stargeek
THE COMING IRAQ CIVIL WARTHE COMING
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 A year ago I predicted that Civil War would break out in Iraq as soon as the occupation force left, no matter how long that took, and that such a war would probably end in the division of the country into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia nations. As the Bush Regime beats a hasty retreat from its latest military, humanitarian and PR disaster in the Mideast, that prediction looks more and more likely. In fact, the civil war has already begun, as various factions are already massing militias, assassinating each other's leaders in the provisional government, and aligning with local tribes, warlords and foreign military and intelligence supporters. This week's New Yorker contains the latest insights from award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. None of the factions, he says, is happy with ex-Baathist hitman Iyad Allawi, the man selected to be interim Prime Minister when the US occupation force formally transfers power next week. The group least happy with recent developments is the Northern Iraqi Kurds, who, in the latest accord, have lost the guarantee of autonomy that had been promised them by the occupying force. They are agitating for an independent Kurdistan region (see yellow on map above), and the Israeli military and intelligence services have a large force in this region training Kurdish commando units. The Kurds have the largest military force in the country, the 75,000-strong peshmerga army, and their leaders recently wrote to Bush that if their autonomy rights are not restored they will not participate in the new Shia-controlled government. Watch out for an attack by the peshmergas on Kirkuk as the first sign of all-out civil war. This flashpoin t city, Iraq's 5th largest, is part of the historical Kurdish homeland, and the centre of one of the richest oil areas in the country, but was 'Arabized' by extensive resettlement under Saddam Hussein. Hersh quotes an American military expert who predicts "If Kirkuk is threatened by the Kurds, the Sunni insurgents will move in there, along with the Turkomen [the Turkish ethnic minority in Northern Iraq], and there will be a bloodbath." Kurdish military action will also likely provoke joint response from Iran, Syria, and (until recently unaligned) Turkey, as all three countries have sizeable populations and areas dominated by ethnic Kurds, who believe these lands should be part of a greater Kurdistan. Although Wolfowitz apparently favours an independent Kurdish state in Iraq, and the Israelis would be delighted to have the Kurds as an ally in the region, the official US position remains that Iraq should remain united. That's easy for them to say, now that they are leaving -- they can blame the civil war and break-up on the new Iraq government and on the UN, who will oversee it. There is a very real threat that the civil war will quickly spread beyond the borders of Iraq. Turkey, which has become decidedly less pro-Western in recent months, has said bluntly "We tell our Israeli and Kurdish friends that Turkey's good will lies in keeping Iraq together. We will not support alternative solutions". And Saudi Arabia, always the most reluctant, unlikely, and taciturn ally of the West, has been the target of insurgents who are making it harder and harder for the rich Saudi elite to hold back the fiercely anti-American and anti-Western sentiment in the country and stay on the sidelines. If forced to take sides between an Islamic alliance of Iran, Iraqi insurgents and Syria on one side, and America, Israel and Kurdistan on the other, there is no question where its sympathies would lie. Its role, or willingness to sit out a civil war on its Northern border, will be pivotal in determining the length and outcome of the war. Look to them to try to look neutral, while financing and arming the Sunnis, while Iran will be much more overt in its political and military support for Iraq's Southern Shia. What is particularly frightening is that there is little doubt that Iran either now has, or will soon have, nuclear weapons capability, so that, as in the India-Pakistan conflict to the East, it is likely that nuclear bombs will be threatened by the area's bitterest enemies, Israel and Iran. In both countries a threatened (but not actual) nuclear attack on the other country or its Iraq allies would probably be politically acceptable to the citizens at home. And both countries' governments would welcome a foreign conflict to divert world and domestic attention from their controversial, unpopular and morally questionable activities at home. It in unclear to what extent the Sunni Moslems of Central Iraq will be willing to coexist with the Shia Moslems of the South. While Shia Moslems make up 60% of Iraq's population, except for Iran they are hugely outnumbered by Sunnis in the rest of the Mideast, notably in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey. And the Sunni central section of the country contains most of the oil wealth and pipelines. When the common enemy, the occupying force, leaves next week, the gloves between the two factions may come off. That would pit Iran against the other Islamic countries in the Mideast, a situation it will likely go to great pains to avoid. Expect some back-room dealing between Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, which may prolong the conflict but will probably ultimately produce a partitioning of the country. All of this is likely to mean a long period of unrest and continued death and destruction, as a country with three peoples who dislike and distrust each other, after a hiatus under Saddam and another under the hapless and underresourced Americans, finally get down to determining the future of their country. In such cases, Balkanization has been a global trend for more than a century, so I will predict that there will be, more or less, three countries, uneasily coexisting, after a prolonged and brutal war. The South may combine with Iran, the Kurds will agitate for additional territory in Turkey, but probably settle for what they can get, and the Centre will be squeezed to share oil revenues and infrastructure with both, and become, Yugoslavia-style, all that remains of what was once a much larger Iraq. The sad thing is that every country except Iraq itself stands to gain from such a war. America can say it got rid of Saddam and then left (people will forget the intervening year of incompetent occupation soon enough, especially if the neocons lose power in November so military involvement isn't further prolonged). Israel will have a new ally in Kurdistan. Iran will have entrenched itself as the preeminent power in the area. The Saudi government will once again be able to be vocally anti-American and keep its people happy. Even the Turks will be able to tell its Eastern Kurdish residents that if they don't like their status in Turkey they can now go to their own new country next door. The military contractors will all make a fortune, the mercenaries will have jobs for their short lifetimes, and everyone will have Iraq as an excuse for ignoring their own domestic problems. The sticking point, of course, is the oil. The Western addiction to oil is now being matched by a similar thirst from China. The corporatists will, as a result, get free rein, no matter who is elected, to rev up arctic, offshore and other eco-sensitive and wilderness area drilling, the coal industry will finish off Appalachia and start strip-mining and burning lots more coal in other countries, and the nukes will be dusted off and fired up. At the same time the cost and unsustainability of this addiction will start to dawn on North America, which will follow Europe, at last, in accelerating use of renewable energy, and upping the price of hydrocarbons to discourage their use (and grab needed tax dollars in the process). Whether that's enough to forestall an energy crisis unlike anything we could imagine is unclear, but I don't see the intermittent sputtering of supplies from Iraq being enough to tip it one way or the other. My final prediction is that, just as in Afghanistan, the West will lose interest in what's happening in Iraq long before the people of the country settle their differences and truly begin rebuilding their shattered lives. But at least now, that inevitable, bloody process can start. |
Apologies for my unannounced silence since
last Saturday. The power supply on my Dell failed, draining the
battery
so I couldn't even back up my files to another computer. I just got it
back now. More on this spectacular failure next week. This week has
given me the chance to work on my novel, The
Only Life We Know, and my book Natural Enterprise, as well as a chance to catch
my breath and think about (a) what to blog about next, and (b) what to
do with myself once the three books are finished.Here are some of the things I'm planning on blogging about in the next few weeks. If there's anything else you'd like me to write about, let me know.
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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. |
 Sudan has a great deal in common with Afghanistan. Both countries are horrendously overpopulated relative to their carrying capacity, and have exploding populations -- Sudan's population of 40 million people is doubling every 25 years and that rate is not slowing, raising the spectre of its population topping a half billion by the end of the century. Both Sudan and Afghanistan are also desperately poor, with only 7% of Sudan's land and 12% of Afghanistan's capable of supporting agriculture. What's worse, over-farming, over-grazing and global warming are producing chronic drought, which in turn causes massive famine and desertification. Encroaching desert has already halved arable land in Afghanistan since 1975, and the same phenomenon is happening in Sudan. Both countries have long legacies of brutal and repressive dictatorships, foreign occupation, savage and interminable civil war, lawlessness, genocide and, in the case of Sudan, slavery. And both countries provided safe harbour for Osama bin Laden. What is happening now in the Western Sudanese provinces of Darfur is merely a continuation of a centuries-long legacy of misery, poverty, conflict and violence. In this week's New Yorker Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power reports from Darfur, with first-person interviews with government and rebel leaders and the victims caught eternally in the middle. Some of the information she reveals in telling the agonizing story of this impoverished and hopeless nation:
What about invading Sudan? Its government is much more popular, at least in the North, than the government of Afghanistan, and the end result of an invasion would inevitably be the same as what we see in Afghanistan: Tyranny replaced by anarchy, the retrenchment of the power of local warlords, massive resentment by the locals of the invading force's inability to bring order or build infrastructure to allow even the promise of a normal life. Intractible civil war and strife. And quagmire for the invaders. Should we arm the non-Arab people of Darfur so they can defend themselves? After all, the weapons used in the genocide against them came from the West and from Russia, so can two wrongs make a right? And we can't disarm the janjaweed -- in Sudan, as in Afghanistan, there are so many weapons that disarmament is an impossible objective. This was, of course, how we dealt with the earlier problem in Afghanistan -- providing arms to the Taliban and other extremists to allow them to defend themselves from the invading Russians. We all know how successful that was. Should we relocate a million or two million people to Chad, and pay Chad to take them in, and protect their borders? This was how we dealt with the persecuted Jews after World War II, helping them build a new homeland in Israel. That, too, has been a political nightmare. Why would the people of Chad, itself overpopulated and struggling, be willing to give up part of their homeland to accommodate a huge exodus of destitute foreign refugees? The sad reality is that there is no answer. The problem is that there are too many people and not enough land, water, or resources to support them. Throughout human history, the maximum sustainable population has been 160 people per arable square mile (1 person per 4 arable acres), which would mean that Sudan should have no more than 11 million people, a quarter of its current population. By the end of the century it could have fifty times this maximum sustainable population, and if desertification isn't halted, it will be even worse. If we think democracy, 'free' trade, education and technology are somehow going to prevent this situation from being catastrophic, we're wildly deluding ourselves. What's happening in Sudan, now, is foreshadowing what will happen worldwide by the end of this century if we don't address massive overpopulation, unsustainable resource consumption, and all the consequences that these two excesses produce: famine, war, destitution, lawlessness, epidemic disease, terrorism, tyranny, oppression, suffering, genocide, and ecological collapse. Sudan is a country out of control, and while we must of course provide humanitarian aid to its needy masses, and do everything we can to persuade its government to allow us to help it broker a lasting peace, this is only a stop-gap. We must convince the government and the people of Sudan that it must reduce its population and start stewarding its resources in a sustainable and responsible way. Otherwise the next war, the next genocide, the next famine, the next epidemic, the next oppressive government, will be incomparably, unimaginably worse. They say you can't get blood from a stone, but there seems to be no limit to how much blood can be wrenched from an ocean of sand. Photograph of a Darfur refugee camp from this remarkable online portfolio by Bruno Stevens at New Yorker online. |
| Well, thanks to readers much
more tech-savvy than I am, I think I may be able to get Google to
start
picking up my posts again, and, by tightening up the code of my
blogroll, also make the page load faster for those patient readers
with
dial-up access. So far I have moved the blogroll to the right hand
column, so Google will not get bogged down in the blogroll code and
give up before it gets to the actual posts. In the process I messed up
the masthead, so I've adopted a simple one-piece masthead
temporarily. If this post works properly, I'll then make an additional change to my blogroll, stripping out the table HTML and replacing it with a simple list separated by line breaks. Next post will report on the results of that. Keep your fingers crossed for me. |
 Last year I waded through Jeremy Rifkin's The Hydrogen Economy and wrote a blog post that explained what's promising about hydrogen as a fuel, and its two major drawbacks. I used two charts, reproduced here, to explain how it works and what's holding it back. The chart above shows the energy economy we have today. Red boxes are non-renewable, polluting and environmentally damaging energy sources and green ones are clean and renewable. Whether we use hydrocarbon fuels or electricity to light, heat and cool our homes, it's likely that non-renewable, damaging sources are producing it. Our cars likewise burn fossil fuels, and although hybrid cars are certainly an improvement, they still depend on fossil fuels to create ('reform') the hydrogen that the fuel cells convert into electricity. The chart below shows the energy economy in twenty years, if we can solve the two major dilemmas of the hydrogen economy.  Under this scenario, hydrocarbons are replaced by solar, wind and other renewable, non-polluting, non-damaging energy sources. The central hydro utility is replaced by a local energy co-op, which produces energy for your community from its own solar collectors, wind turbines etc. The compressed hydrogen used to power next-generation pure hydrogen vehicles is produced from some of this electricity, and distributed through local service stations. The excess electricity produced by these cars can be used to provide light, heat and cooling to the home or sold back to the local energy co-op. The cars themselves will have no engine, no pedals, clutch or gearshift, make no noise and produce no harmful exhaust. The entire process will require no burning, no pollution, and no grid at the mercy of multinationals and sheikhs. What are the two catches? First, the current cost of electricity produced from non-renewable sources is very expensive, and the process is cumbersome and not yet terribly efficient. Even more problematic is the $100 billion cost of building the infrastructure to generate, distribute and store the electricity and hydrogen, obsolescing a comparable amount of existing energy infrastructure, and probably causing some consternation to and resistance from the owners of that infrastructure.  Yesterday the University of New South Wales
predicted that by 2010 a new generation of photovoltaic
'harvesters' based on titanium dioxide ceramics will both collect
solar energy and
use that energy to produce compressed hydrogen from water. A 10m
square
array, such as that depicted at right, mounted on just half the
households in a sun-rich country like Australia, could produce the
entire country's energy.This would allow an even more distributed, decentralized model than that depicted above: With each household able to produce its own energy, the local energy co-op might be nothing more than a virtual market, and the need for local service stations selling or even producing compressed hydrogen would be obviated. We'd all change from consuming to producing energy. The university has even higher hopes for the titanium dioxide technology behind this advance: They believe it will allow innovations in other areas such as "water purification, anti-viral and bacteriacidal coatings on hospital clothing and surfaces, self-cleaning glasses, and anti-pollution surfaces on buildings and roads". Anyone know anything about titanium? I know it's a metal, but is it plentiful and easy and clean to extract? Is it recyclable? Durable? Toxic in landfill sites? I sense a bit of grandstanding and breast-beating by UNSW here. Is there another catch they're not telling us about? |
 A few interesting articles on innovation, knowledge and the future of business - worth a read:
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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. |
 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? |
 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. |
 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. |
 I have just updated
the full Dire
ctory
of Active Salon Blogs. You can download it in Excel format by
clicking on the link at the top of the right sidebar just below my
e-mail link. It contains current information on the owner and subject
of each blog, plus current sortable data on hits/month and
inbound blog counts. Please send
me details of any missing and new Salon Blogs, and any errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive to the Directory
spreadsheet regularly. Here are the summary statistics for the last
month:
Schnauzer Logic
#3435
If I've missed your Salon Blog, or if you know of any active (posted
within the last month) active Salon Blogs not in the directory, please
let me know.
There's just one day left to find the missing Easter eggs (see post
below), and a few of them are hidden in the above newbie blogs.Connecting the Dots 3437 Vanitas Personae 3446 Cassandra Predicts 3456 Two Fawn's American Indian Movement Pages 3467 Mindboggling Adventure Tales 3488 Bartholomew's Notes on Religion 3494 Saunter & Repose 3517 Avon Calling 3522 Bill Penrose's Radio Weblog 3530 The Cassandra Frost Collection 3531 Lumberg Boinked Her 3552 Screwing the Pooch 3557 Poli Sigh 3566 The Outer Edge 3573 Matriarch 3577 Oh My Stars 3580 The Poche 3591 Bob Rich's Weblog 3592 Douglas Moran's Radio Weblog 3597 XXX Rated Realist 3602 Rich Whiteley's Radio Weblog 3605 Manhattan Waiter 3612 The Grace Pages 3622 Lucy 3627 Vietnam Moving Wall in Worland WY 3628 Ashent TwentyThree's Radio Weblog 3632 What's in Scott's Head 3635 Monkey Labs 3637 Carnival Knowledge 3641 Infidelia 3744 1.21 Giggawats 3746 Docta Puella 3751 Enough 3752 Steve Simard's Radio Weblog 3753 Heart Attack Diaries 3757 |
 My daughter spends much
of her workday at the computer, but has no interest in blogging. Her
hobby is scrapbooking,
a hobby that now supports a $2.5 billion industry. A scrapbook is
essentially a photo album on steroids, replete with souvenirs,
commentary, and now, special thematic papers to make your collage a
work of art. Special scissors are involved, as are many art media
(paint, chalk, etc.). Stores catering to the hobby are springing up
everywhere. People belong to scrapbooking circles (where you share
your
technical skills in scrapbooking, more than the actual scrapbooking
content, with others), and are signing up for classes in scrapbooking
and attending scrapbookng conferences. There is a Scrapbooking for Dummies book. Last week, during a delightful dinner with fellow Canadian bloggers Seb Paquet and Gary Lawrence Murphy, we talked a little about this, and my dinner companions defined the hobby as Blogging + Permanence. Where a blog consists of nothing but bits and is totally etherial, a scrapbook is tangible. It has heft. It has presence. It is also a social hobby, far less solitary than blogging. Mothers and daughters work on their scrapbooks together. And the subject matter is much more personal than most bloggers' writings and photos (livejournal bloggers excepted). This is perhaps because the privacy of scrapbooks allows this intimacy -- no fear of stalkers stumbling on your scrapbook the way they can on your blog. And scrapbookers are overwhelmingly female. They are also, photobloggers aside, of a more artistic bent than the vast majority of bloggers. The whole point of blogs was to make website composition simpler, so the writer could concentrate on the words. Scrapbooks are all about composition, and that composition is getting more sophisticated all the time. Some scrapbookers are even taking art classes so they can supplement their photos with portraits and other works of art. The hobby is even encroaching on genealogy, with much richer stories about, and embellished with artefacts of, one's ancestors than one finds on the usual 'bare' family tree. I keep thinking there should be more overlap between the two hobbies, but while there are lots of websites on how to scrapbook, there are very few blogs devoted to scrapbooking (and those that are seem to have mostly been abandoned, presumably so their writers can pursue their favoured hobby instead). There is certainly a ready opportunity to bring the hobbies together: Scanning the pages of a scrapbook into a blog would not be difficult, and would create a backup copy of the scrapbook that could be given to others or shared with those far away. And if the blogging tools weren't so clumsy, they could allow us to print out our blogs and preserve them, with some of the related real-life scraps, the comments threads etc., in a hard copy archive that those (like my father) who say they find reading online too hard on the eyes could browse. Why doesn't this happen? Probably because the content is different, and the intended audience is different. The audience for your scrapbook (besides yourself) is the person sitting beside you, commenting on each page, sharing your art in a very tactile way. The audience for your blog (besides yourself) is the vast, mostly unknown horde of readers who find your ideas interesting, your compositions provocative or inspiring, your information useful, but who, for the most part, won't miss what you've written next week when it disappears into the impenetrable blog archives. Blog posts are ephemeral, quick flashes, fireworks, left brain stuff. Scrapbook pages are memories, permanent vehicles to recall, richly, again and again, treasured memories. Drawing on the right side of the brain. |
 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? |
| Four
years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation:
Creating
Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I've updated it,
broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the second part
below. The first part, which reviewed the history of human innovation
and technology, is here
and the third part will follow next Tuesday. Four: Innovation & Society: How Technologies Limit Freedom, Human Nature Confounds Innovation, and Consumer Decision Tools Doom Marketing  Those
of you with HR backgrounds are probably wondering why I have not
spoken
about non-individual, community aspects of civilization and why and
how
these arose if the innovative individual is perfectly able to do it
all
him- or herself. These issues are relevant because of the role of
teams, organizations and other social constructs in the process of
innovation.Let's take another look at our proto-human, now equipped with the six basic types of manually powered machine (lever, wheel, screw, pulley, plane, and wedge -- the latter in the form of flint-head arrows), plus other early innovations like controlled fire, animal domestication and crop cultivation. Like other creatures he's adopted the family unit as a social convention, but now he's experimenting with a more sophisticated social construct, the tribe. Question is, why? Is it Darwinian -- Did humans that banded together have a higher likelihood of survival than loners? Or is it purely social -- Do humans, like other creatures, have a basic need for social contact with others that goes beyond family? Whichever it is -- a survival need or a social need, it required innovations to make it work, innovations like a code of laws and behaviours to prevent and resolve disputes between individuals, and shared language. At this point, in the view of some anthropologists, a tug-of-war began between our essential individual, autonomous nature and the perceived benefits of increasingly advanced, abstract and restrictive 'technologies' like division of labour, specialization, private and communal property, governments and other hierarchical social organizations, including the modern corporation. All these social 'technologies' limit individuals' freedom, and much of our civilization has been about trying to find a delicate balance between individual 'rights' and the apparent benefits afforded by technologies that compromise them. This tug-of-war continues to play out today, in our suspicion of government, the existence of 'militias', libertarian movements, evolution of privacy laws, and struggles over property ownership. The battle is far from over, with slavery, one particularly extreme social construct favouring hierarchical efficiency over individual liberty, still practiced in many countries, and women, children and animals treated as property with no rights or freedoms whatsoever in many others. This tension also plays out in the modern corporation, itself a feudal social construct which is neither egalitarian nor democratic. Corporate efficiencies have produced technologies that have massively improved material wealth and (most believe) quality of life in the few centuries since they were invented. But these advantages have come with a huge cost of personal freedom -- In many countries employees are virtual slaves of their employers, with no hope of realizing their full personal potential. In many companies promotion and remuneration have nothing to do with performance or competency. Here are some of the consequences for innovation of this individual/collective tension, in today's companies:
Perhaps this is a universal trait that we need to consider when designing innovation programs: Everyone loves to engage in social activities that are fun, challenging and unthreatening, but when the social activity impinges on individual 'territory' or property, or on scarce resources, social and collaborative behaviour ceases and confrontational, competitive behaviour takes over. But isn't competitive behaviour exactly what business thrives on? Doesn't the rush of adrenaline and testosterone in the quest for competitive advantage and 'winning' yield high productivity, sharpened customer focus, and more new ideas? I would argue that competition is at best a neutral factor in engendering innovation, and may in fact be detrimental. Most of the books on teamwork, such as The Wisdom of Teams, stress two essential preconditions to effective team behaviour:
Furthermore, many businesses are now reaching out to involve customers, alliance partners and even competitors in their problem-solving teams, because they help bring different points of view to the creative process, and because these external partners share both the defined problem and the sense of urgency with the internal team. In a world of accelerating change, no competitive advantage is sustainable -- innovations and new technologies can almost instantly reinvent industries, products, services, and offerings, and eliminate any competitive advantage the old ones may have had. Despite massive and sustained oligopolistic efforts to prevent it, customers are beginning to wrest absolute control of business direction and success from almost every industry's producers, management strategists and marketers, and now set the agenda and reward companies that respond to their needs and build new serving capability, not those that bash the competition, sue their customers, or create barriers to competitive offerings. The Bush regime's corporatist agenda has been only a temporary setback in this inexorable trend. A side-note about branding: Many marketing people, lamenting over the passage of market control from producer to consumer, cite the increasing importance of branding as an organizational strategy, and of brand loyalty as a success factor. For this reason, they argue, aggressive, proactive marketing is not dead. They fail to appreciate that consumers, faced with the severe scarcity of (a) time to assess product alternatives and (b) objective comparative analysis like Consumer Reports, tend to use 'brand' as an unsatisfactory surrogate decision-making tool. If you as a consumer want to buy a car, or select a television program to watch, the ideal decision-making process would be:
Tools like these exist today (Consumer Reports is an example of the former; the Recommendations Lists of Amazon.com are an example of the latter), but they are not yet very robust or reliable. In their absence, brands and brand loyalty are the surrogates: 'I always buy Chrysler products' or 'I usually watch CSI on Thursday nights' is your brain's way of substituting brand for the more ideal tools noted above. Once these tools exist (and the Information Age is ripe for them), product brands will simply become community-identification brands ('I drive Chrysler products because they reflect who I am and I want others to see that and associate with me, or not, because of that identification'). At this point, brand community-association becomes merely one more selection criterion of the analytical tool. With the advent of the near-perfect consumer information these tools provide, traditional marketing has no remaining role, and the knowledge-driven transition of power from producer to consumer is complete. Five: The Structure & Culture of Innovative Organizations: Business Gets Feminine and Consumers Seize Power from Producers It is now accepted wisdom that the organization of the future must be flatter, more empowering, less hierarchical and more networked, in order to be sufficiently agile and responsive to the ever-more-powerful customer's needs. Much has been written about organizational 'ecology' and the ability of communities of practice to self-organize to solve identified common problems more quickly and effectively than command-and-control driven organizational structures. There is a growing awareness that self-organizing communities operate best when their leadership uses what are usually considered 'female' modes of operation rather than the traditional 'male' ones:
These issues are important to the future of business innovation. We must decide whether an organization saddled with the structures and controls of an old 'management' style can hope to be sufficiently agile, responsive to customers, creative and focused on new product development, to survive when that survival depends on strategic improvisation and continuous innovation. There are two huge and contradictory trends occurring in organizational structure today: globalization and fragmentation. Globalization is occurring because small organizations cannot achieve the scale and resource capacity needed to be viable, and fragmentation, the spinning off and incubation of small, narrowly focused 'best of class' companies, is occurring because large organizations are too unwieldy, inefficient and inflexible to be innovative and respond to customers' rapidly evolving needs. So we have today the worst of both worlds: large, fat, unresponsive global companies and emaciated unscalable small ones. Furthermore, because of today's concentration of money and power in the hands of increasing global corporate giants, this system is in disequilibrium, with dysfunctional non value-added consequences such as these:
Those with an entrepreneurial bent would form, or join, one or more Producer or Innovator enterprises over their working life. Those with a productivity bent would gravitate towards the Global Utilities. Many others would be self-employed, providing niche advisory services to all three types of enterprise. You may think this is a very idealistic view of how 'organizations should be reorganized', but it is also a very logical one, and one that could easily be achieved today because of growing dissatisfaction with the dysfunctionality of today's organizational structures, and the ability, thanks to the Internet and other powerful new 'organizing' infrastructure technologies, to bring this 'reorganization of organizations' about. Only a poverty of imagination, opposition from elite vested interests, and the inequitable distribution of power and resources, all of them well within human capability to rectify, are preventing us from realizing this potentially liberating, perhaps even Earth-saving, reorganization. In fact, this customer-driven revolution is already happening, quickly, quietly, and non-violently, its first manifestation being what Shoshana Zuboff in her best-seller calls The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and The Next Episode of Capitalism. The advent of a New Economy, with Innovators focused intently and exclusively on solving real human needs and problems (and not on the hyper-marketed, artificial incrementalism and 'copycat' and 'sequel' new product development that today's risk-averse oligopolies have our most creative minds fruitlessly working on) offers the potential of astounding acceleration of innovation and resolution of seemingly intractable human problems: pollution, over-population, unemployment, inequality, human and animal suffering, disease prevention, war and cruelty, biodegradation, mental illness. Some would say it's not a moment too soon. What does all this mean for today's company looking to jump-start its innovation programs and processes, and today's individual looking to participate in making his or her own, or his or her employer's, enterprise more innovative? From the discussion above we can add six principles of innovation strategy to the eight principles developed earlier:
Attributes of 'Female' versus 'Male' Organization Structures (Adapted from Imperato & Harari, 'Jumping the Curve') So now we have fourteen principles to guide us in creating innovative organizations. Next Tuesday: In the final part of this paper, a prescription that draws on these principles, that organizations can use to evolve themselves into innovative companies. It will also explain the new 8-step Innovation Process diagram at the top of this post. |
 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 |
I've now finished Jim
Merkel's book