stargeek
NATURAL ENTERPRISE -- THE ELEVATOR PITCHNATURAL
|
 In last week's post on
Assembling
the Team for Natural Enterprise* I promised that I would present
an Elevator
Pitch
for such enterprises. Although this post is too long to deliver in an
elevator ride, it does explain what Natural Enterprise is and why you
might want to set one up or join one.What is Natural Enterprise? A form of self-organized, self-managed, community-based business partnership in which two or more people agree to make a living together as collaborators and peers, to strive to attain what each member needs to achieve for his or her personal well-being, to accept substantial responsibility for each other, and to respect and help the community or communities in which the enterprise operates. It is 'natural' because this form of socio-economic activity occurs ubiquitously in hunter-gatherer cultures and in non-human animal cultures. Why is it different?
What's the catch? Natural Enterprise could be to the modern economy what the Internet has become to modern politics and society -- an anti-hierarchal mechanism that democratizes and liberates economic power and opportunity the same way the Internet has democratized and liberated social and political power and opportunity. Both innovations fundamentally threaten established power, authority, 'wisdom' and control, by undermining them and rendering their hierarchies vulnerable and potentially obsolete. Large corporate oligopolies will recognize Natural Enterprises as threats to their power and profitability, and, much as they have responded to labour unions, will attempt to ignore, circumvent, weaken or crush them. For at least a generation, pionering Natural Enterprises, much like the fledgling Internet of the 1980s, will have to be content to play a minor role. Charles Handy envisions this as being like the relationship of the flea to the elephant -- Natural Enterprise will contract mainly with large corporations as suppliers, and will be to some extent dependent on these large corporations' largesse and their increased proclivity for outsourcing, along with the Natural Enterprises' own innovativeness and agility. As Handy says, such uneven contracts will at least be an improvement on the wage-slave employer-employee contracts they supersede. And eventually Natural Enterprises will become so numerous, and specialized and adept in so many industries and aspects of business, that they will start networking and contracting and associating with each other, using the power of the Internet. And much as specialty stores undermined and largely replaced the large, cumbersome, general-purpose department store, Natural Enterprises could ultimately eliminate the need for and replace large, cumbersome corporations. Just as the Internet created a socio-political and information 'World of Ends', where central control and authority are not needed and all value is created at the 'ends', so, too could Natural Enterprise create an economic 'World of Ends' where corporatism, oligopoly and massive size are not needed in economic entities and where all value is created at the 'ends' -- face to face with customers. It's a revolutionary and powerful and liberating idea, but it will take time, patience and energy to bring it about. How do I set one up? The Handbook is now being written. The framework is illustrated above. You can learn more about them here.  * What's In a Name? I have used the terms New Collaborative Enterprise, Existential Enterprise (Charles Handy's term), and New Tribal Ventures (Daniel Quinn's term) to describe such enterprises. The 'new' in these terms suggests there are 'old' collaborative enterprises, the term 'existential' has been voted off the island by readers of this blog as too highfalutin' and intimidating a term, and terms like 'tribal' conjure up images of war paint and noble savages. Autopoietic Enterprise (it means self-creating and self-managing) is accurate but unpronounceable and would probably be perceived as pretentious. Readers have suggested the terms 'Natural Enterprise' (Harold Jarche) and 'Organic Enterprise' (Don Dwiggins), which I like because they're simple and descriptive. I like Natural better because its opposite (unnatural) is exactly what the modern corporation is, while the term 'organic' is a bit ambiguous (it means 'related to organs', 'related to organisms', 'carbon-based', and 'instrumental', of which only the second definition is a propos). I' almost decided to keep 'Collaborative' in the term for two reasons: To stress that these enterprises entail more than one person working together (a sole proprietor, to me, does not an enterprise make, even if s/he is a powerful networker -- enterprises are about people making a living together), and because it would allow me to continue using the acronym NCE, which has gained some common parlance over the past year. But in the end, simpler is better, Natural Enterprise is inherently collaborative, and I was taught 'when in doubt, leave it out'. So Natural Enterprise it is -- thanks to Harold for the inspiration. |
| (Fourteenth of fifteen*
instalments of
the
upcoming book Natural
Enterprise. )"Find a need and fill it".
I have heard this quote from no fewer than a dozen successful business
leaders. Ted Rogers, son of the inventor of the alternating-current
radio tube (that allowed radios to be powered by electricity), and one
of Canada's most successful entrepreneurs in his own right, recognized
a need for more varied radio and television programming in Canada, so
he bought up some new and very inexpensive licenses, for FM radio
stations (when there were no FM stations and few FM radios), and for
Cable TV distribution (when there were very few cable distributors or
customers). Ted usually starts his speeches with the six-word quote
that began this paragraph. Entrepreneur Magazine lists 'find a need and fill it' as Rule #1 for business start-ups. Chuck Frey's 'Innovation Tools' says these six words lie at the root of any business success. It's the most important business advice you can give. But what does this mean? It means that every successful enterprise's offerings (products and/or services) meet four criteria:
The key to doing this is in research, the difficult, time-consuming (but usually inexpensive) process of discovering the who, what, when, where, why and how of unmet needs. There are two kinds of research: Secondary research entails reading and browsing online to gather information that has already been published about the market, and need, and the possible solutions to it. Primary research entails talking to people directly to answer these questions, gathering unpublished information and intelligence. Successful needs identification usually stems from primary, not secondary research. How do you go about doing this? To some extent it will depend, of course, on what the business idea is. You're going to have to be creative and patient and methodical in solving the all-important problem of identifying what the market needs, which is not already being satisfied by existing products and services. That means you're going to have to take the time to learn a lot about the marketplace, and about customers. Here are some ideas to get you started:
You'll also learn a lot about the research process, and you'll get better and faster at it the more you persevere. I know researchers who are the de facto Subject Matter Experts on a lot of subjects, far more informed, and better able to substantiate their opinions, than the gurus who have worked in the industry all their lives. Good primary researchers have the benefit of current information gleaned directly from the horses' mouths, a lot of them -- the Wisdom of Crowds. You might think it takes a lot of gall to get so many people to give you so much information and to offer their opinions free of charge. But entrepreneurs and researchers I know tell me people are often glad to help, and to offer their opinion, as long as the demand on their time is modest and that the solicitation is polite and personal. That means, ideally, face-to-face, with the telephone used only to secure an interview with them. Prepare to wear out a lot of shoes doing your research. Because business' products and services are so diverse, it's hard to generalize beyond this point about the process of Filling an Unmet Need. As the next three chapters will show, not only does going through this painstaking and time-consuming process almost guarantee you success, it can also dramatically reduce the amount of time, effort and money you need to spend promoting and marketing your product or service (you've already met a lot of your first customers, and if you fill their unmet needs they will spread the word to others -- and take some pride in having played a part in your success), and it can even reduce the amount of money you need to raise to launch the enterprise. But most importantly, you should follow this process, gruelling as it may be, because it works. If you doubt me, talk to any successful entrepreneur about the value of doing this, and you'll be convinced. In fact, this book, and the university-level Distance Learning course being built around it, came about precisely by this process: Prospective entrepreneurs, MBA students and professors I had been talking to over the past year kept telling me there was an urgent need for proven, comprehensive, practical business advice for entrepreneurs, both those looking to start their first business and those disenchanted with the struggle and disappointment that 'traditional wisdom' about entrepreneurship had led to. So I'm confident that this book will be a success and prove the entire point of this chapter, and without the need for a massive book publicity campaign. * As the book nears completion, I've taken the liberty of revamping the order and the organization of the chapters somewhat. Chapter 11 (Day to Day operations) will now become part of an expanded Chapter 5 (Improvisational Planning and Day to Day Management), with additional material on self-managed enterprises (defined goals, roles and collaboration processes), on entrepreneurial decision-making (communication, consultation and consensus-building), personal productivity improvement and management by 'walking around'. Chapter 10 (Launch & Life Cycle) is being renamed Business Evolution and will be the final chapter in the book (an excerpt from this chapter, describing organic life-cycles, complex adaptive systems, succession planning and 'natural death', will appear next week in this blog). The material on Innovation will be spread across three chapters: The Importance of Innovation (why it has been historically the #1 driver of business success); An Innovation Culture (including how to develop core innovation competencies); and The Innovation Process. Confused? A complete table of contents will appear with next week's instalment. The final book will also include about 50 'mini-case studies' drawn from my personal experiences with entrepreneurs, and from some of the leading literature on entrepreneurship: Success stories of companies that have exemplified Natural Enterprise, and war stories of those that, mostly, have not. Many thanks for all the comments from readers that have helped make writing the book a joy, and a truly collaborative experience! |
 Unless you're a DJ, or have
one
of those high-end digital music players, mixers, or mixing software
tools
(and actually read the instruction book) you probably don't know what
Pitch Lock is. Basically, it's a function that allows you to change
the
tempo (speed) of a recording without changing its pitch. DJ's use this
function to 'sync' two songs so that one blends into the next. This is
called 'beatmixing' and here, from the DJ
Cafe site, is an example of how it's used, with cross-fading
(lowering the volume of the ending song while increasing the volume of
the starting one) to make a series of songs with different
beat-per-minute tempos into one 'endless' song:If
the song the crowd is hearing is 130 BPM, and the next song you want
to
play is 132 -- you slow the second song down to 130 bpm using pitch
control, and cue it up to the beat. When you are ready to bring the
second song into play, throw the record so the beats stay aligned and
listen to it on your
headphones. Make sure they are in sync!! Once you are sure things are
in order, use your cross fader to let the new song blend into the old
one, and eventually go completely across so only the new song is
playing. This will give the illusion that the song never
ended.
I didn't think much about this, although one of the software tools that works with my MP3 jukebox has a Pitch Lock feature, and it was kind of fun slowing down and speeding up my favourite songs and second-guessing whether the artists should have picked a different tempo. But then this afternoon I was listening to one of my favourite songs from the new Sarah McLachlan album on the radio and it sounded funny -- a lot faster than the version I was used to. I figured it was a remix so I listened through and the DJ announced it but didn't say anything special about it. So I cued up the original and listened, and I knew it wasn't a remix or my imagination. And then it occurred to me: The station is using Pitch Lock to speed up the songs by a just-less-than-noticeable amount so they can play more songs per hour and have more time for commercials. So that got me thinking: What else could this be used for? Consider this fact: Average speech is about 140-160 WPM, and when we try to speak much faster than that our speech becomes slurred. When we're thinking about what we're saying, we talk even slower -- 80-120 WPM. But we are able to comprehend properly-articulated speech of 210 and even 240 WPM without difficulty (average reading speed, by contrast, is 275 WPM, and speed readers top 800 WPM, though they don't read every word). So that means that we could use Pitch Lock to accelerate speech by 50%, to a speed much faster than we could crisply deliver it, but with no loss in comprehension. And thanks to Pitch Lock, it would come out in the same deep, calm, enticing voice as the original, but deliver 50% more words, information or argument per minute. Still think this is a silly innovation? Here are some commercial and time-saving applications that occurred to me right off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more:
What else could Pitch Lock be used for? And what if we combined it with other new technologies: For example, could we teach speech-recognizing computers to 'speed talk' much the way we 'speed read', to 'read aloud' or play back the common words that make up 80% of normal speech and are not essential to understanding at, say, 500 WPM, and the rest at 200 WPM, so we could become 400 WPM 'speed listeners' and 'speed learners'? And in this increasingly oral/aural culture, might we then give up reading and writing entirely? |
 Judith
Meskill, who simultaneously runs two
weblogs (Knowledge
Notes and The
Social Software Weblog),
recently ran a contest to write the Perfect Pitch for weblogs in
business. The idea was to write a very short speech (short enough to
deliver in a short elevator ride) that would persuade a senior
executive of a company to introduce blogs in their company. I was
honoured to have been asked to be one of the judges. The winners were
Lee LeFever, Randal
Moss, Jack Vinson and Michael Angeles. Lee's
prize winning pitch was:First,
think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders.
The value it provides is context — the Journal allows readers to
see
themselves in the context of the financial world each day, which
enables more informed decision making.
With this in mind, think about your company as a microcosm of the financial world. Can your employees see themselves in the context of the whole company? Would more informed decisions be made if employees and leaders had access to internal news sources? Weblogs serve this need. By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company — context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events. Now the winners get to turn the tables on us judges. This time we (Dina Mehta, Don Park, Flemming Funch, Jim McGee, Lilia Efimova, Martin Dugage, Phil Wolff, Ross Mayfield, Scott Allen, Ton Zijlstra and yours truly) have to write a Perfect Pitch for blogs in business, and the winners get to judge our entries. Keep your fingers crossed for me. I can't tell you my entry because Judith is going to keep the identity of each submission hidden, so that no one is swayed by our awesome reputations in casting their vote ;-) Read more about the contest he re. |
 ©2004 The Caring Enterprise Coach
This article is a summary of
what everyone should know before starting their own business. It
assumes that you've done the following groundwork:
If you talk to your local accountant or small business advisory office, they'll probably tell you about the importance of doing a business plan to raise financing, the need to incorporate and register your business name, how to advertise your product and service, and the importance of administrivia like business cards and letterhead. They'll also probably tell you that entrepreneurship takes courage, patience, an ability to handle enormous stress, and a willingness to take risks and work long, hard hours. And they'll tell you that growth is paramount. Most of this is nonsense, and all of it is putting the cart before the horse. Why do they tell you this? Because it's what they've been taught, and because of the frightening failure rate of small enterprise. But most entrepreneurial businesses don't fail because of bad advertising, cowardice, owner laziness or inability to handle stress. They fail because they are poorly thought out, poorly researched, set up wrong, marketed wrong, badly managed, and given terrible business advice. I base this immoderate assessment on my experience working with over a hundred entrepreneurs, listening to their stories, and seeing what works (and what doesn't) in small enterprise, and why. Let's take a step back and consider what an entrepreneurial business is. It is a (usually small) number of people with a shared idea and a willingness to work together to make that idea commercially viable. That means, according to what they teach you in business school, finding capital, developing your product and then going out looking for customers for it. This is a recipe for failure. The money you borrow (which in an entrepreneurial business is always horrifically expensive) compromises your control and immediately presents the possibility of the loan being called, and the personal assets securing it being forfeited. And there are a million possible reasons why there could be few, or no, customers for your product. The #1 reason entrepreneurial businesses fold is because they simply run out of cash. The #2 reason is because the owners make one or more fatal decisions, and the most common fatal decision is to produce a product that nobody wants to buy. Here's an alternative model, based on what Charles Handy calls Existential Enterprise, and which I have called New Collaborative Enterprise. Its first two principles turn the business school formula upside down:
Time for some more heresy. MBA graduates will tell you to select a management team with a balance of skills -- operational, financial, sales, management etc. But they don't know what your particular business needs -- if the business is an R&D outsourcer it needs people with deep knowledge about research, not accountants and sales executives. An Existential Enterprise will follow these principles instead:
Next, the business school grad will tell you you need systems that provide each person with compensation and reward that is 'commensurate with performance'. That means your partner who's independently wealthy and who self-promotes like crazy will get money he doesn't need, and the young, modest partner with a big mortgage will get less money than he needs, and so will probably leave to get more. And the partner who values and needs her spare time but who has critical and scarce skills will be bribed to work long hours and so will probably leave to get less. Here's a more sensible approach:
Think of it as a jazz combo versus a traditional symphony orchestra. In the jazz combo, everyone knows their role, takes their cues from each other, and communicates network-style with the other band members and with the audience (customers). If the audience gets restless (customers are dissatisfied or their needs change) you can improvise quickly. You don't need hierarchy. By contrast, the symphony orchestra, like the traditional business, is hierarchical, communicates only through the guy at the top, and is totally stuck to the rehearsed script (the business plan). If the audience is unhappy, the symphony just ignores them and plays on. Which business model makes more sense to you? Once you're up and running, here are three final principles to keep things going smoothly:
Most of the problems in traditional entrepreneurial business -- the ones that lead to the stress, long hours, divorce, sacrifice, unhappiness, and, often, failure -- are created by the MBA mythology of how to start, build and operate a business -- a mythology that often defies intuition and common sense. And that's all these ten principles are: Common sense, that I've seen work in dozens of small, successful enterprises, and the ignorance of which has been the undoing of dozens of others I have worked with. That's why people with no formal business training are sometimes the best entrepreneurs: They don't have to unlearn all the nonsense, and guided by common sense they instinctively build something closer to the Existential Enterprise model than the Business School model. I'm not saying that this is easy. Adhering to these ten principles (especially the first two) requires a lot of time and energy, and considerable intelligence. But they are relatively fool-proof and stress-free. After all, what could be more joyful than creating a successful enterprise with people you love and trust, on your own terms -- a true labour of love? |
 In previous articles on New Collaborative (Existential) Enterprises, I've explained what existential enterprises are, how to avoid the most common landmines, how viral marketing works, and the role of innovation. This article will focus on assembling the team for your New Collaborative Enterprise. This step is what differentiates NCEs most from traditional small enterprises. It is also probably the hardest step, the most important, and the most personal. Assembling the NCE is a juggling act. You need to simultaneously accomplish two things:
This will take some practice and may have some surprising fallout. You might find that as the team assembles itself, you're the one with the redundant skills, and the other potential partners will urge you to self-select yourself out of the enterprise. If so, it's back to square one, creating a new team, possibly doing something somewhat different from what you had envisioned, where your skills and expertise are truly critical to the enterprise. If it sounds a lot like dating, it's because that's precisely what it is. You may also find that, with the collective wisdom of the team, you may have second thoughts about what you want the enterprise to do. One team member may inform the team that the need you thought you had identified doesn't really exist, or is quite different from what you'd thought. When you refocus on a new need, a new enterprise objective and purpose, it is likely that the skills and expertise you will need to bring it to fruition will also change, and the whole constitution of the team will need revisiting. Just remember, the selection of the team is a shared responsibility. There is no hierarchy. There will also be a temptation, until the Internet and our society really understand NCEs and help facilitate their formation, to settle for something less than the ideal team. Obviously I can't tell you (and your team) that this is a categorically bad idea. But it's like lowering your sights after you've unsuccessfully asked several lovers to marry you, and propositioning someone you don't really love just to get a 'yes'. Sometimes it's better to keep looking rather than settle for something that's not likely to succeed or make you happy. If you want to be rich and miserable, an NCE is not the answer (marry someone rich instead). Each potential partner brings acquired skills and knowledge to the enterprise. Let's look at what these terms mean. From what I've observed in over a hundred entrepreneurial businesses, there are five key groups of business skills:
Knowledge, on the other hand, is what you have learned about specific subject matter. If I want to write software, just having the skills is not enough -- I also need to study and learn programming languages and about information systems and the business environments in which they're used. Some knowledge can be acquired academically, while other knowledge can only be learned from experience. The combination of skills and knowledge is what we call expertise. Ideally, you want your enterprise team members to have expertise. But if you're young, you may have the skills but not the knowledge. And if you're old, you may have the knowledge, but your skills may be rusty. Your team may therefore consist of some people with skills and others with knowledge -- as long as they love and respect each other, that can be just as good as having expertise, and may be a lot easier to find. I can see some eyebrows raising when I talk about loving the people you work with. We have been culturally conditioned to leave our emotions at the door when we go to work (and school), to spend half our waking lives sublimating what we feel and just doing what we're told. In a hierarchical organization this is ideal, though it saps the energy and creativity out of workers. But how sick is that? Why should we spend half our lives being what we're not? If your enterprise is to be a place of passion, joy, and fulfilment (and it should be!), then it will be a place where emotions run free, and that means its partners need to deeply respect and love each other. No matter how perfect a fit their skills and knowledge are, if they don't care for, and about, each other, your enterprise will be a place of chaos and conflict, and will eventually self-destruct. That makes the task of assembling the team even harder. But imagine -- a whole team of people, doing what they do best, their expertise perfectly meshed, engaged and passionate and crazy about their jobs and each other -- isn't that worth the hard work of assembling the perfect team? I have reviewed, quite negatively, the first generation of social software tools designed to help people find other people they want to be with and/or work with. It does not surprise me that many of these tools ask you for lots of personal information and seem to be used more for finding dates than business partners. In fact, I think that's what's good about them. Assembling the team for an NCE is a job of matchmaking, of seeking love interests, as much as it is a job of acquiring skills and knowledge in human 'containers'. That's one of the reasons NCEs must be self-selected: No one person can accurately gauge the affection that partners will have for each other, and it takes an enormous amount of energy and effort to find just the right people, more than any one person can hope to muster. The next generation of social software tools will, I believe, make it much easier. The pioneers of NCEs will need extraordinary patience and tact, as all pioneers do, because we're not used to dealing with each other this way, especially in establishing business relationships. Like all pioneers, we'll need to learn by doing, and document what works and what doesn't, and share this with each other, to make the road easier for those that follow. Last but not least, I have to confess, I have found no proven, successful model yet for a complete Existential, New Collaborative Enterprise. I am hoping that when I meet with Charles Handy, whose concept of Existential Enterprise is entirely consistent with the NCE concepts I have been writing about since before I had heard of his work, he will be able to tell me some success stories. I have studied about a dozen enterprises that claimed, or appeared, to be excellent models, but found them critically lacking in one or more attributes. I know of many enterprises that have some of the attributes of an NCE, and they all believe those attributes are what make them successful and happy, but these aren't yet the stuff of great models. If you took these attributes and combined them in one enterprise, you would have a complete NCE, and there is no reason to believe it wouldn't be a great company, and a perfect model for other pioneers to follow. But I must be honest -- all the individual parts have been tested and work wonderfully, but the whole has yet to be put together in one vehicle and driven. Before the publication of the book of which these articles are a part, I am hoping to find one, or even better, a few. If not, readers will have to settle for some limited-scope success stories instead of a comprehensive one. To illustrate this 'chapter' on Assembling the Team I would then fall back on three family-owned businesses I know well. Their partners meet all of the criteria I have described above -- they love and trust each other, they have a perfect match of skills and knowledge between them, with no overlap or redundancy to cause 'expertise conflicts', and they make all key decisions collaboratively and by unanimous consensus. My only reason for not describing them in more detail here is that they didn't have to go through the hard part of finding each other, assembling the perfect team. They were already together, by fortunate accident of birth or marriage. What's interesting is that I also know of many failed and miserable family-owned businesses, all of which lack the love, trust, respect, and/or mesh of essential skills and knowledge that my three successful proto-NCE family businesses have. And even more interesting, neither the partners nor the employees in these three NCE-like family businesses work anywhere near as hard as most people. They have more leisure time, more time set aside for social activities, and more fun than those in any other businesses I know. And even when they are working, it is a true labour of love. They are workplaces of great joy. We all deserve as much. PS: I need your help, dear readers. I have been using Charles Handy's term Existential Enterprise, and my term New Collaborative Enterprise (NCE) interchangeably. This is probably confusing to readers, but I can't decide which term, if either, to use. I wrote about NCEs several times before I discovered Handy's work. His term is simpler and needs no acronym, but the word 'existential' sounds kind of academic, theoretical, even intimidating to those who don't know what it means. So what name should I use? |
 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. |
This
is the first of five
articles in a series that will be published intermittently this month.
This article summarizes what I believe were the most important ideas
of
2003 in the world of blogs and blogging. The other articles in
the
series will propose the most
important ideas of the year in:
 BLOGS & BLOGGING -- THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003  During the year, the blogosphere doubled in size, and began to mature into a true alternative medium for information and connection. My nominations for the most important ideas of the year* in blogs & blogging are:
* Yes, I know some of these ideas are themselves not new this year. There is nothing new under the sun. But I would argue that the application and implications of these ideas were first manifest some time in 2003 |
 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. |
 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? |
 We went out for a delicious dinner last night at a wonderful, and completely packed, restaurant in downtown Toronto (it's called Mildred Pierce, for those who live in the area), and spent some of the time unobtrusively eavesdropping on the conversations at nearby tables. The discussions, much like the one at our own table, vacillated between the very personal (who's dating who, personal anecdotes) and the impersonal (entertainment, sports, weather). But not a single word was uttered about politics: Nothing about Canadian politics (collapse of the right), Ontario politics (health care and education strikes threatened), Toronto politics ('new deal' for cities in peril), US politics (Bush/Kerry), or international politics (Iraq etc.) Not a word. This was a Sunday night so there were no obvious business reasons for steering away from the subject. It just never came up. And it occurred to me that at our annual neighbourhood BBQ on Saturday night no one talked about politics either. Is politics just too boring in Canada or has it become tacitly PI to talk about them, because of the political polarization that seems to be happening everywhere? Is the left-right gulf getting too wide to even try to broach in 'decent conversation'? I appreciate that there is less urgency about politics here in Canada than there is in the US, at least. The election here is over. And I'm told that at least 40% of Americans know personally at least one person on active duty in the Mideast, and that, I would expect, would probably make it a more likely topic of conversation. But some of my American readers tell me that talking about politics in face-to-face conversations is just too uncomfortable for them these days as well -- too likely to lead to arguments. So outside of political rallies and other meetings of like minds they don't talk about it much either. What does this mean? First, it means the end of true political debate -- I don't mean those phony, scripted events where politicians roll out their rehearsed one-liners, I'm talking about articulate exchange of political views and information between real people. If you don't talk with others about politics, how do you form your viewpoints and where do you get your information? From attack ads? I don't think so -- maybe I'm naive but I don't think they work; most people know when they're being manipulated, and won't fall for it. From radio talk shows or editorials or blogs? Most of them are only for people who have already formed an unwavering political opinion on everything, and are merely looking for reassurance and justification for their belief. From television news and the print media? There isn't enough information content in the sound bites and newswire rehashes in most of them to allow an informed decision or point of view on anything. It seems to me that, on almost any political issue, 50% or more of the population is completely disengaged -- even if they care, they don't think anything they do or say or feel will have any impact, so they can't be bothered to voice, or sometimes even form, any strong opinion on it. And the rest are in two, polarized camps, each believing that the other is irrational or immoral or misinformed, hopelessly so, so that meaningful discussion with the 'other side' or with the disengaged majority is impossible or fruitless. So except for the one-way palaver from the political flaks and political advertisers and partisans and oversimplifying mainstream media, there is no political information flow. And there is no discourse, no exchange of ideas or views, no balanced presentation of opposing views, no true political conversation. Because what purpose would it serve? I see an astonishing paradox in modern society -- in an era with unprecedented access to information, most people are ignorant of even the basic facts on most political issues, from the connection between 9/11 and Saddam, to the causes and implications of global warming, to the political situation in Sudan and Venezuela and Chechnya< /a> (not to mention parts of the world less in the news), to the numerous ecological and humanitarian crises that everyone from the Union of Concerned Scientists to Amnesty International is shouting about. Why are so many so ignorant? I think because they choose to be uninformed. Why? Perhaps either because they they can't relate to the issue, or because they don't think there's any point in getting stressed about issues they feel they can do nothing personally about. So you end up in a vicious cycle: The less people know about a subject, the less inclined it is to come up in conversation, so the media conclude there is no interest in it, so they don't cover it, so people know even less. And if they do know about it but feel helpless or disinclined to do anything about it, they don't share their knowledge with others, and eventually with enough indifference the situation gets worse and the solutions become more intractable so people feel even more helpless and disinclined to try to do anything. Political disengagement is infectious, and it's reached epidemic proportions, especially among the young. All of this supports Richard Manning's argument in Against the Grain that politics was and is designed to protect and entrench the status quo. As a result, nothing pleases those with power and money and influence more than massive political indifference and disengagement -- what Gene McCarthy in the 1960s during the fight against the Vietnam War called 'acedia' -- a Greek word meaning spiritual torpor, lack of care, apathy and inactivity in the practice of virtue. Unlike the 1960's, the numbers of politically disengaged is inversely proportional to the age bracket -- it is the young who I love so much and have such great hopes for who are least engaged in the political process, who infect each other with their indifference to global issues. But I don't think it's that they don't care. Most of the young people I know are overwhelmed and intimidated by how much those of us who are politically active know about global issues. My teenage granddaughter has read my blog, but says she "doesn't understand it". The young focus their energies and their passion instead on issues in their own networks, local things, things that they can do something about. We need to show them the way to do more. We, who have been in the streets, need to reach out to the young and not-so-young who have given up on the political process (often before they began), and stop drowning them in facts and laying guilt trips on them and filling them up with bad news and instead:
The real 'swing voters' are the ones who have never voted before and don't expect to vote in future. Rhetoric won't bring them to the polls. If we can 'activate' them, then conversations about politics will no longer be politically incorrect, and political activism will spread like a virus. As those who fought against the Vietnam War can tell you, political activism is as infectious as political apathy. The defenders of the status quo will be shaking in their boots. And then the revolution we all need, the revolution to save the world, can begin. Cartoon by the incomparable Robert Mankoff (from the New Yorker, of course) |
 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? |
 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:
|