Canadians to vow not to re-elect them. This 8% swing has been predominantly older men in Ontario, who seem unwilling to believe that the Conservatives are as right-wing as Liberal Prime Minister Martin has portrayed them, and younger people, whose support for the Green Party has significantly increased. The province-by-province projections now stand as follows -- 155 of the 308 seats are needed for a majority:
Next week we'll hear the all-important leader debates, but they are likely to change nothing. The Conservatives are muzzling their own right-wing extremists, who are virulently anti-abortion, gay-hating, anti-gun control, anti-immigation, pro closer ties with the US, anti-Kyoto accord, and militaristic (Stephen Harper, the new Conservative leader and former head of a Western separatist party, wanted Canada in the Iraq war). The Conservative strategists are determined to portray Harper as a moderate, despite the fact that he is on record as having taken right-wing positions on many social, economic and environmental position. If this sounds a lot like Dubya, and the spin doctor white-washing of his extremism reminds you of 'compassionate conservatism' in 2000, it should, because the tactics are the same -- say anything to get elected, and then trot out the real agenda of the people who paid for the campaign. But it's even more frightening than that. Small-c conservatives make up only 30% of Canadians, and the capital-c Conservatives are already above that point, with some of their voters coming from angry liberals. But if the figures above don't change, the Conservatives will get 38% of the seats with 33% of the vote. And the Bloc Québecois, the Québec separatist party that runs candidates only in that province, will get 19% of the seats with only 11% of the vote. Add them together and you get a distortion almost identical to what happened in the US in 2000, where Dubya 'won' with only 46% of the popular vote. If the Conservatives and Bloc combine their seats in a strange-bedfellows anti-federalist coalition, they'll have 57% of the seats with only 44% of the votes, while liberal-centrist parties will have only 43% of the seats, even though they will have received 56% of the votes. There is no other coalition that would have enough seats to form a government. Problem is, this coalition won't hold for more than a few months. The Bloc is a left-wing, Francophone party, liberal on all social, economic and environmental issues. The Conservatives have diametrically-opposed views on every issue but one: their dislike of federalism. The cost of Bloc support would be to grant Québec limited sovereignty, kind of 'independence light'. The very idea of this is repugnant to core Western Conservatives. And the Bloc has already said that it would not support any Conservative government that tried to recriminalize abortion, and has made it clear that it would not tolerate abandoning Canada's support for the Kyoto Accord, or anti-gay laws, both of which are bedrock principles of the Western Conservatives. And Ontario Conservatives would quickly cross the floor to the Liberals to save their political skin if the Bush-style right-wing social agenda of the Western Conservatives was trotted out. The role of the media in the final two weeks of the campaign will be interesting. Conservative media are likely to present Harper as the 'heir-apparent', the surprise winner and a fresh new face for Canada. Liberal media will be torn over whether to simply relate the campaign stories as they are spun out by the parties, or to go behind the scenes and surface what Harper has said, in writing, in past, on many issues he is now trying to paint himself as moderate on. The current Liberal campaign has attempted to do just that, but it has backfired, being portrayed as negative 'US-style' electioneering, sour grapes or desperation politics, so the liberal media could be subject to similar admonishments if they get proccupied with the 'secret agenda' of the Conservatives. But media being what they are, expect Harper, the new frontrunner, to face increasing heat over unanswered questions from his decidedly non-moderate past. Not to mention some of his decidedly wacko neophyte candidates. So what do I think will happen? The Conservatives will win a small plurality, and have to either form a coalition with, or try to manage with the tacit support of, the Bloc Québecois. Paul Martin will resign right after the election, and the Liberals will choose a new leader not tainted by the recent scandals. The Conservatives will start to self-destruct right after the election, with hard-line right-wingers expelled or resigning, and moderates crossing the floor to the Liberals, especially after it selects a new leader. The new government will last 3-6 months, accomplish nothing, and fall when the Bloc Québecois withdraws its support. Then we'll have another election, and perhaps even a third, until the 70% of Canadians with moderate-to-liberal social and political views get a government they can live with. Ontario and Québec have 60% of Canada's population, and no party has ever successfully governed the country without healthy support from both provinces. Stephen Harper is on record as opposing bilingualism, although he is now waffling on what his precise position on this is, which makes him unelectable in Québec. And his previously stated positions on many other issues will, if they become widely known, make him unelectable anywhere. It's going to be messy, and stay that way for quite awhile. And if the Martin Liberals hadn't been so politically stupid, it could all have been avoided. Cartoon by Tom Cheney -- buy his stuff at Cartoon Bank. |
 A member of the Derrick Jensen mailing list pointed out a brilliantly-written letter to the editor of a small Virginia community newspaper, describing new laws to increase penalties for 'eco-terrorism', a vaguely defined term which appears to include acts of sabotage to corporate 'property', even if they do no harm to any individual. The law was apparently designed to discourage acts against the property of logging, mining, and factory farm corporations, developers and SUV retailers. Here's the letter in its entirety.
Last week, you used the term "ecoterrorist"
with
regard to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). A note on semantics: The
Department of Defense defines terrorism as "The unlawful use or
threatened use of force or violence against individuals or property to
coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to
achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives."
Somehow, burning a bulldozer fails to meet these criteria. Unlawful and ideological, yes. But they intended to coerce corporate entities (United Land, Virginia Land, Kessler Group, Regency Centers, and Dierman Realty Group), not governments or societies. Do you feel "terrorized" by the loss of the Land Company's trackhoe? Even developer Wendell Wood seems non-plussed. "You can go buy another." What is scary is how terms like "ecoterrorist," "cyber-terrorist," "narco-terrorist" and "special-interest terrorist" are slipping into our vernacular. Know this: "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act" legislation was proposed in Texas and New York, to officially label many forms of advocacy as "terrorism." Plus, President Bush's proposed Patriot Act II hopes to broaden the definition of terrorism and make it easier to sentence such "terrorists" to death. Now, who's scaring who? Indeed, the ELF is the FBI's top priority regarding domestic terrorism. But I, for one, would hope they'd instead focus more on whoever mailed U.S. military-manufactured anthrax and ricin to Congress. Truth is, most people agree with ELF's intentions. A recent national survey found that two out of three people think the environment is more important than property rights, corporate profits, or even creating jobs. The ELF usually targets only the most egregious of industrial polluters and ecology-destroying profiteers. Take Nestle's Ice Mountain bottled water, which built a plant in Michigan's Mecosta County (despite a 2-1 resident vote to deny them zoning) and then proceeded to violate state and federal water rights by siphoning from public rivers and streams. ELF activists, after exhausting legal avenues of dissent, tried to blow up the plant. Is the sprawling Hollymead Center as bad? No. But Richmond's SUVs were arguably an environmental and social menace. Objectively speaking, SUVs kill more Americans than al-Qaeda does. The last word: There was a time when we had a very different term for those who sabotage avaricious corporations. As John Adams said of the Sons of Liberty who dunked East India Company tea into Boston harbor: "There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity in this last effort of the patriots that I greatly admire." Brian Wimer Charlottesville P.S. This week, Bush's Education Secretary called the National Education Association teachers union a "Terrorist Organization" for criticizing the shortcomings of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. Who's next? Editorialists? |
 In his book The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria argues that democracy cannot be imposed on countries that have no foundation of constitutional liberalism. Without such a foundation, he says, there are not sufficient self-imposed checks and balances to prevent the government from falling victim to a predisposition to nationalistic excess and corruption that political power inevitably brings with it. I've been watching the situation unfolding in Haiti and Venezuela, where once well-intentioned and widely-supported populist governments have fallen out of public favour and are in the process of being overthrown by Western-backed opposition groups. It occurred to me I've seen this all before, and it's like a bad replay of a vicious cycle that seems to play itself out again and again in most of the so-called third world 'democracies'. I've illustrated it, in over-simplified terms, in the chart above. The boxes in red show the phases of the cycle where nationalists and populists are in power, and those in blue show where pro-Western elites are in power. It's an endless cycle of hope, disillusionment, corruption, cynical foreign interference and despair. In countries with sizeable resources, like Iraq, the West tends to intervene to short-circult the cycle and replace one pro-Western government, when it gets too corrupt or independent, with another. In countries that are resource poor, like Bolivia, the West tends to ignore the woes of the prevailing governments regardless of their political stripe, using economic restrictions to keep them in line, and allowing prolonged crises to remain unsolved, stalling the cycle where Argentina and North Korea are shown on the above chart. This space is the hardest and most important to move forward from, and it is the space that many African nations have occupied for most of the time since they became independent of their colonizers. Occasionally, countries break out of the cycle. This usually happens of the country's own accord, on its own schedule, and only once constitutional liberalism has taken root. Chile and South Africa, for example, after each going through a particularly bloody cycle, may have finally had enough. They look, at least for now, to have imposed enough checks and balances on government, and enough institutions of constitutional liberalism, to have escaped the cycle. In his new book, Forging Democracy, Geoff Eley argues compellingly that democracy is a relatively recent, fragile, and hard-won accomplishment, one that still exists legitimately in very few countries. All it takes is a coup, an invasion by a non-democratic neighbour or a stolen election to take a country out of the virtuous cycle of democracy in the upper left of the chart, and hurl it back into the lower right where the cycle begins all over again. For most of the world, for most of human history, that much power has been just too much to handle. The message, which Zakaria and many others have made, is that countries without a heritage of democracy and constitutional liberalism need our (non-military) investment, our support and our patience. They do not need oppressive and unrepayable debts or 'free' trade rules rigged in favour of heavily-subsidized Western multinationals. They do not need military intervention or political interference every time they slip, as we all did, on the hard road to democracy, and every time they elect or find themselves ruled by a government whose political and economic ideas are at odds with ours. Let them build their own nations, supported by Western humanitarian and educational aid with no strings attached, and democracy may eventually take hold. Fail to do so, and the cycle will continue forever. |
 In order to test Edward Hall's hypothesis< /a> that population stress is the fundamental cause of human violence and war, I decided to see if there was a correlation between the state of civil unrest and the density and growth of human population in various countries around the world. Using data from the FAO, I computed the population per arable hectare of land for each country in the world with at least a quarter of a million people. Then, using data from the Population Reference Bureau, I mapped this to annual population growth rates (%) for these countries. Initially, I produced the scatter diagram shown below:  In this chart, about a third of the countries, those with annual growth rates under 0.5%, are excluded to keep it from being too busy. The overall global population per arable hectare (4.0) and overall global annual growth rate (0.8%) are shown by a large blue dot. The sustainable global population per arable hectare (1.0, per a variety of sources I have cited in earlier posts) and the sustainable overall global annual growth rate (0%) is shown by a large green dot. No country has achieved that sustainable level -- every country in the world has either positive growth rate or a density over 1 person per arable hectare. Sure enough, the countries furthest from the green ideal point are also, almost without exception, the most violent and war-torn countries. At the far extreme, you find Palestine and Kuwait, with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and most of the MidEast countries close by. In the upper central part of the chart you find most of the war-ravaged sub-Saharan African countries, led by the Congo, with its horrendous and incessant war, Sierre Leone, where militias amputate their enemies' limbs as a symbolic warning, and Rwanda & Burundi, site of the bloodiest massacre of the last half-century. Here, too, you'll find Colombia, where anti-drug spraying and civil war have killed thousands, destroyed the economy and poisoned 80% of the arable land. And you'll find Haiti, site of this week's coup, and several Central American states that have witnessed horrendous warfare in recent years. I then decided to multiply the two factors -- density and growth -- together to produce what I call the Population Stress Index (PSI). The calculations are shown graphically (I have tables if anyone wants them as well) on the map above: Purple for a PSI over 10 (extreme), Red for 4-10 (very high), Orange for 2-4 (high), Yellow for 0.5 to 2 (moderate), and White for less than 0.5 (low). If you were to correlate this index against the propensity for violence and war in the past few decades, I think you'd find a nearly perfect match. What's more interesting is that if you repeat the exercise using data from a century ago, you find the major belligerants of the world wars have the highest scores. By the middle part of the last century, China, Vietnam and Korea had exceptionally high scores. So what can be done to bring annual growth down to, and below, zero, to achieve globally a zero PSI, a situation that today exists nowhere on Earth? In his essay How to Influence Fertility, John R. Weeks, Director of the Population Center at San Diego State University suggests the following programs to reduce population growth, and ultimately reduce global human population to the sustainable level of one billion, no more than one person per arable hectare:
It's certainly a solution set worth striving for. I am, however, pessimistic that it's sufficient to overcome the enormous population momentum that I've written about on these pages. Nor do I have much confidence that, when we have an American regime that is hell-bent on banning abortion again, which deprives foreign aid and support to countries and agencies that practice family planning, and which funnels money to religious groups hostile to birth control, there will be enough political will or economic investment worldwide to bring these programs to fruition. You would think that, when evidence indicates that overpopulation is the key cause of environmental degradation, violence and war, and human suffering, there would be an unstoppable groundswell of support for programs to reduce our population back to sustainable levels. But that's the power of our culture: In the face of irrefutable proof of its folly, we continue to chant the mantra of Growth. Postscript: 3pm -- Just found this interesting site from Matthew White, who tabulated the death rate from war and atrocities during the period from 1975-2000, and conveniently mapped it like I did the PSI. His colour code is: bright red over 1% of the population (extreme), dark red 0.1-1% (high), maroon 0.01-0.1% (moderate), black under 0.01% (low):  Sure looks like a close correlation to PSI to me. I'll have to go back and plug in his data to my table to calculate the r2 correlation coefficient, but I'm willing to bet it's very high. |
 In an article in this month's Fast Company, Keith Hammonds profiles an unlikely hero of social and environmental progressives: Ashoka founder Bill Drayton. Drayton, a former Director at McKinsey and the Environmental Protection Agency, is now a philanthropist with a difference: Ashoka provides a 'leg up' to those with vision, creativity, entrepreneurship and a strong ethical sense, by making them Ashoka 'fellows', who receive a stipend, funding for project costs, and the legal, management, intellectual and networking support of the Ashoka team. From a modest start 25 years ago, the group has grown to over 1500 fellows in 53 countries, including some highly celebrated and astonishingly creative social entrepreneurs who are household names in their home countries. The support team includes representation from McKinsey (management consultants), Hill & Knowlton (PR) and the International Senior Lawyers Project (legal counsel). According to the group's website, "Ashoka Fellows are individuals who share qualities traditionally associated with business entrepreneurs — vision, innovation, determination, and long-term commitment — but are committed to systemic social change in Ashoka's areas of interest: learning/youth development, the environment, health, human rights, economic development, and civic engagement. Fellows receive up to a three-year financial stipend to allow them to concentrate fully on their programs, and in addition may apply for supplemental funding for collaborative projects and are eligible for training and technical assistance." Here are a few examples of what Ashoka fellows are doing:
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This
is the second in a series of articles that will be published
intermittently this month.
This article summarizes what I believe were the most important ideas
of
2003 in the world of politics and
economics. The first article in the
series covered the world of blogs &
blogging, and future articles will cover business, the arts &
sciences, and the environment.  POLITICS & ECONOMICS -- THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003  I make no apologies for the fact that this list reflects my perspective on the political compass (-8.2, -8.0). Those with conservative or authoritarian views are welcome to make their own lists.
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 Dave
Snowden has a lot of nerve. The founder of the IBM Cynefin Centre
doesn't stop at saying that collecting 'best practices' and most other
accepted Knowledge Management activities are largely fruitless (he
makes an exception for standard practices in highly prescriptive jobs,
and proven, authorized practices in high-risk and high-security
situations). He is almost as disdainful of many of the idealistic
goals
of Personal Knowledge Management -- helping front-line workers to do
their jobs more simply and effectively and to find experts they can
draw on and network with. If the tools to do PKM aren't adequate, he
maintains, the answer is to create better tools, not show people how
to
use deficient ones (and creating tools is IT's job, not KM's). One of
the things he thinks KM should be doing is helping management
understand and lead their organizations more effectively. Management
is, after all, the group paying for organizations' KM activities, and
a
group that is, in most organizations, far from happy with what KM has
delivered. Snowden argues that the best way for KM to help management
is to be a kind of 'cultural anthropologist' in the organization you
are working in or advising. One of the ways anthropologists study and understand tribes is by listening to and gathering stories. Analogously, Snowden says, it's important that KM people get out and spend time on the front lines really understanding what the organization's real stories are -- not the ones that appear in the mission statement or the company newsletter, which say what management wishes the company culture was, but the peer-to-peer stories that truly define the organizational culture, drive what people really believe and do and how they act, and make the company, for better and for worse, what it truly is. To gather those stories, you must be as honest as an anthropologist, not try to do it surreptitiously, because people only tell the real stories to people who have gained and earned their trust. Snowden has developed very sophisticated and rigorous processes for doing so, which he details in his 'masterclass' called Using Narrative in Organisational Change,, which you can now buy on CD-ROM. In Thomas King's book The Truth About Stories, King argues that if you want to change a culture, you need to change its story, because that's all a culture is. I don't know that Snowden would disagree, but he would argue, I think, that changing an organization's real stories is not so easy. That's why mission statements don't work -- they're wishful thinking, myths that management would like to believe everyone buys and is motivated by, but really aren't. If you're in management, he says, you don't change the stories, he says, you understand them, then you act on them, and then you make them your own, retelling them in your own way so that you show the people in the front lines of the organization that you understand the real culture of the organization (and the real problems of front-line workers). In so doing you harness the astonishing power of 'true' stories. Snowden is acutely aware of the overt class distinctions in Britain that make trust, and hence collecting stories, hard to achieve. While some of us in Europe and North America might argue that our class distinctions are not as formidable barriers as they are in the UK, I think this would be a mistake. Americans, I have observed, make a great effort to pretend that class distinctions don't exist or are permeable, by allowing everyone to use first names, for example, when in fact the hierarchies are at least as strict as they are in the UK. The only real difference is that the determinants and clues of status are subtler -- a bit more tied to wealth and the circles you move in and a bit less pre-determined by heredity. But trust is still deepest peer-to-peer and extremely hard to earn and sustain between management (or their henchman consultants and head-office lackeys) and front-line people. That is perhaps why management is in a constant quandary over decentralizing -- it clearly improves productivity, innovativeness, morale and work effectiveness, but it allows people that management doesn't really trust more control and autonomy, and perhaps even allows them to develop -- heaven forbid -- their own organizational culture. The reality, as Snowden argues, is that management is never in charge of organizational culture, that people behave the way they do partly because they've learned it's the most effective way to do their unique job and partly in their own self-interest, and not because it's in the procedure manual or the role description or aligned with the mission statement or the strategic plan. Once you have collected the true stories in an unbiased manner (Snowden carefully explains how to remove bias, so you don't get 'fed' just what you want to hear or put your own personal 'spin' on the story), the next step is to act on them. Stories tell management important information about what works, and, more importantly, what doesn't work, in the organization. A lot of stories are about how people have solved problems that management hasn't addressed, or which management has in fact created. These are often very comical or very heroic stories that not only have important messages for management, but illustrate exemplary behaviour that management may not realize it's not rewarding, or actually inhibiting. It is critical, Snowden says, to make sure you understand the stories, and to collect and organize and ponder a lot of stories, before charging in and making changes that misconstrue the organizational culture, impede rather than help, and destroy forever the trust that the story-gatherer built up to capture this critical information. And finally, once management has acted carefully and conscientiously on the learnings from the stories, they can actually make these stories their own, not by retelling them in the same words and context as they heard them (that would be disingenuous, a form of intellectual property theft), and not by appropriating them and making models and heroes of their protagonists (that could make the poor protagonists look like head office plants), but by conveying the same messages and lessons with stories from their own personal work context. Crafting such stories is a complex, rigorous and skillful process, and explaining this process takes up much of Snowden's 'masterclass' time. There are different types of stories, like fables, myths and viruses, each with a different purpose and different construction (the course provides templates of each). Even more important is the testing of stories by telling and having others retell them until they are perfected. The impact of an executive telling employees a real story about the organization, credibly and powerfully, can be profound, even transformational. Just imagine -- instead of the boss telling his/her people what to do, and evaluating them on his/her perception of their 'performance' in doing so, picture the boss explaining that he/she understood exactly why his/her people were doing what they were doing, and offering constructive ideas on how management could make the employee's job easier and more effective. Management supporting the staff instead of the other way around. Hey, I know it's a 90s idea and is out of fashion again these days, but stories, properly collected and interpreted by trained KM practitioners, can make it possible. I hope Dave won't object to my sharing one of his stories to illustrate this -- it's hard to write about stories without at least one example. He describes a group of public service utility workers who are subjected to a consultant's efficiency review, which leads to them being given fewer work breaks and being given networked PCs to allow them to save time travelling into the office for paperwork between jobs. What the consultant didn't realize (and what the careful collection of stories finally revealed) was that these workers shared vital information about how to do their jobs properly during these work breaks and office visits, and this information either couldn't (because it's highly contextual and needs conversation to convey effectively) or wouldn't (because of the lack of trust of how stuff posted publicly might be used by management) be captured in databases or messages on their new PCs. So the workers found a surreptitious place for unofficial work breaks and a surreptitious place for 'offline' documentation of information they wanted to share with peers, 'working around' the consultant's well-meaning but wrong-headed and dysfunctional change proposals. [Dave makes this into a long and wonderful story with a brilliant punch line, a resolution in which management finally learns from this mistake and turns it to astonishing advantage, and since I'm not telling a story here, I won't spoil it -- get the CD-ROM to hear the story completely and properly.] But the point is that the organizational culture is what it is, and usually for a good reason, and it's vital to understand that culture by collecting the stories that reveal it, before you try to change processes or behaviour, or the change effort will inevitably fail, as almost every organizational change effort does. I got out of the KM business last December, and since then I've toyed with the idea of becoming a new-age KM or PKM consultant, but then decided I'd had enough of this well-intentioned but endlessly-struggling discipline. But I recognize that there's still important KM work that could and should be done. While I agree that PKM needs better tools much more than it needs process improvement consulting, I still think there is much promise in Personal Productivity Improvement as an offshoot of KM. And now Dave has convinced me that the exercise of capturing and interpreting and acting on an organization's real stories would be worthwhile, especially for large organizations. But I think calling it Cultural Anthropology or Story-Gathering is a non-starter -- try to sell CEOs something with that woolly a name these days and you'll starve. What could we call it that would be accurate and still compelling to CEOs who don't, yet, get what it's all about? |
 Schadenfreude. It's a German word that literally means "joy from damage". It refers to the perverse pleasure we take in observing or hearing about the misfortunes of others. That pleasure seems to be enhanced by talking about it with others -- gossip would be empty without it, and when we hear about a disaster, like the horrendous catastrophe of this week's Asian earthquake and tsunami, we have an almost instinctive need to share the news with others. If you don't think it's pleasure we feel in these situations, here are some more examples:
Writer Valerie Weaver-Zercher suggests< /a> what may be behind this is our dual need to see others as needy (which plays to the nurturer in us) and to see ourselves as not needy (which plays to our egos, and our feelings of learned helplessness). She calls this the "head-shaking syndrome". Some writers say it reflects a subliminal (or not-so-subliminal) desire for revenge against those we feel have wronged us or shown us up in some way. I confess I'm like Calvin's Dad in the cartoon above: I don't get it, though I recognize it seems to drive an enormous amount of human behaviour and activity. I loathe reality TV and the plethora of programs and films that wallow in human misery and suffering. I love games, and play to win, but afterwards I feel badly for the 'losers', and it is the social and learning aspect, rather than the competitive aspect, that I enjoy: I would get as much, if not more, pleasure from a collaborative social activity that everybody 'won'. I find comedy that ridicules and humiliates people to be pathetic and exploitative, not funny at all. And although I have been predicting a growing cascade of social, economic and ecological catastrophes, I will get no pleasure from being proved correct. I change the station when news comes on about disasters, crimes, and the undoing of celebrities: If there's nothing I can do about these things, to me it seems merely morbid to dwell on them. Can someone please explain to me how these things are pleasurable, or even cathartic? What perverse joy can anyone get watching people eat worms, women screaming at the loss of a child, athletes and film stars humiliated, losers of card games groan, or stand-ups reveal grotesque embarrassments from their past? Taking joy from these things seems deranged to me, evidence of great mental distress and anguish, or at best a bizarre, reality-detached ennui. But I will admit to a strange desire to spread bad news about others (though only if I know the news to be true -- I don't traffic in rumour). I don't know what's behind this. Maybe it's my natural pessimism, an opportunity to say 'I told you so', to warn people: If John and Mary are breaking up, we should all be alarmed -- maybe all marriages are doomed, or maybe monogamy itself is unnatural, unsustainable, and Tom Robbins' warning of the staggering difficulty of 'making love last' needs to be heeded. If Frank lost his job, perhaps this shows that all business hierarchies are fragile, uncaring, poised to destroy the lives of those who rely on them and allow them to continue. If Bill took his own life, maybe he's the brave one, the harbinger of the future, the canary in the coal mineshaft. I love to learn, to attach meaning to things, and bad news seems to call out for explanation, for interpretation of meaning. Why would our amazing planet be designed to suddenly shudder, and drown millions of her creatures in a tidal wave of misery, and destroy the joyous lives of tens of millions of others? What possible reason could there be for such cruelty, such devastation? Someone, please, stop telling me how many died, and instead tell me why? |
 Things are usually the way they are for a reason.
But there are few situations in the world that appear, from a
distance,
as unreasonable as the war between Israel and Palestine, a war that
has
been going on, in essence, without let-up for more than half a
century.
At one point the efforts to reach a peace settlement got so close to
success that the negotiators on each side received Nobel Peace prizes
for their efforts. But the dream didn't last, and for reasons we
couldn't fathom, the cycle of bloodshed, escalation and retaliation
cranked up again and is now at firestorm levels, threatening to push
the entire Mideast into even more cataclysmic violence.The reason we couldn't fathom this, is because we've never lived there, never walked a mile in their shoes. In The New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Goldberg provides us with an excellent proxy for such an experience, as he crisscrosses the area, from Israel's "ideologues of aggressive settlement" to Palestinian mothers teaching their children the honour of death in the holy war against the Jews, describing what he sees and what he hears from those in power, and from those who have nothing. It is a gut-wrenching, depressing journey. You'll need to buy the May 31 edition to read it, and I would recommend it highly. Alternatively, you can listen to Goldberg summarize his findings, along with a slide show of photos by Gilles Peress, here. One of those photos, of a Palestinian woman peering through a temporary gap in the new Israeli Separation Wall, is reproduced above. Goldberg makes no secret of his personal view of all this: The
leaders of the Jewish national-religious camp do not adhere to
observable reality, They exist in the glorious Jewish past and in the
messianic future but not in the reality of today, in which Jewish
soldiers give their lives to protect settlements; in which
Palestinians
live and die at checkpoints; in which Israel is becoming a pariah
among
the nations; and in which Israel may one day cease to exist as a
democratic Jewish state.
[Michael Tarazi, legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team says] "Settlements are the vanguard of binationalism" -- a single state that would soon have an Arab majority. "I don't care if they build more. The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state."... "We have to look at the way the South Africans did it. The world is increasingly intolerant of the Zionist idea. We have to capture the imagination of the world. We have to make this an argument about apartheid." The view of the moderate majority on both sides is that the best of a sorry lot of options is to have Israel dismantle the settlements and withdraw from the pathetic Gaza Strip and the volatile West Bank, to the so-called Green Line, the UN-brokered treaty line after the last "official" war. But that majority view is very fragile, and violently opposed by a significant minority on both sides. The settlements in the occupied territories are the flash-point, where hugely outnumbered Jews, many of them vehemently anti-Arab, provocative, and uncompromising, are surrounded by largely militant Palestinians ready to lay down their lives to reclaim "their homeland", and protected by an Israeli army that has ceased being protectors and become an army of occupation, many of whom are all too willing to demonstrate violently which side they support, as Goldberg reports. There are no good guys and bad guys in this war, and every confrontation, of which there are thousands, at every checkpoint, every attack by Arab militants (many of them children), every razing of Palestinian homes to make way for more Iraqi settlements, every suicide bombing, radicalizes both sides and renders the position of the moderate majority untenable. The extremists on both sides, outnumbered though they may be, are firmly in control of the political agenda, and their every provocative act strengthens their position rather than ostracizing them. The "ideologues of aggressive settlement" on the Israeli side, and especially in the settlements, largely believe that all of the occupied territories are theirs by divine right, and that it is the will of God that all Arabs be expelled from their holy land in its entirety -- that, as their website says, "There is no Palestine". And the militants and zealots on the Palestinian side, among the poorest and most destitute people on the face of the Earth, and with one of the highest birth rates, state categorically that they would not stop fighting if Israel withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank, but would merely be encouraged to continue the war until all Jews were extinguished from their holy land. The rabidly intolerant have the will and the ready means to scuttle every attempt at compromise, to embarrass moderates, to incite violence and then say "I told you so." There is nothing particularly unique in this, of course. Many of the tribal wars in Africa, the ethnic wars in the Balkan states, and the insane religious war in Northern Ireland, exhibit the same shameful, and shameless, pattern of violence and intransigence. The next, inevitable attack by Islamic fundamentalists on US soil will surely produce the same knee-jerk result in the US, and launch another war to treat the symptoms and exacerbate the disease. Ariel Sharon, less moderate than most but less extreme than the extremists, has taken an impossible 'middle' course sure to satisfy no one: Withdraw from Gaza, kind of (there are a host of conditions that render the withdrawal largely a joke to Palestinians), and bulldoze Palestinian homes to build a mammoth wall, not along the Green Line but deep inside the West Bank to "protect" the Jewish settlements, which are everywhere, not just in the border areas. The partisan, bipartisan support he has received in the US shows how little America's leaders understand the realities of the area's politics. As I've said before, the only answer, and it will take decades, perhaps centuries to achieve, is to deal with the underlying humanitarian issues, to give Palestinians a reason to value peace, "something to lose", and help them build infrastructure and educational institutions, and a future to believe in. Poverty, ignorance and inequality, not religious and ethnic hatred, are the real enemies of peace. It doesn't matter whether the area is partitioned into two states, fairly or unfairly, or made into a single apartheid state. Things are the way they are for a reason, and in Israel-Palestine the reason is entrenched, and there is no short-term answer. No matter who represents the two sides, there will be decades of violence, war, and bloodshed to come, and it is inexcusable and ignorant of those of us who don't live there to take sides for cynical political gain. Let us instead -- as we should be doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other areas we have recklessly meddled in, in the absurd and arrogant belief that we understand the problems and have all the answers -- let us instead invest in infrastructure, in education, in building a better world even as the zealous minorities try to tear it apart. The founders of the religions we all claim to believe in would surely understand, and nod in assent. |
 Global Footprint Stress Index: Extreme (purple, >10), High (orange 3-10), Moderate (yellow 1-3), Low (white <1) Last month I wrote an article suggesting that a propensity for war-mongering and civil violence, i.e. the tendency to take hasty and extreme action rather than a reasoned and responsible response to a crisis, might be attributable to what Edward Hall describes as population stress, the adrenaline-driven aggressive/panic stress response that all creatures exhibit when their population greatly exceeds sustainable carrying capacity. Hall explains that this is nature's 'last resort' method of bringing the population of the species quickly back into balance with the rest of the ecosystem, when the species fails to manage its own numbers and when opportunistic diseases don't do the trick. Earlier I had calculated< /a> a simple Population Stress Index (PSI), which was computed by multiplying density per arable square mile by population growth rate, and I compared it to an astonishingly similar map by another blogger, Matthew White, showing violent death rate by country. As I explained in last month's post, the PSI is an imperfect stress index. It does not show the very different levels of consumption and demand on local resources of people in different countries (which has as much to do with sustainability as population). So I have now computed a Footprint Stress Index (FSI), plotted on the map above, which is computed as follows:
Resource Use Index: Sample
Countries
Footprint Stress Index: Sample
Countries
|
I've now finished Jim
Merkel's book