EXPOSING THE YOUNG TO NATURE: COULD MODEL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES CHANGE EVERYTHING?

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CREATING
MODEL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES: SETTING
THE EXAMPLE

CREATING
MODEL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES: SETTING
THE EXAMPLE 08/16/2004 07:40 PM

My article last month proposing Model Intentional Communities (MICs) as a means of showing young people a better, more natural way to live provoked a strong and positive response. Many readers commented on how important it is to teach by showing (or better yet, by letting young people experiment themselves with some intelligent, structured but light-handed facilitation) rather than by telling. So I'm encouraged to go on to the next step to try to assess how we can (and should) create some MICs.

First, some definitions: An Intentional Community (IC) is an autonomous, self-managed, democratic association of people with shared social, cultural and economic intentions and aspirations. A Model Intentional Community is an Intentional Community that is:

exemplary -- it works well, and represents the best of what ICs with similar focus and talents have to offer
egalitarian -- it is non-hierarchical, has no dominant leader, and is free of the coercive characteristics that can cause healthy communities to decline into cults
replicable -- other successful ICs could be created by following its example
educational -- by spending time in it, you can learn a great deal, including how and why it is successful
responsible and respectful -- there is no reason why ICs can't be selfish or arrogant, but I think we'd want the models we show our young people to be communities where members took responsible for, and were respectful of, the welfare of other members and their neighbourhoods
sustainable -- it's not dependent on the largesse of outsiders, or on subsidies or low commodity prices
diverse -- substantially different in focus, style, and/or structure from the other MICs

There is no cookie-cutter mechanism for creating ICs, but in reviewing the various websites of successful ICs and the umbrella organizations like the FIC, the FEC, and the CCS and CCA here in Canada (cooperatives are somewhat different from ICs, but they share some important principles of formation), you can identify at least a skeleton formation process, which I've diagrammed above. I wouldn't presume to say exactly how to accomplish each of these steps (ask me again when I've set one or two up), but the steps are:

Find Members: Select the people who you would love to have in your community, and live and/or work with. Just as in any other activity that involves social networking, this is by far the hardest step. We desperately need better social networking tools and processes.
Set Intentions & Principles: Collectively, the members decide what the objectives of the community will be, and what principles it will live by. These may include principles that define its responsibilities and values, how new members are admitted, a size limit for the community, how resources will be owned and 'profits' distributed, the decision-making process, required contribution and participation from members, and many others. Like the membership itself, these principles may be fluid, at least until the community has been operating for awhile.
Design the Community: Now collaboratively the members design what the community will look like and how it will operate.
Obtain Needed Resources: Acquire what the community needs to achieve its intentions
Create the Community: Together, make it happen.
Connect & Outreach: Connect with other communities, with the outside, and with schools and other organizations and people looking for models of a better way to live. This is the step that too many communities, fearing contamination or destruction by contact with the rest of the terrible world, so often omit. We all need each other. Isolation deprives the communities of some of the benefits of technology, innovation and civilization, and deprives the rest of the world of much-needed learning about living alternatives.

If you have set up, or belong to, an IC, please share with us what you've learned about the process. I've made arrangements to visit a local IC just north of where I live later this month, and I'll report what I learn after they show me around. The more I find out about ICs, the more attracted I am to the concept. And what's interesting is that they seem to have figured out the principles of Natural Enterprise as well, by trial and error, so I'm going to feature some of their stories in my upcoming book.

So suppose a bunch of us built a set of MICs with varied intents and specialties. We might categorize them in some way to reflect their diversity and their principal focus, for example:

Inventors -- ICs focused on innovation and development, perhaps applying lessons from nature to invent products and processes that do more with less
Fabricators -- ICs focused on 'ingeneering' and manufacturing durable, customized, recyclable products
Carriers -- ICs focused on distribution of products of other ICs to customers, just in time, and including recycling and returning all materials used, cleanly, back to the Earth
Menders -- ICs focused on preventative maintenance and repair of people (health and spiritual wellness) and the things they use
Scientists -- ICs focused on scientific discovery, and development of technology and biotechnology drawing on those discoveries, that will allow us to live well with smaller ecological footprints
Artists -- ICs focused on arts & entertainment, whose members portray for other MICs the world as it is, was, and could be
Players -- ICs focused on sports & recreation, exemplifying and teaching the value of physical prowess, collaboration and play
Designers -- ICs focused on cooking, fashion and other design, making intelligent and creative use of natural ingredients
Teachers -- ICs focused on philosophy, education and the social sciences, and the dissemination of knowledge
Nomads – ICs focused on travel and continuous learning

These would not be exclusive specialties, of course. Each community would need some expertise in the other areas, and all communities would be self-sufficient in growing their own food and producing their own clean, renewable energy. And people in each community would doubtless have hobbies outside their MIC's focus. But having models that fell into each of these diverse types would provide the perfect basis for showing young people the diversity of opportunity, work focus and intellectual and emotional pursuit that is open to them. Instead of four years sitting in classes in high school, for example, students from 14 to 17 years of age could rotate through a couple of MICs of each of the above focuses, for, say, a month at a time, observing and trying things out and contributing as much as possible, at the end of which they would have acquired the kind of exposure, learning and experience that no classroom could ever match. My bet would be that many, perhaps even most, graduates of such a system would want to join one of the MICs they had lived in, or would want to set up their own, with other members of their graduating class and people they had met along the way.

Who knows, we might even start a movement, launch a new, sustainable economy, and create a new culture. Education, done correctly, can be that powerful. But first we need to create these MICs, these new dynamic 'educational institutions'. And that isn't going to be easy.

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE, PART ONE

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE, PART ONE 08/03/2004 06:22 PM

Five years ago, at the age of 48, I decided it was time to stop complaining and being depressed about the state of the world, and start doing something about it. I began to read voraciously, an average of two books a week, and gradually put together a picture in my own mind of the current state of the world, how we got here, and what we needed to do about it. In February of last year I started a weblog, in part because I wanted to share what I had learned, and in part to discuss it with others and find out if they felt the same way that I did. At that time I wrote an essay that described my learning journey to that point. Since then, I have read a great deal more, and engaged a lot of very bright and perceptive people in discussion of these issues. I intended to update the essay, but I have come to realize that the sequential story of discovering the unprecedented crisis this world is in today is essentially what the 'environmental philosophy' category of my weblog tells already. What is needed now instead is a recapitulation, much shorter and not necessarily in the order in which I learned it, of what I have learned and what I believe we need to do to stave off ecological catastrophe. That is what this essay is about.

It is my way of 'signing on' to the 1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity signed by 1600 senior scientists from 71 countries, which stated:

"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated."

At the root of my environmental philosophy is a growing belief that just having everyone 'do their best' to make the world a better place will not be enough. In other words, we need to bring about a dramatic change in our world in this century, a much greater and faster change than any culture can achieve organically. A change this drastic and this sudden has occurred four times before in human history:

about 30,000 years ago, with the invention of the axe, the flint arrowhead and the spear
about 10,000 years ago, with the invention of catastrophic agriculture and animal domestication
during the Renaissance, with the invention of modern science
during the industrial revolution, with the invention of automation

Each of these revolutionary inventions utterly changed the way humans lived. None of them, I think importantly, came about because of political or social actions or revolutions -- they were all (in the broad sense of the term) technology-based. What we need urgently today is another such revolution, every bit as radical as these four. We need to find, and rapidly implement, a better, sustainable way to live.

This essay is organized around ten 'arguments'. I am not smart enough to be able to distill the entire logic supporting these arguments into this essay, but I will refer the reader to sources that do. The Bibliograph y at the end of this essay contains the full list of these sources. Some of the books and articles in this Bibliography contradict each other in places. I freely admit to being selective in what I've taken from each. I trust my instincts in that selection. My purpose is not to persuade you, dear reader, but merely to show you what persuaded me.

The essay also contains a systems chart of 'How Nature Works' and another of 'Why Civilization Doesn't'. These charts are my attempt to capture the interrelationship of the forces that allowed the world to function as a self-managed system so effectively for millions of years, including the first three million years after the appearance of man, and the forces that have largely replaced these natural forces since the dawn of civilization, driven largely by the changes wrought by the four human revolutions noted above.

Here are the ten Arguments:

The Truth About Nature: What We Have Forgotten

Man is not Special, not the Crown of Creation, or a Species Apart, but rather a fairly minor evolutionary adaptation to one ordinary branch of the tree of life on Earth. The impact and 'success' of this species is no more an indication of greater importance, predestination or divine will than is the impact and success of the mosquito, HIV, bacteria, cancer cells or the Plague.
Our planet is a single self-managing organism. All life on Earth exists to sustain, nourish and support all other life on Earth. As with a human body or any other organism, that is only possible when each component of the organism does its part, in balance and harmony with the rest. In that sense the Earth is sacred, it demands and earns respect and obedience to its 'laws' because that is essential to the survival of all life.
The Earth is full of sentient, intelligent, communicative, emotional creatures. Most human moralities and religions seem to hold that creatures with these attributes deserve freedom from harrassment, suffering and enslavement, and the right to exist. Therefore much human activity, which deprives all non-humans of these rights and freedoms, is an atrocity no less despicable than human genocide, holocaust, torture and slavery, and must be stopped.
Small is beautiful, and place gives us identity: The community as the basic political unit and Natural Enterprise as the basic economic unit work best because they can be self-selecting and self-managing, and are extremely adaptive. In nature, the community teaches you what you need to live, it defines you and gives you purpose, it anchors and connects you. And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. It is your community, your ecosystem, all of it, that is your place -- not the isolated, nuclear-family, locked house on 'private' property. Larger political units (states) and economic units (corporations) are inherently unwieldy, inflexible and less democratic. Because of their sheer size they are detached, remote, and cannot possibly understand or respond to our needs. Forged from both idealism and cynical greed for power, these abominations serve no useful purpose except to protect us from other large political and economic units (and they do that poorly).
We learn what we're shown, not what we're told. Our senses provide us what we need to learn, to really understand, to be happy. When we live in our minds, we close ourselves off from so much. Formal education is futile. To bring about change we need to show people something that works better, and reconnect them with their senses, their imagination, the Earth.

The Truth About Civilization: The Problem and Its Root Cause

Civilization was a well-intentioned response to a sudden drastic shortage of human food (possibly arising from overhunting of large game and/or the last ice age). But it was not an instinctive way to live, and needed a lot of artificial constructs and controls to work. Our civilization systematically brainwashes us into staggering cultural homogeneity and imaginative poverty, and to believe ours is the only way to live -- that there is no other human way. To do so it must get us to forget or deny the 5 truths above, and teach us these great myths:

That our instincts are unreliable (what nature 'tells' us to do), and logic and morality are infallible (what human codes tell us to do);
That life is a struggle of 'good vs. evil', and that we are inherently weak, selfish and lazy;
That it's good to be 'normal' and to be like other people, and that we're all part of society and not ultimately, terribly alone;
That we must be unconditionally obedient to our 'superiors', their hierarchy and their laws, or society and order will collapse;
That our well-being is appropriately measured by our material possessions and our ability to acquire more;
That disparity of wealth, health and dignity is necessary and inevitable and that with hard work 'have-nots' can become 'haves';
That we must all work long, hard hours at unsatisfying jobs or we will all suffer and starve;
That humans have an inherent right to all the land and all the resources of Earth (and even beyond);
That history began with civilization, before which life was short, fearful, nasty and brutish (and in nature and tribal cultures, it still is).

We are instinctively responsive to, and responsible for, everything we have control over. In nature that is the immediate community -- what goes on outside is not one's business. But now that we, as a 'global community' control the whole world we cannot respond, cannot bear the commensurate responsibility. This conflict between our instincts and reality, along with the stress of overpopulation and separation from nature, has made us all mentally ill. This illness manifests itself in violence and war, hatred, abuse, greed, jealousy, and fear. We are helpless to do what we 'know' we must. It is like facing 'Sophie's choice' (being asked by the Gestapo to decide which of your children to spare from the gas chamber) over and over and over. We cannot bear to know, so we turn off, we hide inside, we distract ourselves. It is only when we don't know, and cannot even imagine, that we can go on, and tolerate the world we have created. This makes it easier for us to accept the brainwashing that ours is the only way to live, to tolerate the abuses and outrages that weknow are going on behind closed doors, and to accept the arguments of skeptics and apologists and holocaust denyers that it's not really that bad, or perhaps it's even good, or at least it's divine will so it's beyond our control, there's nothing we can do about it, we're not really responsible
As a consequence, we are poised, by the end of this century, to create a world that contains one billion Americans and fourteen billion people, and uses eight Earths worth of resources (at current regeneration rates) just to meet human needs. A world that will, as a direct consequence of this overcrowding and unsustainable consumption, be preoccupied with catastrophic famines, epidemic (new) human diseases, crop failures, cannibalism, crop failures, nuclear and biological wars, water rationing and desertification, economic depression, catastrophic terrorism, cascading weather disasters, and the decline of democracy, constitutional liberalism, and the rule of law. A world, arguably, not worth living in.

Forward Not Back: The Solution Process

Solutions are needed that either directly address overpopulation and unsustainable consumption, or address the causes of these problems (see the Why Civilization Doesn't Work chart). Or, alternatively, we could resign ourselves to the inevitable crash of this horrible world (probably as a result of a new catastrophic disease or nuclear or biological holocaust), and start designing a post-apocalypse world that will allow the survivors to carry on and perhaps learn from our mistakes. Solutions, throughout history, have come in four 'flavours': innovative (new technologies), social (changing people's minds), commercial (changing the economy) and political (changing laws and regulations). Innovations have been, throughout human history, by far the most effective and enduring. Revolutionary change requires radical solutions -- solutions that undermine, replace and ultimately destroy existing systems, technologies, ideas and beliefs. But they must represent bold steps forward, not nostalgic steps back to a pre-civilization world that is no longer possible or desirable.
If we hope to impose change on a world unready and unable to save itself, enough of us must be informed, aware of the consequences of our actions, skeptical, willing and able to learn from nature, fully committed, confident we can do it, passionate in our search for radical solutions and courageous in following through on them.

Next Week: Part Two of this essay will support and elaborate on the first 5 arguments, and show that the answers to today's problems are right in front of us -- we need only relearn what we have forgotten and open ourselves to the truths we can no longer see.

Week of August 16th: Part Three will conclude the essay by establishing the sense of urgency for change, explaining why continuing to do what we are doing now, no matter how valiantly, will only get us where we are currently headed, and prescribe not solutions but a process for those who are ready, caring and courageous to find and then implement creative solutions.

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART TWO

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART TWO 08/10/2004 04:07 PM

Second part of a three-part essay. Part One is here. Bibliography of all sources cited is here.

fig 3

To appreciate the truth about nature you need to look at it from outside the frame, the filter through you've been taught to look at everything. In other words, you need to unlearn, or at least forget, what you've learned, been told, and come to understand about nature and about the entire world in which we live. We need to give you a kind of cultural amnesia for awhile. If you're willing, let's see if we can do that.

Most people have a picture of humans at the top of a long, complex evolutionary tree, an inevitability, a pinnacle, a culmination. In fact the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House, teaches us that homo sapiens is in evolutionary terms a small, recent and ordinary evolution, a small part of a small and undistinguished (if you study variations in our DNA) branch of the tree of life. He also teaches us that evolution is not about 'up' at all, but rather a constant series of experiments, variations, random walks from what has succeeded, as nature's method of ensuring the resiliency of life on Earth by checking to see if this minor variation might be a bit hardier in this ecosystem, that minor variation in that ecosystem etc. Most of these variations fail, but quite a few succeed, so to the outside observer all life on Earth, and perhaps on every planet, appears to be a single living organism that takes root, flowers, grows to occupy as much space as the climate will permit, and then continues to change in a balance, an equilibrium, responding to climate change and introducing new random variations in an eternal quest to find forms that are best suited to survive in the little place in space where it happened to land. Gould's lessons are:

Darwinian selection, this 'random walk' of evolution in which new variations are constantly introduced and tried out to see if they're better suited to the local ecosystem, tends to favour, for short periods, new species that are bigger, fiercer, and smarter than those currently prevailing. By 'fiercer' Gould means species that have the ability and tendency to catch and eat a lot of prey. By 'smarter' he means species that can discover how to use tools to supplement the natural tools evolution endowed them with. For brief periods, these bigger, fiercer, smarter creatures squeeze out the rest, decreasing biodiversity and biocomplexity. The result is temporary fragility of the ecosystem to the point the dominant creatures begin to destroy the system's ability to support other life, including its own prey. The dominant creatures then find themselves overcrowded, short of food, and/or vulnerable to opportunistic diseases, as shown in the chart above. The consequent decline in numbers of the dominant species removes the stress so ecological equilibrium is gradually restored, biodiversity and biocomplexity again explode, and the system thrives in ever-shifting balance until the next big, fierce, smart creature evolves. These cycles of evolutionary change and re-balance occur constantly at the local level, and sometimes, when the re-balancing forces take longer to emerge, at a regional or global level. So natural selection paradoxically favours short-term prosperity of creatures that, in the longer run, could be detrimental or even catastrophic to the ecosystem as a whole. In any laboratory with trillions of experiments going on constantly, some of them will get temporarily out of control. In these cases, nature has to bring in the big fire extinguishers -- epidemic disease, cannibalism and war -- to restore the balance quickly, and the result, which fortunately is rare, is called an Extinction Event. These events, which punctuate the history of our planet, are described in Michael Boulter's book Extinction.
In some cases, drastic changes in the ecosystem can also precipitate Extinction Events. Most scientists believe that the last two major Extinction Events were caused by massive volcanic eruptions and by a meteor impact. Both occurrences blocked out the sun with dust particles and prevented photosynthesis, and the latter of these caused the premature extinction of the dinosaurs. Much more recently, another meteor impact may have caused Earth to wobble on its axis, producing drastic and sudden climate change and the Ice Ages and causing a series of lesser Extinction Events. The resultant loss of prey may have led to the decision of homo sapiens, up until then a hunter-gatherer for three million years, to try out an agricultural culture, the culture which currently dominates the planet and ironically threatens to bring about the next Extinction Event prematurely.
After the next major Extinction Event, whenever it occurs, Gould argues that the new evolutionary cycle will produce species that are so different from us as to be unimaginable: The probability of vertebrates (which most larger Earth creatures and all Sci-Fi aliens improbably are) emerging from any primordial soup is infinitesimally small. But whatever it looks like (if it's even 'visible' or otherwise discernible by our species), if it's big, fierce and smart it is likely to exterminate itself before it visits us in UFOs, or vice versa. So hoping for aliens to rescue us from our cloddishness, or hoping to find a new habitable world before our time runs out, or hoping to find answers in SETI, are all just foolish wastes of time and energy. We're in this all alone, and there's no deus in this machina, no matter how much we pray for one.

Gould's theories have earned him the enmity not only of creationists and the religious right (for obvious reasons) but also of other evolutionists who would like to believe evolution and the dominance of the human species is a progression with perhaps some deeper purpose, result or guiding hand. This view of all life on Earth as a single, self-regulating organism is called the Gaia Hypothesis, so named by James Lovelock. Unlike the previously prevailing view of most scientists, and historians, that life on Earth is a constant, violent, competitive struggle, this hypothesis sees life on Earth as a cooperative undertaking for mutual advantage. Earth as a single organism, Lovelock argues, is analogous to the human body -- the constituent parts work together to make the whole successful, rather than constantly warring with each other for dominance and space.

In fact prehistoric man's life was not, as we have been led to believe, "short, nasty and brutish", but idyllic and leisurely, for three million years, argue revisionist economist-historians Peter Jay, in his book The Wealth of Man, and Marshall Sahlins, in his book Original Affluence. Jay's timeline parallels that of Gould: When, 60 million years ago a meteorite plunged the planet into darkness and exterminated the dinosaurs, smaller species got the chance to evolve and thrive, spawning on Earth an enormous and interconnected diversity of life in dynamic equilibrium. That amazing, Utopian heterogeneity continued until about 30,000 years ago (an infinitesimally small flicker of time before now) when the population of homo sapiens suddenly exploded. Until that time, according to Jay, early humans probably lived an Eden-like existence, easily preying on large, slow and abundant fellow mammals in all corners of Earth, and 'working' only a few hours per week. As these species became extinct (aided perhaps by the Ice Ages and by the increasing sophistication of our hunting tools), we turned to new technologies, most notably agriculture and animal herding, to feed our exploding numbers, which rose from 6 million ten thousand years ago to 60 million three thousand years ago to 600 million five hundred years ago and to 6 billion today. Each ten-fold increase from our 'natural' six million population (which prevailed for the first 99% of human history on Earth) increased the effort each individual had to make to sustain his family, competition for land and resources, and in turn cycles of war, famine and epidemic disease. In the process, our resourcefulness led us to industrialize and urbanize to improve productivity, and, more recently, to so horribly foul our environment that its ability to support non-human life is quickly vanishing, due to stress from global warming, exhaustion of arable land, fisheries and forests, desertification, overpopulation, shrinking of the water table, and a host of other man-made threats. Jay is a pessimist about the competitiveness that our civilization has inspired, believing that we are unlikely to ever put the collective interest of all life on Earth ahead of our individual interests in the face of ever-exploding population and growing scarcity.

So we live now on a world where two systems coexist uncomfortably with each other: The 600 million year old natural system of biodiversity, experimental evolution, and continuous re-balancing, punctuated by Extinction Events, and the 30 thousand year old man-made system of continuous growth, expansion, internal competition, and innovative technologies. We'll look at the man-made system later. For now, let's go back and try to understand the natural system.

fig 1

Imagine that you, and a small group of other people, were to wake up tomorrow with absolutely no memories of your past or even of the language you spoke, in the middle of a forest in a tropical wilderness. Even if none of you had ever spent a moment away from the shelter of civilization in your life, you would not awake and be filled with dread and fear. You think you might because in the 'real' world you have been conditioned to fear nature, to see it as savage, violent, a struggle to survive. You have been taught, brainwashed, to distrust and ignore your instincts. But now you would awaken with no such prejudgements. You would become, in many ways, as children, and your whole group would awake full of wonder, and greet each other awkwardly, and then, probably, until hunger and thirst and sexual desire started to command your attention, you would probably play with your new 'friends', exploring and discovering, as children do, and as the newborn of all species in nature do. Imagine, too, that there is an unseen force that, for a while, protects you -- pulls you away before you can touch plants that are poisonous, guides you to safe, comfortable places to sleep, eat, drink and play, and repels predators, until you have learned from this force -- let's say you call it ma -- how to survive without its intervention, at which point ma leaves you to your own devices. Your group becomes, in fact, a hunter-gatherer tribe, completely unaware of any of the precepts of civilization -- language, science, reason, morality. Your initial state is one of astonishing joy, wonder, health, well-being, self-sufficiency, peace, security, community, learning, alertness, awareness, cooperation, imagination, love and respect for nature, and, to the extent needed, creativity -- all the elements of natural systems shown in the diagram above. You will instinctively hunt together and gather and share food, and you will recognize in each other specialized talents for doing one thing or another, and learn from your expert peers. There will be a 'pecking order' of sorts, based on consensus of, and respect for, those whose talents are most valuable -- keen senses, physical strength, creativity -- but the tribe will be egalitarian. There will be no hoarding or inequitable distribution of food or other resources. Since there is no scarcity, sharing will be according to need. Sex will be consensual and non-exclusive. Some members of the tribe will be eaten by predators, and others will contract diseases and go off by themselves to die, but these deaths will not cause the members of the tribe to become fearful, paranoid, selfish, greedy or violent. They will simply be accepted as the way life is. Your tribe of amnesiacs will know of no other way to respond. You will respect and flee from predators, and be alert for them and protect your young from them, but you will not fear them.

That is how nature works. Each creature strives to live and to bring more of their kind into the world not because they fear death, but because life is wonderful. When you see tiny birds scrounging at your bird-feeder or shivering in a tree in winter, don't feel sorry for them. They are not helpless and struggling and cowed. They shiver because instinctively they know it keeps their body temperature up. They have amazing (at least to us, who lack them) instinctive survival talents -- they need a lot of food in winter to keep warm, and they find it easily, enjoyably, and if they can't, they simply hibernate, and if they even suspect they won't be able to, they'll migrate. They can fly, and I envy them, I wish I were one of them. Although lots of birds are eaten by predators, few freeze or starve to death -- famine is a modern human invention, due to our huge numbers and loss of natural adaptability. If you see a dead bird, it almost certainly succumbed to one of three human-caused injuries: Collision with a window, or an automobile, or a domestic cat that no longer needed or wanted to eat what it killed.

The people in your amnesiac tribe, and all the creatures in the wild, know what David Abram calls the Spell of the Sensuous. Many animals have senses that are much more acute than ours, and we have lost much of our sensory acuity and openness, largely because we live most of our lives in cities and indoors, areas of great sensory homogeneity, poverty and concealment. We no longer have either rich sensory environments to experience, or practice exercising our senses, opportunities to open ourselves up to the richness of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and feelings in nature, so that even in those rare times when we are in natural environments we are unaware, insensitive, closed, disinterested in their magic, their meaning, their knowledge.

Our ignorance of nature, combined with our collective arrogance (because of our unquestioned evolutionary success), leads us to believe that we are the only sentient, emotional, intelligent creatures on the planet, and to tell ourselves that all other life couldn't possibly have done so well for so many millions of years because they're smart, sensitive and creative, so it must be because they're automatons just doing what they've been 'programmed' to do. But just as economists and historians are tearing apart our myths about prehistoric man, scientists are systematically deconstructing the anthropocentric myths of our emotional and intellectual uniqueness and superiority. Although our incompetence at deciphering animal language and communications has so far made it conveniently impossible to prove conclusively, there is very compelling evidence that many animals exhibit extraordinary intelligence, great awareness of their own existence, and profound emotion.

Jeff Masson's work on the emotional life of animals, most notably a book called When Elephants Weep, supports this theory. As an environmentalist, and a caretaker and observer of cats and dogs throughout my life, I had always believed that other animals were almost as sentient as humans, and that our bigger brains had led us to be different in degree from other animals, but not unique or fundamentally different. Until I read Masson I was a bit embarrassed about, and unsure of, this belief, since it seemed romantic and impossible to substantiate. Masson's extremely scientific, thorough and well-substantiated work not only dispelled my embarrassment, it hardened my position against those who, as apologists for animal testing and pathetically weak animal-cruelty laws, label animal rights as being anthropomorphic and hence absurd. They do so in total, convenient and deliberate denial of overwhelming scientific evidence that animals are sentient, intelligent and capable of deep emotion, long-lasting memory and astute reasoning.

I have since read other works that ascribe similar intelligence and emotional sensitivity to primates learning sign language, wolves, whales and dolphins, ravens and other corvid birds (Bernd Heinrich's book Mind of the Raven is especially persuasive and hugely entertaining). At this point I do not know to what to ascribe continuing human ignorance and inaction to improve the lot of our fellow animal creatures on this planet. When I hear arguments that "we need to solve the problems of humans first" or that "you can't equate the life of an animal with a human life" I am incredulous -- such thinking is beyond ignorance and to me represents a deep-seated fear and hatred of all things natural (which to me, since we are part of 'all things natural' is a form of self-loathing). Or it represents a blind acceptance of religious dogma. Whichever it is, I can't fathom such a position. I know that, like all species, we are slow to change our thinking and beliefs, but I can only hope that, with people like Masson and Heinrich systematically debunking the myths about our fellow creatures in solid scientific ways, we will at least move to reduce animal cruelty and begin to try to understand what other animals have to teach us, and to say to us.

In fact given some new evidence that emotion is principally a response to sensory stimulus, and knowledge that some animals have greater sensitivity to many sensory stimuli than humans, it's quite possible that many animals lead much richer emotional lives than we do, that they are more 'sensitive' in every sense of the word than we are, that they 'feel' more, and more deeply, than we could ever hope to. Why then don't they articulate this, so that we understand? Perhaps they do -- maybe we are just so numb to all language other than our limited and clumsy human ones that we don't 'hear' them. Or perhaps it's just that they don't have to -- maybe we developed 'sophisticated' abstract language not because we were uniquely able to, but because it was necessary to convey precise instructions about man-made processes (like harvesting crops) in our strange new unnatural hierarchical culture, whereas other animals always survived just fine without such artificial constructs. How sophisticated a language do you need to say "danger", "food", "yes", "no", and "I love you", and ultimately what else is really important to say? I'm being facetious of course -- humans now need our language and our technology to live comfortable lives. But most other animals know a better way to live, and don't need sophisticated language or technology to do so.

Another truth about nature is the importance of community and of place. Civilization has supplanted our sense of community -- the essential unit of social life for all other creatures and cultures on Earth -- with constructs that allow greater command and control over all civilized humans and all human endeavour: The family, the corporation, the religious order and the state. The family is a small, nuclear social unit that is undemocratic (the power is unequally distributed) and helpless (it can't survive without interacting with larger social groups). The corporation, the religious order and the state are large, hierarchical social units that are undemocratic (the power is unequally distributed) and omnipotent. By giving the adult (usually the father) the power in the family unit, corporations, religious orders and states are able to lower social resistance to keeping the real power for themselves, which is essential to maintaining order in a world of six billion people who intuitively want to self-govern. The community competes for allegiance and authority with the family on one side, and with the corporation, the religious order, and the state on the other, so it has been systematically attacked and subverted from both sides. When we say we live in a 'community' today, it doesn't mean a group of people with whom we have special kinship (unless we are exceptionally lucky), it means the homogeneous yet unintegrated collection of nuclear family homes that is part of a larger, powerful state. This community has no real power, no real authority, and no real organization, and commands no allegiance from those who live in it, who cannot even really be called 'members'. We are, however, members of a family, and members as well of a state (citizens), religious order and corporation (employees). The place in which we live usually bears no signs of its natural heritage (trees are cut down and non-native trees and flowers planted in their place, and all houses look much like houses everywhere else in the civilized world, and block the view of everything except the neighbouring houses). And many of us live transient lives -- we move often to other, identical-looking places far away, and during the day we commute from our 'homes' on identical-looking highways to identical-looking office buildings and plants. So we have no sense of community, no sense of place, and no loyalty to either.

In the natural world, community and place are paramount. The community is democratic, self-managing and self-selecting: Even if you are born into it, either you have to pass a rite of passage to stay (with the approval of other community members) or you are expected to leave and find another community (or form your own). You belong to a community -- a much stronger bond than mere membership. The community (like the amnesiac tribe described earlier) teaches you what you need to live, defines you and gives you purpose. It anchors and connects you. And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. It is your community, your ecosystem, all of it, that is your place -- not the isolated, nuclear-family, locked house on 'private' property. A house is not a home. And even though most humans live largely inside their own minds, a mind is not a home either, it is not a real place.

Very few of us in the civilized world really belong to a community, or have found our true place, a natural home. In nature, by contrast, every creature either belongs to a community and to a place, or is in a lifelong quest for them. It is instinctive to belong to a community and to a place because in Darwinian terms that is what works best. Even we humans, newcomers to the Earth, have three million years of programming in our DNA driving us to seek community and find our place. And because it works so well it is not surprising that most creatures, human and otherwise, who have found where they belong and found their place are quite passionate about it -- they will defend it from all outsiders of their species, even to the death if necessary (which it rarely is, because except for civilized man, most creatures profoundly respect the communities and places of others, and unless welcomed in will go back or move on). And they will share their space with communities of all other species that also call that place home, because they instinctively understand the reverence of place and community, appreciate the value of diversity, and that all life on Earth is sacred. The love that you have for your place and your community, and the other and diverse lives with which you share it, is what gives your life meaning. There is no 'Tragedy of the Commons' in nature, because of the profound understanding that every place is somebody's home, a part of somebody's community, and must be respected. Land is not merely property to be owned or fenced off by one individual of one species. It is sacred, holy, part of life itself. It 'belongs' to no one. We belong to the land, to the web of life of which it, and we, are all a part.

Now I know how David Abram must have felt writing The Spell of the Sensuous. It's all too hard, maybe impossible, to explain the truth about nature in words and charts and pretty pictures. It's like trying to describe life outside to someone who has lived their whole life in a prison. A prison with no bars or locks but which, astonishingly, no one walks away from. I can't tell you, but nature can show you her truth. But you need to let her. If you live most of your life indoors, in a car, in a city, inside your own mind, it will be hard, like learning a new language when you're old. To understand you will have to:

Spend time with her, in wilderness (not just a park or a cottage or a summer camp)
Open your senses, and re-learn to really see, hear, smell, taste and feel again
Re-learn to trust your instincts: For three million years they showed man the way to live
Find a real community and a place in nature to which, even if only for awhile, you can belong
Silence the noise in your head
Re-learn to imagine what is real, what is really going on that you can't see, and what is possible
Learn to think critically and profoundly beneath the issues and distractions of the day to what really matters
Find the courage to challenge a culture that doesn't make sense to you, to be different, to be fearless, to be genuine, to be yourself, and not like everyone else (rational and moral and superficial and passive)

You don't have to do all these things. If you do a few, even a couple, the others will probably happen naturally. I don't expect many people to understand or buy any of this. The idea that six billion of us are needlessly and voluntarily living profoundly destructive, counter-intuitive, unhappy, unhealthy, unnatural, hard, self-limiting, self-sacrificing, deprived lives, and that all we need to do is learn the lessons of nature, change our minds, walk away from civilization and create an stunningly better, joyful life, and save the world in the process, is just too radical, too insane an idea for most people to accept. Who are we to throw away 30 millennia of civilization and try to build something new based on a three million year old idea? There must be a good reason why the world is the way it is. We're humans, we're the Crown of Creation, if there was a better way to live we'd have found it. We can't change it anyway, we don't have the power, it's not our place. And we're too busy just doing our jobs, just trying to get by. Don't bother us. It's too hard. You're asking too much of us. Go bug someone else.

OK. So don't listen to me. Listen to the quiet, nagging voice inside you. The voice that resonates with your three million year old DNA, that's telling you that something is very wrong, that life should be better, happier, less of a struggle than this.The truth about nature is that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her what to do. And waiting to welcome us all home.

Part Three, the final part of this series next week, will describe how we, civilized man, lost our way, and forgot who we are, establish the sense of urgency for change, explain why continuing to do what we are doing now, no matter how valiantly, will only get us where we are currently headed, and prescribe not solutions but a process for those who are ready, caring and courageous to design and create a better, natural world.

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART THREE

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART THREE 08/19/2004 05:19 PM

Third and final part of a three-part essay. Part One is here. Part Two is here. Bibliography of all sources cited is here.

fig 2

In Part Two I explained what we lost when, thirty thousand years ago, in response to a sudden shortage of big game, we gave up our hunter-gatherer cultures, started the tedious and back-breaking work of agriculture, invented civilization and tried to convince everyone that this strange and unintuitive new society was a good and necessary way to live. Although the 'history' we are taught in school starts with the birth of civilization, and treats everything before that as a non-event, books like Daniel's Quinn's Ishmael and Story of B, Richard Manning's Against the Grain, Derrick Jensen's A Truth Older Than Words and the essays of Jared Diamond have started to develop a credible, broader picture of human history, explaining that the transition of three-million-year-old homo sapiens from hunter-gatherer to farmer-settler was a traumatic one, and led inadvertently to consequences of great suffering and misery and ecological stresses that today imperil the survival of all life on the planet.

This picture looks something like this: We learned that for civilization to work, we had to live closer together, and to work in a coordinated way in new and difficult jobs. To do so we needed to evolve new, abstract, technical languages and create hierarchies of command and control. The crowding, the coercion, and the development of very successful agricultural technologies had three immediate consequences: High levels of physical and emotional stress (nature's way of signalling and dealing with overcrowding), excess food (which in turn led to exploding population, and even more crowding), and, paradoxically, recurring and catastrophic shortages, as the new monoculture crops occasionally and spectacularly failed. Thus the vicious cycle shown in the chart above began.

With more and more people crammed into civilization's new 'cities', opportunistic diseases that required proximity quickly evolved and blossomed into epidemics. The human forms of poxviruses, nature's ubiquitous species-specific population regulator, became endemic and killed over a billion of the first few billion humans born into civilization. The crowding and the loss of community and purpose and place led to mental illness, to new physical ailments (like tooth decay and heart disease) connected to the loss of variety in our diet, and to addictions, which are now so common and widespread that we have come to think of them as normal, and only notice them in the descendants of tribal cultures most recently conquered and forced to adapt to civilization's ways, where their symptoms are most tragic and most obvious. The crowding also produced continuous violence and war, as fighting broke out over increasingly scarce land and resources, and the ethic that had held for three million years that land was sacred, and belonged to the community that was already there, was replaced by an ethic of acquisition, of justifiable genocide of uncivilized cultures, and of manifest destiny to conquer and seize every acre of land to meet civilization's insatiable needs. Catastrophic crop failures led to famines, previously unknown on the planet, and the 'fear of not having enough' caused everyone to try to hoard surpluses, and prompted those higher in the new hierarchies to demand more than their share, and to use their power to establish and preserve a staggering new inequality of health and wealth.

Social order, which for three million years had been egalitarian and instinctive and built around the tribal community, started to break down as the new larger social structures did not work on the same principles. New social principles therefore had to be developed: New religions taught that suffering was normal and divine will; New laws and punishments and prisons were introduced to enforce obedience to the rules set by those at the top of the hierarchy; New educational and moral codes taught that war is honourable and inevitable, that some people deserve more wealth and security than others, and that conformity and other qualities that keep order and discipline are 'virtues'; The nuclear family unit was conceived to promote patriarchy and hierarchy as the natural human order, and to replace the loss of the tribal community. And all of these new systems portrayed nature as dangerous, brutal, something that had to be conquered and subdued in the interest of man, and portrayed man as divine, above and apart from all other life, so that man was absolved from the guilt, the responsibility and the intuitive distress over destroying nature and enslaving the tribal peoples and animals that got in the way of global dominion by 'civilized' man, in his insatiable need for more land, more resources and more slave labour to feed the ever-increasing masses. And man, social, adaptable, gullible creature that he is, bought it all. He learned to forget his true nature, to distrust his instinct, and to believe that civilization, despite its vicious cycle, was the only way to live.

It's only in the last century that the wisdom of this new civilization ethos has been seriously questioned by more than a few eccentric individuals. This century has seen the worst wars, the worst famines, the worst epidemics, the greatest suffering of any century in civilization's brief 300-century history, and the lack of progress has started to lead many to a sense that something is terribly wrong. In The Axemaker's Gift, Burke & Ornstein reveal that human innovativeness, which originally helped man adapt and live better, is now used as a tool to entrench authority and concentrate power. In The Unconscious Civilization John Ralston Saul explains that the political and economic and corporate systems we built to make our lives better have now enslaved us, and are out of our control. In Ockham's Razor, Wade Rowland argues that civilization has dehumanized humans, and that science and technology have accelerated rather than slowed this process in the last millennium.

In People Before Profit, Charles Derber recounts the cautionary tale of the 18th century robber barons and warns that corporatism is once again driving much human activity, in ways that benefit only a tiny elite and impoverish all other life on Earth. In When Corporations Rule the World, David Korten shows how corporations, which we invented to try to improve the production and distribution of resources, have lost sight of their purpose and now control us, while producing ever-greater inequality of wealth. The Worldwatch Institute, in its annual State of the World reports, dispassionately identify the measures of growing ecological collapse. And in The New Rulers of the World, Jon Pilger shows how much control now resides in a tiny number of people -- fewer than a million -- with a vested interest in perpetuating the vicious cycle above.

Richard Manning's Against the Grain explains how grain surpluses were the first human currency, used to bribe some people into beating down others to establish the first human hierarchies, and describes the incredible vulnerability of monoculture agriculture to catastrophic failures that has led to soul-destroying famines, wars, unimaginable suffering, and even cannibalism -- and ultimately to the political systems that perpetrate these disasters and lead to overpopulation, modern concentration-camp style factory farms, and staggering inequality of power and wealth.

As these and other authors paint a disturbing picture of civilization's well-intentioned social, political and economic folly, other writers describe civilization's devastating impact on our psyches. Edward Hall, in The Hidden Dimension, explains the psychological impact of overcrowding as a natural stress reaction common to all animal species. The purpose of this reaction is to induce in creatures that have overpopulated a series of hormonal changes that reduce fertility, increase aggressiveness (to spread them out), and increase susceptibility to disease, and hence quickly bring the population back into ecological balance, as illustrated in the diagram in Part Two. In rare situations when that fails, the hormonal changes kick up another notch, and a social 'blow-up' is produced -- aggressiveness to the point of murder, eating of the young, and adrenal shock leading to premature death ensue. Hall argues that this is precisely what we are witnessing in violent, stressful civilized society. Psychologist Glenn Parton goes further, arguing in The Machine in Our Heads that because we have forgotten how we lived for three million years, lost touch with our instincts, we recognize that something is terribly wrong with the world and feel responsible for it, but no longer see the solution, so the stress ultimately drives us insane.

Meanwhile, the vicious cycle continues to spin out of control. The Census Bureau now predicts that there could well be one billion Americans and fourteen billion humans on the planet by the end of this century, but the corporatist-owned major media continue to pander to the modern myths that population is levelling off quickly, that technology and ingenuity will solve all our problems in plenty of time, and that in fact the West needs more babies to support its ageing population.

Agencies like NOAA and NASA, and scientists like Bill McKibbon (The Overheating World), David Stipp (Climate Collapse) and Kenny Ausubel (The Empire Strikes Out) provide growing evidence that human overpopulation, overdevelopment and overconsumption are not only wiping out most species of life on the planet, but precipitating potentially catastrophic climate change as well. And the creatures that are left, argues JM Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello, are being subjected to cruelty of holocaust proportions.

It is not surprising, in the face of the enormous stresses of civilized life, the incredible unease and guilt we feel about the extinction of all other creatures on the planet, the staggering violence, cruelty and suffering endemic in the culture we created and which is now seemingly out of our control, that we should seek refuge in denial -- denial that Earth is in crisis, denial that the atrocities and suffering are actually occurring, denial that it going to get worse rather than miraculously better thanks to human ingenuity or divine intervention, denial that it is our human responsibility to do anything about it, denial that we can do anything about it, and denial that we have any personal responsibility beyond just doing our best not to contribute to the crisis. And if we're smart enough and informed enough and sensitive enough to be unable to deny this grim reality, we take refuge from the hopelessness and from our helplessness instead by turning it off, by busying ourselves with simpler, more personal, more manageable things. And if we can't do that either we end our own lives. Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

So what are we to do? Some of the writers cited above offer no solutions -- they are merely diagnosticians, they say, it is not their place to tell us what to do. Some writers do proffer answers, that range from the modest to the radical to the resigned. Here are some of them:

The late Freeman Dyson, in his famous Wired interview, suggests we need to rediscover community and focus our attention on it, since that's the political level at which we can have a personal impact. Along with that, he says, we need to quickly advance new technologies that (like solar energy co-ops) increase community self-sufficiency and (like biotech innovations) improve quality of life. Economist Herman Daly, in Developing Ideas, proposes an economic and tax program that would help communities flourish and encourage conservation and the protection of the commons, and proposes a global contract in which developed nations would agree to reduce their levels of consumption while in return the developing nations would agree to reduce their levels of population.

Just in the last year, Jon Schell in The Unconquerable World has proposed a new political system built around non-violence and consensus-building, while Shoshana Zuboff in The Support Economy has proposed a new post-capitalist economic system based on small enterprises collaborating to meet human needs holistically. Thom Hartmann in Unequal Protection, David Korten in When Corporations Rule the World and Joel Bakan in The Corporation present prescriptions for stripping corporations of their power and perhaps returning that power to local communities. Jim Merkel in Radical Simplicity prescribes a way that each of us can strive to reduce our personal footprint to sustainable levels.

Thomas King in The Truth About Stories and Thomas Berry in Dream of the Earth both say we need to write a new story about a new human culture, that the rest of us can embrace, and which will show us the way forward. Meanwhile, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point teaches us how change occurs and can be brought about quickly, and Peter Singer in Ten Ways to Make a Difference and the late Dana Meadows in Places to Intervene in a System offer pragmatic advice about how to bring change about. Stuart Koffman in At Home in the Universe explains how we can exploit the attributes of self-managing systems to help humans evolve at the community level.

While Margaret Mead tells us that most of the major changes in human society and culture have been wrought by a few, caring people, James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds persuades us of the importance and value of tapping into the collective wisdom of large numbers of people who, together, probably have the answer to every problem, even one as intractable as the crisis that faces us today. And Bill McDonough in Cradle to Cradle and Avery Lovins in Natural Capitalism show proven ways that could be used to redesign the world by learning from nature.

Bucky Fuller reminds us that it is much easier to create a new system that renders the old one obsolete than to try to reform an existing system. There is even a school of thought that proposes a human cultural metamorphosis, explained by Elisabet Sahtouris in EarthDance and Gary Alexander in eGaia, by which transformation to a new human culture might be achieved quickly. Glenn Parton in Humans in the Wilderness suggests a grand experiment of spaced-out Intentional Communities, to reintroduce humans to community and wilderness, and provide a model for building a new natural culture.

So there are many suggested solutions, none of which has achieved any great groundswell of support. They are of four main types:

innovative (brought about through invention of new technologies),
social/educational (brought about by virally changing a lot of people's minds),
commercial/entrepreneurial (brought about by changing the rules by which the economy operates) and
political (brought about by changing laws and regulations).

If there is any consensus of these writers, it is that innovation is the easiest way to bring about change ( because it requires no widespread public agreement to occur) and political reform is the hardest (because the political system was set up to institute the changes needed to make civilization 'work' and its very purpose is to defend the status quo).

My answer continues to evolve the more I read, and I'm much less convinced that it's the right answer than I am of the Truth about Nature and the Truth about Civilization. But for those that are interested, here is my answer, as of today:

There are a lot of things that everyone can do, and should do, to make the world better. Here's my latest list of 15 things: Trust your instincts; Listen, learn and teach others; Learn and practice critical thinking; Re-learn how to imagine; Use less stuff; Stop at one child; Become less dependent; Become an activist; Volunteer; Be a role model; Be a pioneer; Find or create a meaningful job; Share your expertise; Be good to yourself; and Infect others with your courage and spirit and passion. It's the least we can do. It's necessary that we do these things to be clearer about what else we need to do, because these things by themselves won't be enough.
There is a second group of things that we need to work on that will require specialized expertise and talent:

Innovators and scientists need to work on simpler, cheaper, more reliable birth control, abortion and assisted-suicide technologies, breakthroughs in clean energy technology, and technologies that: reduce pollution and waste; prevent rather than just treat diseases; reduce the need for transportation; enable community self-sufficiency (e.g. solar/wind energy co-ops, indoor gardening); do more with less; replace molecules with bits; conserve energy and resources; create nutritious and delicious animal-product-free food; reduce the need for agricultural chemicals; enhance the ability of activists and problem-solvers to organize, collaborate virtually and share information; help identify socially and environmentally irresponsible people and corporations; prevent and treat mental illness; and enable us to better communicate with and learn from other animals.
Social activists and teachers need to develop a new non-corporatist, autonomous community-based education system that teaches responsible citizenship, how to learn, how to think creatively and critically, how to get along with others, and how to start and run your own responsible business; they need to persuade people to stop at one child, adopt a vegan diet, buy local and live simpler lives; and they need to teach appreciation of and skills in: community-building, achieving consensus, using citizen-power, effective listening, peaceful conflict resolution; and they need to teach us all how to cope with terrible knowledge, responsibility and change.
Entrepreneurs need to demonstrate and teach community-based Natural Enterprise, and pledge to buy local.
Politicians and lawyers (I'm not holding my breath on this) need to revamp corporate charters to refocus corporations on responsibility to community, end business subsidies, reform election and campaign finance laws, shift taxes from goods (employment) to bads (pollution, waste, non-renewable resource use), replace GDP with a genuine progress indicator, restrict property ownership, protect and expand the commons and wilderness, make health and education universal rights, shift spending from defense to humanitarian activities, forgive third-world debts, reduce extraterritoriality (power of companies and nations over the affairs of other sovereign nations), reinstate usury laws, introduce currency reform and LETS systems, and extend anti-cruelty laws.

We need to quickly reduce human population on Earth to a sustainable level of no more than one billion. Attempting to make any solution work in a world so horrendously overpopulated is futile and insane. If technology improvements, education and peer pressure can achieve this quickly and voluntarily, that would be the best answer. Political pressure to do so has repeatedly failed, and won't work. If the voluntary methods won't work quickly, we need to find another way, painless and non-discriminatory and non-political.
The next culture, everyone seems to agree, needs to be built around communities. We need to create some Model Intentional Communities, a lot of them, to re-learn how communities work, and how to create them, and to show our young people a better way to live (preaching to them won't work). Quinn's idea of just 'walking away' from our civilization culture is a good one, but we need something to walk away to, and MICs might be the answer, the building block of the next, sustainable culture.
Saving the world is going to require some self-sacrifice and some risk-taking. We need to bring together a lot of bright minds in a lot of different ways to start focusing on this one big problem, instead of the immediate little problems civilization keeps throwing in front of us. We need to diagnose and cure the disease, and that means some of us need to stop being preoccupied with treating the symptoms. I believe that process needs to be voluntary, and the problem-solving groups need to be self-selecting and self-managed. And we need to solve the problem holistically -- a vicious cycle can't be changed merely by tinkering with its isolated parts. That means we need a combination of big-picture thinkers and innovators, and specialists who can expose the big-thinkers' ideas to real-world reality tests. Think-tanks, conferences, ad hoc organizations -- we need them all, and lots of them. If we're going to fix this, many people will have to decide to make this their calling, their purpose for living, at considerable personal sacrifice, and they'll have to find, and work with, like minds.
My sense is that the answers, if there are any, are innovations and technologies that can change our culture as broadly and abruptly as the invention of the arrowheads, agriculture, science and automation did. They won't be the result of linear thinking, and will probably be far more revolutionary than any of the technologies I call for in point 2 above. As Einstein said, We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
We don't have much time. We are already starting to see the early signs of total ecological and social collapse, and although this collapse is unlikely to reach a head in our lifetimes (it could take as long as another century), we may already be too late to begin to prevent it. I believe the signal for the beginning of the end will be more conventional than natural disasters caused by global warming -- it is more likely to be a nuclear or biological holocaust caused by two warring, suffering, nothing-left-to-lose nations, or by a stateless group of desperate malcontents who have the motive, and probably the method, and are only now waiting for the opportunity to say fuck you all. There is no time to lose, or to debate whether anything needs to be done. Something needs to be done, now.
We can't go back. Returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is neither possible nor desirable. We need to go forward to build a new culture that understands and learns from the truth about nature, and is sustainable, but which also uses the best innovations and technologies that human ingenuity has and will come up with, so that a billion of us can live lightly on the Earth, comfortably, easily, connected, in balance with and as part of nature. Innovation can allow us to do more with less, to eat well without farming animals or catastrophic agriculture, to specialize in what we do best and love doing most, with people we love to live and work with. But that innovation and those technologies must also respect the truth about nature, which means we'll need to reinvent them to work without non-renewable resources, and so that they can be produced with no pollution and no waste. Just because many current technologies use non-sustainable processes and non-renewable materials, exploit slave labour, are produced by a demeaning hierarchical and irresponsible corporatist economy and produce mountains of toxic garbage doesn't mean all technologies must do so. Just as civilization isn't the only viable human culture, today's wasteful and destructive economy isn't the only viable economy. They're the only life we know, but not the only life possible. We need only imagine something better, and strive to make it so.

My novel, The Only Life We Know, will attempt to take up Thomas King and Thomas Berry's challenge to write a new story for homo sapiens. It is set two centuries in the future, after eco-catastrophe has occurred or been averted, in an idyllic world where man lives in harmony and balance with nature, in a life of comfort, community, respect, responsibility and astonishing diversity. I'm not a scientist, or a powerful teacher, or a politician, or a great debater, or an entrepreneur, or an organizer. My skills are innovation and writing, so what I can best offer to save the world is an imaginative story of what could be, and hope that it might serve as an inspiration for those with other talents to figure out how to get us there, from the terrible and precarious world in which we live today.

Once the book is done, I'd like to start a think-tank, to make respectable the idea of Saving the World as a full-time job, and help those that are informed enough, and committed enough, and courageous enough, and self-sacrificing enough, to start working together on some bold, revolutionary answers. And I'd like to start a Model Intentional Community, and use it as an opportunity to teach young people about nature and Natural Enterprise and critical thinking and creative thinking and a better way to live. And of course I'll continue to do the 15 things listed in point 1 above, which have so transformed me in the three short years since I began this belated journey to try to understand my purpose and my sense of dread about the world we live in.

The truth about nature is that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her what to do. The truth about civilization is that it was an honest mistake, an invention that was necessary at the time, a mere 30,000 years ago, when nature appeared to be letting us down and we thought we could do better. But now it has outlived its usefulness, and is out of control, and threatens the survival of all life on our planet, so it's time to let it go. It's time to move forward and imagine and invent a new culture, a sustainable one that works for all creatures on Earth, drawing on the best learnings from nature and the best innovations from civilization.

It's time to go home.

THINKING
LIKE NATURE: WILLIAM MCDONOUGH REDESIGNS
THE WORLD

THINKING
LIKE NATURE: WILLIAM MCDONOUGH REDESIGNS
THE WORLD 05/26/2004 10:30 AM

Virginia reader Myke Myers kindly brought to my attention the work of his fellow Virginian William McDonough. McDonough is an architect and designer who has garnered a lot of press for his bold yet pragmatic view of design. In a recent interview with New Scientist he says:

Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years, yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little more than a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do...

The Earth's natural systems can probably support a few hundred million of our species, but soon there could be 10 billion of us... Eco-efficiency, where you try to reduce everything to zero, is not much fun. And nature itself is not that efficient. It's effective. Take a cherry tree in the spring. It's not efficient - how many blossoms does it need to regenerate? But it is effective: it makes cherries. We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency, but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem. We can celebrate abundance where it is ecologically intelligent. From my designer's perspective, I ask: why can't I design a building like a tree? A building that makes oxygen, fixes nitrogen, sequesters carbon, distils water, builds soil, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colours with the seasons and self-replicates. This is using nature as a model and a mentor, not an inconvenience. It's a delightful prospect.

When I'm working with business people I talk business. We talk about how much money can be made or saved, because that gets their attention. We never try to convert someone who is calcified: we never try to teach mules to play the violin. It sounds terrible and the mules don't like it.

McDonough maintains four websites: His firm's, his partnership's, his own, and his intelligent design site. The sites are as effectively designed as his buildings -- easy to browse, productive, engaging, and advancing the cause (the media are invited to select from ready-to-plagiarize materials that simplify writing about McDonough or his businesses). He's won awards as a visionary and environmentalist, and his firm's designs have won awards for eco-efficiency. And he's written a book, Cradle to Cradle (itself made of recyclable polypropylene, not paper), with colleague Michael Braungart, that explains the vision that underlies all his work. It is, simply: Learn from, and imitate, nature -- nature knows how to design and build things right, everything recycled, zero waste.

This is the kind of thinking we need -- assuming we can somehow solve the fact that there are at least ten times as many people on the planet as it can healthily support, and that our culture, and its political, legal and economic systems are utterly dependent on an unsustainable concentration of wealth, abuse of power, ever-accelerating growth in consumption of resources, and subjugation of human will and dignity.

McDonough calls himself an optimist, and thinks we can turn everything around by just redesigning our world. But I think sooner or later in this century, whether we solve the population and culture problems quickly and intelligently, or go crashing into the wall of eco-catastrophe, we are going to need to radically redesign and rebuild our culture, our economy, and our social systems. We can only hope that with guidance from people like William McDonough -- and also listening to nature and our own instincts -- we will design and build the next human culture more responsibly and intelligently than we did the current one. So that those of us lucky enough to live in that brave new world will know only balance, beauty, harmony, abundance and peace. Just as our ancestors lived for three million years before we invented civilization, and just as every other species on our world has always done. Imagine.

THINKING
LIKE NATURE II: AMORY LOVINS RE-INVENTS
CAPITALISM

THINKING
LIKE NATURE II: AMORY LOVINS RE-INVENTS
CAPITALISM 05/30/2004 11:48 AM

The same day I posted my article about William McDonough, reader Brian Dear pointed out the work that Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has been doing in much the same vein. Lovins, with colleagues Paul Hawken and L. Hunter Lovins, wrote a (fully downloadable) book entitled Natural Capitalism that, like McDonough's Cradle to Cradle, suggests pragmatic, creative ways for man to stave off environmental disaster by simply thinking and working better, more organically, with nature as the model. If McDonough's bottom-line message was Learn from, and imitate, nature -- nature knows how to design and build things right, everything recycled, zero waste, Lovins' could be Shift the economy to recognize the inherent value of people and natural resources, and you can transform the world. While McDonough, the architect, is focused on physical design, Lovins, the economist, is focused on systems design. They are perfect complements, with similar, optimistic, "let's get on with it" worldviews and concrete prescriptions for change, a refreshing change from the relentless pessimism in so many analyses of the world's environmental problems.

You can get an excellent idea of Lovins' prescription by reading the chapter summaries of his book online (I'm going to buy the whole book for my reference and "lending" library). Or, read the HBR summary, A Road Map for Natural Capitalism. Using case studies and small successes achieved already, the authors explain how each industry and each facet of the economy can be transformed by looking at it differently, more holistically, including the natural capital that we currently don't value and waste, and step-by-step changing its operating principles, structure, strategy, practices, rewards and governance, and drawing on biologically inspired design principles.

Everything in Lovins' prescription is achievable, sensible, and consistent with looking at the economy and markets as a means of maximizing human well-being instead of wealth. But it is in the final chapters, where he takes on the environmental pessimists (like me) and the unrepentent markets-need-growth traditionalists, that I start to lose conviction that this prescription will do the job. After effectively destroying the myth that our economic markets are free and efficient, he describes ways (e.g. tax shifting, changing our measurements of success, encouraging risk and innovation, improving regulation and information) that we can reinvent markets, much as he proposed in earlier chapters how to reinvent industries. His ebullient description of the economic and cultural transformation of Curitiba, Brasil, by a succession of architect-mayors who have redesigned one of the world's poorest and fast-growing cities into a city that works for people, is truly inspiring (anyone know if it's really that successful?)

But ultimately, the economy is designed the way it is to funnel power and wealth to those that have it and plan to keep it. It is not designed for efficiency, equity, fairness, and optimal distribution of resources -- in fact, as the extent of poverty, famine, and destitution in a world where a small minority have unimaginable wealth demonstrates -- political and social structures are designed to keep the status quo, to hoard resources, and to create and sustain inequitable distribution of wealth and power. Lovins suggests that the four groups in our political and economic systems: the blues (free-marketers), reds (socialists), greens (environmentalists), and whites (pragmatists), need to set aside their differences and opposing worldviews and respect the fact that each is partly right, and collaboratively assemble an "operating manual for Planet Earth". If there was a more equitable distribution of the resources, power and knowledge needed to assemble such a manual, and if the population and average footprint of humans on this planet weren't both catastrophically soaring, and if the horrendous consequences of these two realities (consequences like war, famine, global waming, epidemic disease, violence and crime, despair, hopelessness etc.) werren't preoccupying all our time and attention, such a manual might be possible. But ultimately, Lovins' prescription is like asking the crew and passengers of an airplane that has been struck by lightning to collaborate and share knowledge and energies to assess how to bring the plane to a safe landing, while it is plummeting to Earth.

It's a nice idea, but I think it's a little late for that.

HOW NATURE
WORKS AND WHY CIVILIZATION DOESN'T: A
SYSTEMS VIEW OF GAIA

HOW NATURE
WORKS AND WHY CIVILIZATION DOESN'T: A
SYSTEMS VIEW OF GAIA 06/01/2004 03:46 PM

I'm working on an update of the long paper that describes my 'journey' to environmental awareness and activism. Rather than starting the revision at the beginning, I thought I'd start with what was most important -- the final section with the 'root cause analysis' and the 'solution map' that ultimately became my How to Save the World Roadmap.

When I first published this paper on my blog, the charts that accompanied it generated more buzz than the paper itself. You can find them here and here. Since then, I've come to realize that these variables are less cause-and-effect than components of a self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating system. In Systems Thinking terminology, the 'virtuous circle' of life that existed in nature until about 30,000 years ago was 'disrupted' by events that upset the equilibrium and rippled through the system, producing a new self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating system that we call 'civilization'.

Based on the research I've since done on population, violence, and on our political, economic and social systems, I've now updated the charts to show the circular nature and greater interrelationship of the 19 elements. The first chart shows how nature works as a self-managed, self-balancing planetary organism -- a map perhaps of what is called the Gaia Theory:
Chart 1

Chart 1

And the second chart shows the equivalent man-made systems that have come into play with the dawn of civilization 30,000 years ago. This replacement system, alas, is not self-balancing -- it is utterly unsustainable, though our awareness of that fact is only a century old:
Chart 2

Chart 2

How did this unfortunate transformation occur? We don't know for sure, but the most compelling theory I have seen is that, as a consequence of the last ice age, and/or the invention of efficient hunting tools (like the spear, and the bow and arrow), there was a sudden and massive shortage of the big, lumbering game that man had hunted so easily since his emergence on the planet. So the element to the right of the red box changed from "Abundant Resources and Energy" (chart 1) to "Scarcity of Resources and Energy" (chart 2). Usually when this happens (except when it is a result of a major extinction event like that caused by the meteorite impact 65 million years ago that wiped out most of life on Earth), nature is able to fix the imbalance. It does so by causing the species suffering the shortage to reduce its fertility rate, temporarily increasing its mortality rate (more of them are eaten by predators, and epidemics arise to reduce over-crowding), and the result is a reduction in their consumption of the scarce resources (food, land etc.), until the scarce resources have had time to replenish themselves (illustrated in chart 3, below, which is based on the work of Darwin, Lovelock, and Edward T. Hall). In this sense, our planetary organism Earth behaves analogously to a human organism -- when there's a shortage of food, it goes into hibernation, lowers metabolism, and draws on internal reserves (fat) to compensate until a new external food supply is found.
Chart 3

Chart 3

But the situation 30,000 years ago was different. Man had developed enough intellect to institute some man-made solutions to scarcity instead of relying on the ones nature had always used. These human inventions included agriculture, animal domestication, and then, to make those work, a whole series of social, political and economic systems. We created man-made 'stores' of resources to offset the natural shortages, and tools to protect ourselves and our food supplies from, and even eradicate, natural predators and diseases. Our intellect tipped the balance of power, at least temporarily, from nature to man. Once that 'tipping point' had been reached, the rest of the 19 elements on Chart 1 were transformed into the corresponding elements on Chart 2. By enormous strength of ingenuity and will, we have entrenched this New World Order for 30,000 years, and exported it to every corner of the globe.

The problem is that it's unsustainable, and the kind of tinkering with it espoused by optimists and those that deny we are in crisis, just won't fix it -- both nature and civilization are immensely complex systems, and civilization is also immensely fragile. We need to simultaneously work on many of these 19 elements to create a new 'tipping point' to restore the natural system that worked for millions of years before civilization. That doesn't mean going back to a pre-civilization lifestyle -- that would be foolish and impossible. It means moving forward on many fronts -- political, social, economic, ecological, technological and in the way we make a living. Let's take a look at some of the weakest points in Chart 2 to see how we might, with coordinated or ingenious small-group effort, flip some of them over to their corresponding Chart 1 states:

Innovation: We need to develop:

Simpler, cheaper, more reliable birth control technologies (and ban technologies that increase human fertility)
More efficient clean energy technologies (and encourage their development by banning technologies that create massive environmental damage like coal-burning plants, dams, nuclear plants and internal combustion engines)
Technologies that prevent rather than treat diseases (we could learn much from nature in this area, but we had better do so before we destroy her medicine cabinet, the tropical rainforests), because families that live long, healthy lives are smaller
Technologies that reduce the amount of poisons we release into the air and the water
Production technologies that produce no waste, and whose products are 100% biodegradable -- If it can't be completely, inexpensively, easily and quickly recycled, it should not be produced
Technologies that eliminate expensive, polluting, dependence-creating transportation of goods, and allow local self-sufficiency and bioregionalism to work (Local wind and solar energy co-ops, and new greenhouse technologies that expand the range of foods that can be locally produced, for example) -- Nothing should have to be imported unless it cannot be reasonably produced locally
Technologies that allow us to do more with less, that replace hardware with software and molecules with bits -- and where there is no alternative to durable goods, they should be lightweight, recyclable, and unconditionally guaranteed to work for many lifetimes, so there is no need for landfills
Nutritious, delicious foods that use no animal products, to render obsolete current technologies that cause massive suffering, like factory farms and pharmaceutical and chemical products using laboratory testing
Technologies that produce more edible plant mass per acre, without using pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers or genetic engineering
Networking technologies that allow people working on solutions to global problems to self-organize and collaborate more effectively
Information technologies that allow citizen and consumer groups to organize and to identify, prosecute and defeat socially and environmentally irresponsible corporations, governments and organizations
Technologies that allow us to learn better from nature -- the languages of other animals, the mechanisms of self-regulation, self-organization, conflict resolution, and other important lessons
Technologies that will prevent and treat mental illness, that can be inexpensively and easily provided to all, including those on the streets and in our criminal institutions

Social Activism: We need to:

Completely revamp our education systems and wrench them away from corporatist control -- they should be community-run, autonomous, mobile, virtual, and dedicated to teaching responsible citizenship, how to learn, how to think creatively and critically, how to get along with others, and how to make a living with those one cares about (everything else they can learn by themselves -- they don't need to be force-fed anyone's biased viewpoint)
Persuade people of the need and advantage of limiting their families to one child
Persuade people of the need and advantage of a 'radically simple' lifestyle
Demonstrate by example the superiority of self-selected, self-managed communities over both the nuclear family and larger political units (cities, states) for effective, efficient, self-sufficient social, political and economic organization
Think critically and creatively, never stop challenging, never stop thinking of ideas to make the world even better
Learn to live a healthy vegan lifestyle, and make more of our own foods instead of relying on prepackaged foods
Learn to compromise, cooperate, collaborate, resolve conflicts amicably, build consensus and negotiate better
Organize to use our very real power as citizens and consumers to end corporatism, devolve power to communities and individuals, create a more open, fair, socially and environmentally responsible and egalitarian society, and support local enterprise
Learn to listen, be more respectful and pay attention better -- to nature, to each other (especially those with different views), to women, to children, and to our own instincts
Pace ourselves -- saving the world is going to take enormous energy, passion, faith and courage

Community-Based Enterprise Formation: We need to:

Encourage and facilitate the formation of innovative, locally-owned, community-based businesses
Pledge to buy local, so that we have more say in our economic lives, so that business is incented to invest in and take seriously its responsibility to the local community, and so that unnecessary, polluting, traffic-creating transportation of imported goods is minimized
Encourage and enable community-based businesses to take an active role in the education system, showing our young people how to run their own successful local business enterprise
Create community-based financial institutions that will exclusively fund community-based businesses and hence enable people in the community to invest locally

Political Activism: We need to:

Revamp corporate law to make corporations once again the servants of man, not our masters -- rewrite corporate charters to make them more restrictive and more responsible, and make corporations once again mere 'economic shells' with no political power, no place for corrupt individuals to hide, no separate 'rights', democratic voting, open information access and a strict size and salary cap
End agricultural and other business subsidies
End the tax subsidies to religious organizations, and treat them legally as political organizations
Reform election laws to introduce proportionate representation and instant-runoff voting, eliminate gerrymandering, prohibit corporate and group campaign financing, cap personal campaign financing, and have all elections supervised by international observers
Shift taxes away from income and employment and towards pollution, waste, resource consumption, speculation and wealth accumulation -- and use these taxes to radically even out wealth and power disparity
Change our measures of economic 'success' -- scrap GDP and similar measures in favour of Genuine Progress Indicators and similar measures of well-being and equality
Revamp and reduce property rights to cap ownership by any one individual, require public access to land with special social attributes (e.g. ocean-front), increase ownership responsibilities, prohibit property ownership by corporations and organizations (they could still lease appropriately zoned lands from the public), prohibit property ownership by non-residents, and solve the Tragedy of the Commons
Set aside a significant amount of the Earth's area, across all bioregions, as wilderness land, where no development, economic activity or pollution would be allowed, and human access would be heavily limited
Strengthen, hone and globalize charters of human rights and freedoms to include absolute rights to free health care and education, and give them legal status ahead of domestic law
Scrap 'free' trade agreements that undermine local and national social and environmental laws and traditions
Set global standards for government spending -- a maximum % of government revenues that can be spent on military activities and a minimum % that must be spent on international humanitarian aid, and expel from the UN countries that violate these standards
Write off all current third-world international indebtedness, prohibit creation of new international debt, and ban extraterritoriality (political and economic activities that compromise local or national sovereignty)
Reinstate usury laws (limit interest rates on consumer debts to no more than 3% above inflation rate)
Introduce currency reform to allow LETS systems
Extend anti-cruelty laws to all animals, and for the purpose of such laws define them as living beings, not as property

I have deliberately put political activism as the final category of this list, because the more I learn about change, the more I am coming to believe that politics and law are much less effective levers for change than innovation, social activism or community-based enterprise formation. Political activism is an uphill battle against the status quo and against entrenched wealth and power. Social activism and community-based enterprises, by contrast, work peer-to-peer, citizen-to-citizen and consumer-to-consumer and, thanks to the power of modern communications, can spread virally very quickly, undermining the political and economic establishment by working beneath their radar, until, starved of its grass-roots citizen and consumer support, this establishment simply crumbles, no longer needed. Most of the bullets on the Political Activism list above are, in fact, more about undoing things that are contributing to ecological collapse, than about doing something else. And innovation, which respects no political or economic authority, can help immensely.

Many of my readers have told me "that's fine, but I'm not rich, powerful, expert, entrepreneurial or innovative, so what can I do now to help, to make a difference?" That's a fair question, and I'm developing the answer to it as the final section of the revised paper (and also as a more practical replacement for the Roadmap). I should have it finished next week, and I'll publish it here first.

THE FEAR OF
NATURE

THE FEAR OF
NATURE 01/19/2004 01:41 AM

In his book Extinction: Evolution & The End of Man, palaeontologist Michael Boulter reviews past cycles of evolution and extinction on Earth, and sudden cataclysmic extinctions (caused by meteorites or massive volcanic eruptions). He predicts with scientific detachment the probability that the next great extinction has already begun, and that man is very unlikely to survive it. We are simply not endowed with the right attributes and physical adaptability. The next flourishing of life on Earth, says Boulter, will be dominated by creatures of the air -- the birds and insects. It was by taking to the air and evolving into birds, after all, that the dinosaurs survived the last great extinction. Après nous les dragons.

This winter I've taken up a new hobby, birdwatching, and as with all my new hobbies I start with a flurry of research. The incredible sophistication of the design of birds -- aerodynamically, thermodynamically, and socially -- is endlessly fascinating to me. Birds have a body temperature of about 108°F, although some birds like chickadees are able to lower their body temperature by up to 20°F at night in winter, a process called shallow hibernation that helps reduce body heat loss. Unless injured, birds rarely freeze to death, even in -50°F temperatures. Their feathers have extraordinary thermal qualities, and can be fluffed out to increase these qualities further. Their usually easy and carefree 'work' schedule stretches out to an exceptional four hours per day in very cold weather, as they bulk up on fats and proteins, which they work off at night by shivering, generating enough extra heat energy to sustain their body temperature. There's no indication that this shivering is uncomfortable to them as it is to us (perhaps it's more akin to the way we shiver in the throes of passion). They don't go to particularly great pains to find the warmest possible shelter on cold nights, preferring, like human homeless people, the closest unoccupied place out of the wind over much warmer, more crowded, places further afield. Their evolved body chemistry also allows them to fly at heights with thin oxygen despite their rapid respiration rate -- they have auxiliary air sacs beside their lungs, that also allow diving birds to stay underwater for 15 minutes at a time. And their metabolism allows them to fly thousands of miles, for three days at a time, without stopping or landing, during migrations that can take them from one end of the earth to the other, at speeds up to 100MPH.

I especially like watching the chickadees and sparrows, which scientists believe are, in this part of the world anyway, the only species that are somewhat dependent on the welfare of bird lovers for sufficient food during the winter. The chickadees announce my arrival at the bird feeder with a unique and elongated trill, repeated among the group that hang around the massive old evergreens beside our house. At first I thought this was a warning -- human in area message, but they've become so tame in my presence now that I know this message is seed guy's here -- lunch is on. They soar from the evergreens to the sunflower seed feeder with three graceful and elegant dips, making perfect stops on the small plastic rods below the feeder openings, grab a seed and take off, the next one arriving just as it leaves. The sparrows tend to arrive later, and are more sociable, dining at the mixed seed feeder a dozen at a time. Just before sundown they're at their most voracious, bulking up to fend off the coming night's cold. To the shyer juncos, cardinals, finches, nuthatches, creepers and wrens, this seed is less critical fare, and like the occasional jays and crows, chipmunks and squirrels, they're content to eat the seed that's been blown, kicked or dropped from the feeder by the chickadees and sparrows.

wing

The most remarkable thing about birds, of course, is their aerodynamics. Birds have between 1000 (hummingbirds, whose aerodynamics would need a completely separate article) and 25,000 feathers (swans), of at least six different types. These feathers, which evolved fairly rapidly and dramatically from reptilian scales, are almost pure protein, almost weightless, and staggeringly complex and intricate in their construction and variety. The dominant contour feathers themselves come in multiple varieties. They're used for flight, and include the very different wing and tail flight feathers, plus some feathers that biologists think are for protection, body aerodynamic shaping, and colour. The colours of birds, by the way, are a reflection of what the birds eat -- the pigment comes from their food -- and hence a message to migrating birds of what foods are locally available. But the colour of birds is even more complex than that: Part of the colour of birds is due to microstructure of the feathers themselves, and is a result of refraction of light rather than pigment on parts of the body that can't aerodynamically sustain the weight of pigment (most birds' thousands of feathers are so light they would not, all together, register on the most sensitive household scales).

The down feathers are for insulation, of course, and of completely different construction from the contour feathers. The other four types of feathers -- semi-plume, filoplume, bristle and powder -- are utterly different again. No one really knows what they're for, though educated guesses include environmental sensing, protection, cleaning, and sound muffling (in the presence of insect prey). The feathers can be manipulated in all directions in an almost unlimited number of sophisticated ways. The elegant pinpoint stops on the feeder rods are made possible by a simultaneous angling of the wings, a manipulation of the wing tips, and a turning down and fluffing out of the tail feathers to increase drag. No human technology has even come close to the precision and intricacy of these manoeuvres. Like our fingernails, the closest human evolutionary cousins of feathers, birds' feathers grow from a root to full growth, and then the cells that permitted the growth, their work done, die. Every feather is replaced by a new one on average every nine months. The musculature of birds is focused in the wings. Fused, incredibly strong bones replace muscles in other places to minimize weight. Birds have three eyelids to protect their vital eyesight, which is up to eight times more acute than ours, much better able to distinguish colours and detect movement. Birds can see with startling, crystal clarity things we see only as a blur.

When you study nature in this way, without judgement or condescension, a way that has only been done in our culture for a few generations, it changes your whole worldview. When I was young, growing up in a prairie Canadian city, I was fascinated and terrified by nature. My favourite animals were wolverines -- I learned stories about how they would attack much larger animals. The sheer otherness of nature, its difference from the world 'people' lived in, was the stuff of boys' dreams. I could be Davy Crockett, staring down bears and wearing 'coonskin caps. If I could overcome my aversion to beetles and spiders and snakes, I could learn wilderness 'survival' skills, how to stay alive despite overwhelming hardship, deprivation, scarcity, cruelty.

Where do we get this crap? How do we get this strange, warped sense of what the world is like beyond the fragile, flimsy, artificial walls of 'civilization'? Why do we so misunderstand, romanticize, fear -- nature?

Today, I'm fortunate enough to live adjacent to wilderness. Half of our four-acre property is pond and swamp and forest and cannot be touched, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Right behind us is a six hundred acre tract of wilderness. I've wandered into the forest and seen magnificent grey wolves no more than 20 feet away. I've seen foxes and coyotes and stags flee at my approach. I've been stared down by a 100-pound, three foot long beaver. Snakes and strange, primeval insects share the patio as I sip my morning tea. Even before I studied the birds, I knew they didn't live their lives in misery, constant terror, near-starvation. My childhood pity for the birds huddled against the cold has long ago given way to a sense of awe and envy.

I did some research to try to understand the prevalence of the myths that make us so misunderstand and even, if we were to be honest with ourselves, fear nature. There seem to be three theories, all of which relate to our tendency to fear what we do not know and understand:
fear of nature

The physical theory, espoused by anthropologists and environmentalists, is that we fear nature because we've been physically separated from it for so long that we've become ignorant of its beauty and grace and peacefulness, and prone to believe the sensationalist nonsense of nature being cruel and savage. The moral/psychological theory. espoused by students of religion and philosophy, is that the salvationist, acquisitive culture, the culture that has become ubiquitous on Earth since the invention of agriculture, urbanization and the spread of western religions, teaches us relentlessly that we are morally and spiritually separate from 'the rest of nature', and that our relationship with nature is adversarial and competitive, and as a result we have become psychologically separate from, and hence unable to understand, what nature is really like. The third, scientific/intellectual theory, is that our brain's evolved size, complexity and capacity for abstraction has so expanded our imaginations that, with the lack of direct empirical contact with nature, we imagine nature as huge and ominous and mystical and terrifying and full of danger.

As I was putting together the chart of the three theories above, I began to realize that they're interrelated and inseparable and they reinforce each other, and it's the insidious combination of our physical ignorance of nature (for most of us anyway), the relentless psychological indoctrination we receive about nature, and our vivid imagination about things that we don't understand, that together produce the total fiction of nature as dangerous, difficult, tragic and fearsome. The problem is that the underlying causes that have led to these fictions -- overpopulation and environmental stress, our acquisitive/salvationist culture, and the evolution of our brain and imagination -- are themselves connected and self-reinforcing. So the only way we're going to be able to achieve a reconciliation, a re-connection, between man and nature, on any kind of universal scale, is to deal with all three causes at once.

I think the way to do that, aside from having to do a lot of education in a very short period of time, is to stop moralizing and rationalizing about nature (in either adversarial and 'noble savage' romantic ways) and start to think about nature in A Third Way. Religion and philosophy are rooted in, and hopelessly tainted by, our cultural anthropocentrism. To try to understand nature from the perspective of anthropocentric morality is as futile as trying to understand the motion of the stars using ancient Earth-centric Aristotelian astronomy. To try to describe nature from the perspective of anthropocentric rationality is like trying to teach someone your language when you have no shared vocabulary or grammar to build on.

The Third Way is to understand nature instinctively, intuitively. Trusting your instincts makes things that are inconceivable morally or rationally, as easy for humans to conceive of, and understand, as they are to birds. Scientists have been trying rationally, scientifically, to understand how birds fly, and the staggering complexity of birds' aerodynamic apparatus since Da Vinci, and have hardly made a scratch in that understanding. Meanwhile, instinctively, birds know what they have to do to fly. It is, to them, staggeringly simple, obvious. The instinct is hard wired in them. Moralists and philosophers have been trying to construct codes of conduct and behaviour to explain and modify human behaviour since before the invention of language, and still every century we kill and damage each other in greater degrees and greater numbers, behave in successively more barbaric and less 'civilized' ways. Meanwhile all the other life species on Earth, who have neither capacity nor need for moral codes, conduct themselves in amazingly collaborative and synergistic ways that optimize the quality and quality of life of every creature on the planet -- save perhaps man. The instinct to do so, to know what to do and how to do it, is part of them. They don't have to learn it. There is nothing romantic or mystical about this. It is just listening to the simple, inherent language of evolution.

This same instinct is hard wired in us. It was for three million years, long before we developed moral codes and rational skills. We've simply forgotten how to listen to these instincts, how to trust them. But despite the efforts of moralists and scientists to sublimate our instincts for 30,000 years, to replace them with something uniquely human, it's very hard to bury three million years of knowledge coded in our DNA. Just learn enough to set aside the fear-mongering crap the moralists want you to believe, and enough to suspend your stupefying belief in our technology's superiority over the elegant natural science of a hummingbird's wing, and take a walk away from the trappings of civilization, the universe of human myth. Walk in a place relatively untouched by man's heavy hand and just listen. You'll remember your instincts as soon as your head clears.

If you were to ask me if, at age 52, I would be willing to give up the rest of my life for the chance to experience five years as a songbird (an average lifespan for such birds -- though crows and geese live 15-20 years and parrots 80 or more), to give up the security and intelligence and property I have accumulated and live free of the demands of human life, spending an hour or four each day finding food, and the rest of the day simply living, just being alive as part of this wonderful, magical world, to be completely free of any demands or restrictions, to be able to fly, I would say: In a heartbeat.

EATING OUR
YOUNG

EATING OUR
YOUNG 05/05/2004 02:19 PM

I have not, until now, commented on the pictures, or scandal, of American troops and intelligence forces torturing Iraqi prisoners, most of whom, according to a Bush administration announcement today, are going to be released in the next few days since there is no evidence they ever did anything wrong. My reaction was simple: What did you think was going on in these prisons? There have been reports of such abuses, some of them well documented, for almost a year. Many, many people born in the Mideast have been deported to their countries of birth, with no explanation, where they were tortured for months, killed, or simply "disappeared". The activities in the torture chambers of almost every Mideastern nation, some of them working in collaboration with the CIA, make the "indignities" suffered by the Arabs in the CBS-released photos look like a picnic. And surely no one believes that anything less is going on in the Guantanamo camp, where the US will not allow prisoners, almost none of whom have been charged with anything, to even have contact with families or lawyers, and where the press are only allowed on scheduled, chaperoned visits.

How naive can people be that they find this torture, to use the Presnit's words, "abhorrent" and "repugnant"? Do people really believe that there is something civilized and decent and honorable about war? Here are the far more rational reactions from two Arab journalists, neither of whom expressed any surprise or indignation at the revelations:

The United States probably expected to get away with such horrible abuse because Arabs had long been passive about torture. Who will take pictures of the even more hideous practices in the Arab world's prisons where thousands upon thousands of prisoners of conscience have been tortured for many years while we, the millions of Arabs outside the prisons, pretend to neither see nor hear? - Ahmad Amorabi, Al Bayan

President Bush has asked the world not to judge his countrymen on the debased acts of a few. That's what we said after 9/11. Don't judge the intentions of the Muslim world by the crazed, deranged acts of a few. - Mona Eltahawy, Al Sharq al Awsat

These kind of abuses, and much, much worse, go on every day, in most of the countries of the world, and with the full knowledge and often acquiescence, sometimes even complicity, of the Presnit and every other world leader. Some see it as one of the costs of freedom. Others realize that we cannot prevent or stop these abuses by any political or military means.

So what is the cause of this? Organized violence is nature's way of responding to extreme stress, stress that cannot be solved by waiting for nature's balancing mechanisms (natural predators, epidemic disease etc.) to kick in. As Edward Hall explains in The Hidden Dimension, all animals react the same way in response to stress caused by overcrowding and scarcity. The first-stage reaction is to test the boundaries of the community, to see whether it can expand and take over more land to relieve the pressure. If that is unsuccessful, the second-stage reaction is a form of shock, fueled by an overload of secreted adrenaline that produces hyperactivity, depression, distraction, and metabolic instability, which lead in turn to higher rates of spontaneous abortion, lower fertility, and more suicides. If even this is insufficient to reduce numbers and alleviate overcrowding and scarcity, the third-stage reaction is a form of madness: war, violent and unprovoked aggression, mass suicide, and the eating of the young. This 'last resort' ensures that no species can seriously disrupt the ecological balance of life long enough or severely enough to produce an ecological crash. It's the self-regulating process that has worked well since the first living creatures appeared on the planet three billion years ago.

The evidence that the human species is in this third-stage state of madness is pretty overwhelming: The number and extent and level of violence in wars is unprecedented. Social violence has exploded to the point that in many places there are more people in prisons than in schools. Domestic violence is at epidemic levels -- our modern form of eating our young is to sexually, physically or psychologically abuse or neglect them, repress them, throw them into the streets, incarcerate them in juvenile detention centres or schools that rob them of their spirit, self-worth, and physical and psychological security -- or send them off to fight wars that are so cruel and violent that even those who return physically intact are often psychologically damaged for life. Suicide and murder are now the leading causes of death for those under 30 in many countries. And the abject poverty and destitution that many in the third world (and an increasing number in the first world) face every day of their lives is the perfect breeding ground for more level-three behaviour -- rampant crime and corruption, 'terrorism' and other anti-social acts.

We are so caught up in this madness that we can't see it. War is the very manifestation of the insanity that produces a Saddam Hussein, a Kim Jong Il, suicide bombers, Al Qaeda, Enron, and the Patriot Act, and will never be a solution for anything. We can either let our third-stage madness play itself out, with consequences too grim to imagine, or start to take some responsibility for dealing with the underlying causes -- overpopulation, inequality, overcrowding, ecological destruction, and ignorance -- quickly, dramatically, and immediately. In the meantime, we should not be surprised at what is happening behind the doors of prisons, homes, institutions, schools, factory farms, and old-age facilities. We are merely playing out the instructions embedded in our DNA for three billion years. And if we don't do something very different very soon, it's going to get much worse.

A COMMITMENT
TO RADICAL CHANGE

A COMMITMENT
TO RADICAL CHANGE 12/19/2004 02:54 PM

About a year ago, I made my first public commitment< /a> to stop just talking about How to Save the World, and actually do something about it. Here's my progress report:

My Commitment: Clear Actions	My Subsequent Action	My Score
Move to a more energy and space-efficient house	Did an Energy Audit on our house, and have reduced energy by 20% (target is an additional 30% by Dec./05).	C
Become a vegan	I'm about 80% of the way to vegetarian (target is vegan by Dec./05)	D
Become active in organizations advocating 'Maybe One' family size reduction encouragement programs.	No progress, other than continuing to write about it. On my 'Getting Things Done' to do list.	F
Reduce our Ecological Footprint by 80% by Dec./05	Housing component of EF down 20% due to energy conservation & elimination of lawn chemicals; other components down 50% (buying less, buying local, buying more durable, recycling & reusing, less garbage)	B
Produce Boycott List and stop buying from socially and environmentally irresponsible companies.	Boycott List done. Not buying from any companies on the list.	A
Lobby Canadian government for a shift in tax laws from income and employment to resource consumption, pollution, waste, and excessive wealth	Written letters. Activism through professional institutions I belong to not started, on my 'Getting Things Done' to do list.	C
Quit job with multinational organization that facilitates corporatism, and set up my own Natural Enterprise.	Quit my job. New business Meeting of Minds set up but not yet financially viable. Wrote the book on Natural Enterprise.	A

Not a perfect scorecard, but not too bad either. The problem is, even if everyone in North America did these things it wouldn't be enough. As the acceleration of global warming and other interminable bad news on the environment, the endless victories of corporatists over citizens and consumers, our continued theft of our children's and grandchildren's heritage, the prevalence of suicidal economic policies, the endless global thirst for blood and imperialist adventure, and last month's US elections all showed, we're losing ground fast. We need to be doing much more.

So while I'm still working on completing the actions I committed to last year, reading Bill Moyers' stirring and depressing speech has convinced me to add some more radical, and controversial, actions to my 'to do' list, to publicly commit to do more.

Earlier this year I set out the political and ecological philosophy behind what I called 'Plan B', a set of radical solutions to use once it becomes clear that social and political activism, networking, education, and the plodding pace of new technological innovation simply aren't going to be enough to save the world from inevitable social, political and ecological catastrophe and collapse in this century. The principles of this philosophy are:

We need to end the 'growth' economy quickly, putting a stop to the increased destruction of our environment and increased consumption of scarce resources. To reach a sustainable level and stave off collapse, we must achieve an 80-85% reduction in resource consumption, through a combination of conservation and population reduction. Today this consumption is doubling every forty years. The longer we wait, the greater the challenge to achieve sustainability.
<>We need to drastically cut the disparity of wealth and power between rich and poor, so that the means of control of our future would return to all of us. Globally the Gini index (the difference between the percent of income or wealth of the richest and poorest 20% of the population) stands at an astronomical 80 (81% owned and earned by the richest 20%, <1% owned and earned by the poorest 20%, with a sizeable proportion of that 81% owned by the world's richest 0.1%); it should be close to that of civilized nations like Denmark and Japan, which have Gini indices of 25 (35% of wealth owned by the richest 20%, 10% by the poorest 20%). Economic power and wealth often trumps (or buys) votes, making democratic political and economic change impossible.
<>We need to increase our self-sufficiency, resiliency and readiness to make the rapid transition to a new and radically different human culture. Individuals and communities are currently helpless in the face of centrally controlled infrastructure and total dependence on government and foreign markets. Communities and individuals are currently enslaved and imprisoned by political, social and economic systems they simply can't walk away from without dying.

I believe it is now time for Plan B. Like the rest of nature, humans only change their behaviour (adapt) when they must -- there is a little minority serendipitous experimentation with changes occurring all the time as an inherent part of evolution, but for the most part that is merely fine-tuning and diversification to protect the gene pool. The vast majority of the world's people support the Kyoto Accord and even more radical action to protect the environment, and appreciate that the world is overpopulated, but in the face of opposition by the rich and wealthy elite and of religious leaders, they're not about to rise up and overthrow the intransigent governments, stop having children, disband the churches and revoke the charters of polluters. They would only do that when they know beyond reasonable doubt that they must do it -- when there is no other choice. By the time we reach that point it will be too late. Persuasion has almost never brought about radical change in human culture. There must be a 'burning platform' -- either you jump or you perish. Radical change occurs when there is no choice: Change or die.

Plan B is designed to give people no choice but to change. Let's take fossil fuels as an example. We could have started developing alternatives to fossil fuels a century ago. There was no burning platform. In the 1970s, prices spiked modestly. The reaction of the vast majority was to demand that the government increase the supply and reduce the price. Governments complied, even though that meant first getting into bed with and becoming dependent on ideological enemies, and later launching imperialist adventures to take over the major sources of supply economically and politically. As long as there was any choice, no matter how socially, politically, economically and environmentally high the cost, people would not change. As we near the end of oil, we will see a resurgence of nuclear power plants, more strip-mining and burning of coal, the destruction of arctic wilderness, the ruin of coastal waterways, massive, and bloody and incessant imperialist wars with oil-rich countries -- anything to forestall the need to change. The cost will be horrendous. That's human nature. That's nature, period. Do not change until you absolutely must.

For oil, the answer is to not give people a choice. That means rationing supply, and imprisoning those that buy in the black market. That means huge oil tax increases to make it unaffordable for most people to buy oil beyond the bare minimum, tax-free ration, with the taxes used to finance fast-track research on alternative renewable energy. That means prohibiting bringing on-board new sources of supply that merely delay the inevitable crisis, prolong the bad habits of reckless consumption, and ruin the environment for the sake of a few month's supply. That means higher income taxes to pay for the development of a completely new infrastructure based on alternative energy (corporations won't pay for it). All of these options are anathema to North American governments, which understand human nature and won't dare impose these draconian solutions on people after seventy years of preaching that government and taxes are bad and the market will fix everything automatically.

So we need to make sure there is no choice. Since we can't do this by changing human nature, persuading people to voluntary reduce consumption, we have three options: Precipitate a crisis by interfering with supply (socially and environmentally conscious sabotage), precipitate a crisis by interfering with price and supply (persuade OPEC to quadruple prices and curtail production), or avert the crisis by coming up with innovations that reduce demand. The third of these options is not available because those with wealth and power would have to invest massively in these innovations, innovations that would reduce demand for their products, so it would be both politically insane for them to do so, and a violation of the modern 'maximize short-term profit at all costs' corporate mantra, and hence would subject these courageous corporate idealists to legal action and dismissal from their posts.

We can and should encourage OPEC to drastically cut production and to quadruple prices (that's what many OPEC members believe is a fair price for their product now, but they're unwilling to risk an invasion by the West if they raised the price). Production cuts aren't in their short-term interest either, though steep price increases are (I'm sure awareness of this is what's behind the recent crude price volatility). Why would OPEC nations sell for $40/barrel when they could sell for $160/barrel with little drop in demand? The only conceivable reason is military threats from the West.

If OPEC doesn't have the courage to confront Bush & Co and charge fair market rates for their increasingly scarce products (which seems to be the case), the only solution left is sabotage of the energy and transportation systems, done in a way that doesn't cause human or environmental injury -- preventing the supply from getting to the market. We need a lot of individuals to sabotage the system at its most vulnerable (probably pipelines, dams, power transformers, tankers, refineries, drilling platforms, border crossings and major hubs in transportation routes). At the same time, we need to take the opportunity to block traffic in the despicable goods that finance the flow of oil -- arms flowing out to oil countries, and the IMF-mandated flow of other underpriced locally-needed raw materials and slave-labour-produced manufactured goods from poor countries to rich.

This monkey-wrenching needs to be done in a coordinated but non-hierarchical way by a large number of caring, ingenious, enterprising, self-disciplined individuals. But before we can do it, we need to research how best to do it, what and where the vulnerabilities are, hand ow to achieve maximum disruption of supply with minimum effort and no serious injury to people or the environment. I am confident that most of this knowledge is online, and the rest can be put online by those in the know so that the rest of us can share it.

The result would be a constant and debilitating disruption of supply to the point where both consumers and producers say 'uncle' and start to change their behaviour because they have no other choice.

I think it can be done. It will take great courage (I expect this blog is already under government surveillance and will probably eventually be attacked or taken down). And it will take great intelligence, to avoid it backfiring on us, and to ensure that, once the media get addicted to this story, they are getting our message loud and clear: We are selectively sabotaging the most serious excesses of the modern economy to bring about conservation of resources and the environment the only way we know will work. If we're going to save the planet, we all need to consume less, and we're doing our part to make that happen.

So here are my additional commitments for actions for 2005.

Establish a loose network of individuals who are committed to researching, sharing knowledge, and then acting upon ways to selectively sabotage the most socially and environmentally destructive elements of the modern economy without causing physical harm or suffering to people or the environment, and in a coordinated way. A million cells of one caring individual each. No formal organization, no hierarchy, no command and control. No name.
Develop and share significant research on the vulnerabilities of the energy, mineral, forestry, water, food, and other natural resource production and distribution industries, and means of exploiting those vulnerabilities to disrupt supply, to dampen demand by undermining public trust in and reliability of their products, and to begin to force communities to look at ways of increasing their resource self-sufficiency.
Develop and share significant research on the vulnerability of the major media, and means of exploiting those vulnerabilities to jam, hack and occupy broadcast facilities in order to educate the public about the threats to our planet and how they can help solve them, to communicate clearly our network's purpose and carefully selected actions, and to recruit new individuals.
Develop and share significant research on the vulnerability of the world's financial systems, and means of exploiting those vulnerabilities (such as short-selling currencies) to undermine confidence in the fiscal and monetary systems through which the rich and irresponsible wield power, and to disrupt the flow of money that supports socially and environmentally damaging activities.
Educate the public about how to reduce consumption and debt without causing hardship, since excessive consumption and debt are the fuel that enables massive disparity of wealth and power to accumulate, and the continued enslavement of the people to a corporatist economy and agenda.
Develop and share significant research on ways in which human fertility can be reduced and population growth rate reversed, including both voluntary (innovative new birth control, abortion and suicide technologies) and involuntary (airborne, waterborne or food supply-borne agents, provided they have no effect on other creatures, cause no human suffering, and take effect across the entire human population without discrimination and therefore cannot be used in any eugenic way).
Create one or more spaces where like-minded activists can share knowledge and ideas, coordinate activities, and collaborate, to find less disruptive, more positive ways to save the world.

Not your average set of New Year's resolutions, I'll admit.

It is absolutely critical that these million individuals take great care to avoid causing harm or suffering, other than economic harm. Otherwise, extremists on either side of the political spectrum, and government agents, could exploit or defeat this movement. We need the media to understand that this principle is inviolate, so that they immediately rule us out as the source when an act occurs that causes harm or suffering. We are not terrorists, we are anti-terrorists. Corporatism is economic and political terrorism, and it is threatening all life on Earth. Our goal is simply to disrupt this economic and political system before it destroys our planet, so that there is no choice but to find a better way to live.

BLOGGING AND
PERSONALITY CHANGE

BLOGGING AND
PERSONALITY CHANGE 04/09/2004 03:59 PM

Yesterday I was checking my referrer log and came across a weblog called PTypes, which rates famous people, and bloggers, by personality type, and also draws linkages between three well-known personality typing schemas. I have commented before that the majority of bloggers seem to be INTPs or INFPs on the Myers-Briggs personality test, but the PTypes blogger list contains more 'Counselors' (INFJ) than either 'Architect' (INTP) or 'Healer' (INFP) personalities.

More surprisingly, How to Save the World is identified as an 'Inspector's' (ISTJ) blog, which surprised me. I had always been a strong NT, and right on the line between E-I (to quote Neil Young, who seems to have a similar personality to mine, "I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day-to-day"), and right on the line between J-P (I'm a compulsive list-maker, but I hate inflexibility). So I couldn't understand how the author of PTypes assessed me as ISTJ.

Rather than argue, I decided to re-take the Myers-Briggs test. I Googled 'Myers-Briggs' and took the first four tests that came up, including this quite detailed one, which all produced the same answer: my personality has changed markedly since I started blogging. I've plotted the shift on the charts above. Using a small letter instead of a capital for close-to-the-border (less than 55-45%) scores, I've gone in one year from iNTj (a Thinker) to eNfP (a Change Agent), after not moving on the test for a decade. I suspect my blogging is more a reflection of changes in my 'personality' rather than a cause of them. But it's interesting -- is anyone else's personality changing, and why? Are personality changes fundamental and enduring, or situational and transient?

Oh, and there is a 'disorder' associated with each of the 16 personality types when that personality becomes extreme or pathological. For INTPs it's schizoid (disengagement) behaviour, for INFPs it's histrionics, for INFJs it's avoidant, for ISTJs it's depression (maybe that's why the author of PTypes pegged me as ISTJ), for INTJs like I was last year it's schizotypal (social anxiety), and for ENFPs like I've apparently become this year it's paranoia.

Not sure I buy this last stretch, since if I were borderline paranoic I would have self-censored some of my recent blog posts.

CHANGE YOUR
MIND?

CHANGE YOUR
MIND? 07/09/2004 11:41 AM

Seth Godin of Fast Company and Purple Numbers fame has a new BHAP (big hairy audacious project) called ChangeThis. The idea is that we need to be more open to well-articulated opposing (or at least different) points of view on important issues. The 'This' in ChangeThis is Your Mind, and by changing it, you will become part of a broader, urgent change movement. The vehicle that gets the ball rolling is something called a Manifesto. Seth has plans for some online Manifestos penned by some very big names.

It's a very intriguing idea, but I don't think it will work, not because of the Internet's limited reach or because of anything inherently wrong with Manifestos, but because it's out of sync with human nature. Here's why, IMHO:

What I've observed is that people want to make up their own minds. They will only read a Manifesto if they already deeply trust its author. A Manifesto by Krugman or Gladwell will go far, but the same ideas by the same source in a NYT editorial or New Yorker article will go just as far. We each have our own (usually small, or very small) audience of people who trust what we write, what we say. A Manifesto will not enlarge one's audience. It is preaching to the choir.
When people write to thank me, it's not for changing their mind. It's because they trust me enough to allow me to inform them about something they're not already informed about -- Tax shifting, or entrepreneurship, or innovation, or whatever. They know me well enough to know my spin, and my blog articles help them learn about something much more quickly than reading books or doing exhaustive research.
So if it's from a trusted source, a Manifesto or blog post or editorial or book review or whatever will help people Make Up Their Own Mind. On any important issue it will not change anyone's mind. People make up their own minds by reading sources they trust. They don't want to change their minds. Only ex-British private school students enjoy real debates, and that's only because they're better at them than anyone else. Most people want reassurance that they're right, and will be more inclined to read things that reinforce what they've decided than things intended to make them change their thinking. That's not lazy thinking, it's good time management. I want to be informed and make up my mind so that IF I need to make a decision (who to vote for, what to buy) I can do so quickly. Making up one's mind is a means to an end.
How and when do people Change Their Minds? Very rarely, and not by reading or debate, but by direct experience. If Bill Cosby goes on the talk circuit and tells me welfare recipients are mostly lazy black women with too many babies, and I'm a conservative or a fan, I'll probably believe him (see today's NYT editorial by Barbara Ehrenreich on this). But if I volunteer at an inner city soup kitchen I learn from direct experience that Bill is full of shit -- he has his facts wrong to start with, and what he says doesn't jibe with direct observation -- the mostly-white women I meet are dying to work, if they could afford day care for their two children. I change my mind. And I no longer trust Bill Cosby -- he let me down, and the next time I hear him I'm going to be inclined to Make Up My Mind that the truth is the opposite of what he's saying.
You want to change people's minds, get them the hell away from the TV, and the newspaper, and the Internet, and let them find out the truth face to face, in the streets, from direct experience.
To every rule there is an exception, and the exception to this rule is that sometimes you can change people's minds by telling them a story. The reason stories are powerful and subversive is that they can be (especially if from a trusted source, or accompanied by remarkable pictures) a surrogate for direct experience. That's why the story can't be too detailed -- the listener/reader needs to internalize the story and make it their own. Then it's as if they were at the soup kitchen, and all of a sudden they don't trust Bill Cosby anymore either. And they loved Bill Cosby. But they suddenly know from 'personal experience' that Bill's facts don't add up. They've changed their minds.
So my suggestion to Seth is to change the word Manifesto to Story before he launches ChangeThis. Ot at least whisper in writers' ears that their Manifesto should be a Story in disguise.
This is not unique to humans. I could tell you a story...

What do you think? Am I just old and curmudgeonly and cynical, or is this really how people make up their minds, and why they change them so rarely?

(Diagram is from an earlier post on The Decision-Making Process)

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD 04/23/2004 09:24 AM

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, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, has come to my rescue. Singer sees no inconsistency between strong local autonomy, community, and self-sufficient economies on the one hand, and global responsibility on the other. The book is based on the Dwight Terry lectures at Yale in 2000, but has been updated to incorporate reflection on the events of 9/11 and the appalling Bush social, environmental and economic record.

I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments).

The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor.

The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations.

The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms.

Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed:

It is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global tyranny, unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is a challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration.

I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task.

THE GLOBAL
FOOTPRINT STRESS INDEX

THE GLOBAL
FOOTPRINT STRESS INDEX 12/19/2004 02:54 PM

Global Footprint Stress Index: Extreme (purple, >10), High (orange 3-10), Moderate (yellow 1-3), Low (white <1)

Last month I wrote an article suggesting that a propensity for war-mongering and civil violence, i.e. the tendency to take hasty and extreme action rather than a reasoned and responsible response to a crisis, might be attributable to what Edward Hall describes as population stress, the adrenaline-driven aggressive/panic stress response that all creatures exhibit when their population greatly exceeds sustainable carrying capacity. Hall explains that this is nature's 'last resort' method of bringing the population of the species quickly back into balance with the rest of the ecosystem, when the species fails to manage its own numbers and when opportunistic diseases don't do the trick. Earlier I had calculated< /a> a simple Population Stress Index (PSI), which was computed by multiplying density per arable square mile by population growth rate, and I compared it to an astonishingly similar map by another blogger, Matthew White, showing violent death rate by country.

As I explained in last month's post, the PSI is an imperfect stress index. It does not show the very different levels of consumption and demand on local resources of people in different countries (which has as much to do with sustainability as population). So I have now computed a Footprint Stress Index (FSI), plotted on the map above, which is computed as follows:

First, I calculated the Resource Use Index by taking the aggregate Ecological Footprint (EF) of each country in hectares (the per capita footprint from sources such as the Living Planet Report, times the country's population), and dividing it by the number of habitable hectares of land in the country (I used as a proxy for this the lesser of 80% of total land area and 200% of Oxford's 'arable land area' data). This very useful number indicates the number of times over each country's citizens are using the renewable and sustainable resources available to them. A Resource Use index of 1.0 is sustainable. An index of, say, 5, indicates that to restore the country to sustainability, it needs to do some combination of reducing population and reducing per-capita resource consumption, by a combined 80%. The table below shows some sample Resource Use indices I computed.
Then I multiplied this Resource Use Index by the estimated annual growth rate of the country's aggregate Ecological Footprint. For this, I started with the annual population growth rate as a proxy (the EF studies suggest aggregate footprint and population are growing at roughly the same rate), and then substituted more precise EF growth rate numbers when I could find them online (China's EF is growing much faster than its population, for example).

Resource Use Index: Sample Countries

80 Japan
60 S.Korea
40 Israel, Palestine
35 Switzerland
25 Netherlands, Belgium, UK
16 Germany
13 Ireland, France, Italy, Venezuela
11 US, Columbia, Chile, Sweden

9 China, Philippines
8 Congo
6 World Overall
6 S.Africa, New Zealand
5 Brasil, Iran, Mexico
3 Canada, India, Iraq, Russia
2 Australia, Argentina
1 A few equatorial African nations

Footprint Stress Index: Sample Countries

40+ Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait
30 China
18 Congo
12 Venezuela, Columbia
10 US
8 Chile
6 India, Netherlands, Belgium, Iraq
4.5 World Overall

4.0 Mexico, Iran, UK
3.0 New Zealand, Sweden
2.0 Brasil, Argentina, Japan, France
1.5 Canada, Australia
1.0 S.Korea, Switzerland
0.5 Germany, Italy
0.0 S.Africa, Russia

The US, China, Congo, Colombia, Venezuela, and several Mid-Eastern nations all have FSIs in excess of 10. These are all countries embroiled in war, imperialistic or regional or civil, except for China where dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. These are the countries that are suffering enormous anxiety because not only are they consuming vastly more resources than what they have available domestically, their populations or industrial capacities are also growing rapidly, meaning they will need to find ever more resources outside the country to feed the soaring need.

Japan, South Korea and most European nations have very high Resource Use Indices, but because their populations are growing slowly and because they are mostly very aware of conservation, their EFs are not increasing. As a result, their FSIs are more moderate. Because they all depend so heavily (90% or more) on imports of other countries' natural resources, however, as these resources get depleted and as exporting countries realize how cheaply they are giving them away, these nations' unsustainable resource demands will not be able to be met, and that will drive their Footprint Stress Indices way up. Once these scarcities become endemic, there will no longer be any option to increase resource use, and at that point the Resource Use Index itself will become the Footprint Stress Index.

What will the world be like when dozens of nations, whose economies are using resources at more than ten times the rate they can sustain them from domestic supplies, suddenly find the price of these supplies quadrupling, or that these supplies are not available at any price? Colour all the countries on the left side of the Resource Use Index table above purple on the map at the top of this article and you'll get the idea. We're talking about a world war for increasingly scarce resources. And all of the countries on the right side of that table then become invasion targets.

We all know what we have to do. Immediate massive taxes on resources to finance the development of technologies that conserve or don't require natural resources. Shut-down of corporations that waste resources, that pollute, and that produce non-essential products. An end to subsidies, so that we can begin to realize the true cost of our profligate deficit spending. The pay-down of government debts to reduce the risk of economic collapse when interest and inflation rates spike. Incentives for having no children, or maybe one.

Of course, we have no appetite for these draconian solutions. The corporatist Frankenstein monster is perpetuating the waste and madness that is producing this crisis, and they accept no responsibility for the ultimate Tragedy of the Commons that will hit us with colossal force once we simply run out of resources to consume to keep civilization's engine running. The hydrogen economy simply won't occur fast enough to stave off disaster.

Our best hope is, ironically, that some crisis will shock us into collective action before the real crunch hits. We learned nothing from the oil line-ups a generation ago, but perhaps it is not too late. If the first crisis to hit is manageable, we may be motivated to combine three massive human efforts: Voluntary negative population growth, global large-scale conservation, and an unprecedented investment in innovation and new low-footprint technologies, that could prevent a social, economic and ecological collapse. We survived a Great Depression three quarters of a century ago by exactly this type of huge, collective intervention. That's what we need now. The 'market' isn't going to fix this mess.

PERSONAL
CONTENT MANAGEMENT: AN
EXPLORATION

PERSONAL
CONTENT MANAGEMENT: AN
EXPLORATION 02/18/2004 04:12 PM

In a recent post I advocated almost a complete replacement of existing knowledge management systems and intranets with a three-tiered set of simple, intuitive tools consisting of:

Personal content management tools -- to help people organize their personal information (and other information they've aggregated) their way, and identify who they will permit to access it under what circumstances ('permissioning')
Metadata tools (invisible to the user) -- to automatically reorganize this personal content for effective, permitted use by others
Social networking applications -- to help people identify other people (inside and outside their organization) with particular expertise or shared interests, connect and collaborate with these people and with people in the individual's self-defined networks, via Simple Virtual Presence, browse and subscribe to others' permissioned personal content, and publish their own permissioned content.

In my early thinking about this, I proposed a new consulting discipline called Personal Productivity Improvement (PPI) to help individuals, starting with those in the front lines of organizations, make better use of the tools and content on their personal computers. When I spoke to people in several businesses in different industries, they were very enthusiastic about this idea.

On giving it further thought, however, I wondered whether PPI was the solution to the wrong problem. If the tools and information on people's PCs and intranets are unduly complex, counter-intuitive, and inappropriate for the key business problems that front-line people need to solve, so that people use other processes (walking down the hall to speak to colleagues), other tools (the public Internet) and other sources of information (the people in their rolodex) instead of the ones supplied by their employer -- doesn't this suggest it's the tools that need 'improving', not the users and the processes they use?

I believe personal content management tools are the place to start, because since the earliest days of business, the principal way of sharing information has been peer-to-peer, the most valued 'repositories' of business information have been personal filing cabinets, and the principal schema for organizing work has been the personal desktop. It makes sense, therefore, that tools that facilitate and reflect these well-established 'knowledge processes', information sources and networks should be much more successful than the complex, centralized, hierarchical knowledge management tools and repositories that have been foisted on users for the past decade.

I wrote the other day about attempts to replace paper, and about Gladwell's study of why paper and documents have proven so durable and successful even in this electronic age (spatial flexibility, tailorability, browsability). And I believe any schema for personal content management needs to reflect and honour our most established 'information behaviour' -- the shuffling of paper. The founders of a company called Alias Research (now part of Silicon Graphics, but in the process of being spun off again) were powerful advocates of making technology adapt to human behaviour rather than the other way around, and I agree with them 100%.

Lowest common denominator, across all job descriptions, levels and industries, are these fundamental 'knowledge worker' behaviours and needs:

"Knowledge-work"-in-process management entails the dynamic, three-dimensional shuffling of paper and documents in a workspace, usually a physical desktop. The organization of the workspace is highly personal and varied, and often opaque to anyone else trying to figure out "how X organizes his stuff".
People learn, and add value to others' work, through annotation, also a highly-personal and varied process
Conversations, overwhelmingly one-on-one and face-to-face, are the principal means by which almost all knowledge work is done. Even research is more highly-valued if it is 'primary' (derived from personal conversations), rather than 'secondary' (derived from library or database searches).
Context is critical to most knowledge work. In business conversations I have observed, three times as much time is spent understanding the context for an opinion or fact, as is spent actually understanding or debating the opinion or fact.
Knowledge work's ultimate purpose is usually to enable informed decisions. Most meeting time is wasted because the decision has already been made, or because no decision depends on the matters being discussed in the meeting, or because people in the meeting cannot relate what is being discussed to a decision that they have a personal stake in. The process by which most business decisions are made should terrify most stakeholders -- this process is frequently emotional, biased, impulsive and uninformed. The executive's gut instinct, and opinions offered by his/her inner circle (usually arrived at by the same flawed process) both trump objective assessment. Much knowledge work is therefore used only to justify a decision already made subjectively, and contrary evidence presented is usually either discounted or ignored. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- we do expect decision makers to be able to make good judgements based on their experience, and not always have to rely on outside empirical knowledge.

So, while we must be sanguine that it's not going to make much impact on how things are done in the corner offices anyway (which explains perhaps why execs I spoke to were not enthusiastic about investing in Personal Productivity Improvement), how would we design a personal content management suite of tools to improve the effectiveness of these knowledge worker behaviours and processes?

I'd start by creating a machine-readable analogue of the physical workspace. We need a Workspace Tool that allows us to shuffle virtual documents the same three-dimensional way we shuffle physical ones. That tool should replace the 'arrow' cursor with a 'hand' cursor, like the Acrobat pdf cursor but a lot more flexible. The 'hand' needs to be able to pick up and move a document, and to pick up and read and browse a document, and to be able to clip a document or a piece of a document to another, either temporarily (so the documents could be separated again) or permanently (so they would become a new document), and to be able to place any document anywhere in a stack of documents. The 'hand' needs to be able to put two documents side by side and browse them simultaneously. The tool needs to allow the user to do this on multiple three-dimensional virtual workspaces, that the user can label as they see fit. It must allow the user to make multiple copies of the document, and move or change each copy in different ways. And it must allow the user to send any copy of the document to any number of other people (without opening another 'application') and to 'permission' the document to identify who else can 'subscribe' to it -- the set of people who they will allow entry to this virtual workspace to access it.

Such a tool would allow us to capitalize on the economy of 'virtual' space by doing away with the 'filing cabinet' -- that horrible black hole invented by Dewey the librarian into which documents disappear never to be found again, which Windows has tragically copied. Instead, we would 'save' the entire workspace, with its three-dimensional array of documents intact. It would be neatly put away but, if we needed something in that workspace again, we would simply open the entire workspace again, arranged in the way that made sense to us, and instantly find what we were looking for by where it was in the space, not by having to remember what awkward name we gave it. And then on to the next project with a 'clean' new workspace.

This tool would need to be indifferent to the document's format -- whether the suffix was .doc or .xls or .ppt or .html or .pdf would be irrelevant. More importantly, e-mail messages and other 'recorded conversations' would need to be seamlessly accommodated just like any other document.

There are some tools today that do limited parts of the above, but in awkward and unintuitive ways. This needs to be as simple as child's-play, and will probably require software designers to start from scratch and throw away all their familiar technological architecture constructs in favour of the human information constructs we have used at least since Gutenburg. The Workspace Tool could eliminate the need for Windows Explorer and similar 'file management' tools on most computers.

OK, that's a start on the spatial flexibility and paper-shuffling spec for the tool. Let's go on to annotation. I've seen some limited annotation functionality in a program called FolioViews, that 'labels' each user's notes and/or changes in a publicly-accessible and centrally-controlled document. MS Word has some such functionality in its 'edit mode'. E-mail uses blacklining or indenting to create 'threads' of consecutive commentary. And wikis take it to the next step -- collaboration -- but at the cost of not distinguishing which individuals contributed and changed what, which requires enormous trust. All of these are forms of annotation. But you have to admit they're pretty clumsy.

Again, let's look at how it happens in the physical world, and emulate that. For short additions we use the carat and write above the line. We cross out, without eliminating legibility, to indicate deletion. We use the margins, and, if that isn't enough, a separate page with a numbered reference for commentary and longer additions. We may use post-its for the same purpose, or for personal notes pertinent to the document.

There are three reasons this is much easier with a pencil and paper than on a laptop. The first is flexibility -- by writing smaller or at an angle we can squeeze a lot of changes into a small area, and we can use graphics as well as text. And we can move stuff around within the document easily. The second is recognizability -- we can tell by the handwriting whose changes are whose. The third is comparability -- we can put two pieces of text side-by-side to compare them or see if they're compatible as we decide what edits or annotations to make.

How could we do this in a simple, intuitive way on a laptop? This is much more challenging because of the different native formats of all the documents we annotate. I suspect any intuitive Annotation Tool would need to quietly convert each document to a bitmap in the background. It would also need to pre-set the user's annotation 'voice' -- using some distinctive font, typestyle, textstyle and/or font/background colour to set off the annotations from the rest of the document. It would use the pencil, rather than the hand or arrow, as the cursor symbol. It would need a simple 'insert or comment' functionality that would automatically expand the available space -- exactly at the point of insert -- to contain all that the user wanted to add. That functionality would include a simple freeform drawing tool for graphics. The tool would need a 'mark to delete' functionality that didn't obliterate what was proposed for deletion. It would need a 'replace' functionality that combined the 'insert' and 'mark to delete' functions. It would need a 'highlight' function. It would need a 'move' function. It would ideally need a 'cross-reference' function that would allow the annotator's inserts and comments to dynamically link to another place in the document, or a section of another document.

The key again is simplicity and intuitiveness. When the user places the 'pencil' cursor in a space and starts drawing or typing, the tool would automatically interpret this as an 'insert or comment'. Click and drag would first 'highlight', and then if the user started drawing or typing it would be treated as a 'replace', whereas if the user hit the 'delete' key it would 'mark to delete' and if the user then moved the pencil cursor elsewhere in the document and hit the 'insert' key it would leave a numbered flag at the original point and move the highlighted content to the new location. The key sequence 'cf.' could activate the 'cross-reference' function. No menus, no special function keys to remember. In fact, this simple analogue to the pencil could even replace the word processor and html composing tool for all but the most sophisticated document preparation. For what is composition beyond starting with a blank page, and successively inserting, replacing, deleting, moving, annotating and cross-referencing?

nonaka kcc

Even if this Annotation Tool isn't able to interpret and spruce up the hand-drawn graphics into more professional form, as long as it is able to compress the annotated document to a reasonable file size for storage and transmitting to others, its product could become the ubiquitous standard format in which virtually all documents are maintained on our computers. And most important, the Workspace Tool and the Annotation Tool together could obviate the need for most of us to ever print out anything in hard copy. So not only would we save a lot of paper, we'd no longer have to worry about page size, page cutoff or printer compatibility.

As I've mentioned before, I think UXGA technology is also essential to getting us to this state, since it allows the user to review, without eyestrain or scrolling, two complete pages side-by-side on the screen. I also think significant productivity improvement will only come when the third 'layer' in the chart above -- social networking applications that allow us to identify relevant contacts, connect to them powerfully, simply and virtually, and share our permissioned content with them -- have been built on top of these newly-improved personal content management applications. Only the three 'layers' of tools working together can enable powerful, context-rich virtual conversations, so that Dr. Nonaka's famous 'virtuous cycle' of knowledge creation (pictured just above right) can finally become a reality. And then, decision-makers will no longer be able to blame awkward and inappropriate technology for being uninformed.

DARFUR: A
COCKTAIL OF SUFFERING AND
GENOCIDE

DARFUR: A
COCKTAIL OF SUFFERING AND
GENOCIDE 08/27/2004 02:02 PM

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:

The military dictatorship that governs Sudan is desperate to end US sanctions so that its newly-found oil, which came onstream only five years ago, can start generating revenue for the bankrupt nation, so much so that it agreed to end its long and savage civil war against the rebels in Southern Sudan (where the oil is), and exempt Sudanese Christians from Sharia law.
That Southern war has cost two million lives, and the Bush Administration was active in brokering the peace for three reasons: (a) many of the casualties were Christians, which led to pressure from American evangelical churches, a bastion of Bush support, for US action, (b) the US would have access to an additional source of much-needed oil and (c) peace would have allowed Bush, in an election year, to portray himself as a peacemaker as well as a 'war president'.
Plans to announce the peace were undone when the Western Darfur provinces, suffering from horrendous drought, rapid desertification, increasing tension between Arabs and non-Arabs for scarce land, and long government neglect, began to clamour for independence (Darfur was an independent Sultanate until Britain annexed it into its Sudanese colony); the government, tapped out militarily and not wanting to jeopardize the possible end of sanctions, responded by outsourcing military retaliation against Darfur's six million people to local Arab sheiks, warlords and tribal leaders, who they financed and armed heavily and supported with aerial bombing raids in key areas occupied by the pro-independence Sudanese Liberation Army.
These local Arab leaders used this power and military might to launch a genocidal attack on all non-Arabs in Darfur, deputizing murderous gangs of Arab bandits called janjaweed, whose intimidation tactics include burning whole villages, gang-raping women, decapitation, burning children alive, mass public executions, ransoming community leaders, burying victims of atrocities and precious wells in sand, and kidnapping women and children. The bandits steal everything of value in the destroyed villages as compensation for their 'enforcement' of government authority. As a consequence over a million Darfur residents have fled their villages to massive refugee centres elsewhere in the provinces, where there is at least safety in numbers (50,000-75,000 per camp), and in neighbouring Chad.
USAID estimates that the death toll from genocide, starvation and disease will, even with humanitarian and peacemaking intervention now, exceed 300 thousand and could, without intervention, top one million by the end of this year. The UN has already established a food program that has reached 900 thousand of the 1.5 million affected in Darfur, but the threat to the safety of both Darfur natives and humanitarian workers is severe.
There are all kinds of reasons for Western reticence to get involved: Darfur is an all-Muslim area, so the genocide is ethnic, not religious, and it is resource-poor, unlike the oil-rich South. European leaders, not wanting to give Bush a smokescreen for his foreign policy blunders and rebukes of its allies, have been perversely reticent to support US humanitarian efforts in Darfur. Arab sheiks and tribal leaders in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan have announced they will consider any intervention by the West in their 'internal dispute' as an unwanted foreign invasion, which they will liken to the US invasion of Iraq, and will use it to recruit zealous young Arabs to kill all foreigners, including humanitarian workers and peacemakers, producing a fiasco similar to the one that occurred in Somalia. One recruiting brochure says "We call upon you to head immediately to Darfur and dig the ground deep for the mass graves of the crusader army". Darfur's refugees say that bringing peacekeepers from the African Union won't work either, because "African troops are too susceptible to bribes". And the Sudanese government is probably both unwilling and unable to rein in the local sheiks and warlords and the rogue janjaweed gangs. And the only non-Sudanese body with authority to bring thm to justice for genocide is the International Criminal Court, which the US government has repudiated.

What can be done? Samantha argues that, despite the danger, we have a global responsibility to bring in peacemakers and protect the people of Darfur (and, if the detente with the Southern provinces falls through, which appears likely, the people of the South as well). But, just as in Rwanda ten years ago, how can that be done over the violent opposition of the ruling government of the country? You can only make peace where there is a desire from both sides to achieve a workable peace. Without that, peace efforts will constantly be sabotaged by the side uninterested in peace, which will produce retribution and escalate into full civil war.

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.

AUSSIE
BREAKTHROUGH ON SOLAR ENERGY?

AUSSIE
BREAKTHROUGH ON SOLAR ENERGY? 08/27/2004 02:02 PM

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.
FState hydrogen

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.

titanium cell

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?

RED
HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR
2005

RED
HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR
2005 12/26/2004 02:31 PM

Red Herring has published its list of the top ten technology trends to watch for 2005:

Moore's Law yields to innovation: The long history of processor speed doubling every 18 months without changing price looks to be coming to an end, not because it can't be sustained, but because other innovations, like dual cores, can accomplish the same ends without having to deal with the growing problem of overheating that fast processors must contend with.
VoIP makes distance irrelevant and increases the functionality of telephony: Although carrying sound over the Internet is most famous for killing phone companies that charge outrageous long-distance rates, and making all telephony flat-rate, it's also increasing the traditional PBX phone system's functionality, allowing people to dial others by clicking on their name instead of having to look up numbers, and providing 'presence awareness' (telling you before you 'dial' whether the person is available for your 'call').
Explosion of authentication and automatic identification systems: Increased need for security and the cost of maintaining password lists is driving this change, but authentication and identification systems, if they can walk the line between convenience and breech of privacy, could also simplify and streamline the process by which we get permissioned for almost everything, allowing us to access both physical and intellectual property without jumping through hoops.
Commercial gene therapy breakthroughs: RNA-interference therapies could soon be used to suppress messenger genes that cause diseases from AIDS to diabetes. But while the technical problems in making such therapies seem to be solved, the anti-innovation US patent laws remain a huge stumbling block, and patients may have to wait while greedy corporations sue each other to death or patent law reform enters the 21st century before the therapies can be brought to market.
Micro fuel cells' last change to prove themselves real: Small fuel cells that recharge or even power small portable electronic devices off-the-grid have been promised for years, but technical and performance problems have delayed their coming to market. Next year may see the first few commercial releases, though they will be unfriendly to the environment (another 'disposable', and in need of constant refilling), and initially very expensive (as much as a dollar per hour's worth of fuel).
Desktop search and desktop management heats up: Software vendors are finally realizing that the up-to-30% of people's work-time spent 'looking for information' is often spent looking on users' own hard drives, not on the Internet and Intranets. Google Desktop arrived with a splash this year, and many more desktop search tools are coming. But will vendors realize that search is just the tip of the Personal Content Management iceberg?
Medical equipment comes 'of age': Baby boomers are fueling the demand for new medical equipment that offers therapy for patients without the use of drugs (expensive, invasive, prone to side-effects, and slow-to-market) or hands-on treatment (even more expensive, and temporary). But while self-administered treatment is exploding, baby boomers are even more enthused with self-diagnosis, doing their own on-line research and using new diagnostic kits to avoid the doctor's office entirely.
Web services allow small companies to grow up fast: New web service companies are providing, in small, affordable packages, the capabilities that big corporations developed in-house or bought from hugely expensive systems integrators and ERP vendors.
Asia and Europe extend their wireless lead over North America: Where 3G technologies dominate in Asian and European markets, North Americans still use their phones for voice calls and go online using cables or phone lines. Only 28% of Americans own laptops or cell phones with wireless data capability, and only a little over half of them have used that capability. The digital divide grows, on many fronts.
PC/TV convergence and the battle for the living-room: The much-ballyhooed convergence of the PC and the TV, and promised ubiquity of 'smart' digital appliances everywhere hasn't really happened. Why? Because for most of us, it doesn't meet a need. Too many tech vendors are overly infatuated with their own technologies, and have no appreciation of the average consumer whose main consumer electronics purchases remain the traditional 'dumb' TV and telephone. 'Smart' devices will only succeed when the companies that make them smarten up and understand the mainstream customer and his/her needs and low tolerance for complexity.

I confess this list didn't exactly blow me away with the ingenuity of technology. What's missing from the list? I'm working on my own lists of Most Important Ideas of 2004 (in each of three areas: Blogs & Blogging, Business, and Politics & Economics), and I can use some help -- this year hasn't exactly been the promised banner year for innovation.

The innovation process at the top of this post is from Credit Suisse First Boston and is explained in more detail in my innovation paper.

OUR PERVERSE
PLEASURE IN OTHERS' MISFORTUNE

OUR PERVERSE
PLEASURE IN OTHERS' MISFORTUNE 12/29/2004 06:17 PM

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:

Our reaction when we hear that another couple's marriage has broken up, or suffered a sex scandal
Our reaction when someone we know (but don't love) loses their job, or their life savings
Our reaction when we hear of an unexpected death or tragedy outside our immediate circle of family or friends
The pleasure we get from comedy that recounts the protagonists' stupid, catastrophic or pathetic behaviours and their consequences
The satisfaction we get from hearing about criminals' dire, even cruel, punishments
Reality TV
The joy many felt at the bursting of the dot-com bubble
Our media-pandered fascination with celebrities' scandals
The pleasure we get from winning a game or sporting event, that we wouldn't get if there wasn't a 'loser'
The popularity of movies that dwell on, and exploit war, suffering, and horror

There's even a book, When Bad Things Happen to Other People, on the subject, written by John Portmann. Portmann believes Schadenfreude is harmless, a natural and healthy stress-buster. At the other extreme, the sublime ecstasy that psychopaths feel when their lies and bullying and manipulation cause misery to their victims is extremely harmful, and perrhaps addictive. How dangerous and unhealthy is this all-too-human proclivity? And why do we feel this way at all? Is it because others' misfortune, in a world of scarcity and competition, vindicates our own behaviours and decisions, increases our own stock and our self-perceived likelihood of success, or at least survival?

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?

MAKING
POLITICS POLITICALLY CORRECT

MAKING
POLITICS POLITICALLY CORRECT 08/23/2004 02:34 PM

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:

Ask them what's important to them (open-ended questions with no preconception of the answers) and listen to their answers,
Tell them stories about how the political process has brought about important and positive change,
Teach them how the system works, in the context of how it could work to deal with the issues they said were important to them, and
Encourage them, starting with something small, to make the system work for them.

If we do that, if we can re-engage even a fifth of the people who never vote, who never read about politics or world affairs, who have lived their entire lives in political passivity, we will have started a revolution. Not only will they infect other disengaged peers with the zen of political activism, they will shake the diehard leftists and diehard right-wingers as well, because all of a sudden these new political activists will be up for grabs by whichever group that makes the most articulate, balanced and credible arguments, not by the blowhards who preach to the choir. And these new political activists will, on many issues, hold the political balance of power.

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)

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - FEB.10/04

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - FEB.10/04 02/10/2004 01:32 PM

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:

Total hits for the month were about 950 thousand, down 12% from last month (the decrease was due entirely to a drop in hits for two blogs). Of that total, 700 thousand hits (72%) went to the top 11 (7%) active blogs. Median hit count remains about 700 per month, or about 20 hits per day.
Inbound blogs totaled about 3700, up 16% from last month, with the top 11 active blogs accounting for almost exactly half of them. Median number of inbound blogs remains at 7.
The approximate proportion of female Salon bloggers was 42%, the same percentage as a month ago.
No longer blogging, it appears, are Subdude Citizen, who I'll really miss, Scott Summers' Taiwan Weblog, the Return of the King Countdown blog, Paul & Chris' Paris Travel Commentary, the very stimulating Mambrino's Helmet, and four relative newcomers, Quakergreen, Struggle for Progress, Graphite Furnace and Gabriela's Radio Weblog.
Storyteller Hugh Elliott's Standing Room Only is back, as is Short 'n Oblique.
Of the roughly 85 new Salon Blog numbers assigned this past month (#3326-3411), about 30 made at least one post, and the following 12 appear to be posting regularly. That leaves the number of active Salon Blogs at 160, almost unchanged from a month ago. Welcome to all new Sloggers.

Insights from Today's Gospel (#3342)
Boomer Mom / Suburban Malaise (#3343)
Tales of a Stone Pilgrim (#3346)
Reading A1 (#3364)
Fortinbras Radio Weblog (#3368)
The Fix-It Chicks (#3378)
What Would Dick Think (#3379)
Reggie E. Scott's Radio Weblog (#3388)
I Cover the Blackboard (#3398)
The Irregulars Blog (#3403)
Post-Coital with a Modern Primitive (#3409)
The Adventures of Sophie's Dildo (#3411)

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.

ISRAEL VS.
PALESTINE: THE INTRACTABLE, ENDLESS
WAR

ISRAEL VS.
PALESTINE: THE INTRACTABLE, ENDLESS
WAR 05/27/2004 04:36 AM

Things are usually the way they are for a reason. But there are few situations in the world that appear, from a distance, as unreasonable as the war between Israel and Palestine, a war that has been going on, in essence, without let-up for more than half a century. At one point the efforts to reach a peace settlement got so close to success that the negotiators on each side received Nobel Peace prizes for their efforts. But the dream didn't last, and for reasons we couldn't fathom, the cycle of bloodshed, escalation and retaliation cranked up again and is now at firestorm levels, threatening to push the entire Mideast into even more cataclysmic violence.

The reason we couldn't fathom this, is because we've never lived there, never walked a mile in their shoes. In The New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Goldberg provides us with an excellent proxy for such an experience, as he crisscrosses the area, from Israel's "ideologues of aggressive settlement" to Palestinian mothers teaching their children the honour of death in the holy war against the Jews, describing what he sees and what he hears from those in power, and from those who have nothing. It is a gut-wrenching, depressing journey. You'll need to buy the May 31 edition to read it, and I would recommend it highly. Alternatively, you can listen to Goldberg summarize his findings, along with a slide show of photos by Gilles Peress, here. One of those photos, of a Palestinian woman peering through a temporary gap in the new Israeli Separation Wall, is reproduced above.

Goldberg makes no secret of his personal view of all this:

The leaders of the Jewish national-religious camp do not adhere to observable reality, They exist in the glorious Jewish past and in the messianic future but not in the reality of today, in which Jewish soldiers give their lives to protect settlements; in which Palestinians live and die at checkpoints; in which Israel is becoming a pariah among the nations; and in which Israel may one day cease to exist as a democratic Jewish state.

[Michael Tarazi, legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team says] "Settlements are the vanguard of binationalism" -- a single state that would soon have an Arab majority. "I don't care if they build more. The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state."... "We have to look at the way the South Africans did it. The world is increasingly intolerant of the Zionist idea. We have to capture the imagination of the world. We have to make this an argument about apartheid."

The view of the moderate majority on both sides is that the best of a sorry lot of options is to have Israel dismantle the settlements and withdraw from the pathetic Gaza Strip and the volatile West Bank, to the so-called Green Line, the UN-brokered treaty line after the last "official" war. But that majority view is very fragile, and violently opposed by a significant minority on both sides. The settlements in the occupied territories are the flash-point, where hugely outnumbered Jews, many of them vehemently anti-Arab, provocative, and uncompromising, are surrounded by largely militant Palestinians ready to lay down their lives to reclaim "their homeland", and protected by an Israeli army that has ceased being protectors and become an army of occupation, many of whom are all too willing to demonstrate violently which side they support, as Goldberg reports.

There are no good guys and bad guys in this war, and every confrontation, of which there are thousands, at every checkpoint, every attack by Arab militants (many of them children), every razing of Palestinian homes to make way for more Iraqi settlements, every suicide bombing, radicalizes both sides and renders the position of the moderate majority untenable. The extremists on both sides, outnumbered though they may be, are firmly in control of the political agenda, and their every provocative act strengthens their position rather than ostracizing them. The "ideologues of aggressive settlement" on the Israeli side, and especially in the settlements, largely believe that all of the occupied territories are theirs by divine right, and that it is the will of God that all Arabs be expelled from their holy land in its entirety -- that, as their website says, "There is no Palestine". And the militants and zealots on the Palestinian side, among the poorest and most destitute people on the face of the Earth, and with one of the highest birth rates, state categorically that they would not stop fighting if Israel withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank, but would merely be encouraged to continue the war until all Jews were extinguished from their holy land. The rabidly intolerant have the will and the ready means to scuttle every attempt at compromise, to embarrass moderates, to incite violence and then say "I told you so."

There is nothing particularly unique in this, of course. Many of the tribal wars in Africa, the ethnic wars in the Balkan states, and the insane religious war in Northern Ireland, exhibit the same shameful, and shameless, pattern of violence and intransigence. The next, inevitable attack by Islamic fundamentalists on US soil will surely produce the same knee-jerk result in the US, and launch another war to treat the symptoms and exacerbate the disease.

Ariel Sharon, less moderate than most but less extreme than the extremists, has taken an impossible 'middle' course sure to satisfy no one: Withdraw from Gaza, kind of (there are a host of conditions that render the withdrawal largely a joke to Palestinians), and bulldoze Palestinian homes to build a mammoth wall, not along the Green Line but deep inside the West Bank to "protect" the Jewish settlements, which are everywhere, not just in the border areas. The partisan, bipartisan support he has received in the US shows how little America's leaders understand the realities of the area's politics.

As I've said before, the only answer, and it will take decades, perhaps centuries to achieve, is to deal with the underlying humanitarian issues, to give Palestinians a reason to value peace, "something to lose", and help them build infrastructure and educational institutions, and a future to believe in. Poverty, ignorance and inequality, not religious and ethnic hatred, are the real enemies of peace. It doesn't matter whether the area is partitioned into two states, fairly or unfairly, or made into a single apartheid state. Things are the way they are for a reason, and in Israel-Palestine the reason is entrenched, and there is no short-term answer. No matter who represents the two sides, there will be decades of violence, war, and bloodshed to come, and it is inexcusable and ignorant of those of us who don't live there to take sides for cynical political gain. Let us instead -- as we should be doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other areas we have recklessly meddled in, in the absurd and arrogant belief that we understand the problems and have all the answers -- let us instead invest in infrastructure, in education, in building a better world even as the zealous minorities try to tear it apart. The founders of the religions we all claim to believe in would surely understand, and nod in assent.

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR 'WORK EFFECTIVENESS
IMPROVEMENT'

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR 'WORK EFFECTIVENESS
IMPROVEMENT' 06/14/2004 02:39 PM

Graham Westwood of ProCarta gave me a copy of Bill Jensen's Simplicity, a book that claims most business problems are a result of unnecessarily complex decision-making processes. I recently wrote that if Knowledge Management were relabeled Work Effectiveness Improvement, both the requirements of the job and the customers' expectations would be much clearer, and we might finally get the job done. Jensen's book offers a prescription for WEI.

Jensen's thesis is that poor decision-making is the root cause of business error and ineffectiveness, and his diagnosis of the four causes for it is shown at right. Most employees, he says, want to do good work, but are impeded by these four causes, which produce unnecessary complexity in each of our jobs. I concur with this diagnosis, though I'm not sure large organization have either the capacity or the will to fix these four problems.

At the individual and team level, Jensen suggests* five behaviour or learning changes that could alleviate these problems:

Better time management - We need to learn to prioritize and provide better context of why tasks are important, clarify and simplify goals, improve our personal work organization skills, provide better definition of expected outcomes and of 'success', develop and provide better, simpler tools and resources to get the job done, and eliminate unnecessary tasks and bureaucracy.
Improvisational project stewardship - We must learn to focus people's attention on what's really important, communicate priorities and success measures, and learn from failures. Today's organization is more like a jazz combo than an army, and needs a very different kind of team facilitation and 'leadership'.
Quality conversations - We must learn to communicate a vision that co-workers can understand in concrete terms, and can buy into, to selectively tell people precisely what to do (but only when it's needed, and when you know), and to communicate the measurements of success and the resources available to help.
Effective listening - We need to learn, in the mass of messages, to filter out what's irrelevant, unimportant, and unactionable, and to focus on messages that clarify expectations and identify unmet needs and critical problems that we can personally help solve. That entails knowing when to intervene, and when not to, and learning how to say 'no' gracefully.
Engaging people - We need to learn to use stories and other techniques to clarify what is important, what needs to be done, and the consequences of success and failure.

Both as an individual 'knowledge worker' and as a team/project member, then, we can be more effective if we learn, and practice, managing our own time and helping others manage theirs (by eliminating unnecessary tasks and simplifying others), more effectively; selectively intervene in work processes and project activities only when we can add real value or eliminate obstacles; communicate what's really important to bring clarity; listen to identify and resolve critical needs and problems; and filter out messages and information that burdens rather than alleviating work effectiveness.

These are useful suggestions for improving work effectiveness and hence decision-making in organizations, but none of them is new. Those that would take up WEI (or KM) as a career need to understand why these techniques have not worked in the past, before they attempt to implement them in their organizations. In many companies, both employees and managers raise their eyebrows at 'soft skills' courses like time management, effective communication and story-telling. We know how to do that, they will say, the problem is more systemic, more entrenched than merely teaching common-sense skills can hope to solve.

These critics are half-right. Many problems in business are structural, strategic, or systemic, and raising people's hopes by suggesting that these basic work management techniques are suddenly going to work bottom-up when they didn't work before, will merely create disappointment. Excessive size and hierarchy, poor managers, and inappropriate success measures (that reward executives more for cutting staff than for making staff more effective, for example) are at the heart of much work ineffectiveness, and need very different solutions.

But these critics are also half-wrong. Each of us today is increasingly in charge of our own careers, our own jobs, and hence our own work effectiveness. The five skills listed above are critical skills for every entrepreneur and every front-line worker, and we should each ensure we have these 'core competencies'. If the big, cumbersome organizations we work for do not allow these skills proper exercise, then the answer is either to leave them or reform them, not to revel in our ineffectiveness and just blame management (even when they are to blame).

The remainder of Jensen's book prescribes some higher-level organizational 'disciplines' that can enable improvements in work effectiveness:

Better understanding of what different stakeholders need, and why
Building trust, through openness, fairness, respect, attention, consistency, and clarity
Designing the content of databases for effective (re-)use
Designing project tools to focus on, and inform, the critical decisions and choices that must be made, and to surface potential landmines and potential innovations
Designing tools to make it easier to connect with the right people and find the right information
Making the objective of all infrastructure to make workers' jobs simpler

I am less excited about these latter ideas, because as desirable as they are, I just don't see them happening in most organizations. Enlightened businesses already have a culture that embraces these concepts, but the vast majority of unenlightened businesses simply lack the adaptability needed to embrace them, so I think they're just so much wishful thinking. Despite the claims of the zealots of acquisition, growth, integration, globalization and 'economies of scale', I am increasingly convinced that large organizations are inherently incapable of being efficient, responsible, agile, or places where effective work can occur. They need more radical surgery than Jensen's treatment.

Nevertheless, this book provides some of the much-needed definition for WEI, which I believe will be the next wave of organizational change, and will accomplish much of what reengineering and knowledge management failed to do. The #1 purpose of management must become empowering people to know and do what's important to achieve the organization's goals, and enabling them to stop doing the other stuff that, today, takes up most of their time.

* Jensen uses different words for these, and for many of the key ideas in this book. As much as I liked his messages, I found sometimes his choice of labels for his key concepts confusing.

LEADING-EDGE
BUSINESS IDEAS

LEADING-EDGE
BUSINESS IDEAS 02/11/2004 12:22 PM

A few interesting articles on innovation, knowledge and the future of business - worth a read:

Distribute d Social Software, by Eric Gradman via Seb Paquet at Many 2 Many: A grad student surveys the current generation of social software and agrees with me that it needs to be simpler, less centralized and more personal.

Life in 2010 - Home and Work, by Patrick Dixon: A futurist who sees that new technologies are going to be smaller, more portable, more specialized, easier-to-use and more personal. Some excellent thinking here.

Webl ogs and Journalism (jump to pg 59 of this pdf), features 18 articles by bloggers and journalists, that I've mentioned before, but are worth a second read because of their broader implications for the use of weblogs and other personal content management and personal publishing apps in business.

WL Gore & Associates, per this case study by Cyndy Payne of the Foundation for Enterprise Development, is not only one of the world's most innovative companies (they invented waterproof, breathable, Gore-Tex fabric and a whole bunch of high-tech materials you've probably never heard of), but also are a prime example of a true partnership of equals (what they call a Non-Hierarchical Corporation and what I've called a New Collaborative Enterprise).

A THEORY OF
KNOWLEDGE, AND HOW IT COULD SAVE THE
WORLD

A THEORY OF
KNOWLEDGE, AND HOW IT COULD SAVE THE
WORLD 08/30/2004 05:29 PM

During my ten years as a Chief Knowledge Officer, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how people should use knowledge, and to some extent how people learn, but it never occurred to me to develop an overarching 'theory of knowledge' until I decided to write a book called The Cost of Not Knowing. This article summarizes that theory.

This is not a new epistemology. I am disinterested in academic arguments that use language, a clumsy and artificial abstraction, to try to justify theories that to me are needlessly complex, counter-intuitive and of no practical use. For students of philosophy, and I'm sure this will come as no surprise to my regular readers, my theory is consistent with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological view of epistemology. For those interested in the philosophical basis for this theory, I would recommend David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous, much of which is devoted to explaining Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I'm merely interested in its practical implications, in work and in life.

My theory starts with learning. Learning is the process of direct and indirect experience and observation, and knowledge is simply the personal, collected, internalized result of learning. We learn in different ways (fig.1): The best way is through active participation, which engages all our senses in the learning experience. Next best is observation, where we see or hear but where some of our senses are not engaged. The least effective way is second-hand, through communication of reports from someone else. When a squirrel learns, by personal trial and error, how to defeat a baffle on a bird feeder, this is powerful knowledge, well retained and employed. When that squirrel instead watches another squirrel show how to do it, the knowledge is less valuable, less credible. The observing squirrel may not be able to replicate the other squirrel's moves, and the method may not be the best one for the observing squirrel, which may have a different body-weight or dexterity than the demonstrating squirrel's. And if one squirrel merely tells another, unfamiliar squirrel of the presence of food in a bird-feeder 'over there' that can be accessed by navigating around the baffle, that knowledge is even less valuable. The squirrel listening may doubt whether the baffle was or even can be overcome -- perhaps this second-hand report is merely bragging or a ruse on the part of the reporting squirrel.

In human activities, we now get almost all of our knowledge second-hand, through books, newspapers, television and online, and its relative lack of credibility causes us to develop and assign a trust 'rating' to different sources, based on how often, in our experience and that of others we trust, that report has turned out to be accurate or useful. A blogroll is one manifestation of that need to rate the trust-worthiness of second-hand sources of knowledge. Schools, unfortunately, now provide almost all learning second-hand, and it is not surprising that 'field trips' are so loved by students -- an experience to learn something first-hand. It is also not surprising that the most effective and credible form of second-hand report is the story, which conveys knowledge in a way highly analogous to the way we might have experienced it personally.

Why do we learn? The squirrel learns in order to survive -- by direct participation at first in play and then, often by observing its parents, in gathering food, building a nest etc. The squirrel draws as well on instinctive knowledge, which is coded in its DNA as an evolutionary advantage, which 'teaches' it the knowledge of its ancestors, for example to 'freeze' when it senses a predator species, which is often more effective than fleeing predators whose eyesight is attuned to motion, more than shape. That instinctive knowledge also tells it at what point, as the predator approaches, to flee, based on its ancestors' cumulative learnings of that point at which the probability of evasion through flight begins to exceed the probability of non-detection by the predator. Instinctive knowledge doesn't need to be learned, so it doesn't appear on fig.1 above. We're born with it.

In natural systems, where the community, the physical area in which animals spend their entire lives, is small and almost completely 'knowable', we learn only to survive and make a living, and because nature has evolved us, as an adaptive mechanism, to find learning fun (fig.2). In such closed systems, we can get almost all the knowledge we need from direct experience and observation, and from our instincts -- there is little need to rely on second-hand reports as a source of learning. As that physical area that we need to know to survive increases, we can no longer get by with direct experience and observation, so we need to evolve languages to convey more and more knowledge second-hand. Our society becomes inevitably more interdependent, and in addition to survival there are now three more reasons to learn:

To be a responsible citizen of that society we need to know as much as possible. Crows have fairly sophisticated and interdependent social structures, with 'travellers' that move back and forth between different crow communities, carrying information about the location of food and predators with them, and they have developed appropriately sophisticated languages to convey that second-hand knowledge. In fact, they have developed 'body' languages and sounds that communicate the location of food to other species (notably wolves and indigenous humans) on which they depend (since their claws are not strong enough to tear flesh and kill, they locate food for other species that can, and then eat the leftovers).
To be an intelligent consumer we need to know enough to evaluate our choices. In a society where you don't just eat what you kill and live where your ancestors did, there are often more choices than we can try out through direct personal experience.
To understand our purpose we need to learn as much as possible about our physical world and the history of life in it. We have an instinctive desire to understand how and why things are, which serves an evolutionary purpose -- it helps us to survive. As we assimilate more and more knowledge we assemble patterns and theories about how and why things are. These are belief systems (fig. 3). When early man observed how nature automatically corrected population and resource imbalances quickly and painlessly, he began to believe in a higher power. When more recently he invented civilization, a 'man-made' way to live apart from nature, he developed new, anthropocentric belief systems to justify and explain this new 'separate' purpose for living. Belief systems so powerful that they allow us to tolerate, and even celebrate, incredible suffering, and to ignore and disregard our intuitive knowledge, which is inconsistent with these belief systems.

So where does all this get us? Of what practical import is this theory? My prospective book is about the cost of not knowing, and that is the 'so what' of this theory:

Because we did not know the degree to which extreme and sustained suffering and outrage perverts the human mind, and the malleability of those minds, we allowed the slaughter of nearly a million innocent civilians in Rwanda in 1994, and of nearly 3000 in the US in 2001.
Because we did not know the consequences of reliance on catastrophic agriculture, we allowed millions to die in the Irish potato famine, eighty million more to die of starvation in China during Mao's Great Leap Forward, and the horrendous threats posed today by BSE (Mad Cow), the Asian bird flu, and as-yet-unevolved diseases and pests that prey on massive concentrated quantities of astonishingly homogenous, vulnerable human foods.
Because we did not know that nature uses diseases to winnow overcrowding, and that these diseases will always evolve faster than we can prevent or treat them, we allowed half the people of Europe to die in the Plague, and more than one billion to die of Smallpox, and despite 'clues' like AIDS of what is to come, future diseases we do not yet know, we still have not taken drastic steps to reduce human overcrowding on our planet.
Because we did not know the impact of our wasteful and thoughtless burning of hydrocarbons and forests on our planet's climate, we now face cataclysmic global warming and the paradoxical early triggering of the next ice age.

Not knowing led directly to the loss of biodiversity and much of the carrying capacity of our Earth, the demise of Enron and its auditors, the Great Depression, the dot com bust, the atrocities of Stalin, and the Great Extinctions that regularly obliterate much of life on our planet. And because we still don't know these things for sure, we allow ourselves to hesitate, to do nothing, to hope these problems will magically go away, to allow the conditions that almost certainly gave rise to these and other disasters to continue, to in fact continue to get worse.

I had dinner last evening with some of our neighbours, and we were talking about some of these immense problems, and one of my neighbours, a student of history, said that no problem in history has ever been solved until it got so bad for so many that there was a spontaneous revolution. What would it take, he asked, before these problems -- overpopulation, famine, oppression, violence, disease, resource scarcity, pollution, war, suffering, cruelty, misery -- got bad enough that people would rise up and demand immediate resolution?

I think the massive unrest and strife we see everywhere in the world indicates that we have already passed that point. However, in order to have a revolution there must be (a) consensus on the need for change, (b) consensus on the change that is needed, and (c) a simple process to bring about that change. Historically, the solution has been political -- to oust, violently if necessary, an identifiable oppressor, the cause of the problem, and replace him (or them) with new leaders committed to the consensus solution. And although billions have shown that they see Bush's corporatist imperialism, and the oligopolists' 'free' trade and globalization, to be causes of some of the major problems we face, once we get rid of these scourges, most of the biggest problems will remain. These more intractable problems have no identifiable enemy and, as yet, no consensus solution. They are systemic problems that can only be changed by a radical change to our entire global economic and political systems. And changes to these massive, entrenched and leaderless systems have historically almost never come about by political means, but rather by introduction of disruptive technology innovations that undermine the existing system, as the agricultural and scientific and industrial revolutions did. It is tempting to believe that scientists, not collective human energy and collaboration, are the only hope we have for saving us from ourselves, of rescuing us from our colossal ignorance.

What is the cost of not knowing when, even if we could communicate enough knowledge to achieve global consensus on the need for change and the change that is needed, there is still no simple process to bring about that change? If we were to magically and suddenly be able to bring knowledge to bear that would persuade the vast majority of people on the planet that unless we quickly reduce human population below one billion and reduce each human ecological footprint to no more than one eighth of the current Western footprint, would that be enough to precipitate a combination of voluntary abstinence, intense social pressures, and (over the objections of the very powerful elite) laws and taxes and sanctions, to ensure that these targets were met? We did bring about the end of slavery this way, and the end of the Vietnam War, and in much of the world women's suffrage. Is the intractability of our greatest problems really the lack of a simple, known solution, or is it rather the lack of consensus on the problem, and of its severity and urgency and what needs to be done to find a solution? -- The cost of not knowing.

Until the reactionary cult of leadership took over business thinking a few short years ago, there was a consensus that the best way to run a business was to agree on and articulate the business' objectives, get each employee to define their role in achieving those objectives, remove the obstacles that prevented them from fulfilling those roles effectively, and otherwise stay out of the way and trust the Wisdom of Crowds to produce better results than the arrogance of a few. Could the same principle, applied to the world's most challenging and threatening problems, work in society as a whole? And if not, why not?

It is the examples of slavery and the 60s peace movement and women's suffrage that have caused me, insufferable optimist that I am, to think that there is hope. The solution of reducing human population by 90% and ecological footprint by 10% (in the third world) to 90% (in the West) is daunting, but it's also a simple, clear, measurable objective. And if we have six billion people working on it, convinced that this is what must be done to save the world, there's no reason why it shouldn't be achievable. Women choose not to have babies if they know pregnancy would put their lives in danger, why wouldn't they choose likewise if they knew it put their world in danger? Would knowledgeable people agree to participate in an annual lottery for the right to have a baby, and live with the results, as they now compromise so many of their 'rights' for the greater good? Would they agree to a 100% tax on all wealth beyond sustainable consumption levels, to be distributed to the poor? Would they shut down permanently businesses that knowingly damage the environment? Would they abandon urban sprawl and big centralized governments in favour of self-managed, self-selected, self-sufficient communities if it could be shown that these are more socially and environmentally responsive, and responsible, political units? Would they wrench power, by citizen and consumer action, from unrepentant corporatists who refused to give up their excessive wealth and influence?

It is hard to give up old paradigms. I know a lot of people that see the salvation of the world in global government, to which all states will cede authority. I see no reason to believe that bigger more powerful governments, which largely got us into this mess, and which are more removed from the people they supposedly represent, would do anything but make the problems worse.

But as the Internet has shown, the real power in any system remains at the ends: The front lines, the communities, where people learn by direct experience what works and what does not, what makes sense and what does not. It is as individuals and as members of small communities that we define ourselves and establish our belief systems and commit ourselves to action and to change. As citizens and consumers and members of communities, if we only knew, we could accomplish what needs to be done.

It is time for a bloodless coup, the taking back of power and authority from central corporatist political and economic institutions and its reinstatement in local communities and in individuals. To bring it about, we need only accomplish these four daunting tasks:

We need to communicate to everyone on the planet, one person at a time, that there is a better way to live: happier, healthier, safer, more egalitarian, more harmonious, more responsible, and sustainable for future generations. We need to tell everyone a new story of our planet's destiny.
We need to achieve, by a great deal of open conversation, discussion, and sharing of knowledge, a huge consensus that there are two root causes underlying all the problems we face today and preventing us from achieving that better way to live: Overpopulation and overconsumption, and to set and agree upon deadlines and targets for solving these two problems. Just as in past we agreed that slavery and imperialism and suppression of women were our global enemies, we need to agree that overpopulation and overconsumption are our global enemies, a threat to everything we believe in and a threat to our future. With the right mix of empirical and intuitive knowledge, we can achieve this agreement.
We need to organize six billion people to use their collective wisdom to tell us how to meet these deadlines and targets, and then free them to work in their communities to make it happen.
We need to help each other clear away obstacles to success. That means a lot of humanitarian and peacemaking assistance, helping to build new infrastructure that will work in the new community-based world, redistributing resources from the rich to the poor, and disarming those that will try to establish new wealth and power hierarchies.

So maybe knowledge is power after all. About two centuries ago some new stories arose that were so compelling that they became the world's dominant religions, the basis for everything the vast majority of people on our planet believed, and still believe today. Those stories spread person to person, by word of mouth, before the printing press accelerated their influence. At that time the people of our planet were struggling with the new problems of civilization, like famine, disease, poverty, addiction and violence, and they were desperate for new knowledge, a new story, something to give them faith, purpose and direction. Today we face much greater problems on a much greater scale, but we also have powerful new resources for spreading knowledge, for telling a new story. We also have a much better sense of what the root causes of, and solutions to, our problems are, and knowledge offers the most potent, perhaps the only, means to achieve global consensus and global mobilization to solve these problems.

The cost of not knowing is the end of our world. It's too great a cost to pay, and the answer, if we use the power of knowledge, is within our collective reach.

NATURAL
ENTERPRISE: FILLING AN UNMET NEED

NATURAL
ENTERPRISE: FILLING AN UNMET NEED 09/03/2004 04:31 PM

(Fourteenth of fifteen* instalments of the upcoming book Natural Enterprise. )

nat 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:

They fill an unmet business, social or consumer need.
The enterprise understood why the need wasn't already being met, and overcame those obstacles.
The enterprise has the competencies to effectively create and deliver offerings that fill that need.
The enterprise has the resources to bring those offerings to the marketplace.

This may sound like a simple recipe, but it's actually quite difficult to achieve. The market for products and services, though far from perfect, is reasonably efficient at identifying and satisfying needs. If you find an unmet need, there is almost surely a reason why that need isn't being met by some other enterprise. You need to find out what that reason is, and overcome it. And then you need to gather a team of people with the collective competencies to design, produce, market and distribute the product or service that meets that need, and the resources (physical, financial and intellectual) needed to do so effectively. Easier said than done.

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:

Look at changes and trends in the marketplace: What's hot, and what new needs will the demand for suddenly-hot products and services spawn? How are consumer attitudes changing? How are buying behaviours changing? How is the market changing to respond to changing consumption patterns?
What are people complaining about? Every complaint reflects an unmet need.
What problems are businesses facing? What's keeping executives awake at night? What could you offer that would let them sleep better?
What do people think there's never enough of? Sustained shortages represent business opportunities.
What are the gaps in products and services? In The Support Economy, Shoshana Zuboff describes the next economy as one where the customer's needs are met 'end-to-end'. People don't have time or patience to fill in the product and service gaps, like when the great product breaks down and there's no backup, or when the daycare service closes two hours before they get home from work. A gap implies an unmet need.
Likewise, is there a new service that you could 'wrap around' an existing product or service to make it more valuable? (Offering haircuts and rinses in people's homes and offices, or dinner on the commuter train, for example.)
In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker identifies seven areas of innovation opportunity resulting from discontinuities, all of which can be used to unearth unmet needs:

Unexpected occurrences (if Kerry wins in November, what new market opportunities will that present?)
Perception/reality incongruities (when we realize that greenhouse gases will bring about massive climate and environmental change in our lifetimes, how will consumer needs change?)
Process weaknesses or needs (some believe advertising has no future: if they're right, what will business need in order to get information to consumers in other ways?)
Industry and market changes (what will $160/barrel oil mean to us all?)
Demographic changes (with a huge number of people retiring in the next 10-20 years, what will they do with their time?)
Buyers' attitude and priority changes (consumers see file-sharing as a work-around for CD price-gouging and TiVo as the solution to lousy program offerings and excess commercials -- what does that mean for these industries?)
New scientific and business knowledge (how will RFID devices change the way we live, shop, work, and protect our privacy?)

Look at basic, overarching human needs: Health, safety, education, time, decent quality of life, meaning, recreation. How are our experiences of these things currently unsatisfactory, and how might they be improved?
What great ideas failed, and why? Maybe they were ahead of their time, and their time is now.
What's happening to transform certain industries, or economic sectors like education, public health, and even defense, and how might those transformational ideas, products, processes, technologies and models be applied in other industries and economic sectors?
What are big corporations looking to outsource? Could you offer them what they need in those areas?
What small "niches of need" exist in big business that other big businesses can't be bothered to address? (Event planning for example).
What small "niches of need" exist in consumer markets that big, unspecialized businesses can't be bothered to satisfy?
What new regulations exist that need compliance tools, processes, advice on compliance, and assistance?
Is there a market somewhere in the world for something we take for granted but they don't have at all? And vice versa, do people in some other countries take for granted things that we have never considered selling here? In Europe, for example, some movie theatres offer excellent cuisine and fine wine -- would that work in North America?

So now you've identified an unmet need, or, better, a whole raft of them. How do you investigate why these needs aren't already being met, and identify the competencies and resources that your enterprise will need to galvanize to fill those needs? The successful entrepreneurs I know all say they talked to a lot of people -- potential customers, potential suppliers, prospective competitors, experts in business startups, industry experts, market analysts, and others -- before they did anything else. The more people you talk to, the more you will learn, the closer the consensus of those people will approximate the true marketplace for your idea, the more alternative ideas you will be able to consider, the less likely you will hit the landmines that undo so many businesses with great ideas who rush prematurely into the market with suboptimal solutions. As you do your research, keep asking these questions until you're highly confident that you know the answers:

What exactly is the need?
Who exactly is the customer (the group that has that need)?
What are the alternative solutions to it? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each alternative? Which, all things considered, are the best, affordable alternatives?
Who is offering, and who could easily offer, each of those solutions? Why aren't they already offering these solutions?
What competencies and what resources would your enterprise need to have to bring the best alternatives to market?

No matter how wide a net you cast, you will probably be able to winnow the list down to a very few viable alternatives for each of a few needs that you believe your enterprise could competently satisfy. The best way to decide among these alternatives and needs is to do even more, mostly primary, research. Take a sketch or a prototype of your solutions (that's plural) to a significant cross-section of prospective customers and ask them to choose between them. Ask them how much they'd pay for it. Ask them what's wrong with it and what's missing. Ask open-ended questions (not just multiple choice or true/false, the way so many telephone 'surveys' do) and listen and take notes on the answers. If you're genuine and enthusiastic you can gather extremely valuable and reliable information this way, information you cannot get any other way, and which no one else will have.

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!

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - APR.10/04

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - APR.10/04 04/10/2004 05:46 PM

Total hits per month were about 1.05 million, up 10% from February (due almost entirely to a rebound in Filchyboy's hit count). Of that total, 760 thousand hits (72%) went to the top 11 (7%) of active blogs. Median hit count remains about 700 per month.
Inbound blogs totaled about 4150, up 10% from February, with the top 11 active blogs accounting for almost exactly half of them. Median number of inbound blogs remains at 7.
The approximate proportion of female Salon bloggers was 42%, the same percentage as in January and February.
No longer blogging, it appears, are the passionate Toby's Political Diary (#1282), Asia Business Intelligence (#1319), Everything That Sucks (Come Back, Amanda! #1691), Patriotically Incorrect (#2379),.Lean for Dean (#2429), Doublethink (#2521), Life in LA (We miss you, Claire! #2608), and 16 relatively new bloggers. David Harris is on hiatus.
Mambrino's Helmet is back as The Forge.
Of the roughly 240 new Salon Blog numbers assigned this past two months (#3412-3642 and #3743-3757), about 90 made at least one post, and the following 36 appear to be posting regularly. That leaves the number of active Salon Blogs at 174, up 14 from February. Welcome to all new Sloggers.

Schnauzer Logic #3435
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

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.

LOVE
POLITICS, BY GLENN PARTON

LOVE
POLITICS, BY GLENN PARTON 04/26/2004 03:49 PM

All great ideas are dangerous, wrote Oscar Wilde. And someone else said that every great idea is initially ridiculed as absurd or reviled as heresy. Philosopher Glenn Parton, whose essay The Machine In Our Heads I recommended recently, has a new, great and dangerous idea. It builds somewhat on the ideas in James W. Prescott's paper I wrote about earlier, that human violence stems from a combination of childhood neglect and adolescent sexual repression. Glenn has given me the honour of allowing me to publish his essay on it first on this blog. Although this may be hard to believe, Glenn's idea is more radical than anything I have ever written, perhaps even more radical than anything I have ever dared think. It will probably trouble you, as it did me.

Please take the time to read this essay in its entirety -- it will requre an hour's investment. The first two sections are below, and the link at the bottom will take you to the whole essay. If it seems overly long, bear with it -- it has a lot of well-entrenched preconceptions about our culture to challenge before what he proposes will seem at all acceptable to most readers. And if it seems overly preoccupied with the sexual aspect of relationships, substitute the words 'love' and 'emotional' for 'sex' and 'sexual' respectively, and plug on. You may have some deep misgivings about what Glenn has to say, but if this article affects you as it did me, you will not be the same person when you finish reading it as when you began.

Please let me know what you think. I'll add my own comments either in the comments thread below or in a follow-up article. I'm sure Glenn will be interested as well.

LOVE POLITICS: A Case Against Monogamy
by Glenn Parton

yin

Introduction

Let's shift the focus from the question, what is to be done? to the question, Why can't people see the obvious? If people could see what is self-evident to the rational mind, then appropriate action would soon follow. That Americans do not see the obvious truth is amply demonstrated by the popularity of George W. Bush.

Outline of a strategy for human renewal: One: Americans cannot think deeply because the heart is closed. When the heart is closed, then Reason, the mind, becomes a calculator, an instrument, a machine that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is hard-hearted people who are unknowingly supporting world-disaster. True knowledge, wisdom, must be informed by sympathy, feelings, and heart.

Two: The American heart has turned to stone due to sexual repression, stretching back to our Puritan beginning. Everyone in this culture is, as a manner of upbringing, sexually wounded, resulting in fear, shame, guilt, and resentment. The wound festers; self-doubt and self-hatred prevent us from loving others. Generosity, the opening of the heart, begins with the ability to experience sex as a gift. If you cannot do this, then all your good deeds will be wrapped in resentment. The Christian concept of love, which desexualizes it (Agape instead of Eros), leaves the person sick and suffering at the core.

Three: To open the heart so we can think deeply it is necessary to search and find our erotic nature, accept it, and freely express it. This is not something that can be done alone -- through Yoga, Tantra, for example -- but requires a new man/woman relationship. The old relationship -- namely, monogamy (whose first historical form was patriarchy, but which is now co-dependency or co-ownership) is unnecessarily restrictive, a bedrock value, an unquestioned premise, the ideological basis of State Monopoly Capitalism which is destroying this planet.

In short, we will not think deeply unless we love, and we will not love unless we practice a free sexuality. Dare to love more than one person! It's a simple idea that's hard to do. Consult your daydreams!

Beginning

The integration of politics and sexuality is the best way to build a social movement for resolving the ecological crisis which is threatening to bring Life on this planet to a crash in probably one or two generations, perhaps sooner? Traditional politics, party-politics, and protest-politics, are necessary for postponing world disaster, for providing time and space for fundamental lifestyle changes, but is not sufficient to heal us from the ground up, according to the original-natural order of things. For this task we need to mobilize a different kind of energy, not negative energy, but positive energy, the energy of Eros.

Sexual love is the prototype of all human happiness. If we let this joy, instead of conscience or duty or protest be the source of our community building, it would bring together and hold together aware people. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, even the primary work of saving the planet and ourselves, will not hold us together because the psychological damage in America is too great.

Americans have a defensive ego-structure -- a system of self-deceptions, projections and prejudices that distort our perception of the world -- the cost of survival in this harsh and grossly unfair society. This makes us, “as we are”, incapable of forming enduring political communities for social transformation, which is precisely what we must do in order to avoid eco-catastrophe. We cannot get along well enough with one another for long enough to do the things that must be done. All our sincere and noble efforts self-destruct, but we can no longer afford to fail, for now the planet as a whole is in jeopardy. What will bring us and hold us together for world transformation? Erotic love is the last remaining force in the modern world capable of mobilizing, sustaining, and perfecting us for this long and difficult task.

But not if the erotic life-force is damned by monogamy. A transforming political community of monogamous couples is impossible because monogamous love places itself first and everyone else second; it produces separation and tension between lovers and everyone else, couples and society. However, by refusing monogamy in favor of a highly discerning free love, there is a chance of knitting a community that will not easily unravel. The pairing process, as far as I can see, will remain the basis of the social structure, but we could all work more easily and much better in a network of loving relationships, pairing without exclusivity, opening lines of deep communication that are presently jammed by jealousy, competition, mistrust, fear and arrogance. The key is not to abolish one-to-one love, but to multiply it.

There is already a manifest hostility between the sexes, which is going to get worse. Much of it is a result of a false morality that prohibits us from knowing one another. Each man is "allowed" to intimately know only one woman, and vice versa. How can we expect to find and work out answers to the critical problems we face, if a vital point of discovery, wisdom and sustainability -- love between men and women -- is so limited!

The age of discovery and togetherness between the sexes has not yet begun, so let it begin now with a few individuals who defy the sacred cow of conventional morality -- namely, monogamy-- in favor of political love, which means loving the “highest” in oneself and others, making one's political destiny with a lover clear and binding, creating diverse relationships, loving communities, in which women draw out the best in men (infusing men's minds with love), and men draw out the best in women (inspiring them with intellectual theory and global political priorities). Real love is transcendence, beyond the mutual validation of empirical egos, toward a shared commitment or vow, not just between two people, but to a new commonwealth.

The function of these erotic-political inter-relationships is to accelerate evolution, nature's effort to become aware of itself as a whole, before an eco-catastrophe resets it back to the stage of the cockroach. Why not affirm sexual love as a vehicle for progressive social change; it is presently misused for every moneymaking purpose imaginable -- with great success. That should tell us something. This retail culture would collapse if people tasted real happiness, instead of being locked in monogamous relationships that cannot satisfy the mass of humanity for a lifetime (even if a few simpletons stick to a single spouse), driving people elsewhere for satisfaction, finding everything but the real thing.

When material circumstances are ripe, an idea, Learn to love more than one person, can be a decisive force in history. It depends on a handful of living examples that prove the reality of the concept, and then thousands and tens of thousands will spontaneously respond to it. Today, the information and organs of communication for world transformation are in place: it is the inner readiness for widening the domain of love that is lacking, as Lewis Mumford said. That is our challenge, for without a positive concentration on love, understood as the integration of sexual desire and political awareness, we will not be able to rescue the planet and its creatures from the growing forces of hate and violence.

Did everyone who is dissatisfied with his or her love life make the wrong choice, or could there be something inherently wrong with monogamy? The American way is to always want to solve every problem with a new and improved technique, rather than consider a bold, new reorganization of life. The solution of the sexual problem, however, takes us to the core of human nature, and demands that we come to terms with the human role in the greater scheme of reality, our place in the cosmos.

According to the German philosopher, Maik Hosang, the logos of love can save us: evolution occurs through qualitative leaps, from matter to life to human life. Love among the parts sets the stage for the emergence of higher reality. The gravitational order of the celestial bodies generated life, and the balance and harmony of living beings gave rise to humankind. A just and peaceful world-order is the next step forward, but we need to untie the knot of monogamy and let the whole of evolution flow through a new and free man/woman relationship, creating loving and lasting human communities, which will rationally regulate our relations with nature.

Frederick Engels' book, The Origin Of The Family, Private Property And The State, argues that "group marriage" is characteristic of hunter-gatherers, whereas horticultural people prefer "pairing marriage." The later is more hedged around with restrictions, but is not based on any assumption of sexual exclusiveness for either partner. Pre-European America, according to Lewis Morgan on whose empirical research Engels based his theory, is the classic soil of the pairing family. The Iroquois, for example, simply dissolved relationships at will by going back home, and held festivals every year when tribes came together for the purpose of wider sexual enjoyment and cultural enrichment.

According to Engels, “monogamous marriage”, the third historical stage of the man/woman relationship, results from the influence of private property (beginning with the domestication of animals). Its express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity (so women cannot be permitted to have sex with other men), which later come into their father's property as his natural heirs. Engels shows what a small part individual sex love played in the rise of monogamy. It has an economic origin. And along with permanent monogamy there soon appeared prostitution (for men) and adultery (for women), with no cure for either one.

According to Engels, women brought about the transition from group marriage to pairing marriage, with its greater equality and joy, but men introduced strict monogamy -- though indeed only for women. In her introduction to Engels’ great book, Eleanor Leacock argues that it is crucial for women to understand that the monogamous family as an economic unit is basic to their subjugation, calling it, quoting Engels, “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”

Monogamous marriage, characteristic of modern people, imposes too heavy a weight on human beings. It is not the natural form of human association that corresponds best to human nature; it was a wrong turn, a historical mistake, perhaps facilitated by natural selfishness, but the important point is that it is not irreversible. We need to recapture the freedom and happiness of pre-monogamous tribal love relationships. L. Morgan, after studying the American Indians, came to the conclusion in his book, Ancient Society, that the advanced forms of civilization “will be a repetition, but on a higher level of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity which characterized the ancient gens.”

Love Politics is the idea that sex, the oldest force in the world for building community, when linked throughout to emancipatory consciousness, is still the basis for building a political community that puts us on the path towards a good society. The way to make us strong enough, wide enough, and deep enough to carry out the required socio-economic changes is to make the entire process an erotic adventure. A group of monogamous couples is a boring place, dead spirit, because you cannot stifle the erotic basis of community and hope to keep it alive and well. Gatherings and meetings of any kind do not work. Politics is bleak in America; we have come down to the primal energy of Eros as the source for a genuine political revival. Only by allowing sexual energy to flow more openly, as in aboriginal societies, can aware people create and sustain enough human cohesiveness and solidarity to make a true beginning... Read the whole essay (includes the above extract; scroll to the third section of the essay, entitled "Family", to continue reading where the above extract leaves off).

©2004 Glenn Parton

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART THREE

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART THREE 04/27/2004 01:12 PM

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 third part below. The first part, which reviewed the history of human innovation and technology, is here, the second part, which described the current environment for innovation, is here.

Six: Prescription for an Innovative Organization

Innov Process

The first four years of the century have seen some serious setbacks in business innovation. The corporatist-backed Bush administration has introduced legislation to reduce corporate liability to consumers, and has been extremely lax in enforcing social and environmental laws. Organizations like the RIAA and Nike have showed that the courts will allow large corporations great latitude to sue customers (including infringing on their privacy rights) and to lie to customers in their advertising (about sweatshop operations, offshoring etc.) Corporations like Enron have abused public trust and destroyed thousands of families' livelihoods and life savings. And massive defense and security expenditures have siphoned off funds that might have been invested in innovation, and have made corporations and lenders nervous about any investment while governments and corporations are so seriously overextended and exposed to interest rate fluctuations. The result is a climate of great animosity between corporations and customers, and unprecedented risk aversion.

At the same time, recent surveys indicate a growing corporate awareness that "you cannot cut (or offshore) your way to greatness", that the limit to improving profitability by reducing costs and margins has now more or less been reached, and that innovation must again move to the forefront if corporations are to have any hope of sustaining that profitability.

So corporations are looking for low-cost, effective ways to develop new products, new processes, new delivery channels and new technologies that will meet important human needs, provide real value to customers, and be affordable by those customers. This challenge occurs at a time when the distribution of wealth among customers is massively skewed, both within and between nations, towards a tiny elite, when many governments and most corporations and individuals are buried under a crushing debt load, and when the need for innovation to solve critical environmental, social and political problems has never been higher. Simply put, we are living in an age when we cannot afford innovation, and cannot afford to be without it. Perhaps the most critical innovation need therefore is for creative mechanisms to finance, price and pay for the costs of innovation itself. Funding, pricing, and cost management are now inseparable parts of the innovation process.

The prescription I propose draws on a wide variety of innovation processes that have been advanced by thought leaders on the subject, especially during the 1990s when the appetite for investment in innovation peaked, including Peter Drucker's, Cap Gemini's, Credit Suisse's, Gary Hamel's, and others listed in the bibliography below. This prescription draws as well from several innovation processes that I am personally aware of from my years working with Ernst & Young and its clients, and some lessons from how nature, which has been innovating since long before we appeared on the planet, goes about it.

This prescription has eighteen steps in eight stages illustrated in the chart above: Listen, Understand, Organize, Create, Experiment, Listen Again, Design, and Implement. The three stages shown in blue -- Understanding, Organizing and Implementing -- are analytical processes, well-suited to the left-brained deductive thinkers who predominate in most organizations. The three stages shown in green -- Creating, Experimenting, and Designing -- are creative processes, better suited to right-brained inductive thinkers who are relatively scarce in most organizations. The two Listening stages shown in red are communication processes, that need to involve customers and other stakeholders, and everyone in the organization involved in the innovation process. Assigning (or contracting) the right people for each stage in the process is essential to its effectiveness, and to its affordability. If it's done well, it can draw on the strengths of everyone inside and outside the organization who has a stake in a successful innovation effort.

Here are the eighteen steps. They are in reasonably sequential order, but are somewhat recursive: For example, as part of creating alternative solutions (step 12) it may be necessary to go back and scan for some additional ideas (step 1). Who should do each step depends to some extent on the industry and size of your organization: Large organizations may benefit from having a dedicated Innovation Team responsible for this, while in a very small organization it may be a scheduled part-time task of the whole management team, drawing as well on the diverse backgrounds and ideas of an informal Advisory Board.

Listen

1. Listen broadly for ideas: Appoint your Innovation Team and have them set up an 'environmental scan' that systematically looks for innovations and connections not only in your industry but also outside it, outside your country, outside of business entirely. Have the Team read about, learn about, and meet with people from the broadest possible spectrum of human enterprise and natural discovery. Subscribe to journals like Innovation, and the RSS feeds of periodicals and websites that report ideas and new technologies from a wide range of disciplines. Reward members of the Team for serendipitous readings and meetings, debrief with them promptly and regularly, filter, refine and inventory their ideas and learnings for consideration at the Understand, Create and Design stages of the innovation process. Inputs: readings, newsfeeds, conferences, interviews, meetings. Outputs: a manageable inventory of ideas and insights (categorized and contextualized appropriately so that they can be simply understood and practically applied).

2. Listen to 'pathfinder' customers, competitors, and colleagues: Plug yourself in to the 'voice of the customer'. Set a minimum time quota for everyone in your organization to spend face-to-face with business customers, or with customers' customers or end consumers. Identify 'pathfinder' customers -- those who are most attuned to their organization's future direction and its need to change. Employ a 'Think the Customer Ahead' program that engenders effective listening, elicitation skills, story-telling skills, and creative thinking skills , a capacity explained in Imparato & Harari's book Jumping the Curve. Often the customer isn't able to articulate his or her needs in a way that lends itself to quick technology solution development. Listening to the customer is an iterative process, that entails learning about the customer's business, understanding the things that keep them awake at night, suggesting a lot of 'what if's', proffering opportunities, points-of-view and possibilities, not just asking baldly about needs and offering off-the-shelf solutions. Connect with customers indirectly as well, using all the media at your disposal -- phone surveys, e-mail, website surveys, customer satisfaction surveys (with lots of open-ended questions), self-diagnostic tools, videoconferences, etc., to capture as much information as you can about your customers, their customers, and their markets. Inputs: conversations, interviews, surveys. Outputs: needs, ideas, stories, industry future state visions, five-forces and SWOT analyses.

3. Listen to the front lines: Talk with the people who hear directly from customers and other stakeholders every day -- people in sales, customer service, even delivery and reception staff. Ask them what they're hearing, and what they think most needs improvement or rethinking. Create 'space' -- physical and electronic -- where everyone in the organization can surface, discuss and advance problems, needs and ideas collaboratively. Let anyone 'subscribe' to the inventory of news and ideas created in step 1 above. Consider maintaining a running list of the company's Top 10 Challenges to encourage focus and creative thought from everyone in the organization. Make sure top-level executive sponsorship for innovation is visible to everyone on the front lines. Give people time off their 'regular work' to focus on organized innovation projects, and tools and process guidance to use that time effectively. Reward front-line people for new product and other innovative ideas that they surface from their conversations with customers and others. Inputs: conversations, idea & collaboration spaces, interviews. Outputs: needs, ideas, stories.

Understand

4. Understand who your actual and potential customers are: Study companies like The Body Shop that know their customers, their needs, their buying preferences and criteria intimately. These are companies that spend a lot of face time with customers and have rigorous processes in place to capture what they learn, probe what they need, and explore the potential market for new innovations. And identify and get out and meet with potential customers as well, to understand why they're not already customers and what could change that. And then have your Innovation Team cast a wider net and ask who might be customers that are currently not served by either your company or your competitors. Learn the lessons of Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution -- how disruptive innovations can (sometimes inadvertently) transform whole industries, and how that presents your company with both threats and opportunities that could completely change the profile or even definition of your customers. Inputs/Outputs: list of actual and potential customers and what they currently buy, could be buying, and will and won't be buying in the future, and why.

5. Understand and respect what end-consumers want and need: and based on that
6. Understand what immediate customers will need: Start with the end-consumer of your products and services, and the end-consumer of the products of your immediate customers. Their buying patterns, needs and preferences will determine the success of your customers, and that will in turn determine their buying patterns, needs and preferences. The end-consumer has the ultimate power, and, unlike corporations', their buying decisions are based on broader and more subjective criteria than business need and affordability. They buy things they want, not just things they need. If you sell to the auto industry, you need to understand why consumers, against all logic, buy SUVs. And if your company is making money from sweatshop labour or old growth forests, better come clean now. Business needs to end its abusive relationship with consumers -- overcharging them, misleading them, suing them, and selling them inferior, imported merchandise and services. Once consumers realize their true marketplace power, they will get back at adversarial suppliers with a vengeance. Business needs to respect them, respond to them, and be responsible members of the communities in which they operate. The Reputation Economy isn't here yet, but it's coming. If you cause consumers to dislike you or distrust you, you'll soon be dead. Inputs/Outputs: current state analysis and future state vision of wants and needs for both current and future immediate customers, and end-consumers, and a resultant future state vision and emerging needs profile for your industry.

7. Understand why these wants and needs aren't already met: Here's the hard part. Things are usually the way they are for a reason. You know there are wants and needs that aren't being met. The challenge is not to throw in the towel when you find out why. The technology doesn't exist? The solution would be very costly or risky to develop? The solution is not affordable to customers? The solution is too radical for customers to accept or too complex for them to understand? The organization currently lacks the capacity or competencies to produce the solution? That's what innovation is about. Take up the challenge with your eyes open about what must be overcome, but take up the challenge. If it was easy someone else would have already done it. Inputs/Outputs: list of challenges.

Organize

8. Organize those with a stake in solving the problem: Now you know what needs to be done, the next step is to organize the troops. Who can help solve the problem, assess the alternatives, provide the needed resources? Outputs: project team member list, including 'pathfinder' customers and other outsiders. (Note that the project team is responsible for solving a specific problem or need, while the Innovation Team has oversight over the entire innovation effort of the organization -- they aren't the same group).

9. Organize the program for solving the problem: There are a lot of techniques and methods that you can use to break through a problem and come up with solutions. The bibliography below is replete with them. In my experience, creative minds need a very broad framework (schedule, budget, high-level process) and a lot of freedom to figure out how to solve the problem within that framework. Self-organizing, self-managed innovation project teams seem to work well in some organizations but not in others. If you insist on imposing more discipline on the process, more hoops to jump through, control points and early-stage go/no-go filters, make sure the people you're imposing it on see the value in these constraints, and that they don't squeeze the boldest and potentially most successful ideas out in the process. Outputs: project schedule, budget, program.

10. Organize the resources needed to solve the problem: The project team needs sufficient tools and knowledge to be able to understand the problem, the customer need, and the variables that could impact the potential solutions. Inputs: all the Outputs from steps 1-7 above, redrafted into a cogent and digestible form.

Create

11. Create an environment and capability for innovation: Give the Innovation Team and the project teams permission to fail, and teach them how to fail early and inexpensively. Prevent executives from pushing their 'pet' projects to the detriment of others. Don't let the 'black hats' deep-six good, hairy, audacious ideas prematurely, and ensure that 'black hat' behaviours are not rewarded by senior management. Help the team avoid slipping into excessive caution or incrementalism. Keep the marketing group from unduly influencing the process with antiquated ideas for 'creating market demand' and launching products with press releases and self-serving promotional and advertising campaigns -- In the emerging customer-driven market these techniques will no longer make a mediocre product a success. Provide rewards and incentives for team members, and for other contributors to the innovation effort. Don't tolerate hoarding of ideas and knowledge, or inter-department 'charges' that block knowledge transfer and cross-functional collaboration. Share credit for good ideas and successes, and don't make innovation an area of internal competition. Help bright, creative, quiet people find their voice, and let people promote 'crazy' ideas without fear of ridicule. Teach the Innovation Team and the project teams (and others in the organization who show interest) techniques that will enhance their creativity and improve the innovation process, and give them time and resources to discover other techniques and try them out. Invest adequate, patient capital and resources for innovation. Give ideas sufficient time to find their market but don't throw good money after bad, no matter how well-intentioned. Understand sunk costs and learn from failures. Consider letting those involved in the innovation 'invest' personally in return for a share of the ultimate revenues or profits: Having some 'skin in the game' can be very motivating and empowering. Inputs: time, training, tools, space, sponsorship, leadership and resources. Outputs: people who are inspired, capable and encouraged to contribute productively to the innovation effort.

12. Create lots of alternative solutions: Don't put everything at risk on one option. Use scenario planning and other techniques to identify and assess alternatives. Don't reject the really far-out alternatives prematurely -- cost/risk/benefit decisions usually can't be properly made until the customers have had the chance to say their piece again in step 15 below. Outputs: alternative solutions.

Experiment

13. Experiment: Try many things, learn fast from failures, tinker, iterate, combine, transfer: Try several alternatives simultaneously in different markets to speed up the assessment process. Use rapid prototyping and other iteration techniques to expose as many alternatives to the market as possible. Outputs: test results.

Listen Again

14. Listen to potential customers and help them imagine: Use prototypes and stories to make the innovative product, service, channel or technology as concrete as possible. Beware customers' propensity to say 'yes' at this stage when there's no required commitment. Go back to what you learned from customers in steps 1-7 and recite what you heard back to the customers for confirmation, explaining how the innovation addresses the need articulated by the customers. Listen objectively for confirmation or dissonance. Outputs: customer evaluations

15. Listen to acceptance criteria -- the ‘if’s: If the product appears to meet the need, the next task is to assess the customers' buying criteria: price and affordability, convenience, options, delivery time, upgradability etc. Some of these criteria may be show-stoppers that will require re-invention or other creative brainstorming, while others may be able to be addressed in the design stage below. Outputs: customer buying criteria

16. Listen to ‘what could go wrong’: Here's where you let the 'black hats' say their piece: What competitive threats exist or could arise? Is the innovation vulnerable to disruptive innovation from unexpected sources? Are there unforeseen production, quality control, political, regulatory, financial, marketing, or servicing landmines? What's the shelf-life? Could it become a commodity prematurely? Will it be prohibitively expensive to produce or to buy? Will it cannibalize existing product sales? Is it a strategic fit for the organization? Some of these 'what could go wrongs' may require re-invention or other creative resolution by the project team, while others may be able to be addressed in the design stage below. Outputs: list of threats and risks, and resolution plan.

Design

17. Design: consider customer-valued attributes, cost, intuitive ease of use, ease of change, ease of enhancement: The greatest idea in the world can still be torpedoed by bad design. The designer has to be told, in no uncertain terms, what attributes are important to the customer, how much at most the solution can cost, and the trade-off between ease-of-use and power. Technology products especially are often over-engineered because additional functions and features are easy and inexpensive to add, but they add complexity disproportionate to the benefits of the additional functionality, often to the point of turning off potential customers. And in this age of constant upgrades and inter-operability requirements, the solution must be easy to change, redesign and enhance. Inputs: specifications based on Outputs from steps 12-16 above. Outputs: completed designs.

Implement

18. Make the final go/no-go decision, then implement: If there are still several alternatives on the drawing board, whittle them down to a manageable number. If necessary, send the idea back for reinvention (step 11), re-testing (step 13) or redesign (step 17). If the previous steps have been done properly, this step should be the easiest. Once the decision has been made to go, the set-up, production, viral marketing, sales, distribution, employee and user training, partnering, after-sales service, success measurement and continuous improvement should be problem-free, since the 'what could go wrong' possibilities have already been considered and addressed, and people from all functional areas of the organization should have been involved and consulted during the Create and Design stages.

Seven: Applying the Prescription: Some Examples

To give you a flavour for how this prescription could work in practice, here are eight fundamental business problems from different industries, and some innovations that have recently been (or are currently being) successfully commercialized to solve them. In each case, the solution shown could reasonably have been derived using the principles and process in the prescription above:

Customer Problem / Need	Innovation / Technology Solution
Car and computer buyers can't get exactly what they want, and hate haggling with dealers.	Web sites let you design your own car or computer, find the closest model to your design, find the best price for that model, accept payment and deliver it to your door. Some will even take a completely custom order.
Television watchers find most fare awful, TV guides complicated, and VCRs even more complicated.	The new TiVo technology asks for and monitors your preferences, pulls e-schedules off the net & satellites, and automatically records and indexes your preferred shows, commercial-free, onto a hard drive.
Although newspapers are a terrible waste of paper, and hard to read on the commuter train, reading from a computer screen doesn't work either due to poor legibility and awkwardness.	Two innovations are converging on a solution to this: Erasable paper, which allows you to print out each day's newspaper onto the same recycled pages; and ultrathin large screens with memory, that allow you to read one page at a time on a crisp viewing device smaller than a paperback.
Clothing that gets torn or stained is cheaper and easier to replace than repair.	A new organic clothing technology has been developed, modelled after human skin, that heals and itself. There is even a 'spray-on' version that can help burn victims to heal without scarring.
Banks are facing 'spread' squeezes, forcing them to generate new revenues from user service charges instead of interest charges, but consumers hate service charges and see little value for money in them.	Progressive banks are offering customers a 'menu' of alternative ways of 'subscribing' to bank services, including variable rate (pay-per-use), fixed rate, 'frequent-flyer' rate (lower or no service charges for users who use many of the bank's services), and free-if-you-handle-it-yourself rates. They are also offering a variety of new services that use the Internet to ignore geography (offering mortgages and business loans on-line worldwide) and exploit existing infrastructure and knowledge (e.g. accounting and tax services, insurance, financial planning, credit management).
Retailers are caught in a squeeze between low-cost Power Centers and consumers' dissatisfaction with (and cost of) the 'retail experience'.	Car companies have invented the concept of 'try on' centers, where competitors share a low-cost, do-it-yourself space where consumers can try out competing models, and then place orders electronically that are delivered, to their specs, from a low-cost warehouse to the consumer's home. Where the 'retail experience' requires more than just try-outs, companies like Home Depot have created value-add services like education (how-to sessions) and adventure (rock climbing walls at some sporting goods stores) that now draw customers more powerfully than their products.
Audit firms have found their 'product' commoditized and vilified by regulators for not measuring what is now important to stakeholders.	A US University is exploring whether 'fraud insurance' would be cheaper than audits and just as satisfactory to stakeholders and regulators. Meanwhile, some firms have invented a variety of new ways to measure the value of a company, including EVA, Balanced Scorecards, and Social Responsibility Reporting.
Many people are intrigued with, and want, the benefits of computer and Internet technologies, but don't have the time or comfort with the technologies to use them.	High tech companies are inventing computer and Internet 'appliances' that perform a single task automatically, simply and transparently e.g. refrigerator that sends a message when items are out-of-stock, past their 'use before' date, or too cold or too warm.

Conclusion

This presentation was itself the result of addressing an unmet need: After reading dozens of books on innovation, I was unable to find one source that explained in clear terms what innovation is, in a business context, conveyed the urgent need for businesses to become more innovative, and provided an actionable prescription for doing so. This paper was initially developed to provide the Core Innovation Team of Ernst & Young with background on the history, current state and leading practices in business innovation, and I am now using it to develop part of a core curriculum on entrepreneurship, of which innovation is a critical element.

I hope this analysis has given you a better understanding of the subject and its importance, and some useful tools and ideas that you can use to make your organization more innovative as well. I would welcome the opportunity to continue the discussion on this subject, by e-mail or through the comments thread below. You can find more of my writings on business innovation in this index.

While I'm optimistic that this prescription will work within business and other organizations, large and small, I am less convinced that it will work to solve some of the more deep-seated human needs and inexorable problems that plague us today, such as global warming, pollution, the energy crisis, biodegradation, endemic war, violence, mental illness and disease, animal cruelty, urban sprawl and decay, crime, unemployment, and the inequitable distribution of resources, income, wealth and power. While the process should work in principle, it is unlikely that this process can be followed with sufficient rigour or resources without (a) a willingness by governments to spend much more money (paid for by taxes) to solve these problems, (b) a political will to solve such problems creatively and by consensus, rather than leaving it to private interests to address them or dealing with them by brute force, and (c) a much greater awareness, commitment and sense of responsibility by the body politic of the urgency and opportunity to solve these problems. But just as business will be driven once again to invest in innovation in the search to sustain profitability, it is likely that private citizens and public institutions will ultimately be driven to invest together in innovation in the search for a liveable, sustainable world. The process they then use will probably look a lot like this prescription.

Bibliography

Boston Consulting Group -- Innovation to Cash (annual survey of executive priorities), 2003
Cap Gemini -- The Adaptive Imperative, in Perspectives on Business Innovation, 2002
Chen, Eric and Ho, Kathryn Kai-ling -- Demystifying Innovation, 2002
Chesbrough, Henry -- Sometimes Success Begins at Failure, in HBR Working Knowledge, 2003
Chomsky, Noam -- Manufacturing Dissent, 1995
Christensen, Clay -- The Innovator's Dilemma, 2000
Christensen, Clay -- The Innovator's Solution, 2003
Credit Suisse First Boston -- New Economy Forum, synthesis report, 1999
De Bono, Edward -- Serious Creativity, 1992
Dertouzos, Michael -- What Will Be, 1999: Although the idea of 'find a need and fill it' is hardly new in business, an article by MIT's Michael Dertouzos in the December 1999 Technology Review on the pillars of innovation reinforces the connection between need and innovation. Building on ideas in his book What Will Be , he says: Perhaps the most important ingredient of successful innovation is the creative technological idea that serves a pressing human need. This kind of creativity, in turn, requires a schizophrenic combination of rationality and insanity that's outside our ordinary experience. Imagine that all current inventions in the world and all their possible logical extensions and uses are inside a huge balloon. People are pretty good at extending these ideas further, using logic and common sense. But their results, being logical extensions of what's already there, stay within the balloon. To escape these old ideas and come up with something that is radically new, the balloon must be punctured with something that defies reason -- an [innovation] has been born. Successful innovators apply their drive and flexibility toward looking for and blending these two forces [market and technology] wherever they crop up, always striving to zero in on the key ingredient -- a creative idea that serves a pressing human need.
Dixon, Nancy -- The Organizational Learning Cycle, 1994
Drucker, Peter -- Innovation & Entrepreneurship, 1993
Drucker, Peter -- Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999
Fast Company magazine -- various online and hard-copy articles on Innovation, 1999-2004, notably the Business at its Best series
Gehl, John and Douglas, Suzanne -- Innovation (weekly e-magazine)
Gladwell, Malcolm -- The Tipping Point, 2003
Hamel, Gary -- Leading the Revolution, 2000
Handy, Charles -- Age of Unreason, 1998 and Age of Paradox, 1995
Ichimura, Elliott -- Virtuous Cycle of Innovation, 2001 (unpublished )
Imperato, Nicholas & Harari, Oren -- Jumping the Curve, 1996
Kelley, The Art of Innovation, 2001
Leifer, Richard et al -- Radical Innovation, 2000
Leonard-Barton, Dorothy -- Wellspring of Knowledge, 1995
Meadows, Donella -- Places to Intervene in a System, in Whole Earth magazine, 1997
O'Mara, Kevin -- Five Innovation Best Practices, in ZDNet, 2003
Payne, Cyndy -- WL Gore & Associates, Case Study in Innovation, in Foundation for Enterprise Development online magazine, 1998
Peters, Tom -- The Circle of Innovation, 1999
Robert, Michel -- Product Innovation Strategy, 1995 suggests looking for innovative ideas where there are: unexpected successes, failures or events; process weaknesses; changes in market structure, demographics, and perceptions; high growth areas and convergences; new knowledge or technology; changes in economic, political, regulatory, legal or social environment; changes in markets, customers, resources or delivery channels.
Schrage, Michael -- Serious Play, 1999
Senge, Peter -- The Fifth Discipline, 1990
Tucker, Robert -- Five Steps to Business Innovation, Business + Strategy Magazine, February 2003
Von Hippel, Eric -- The Sources of Innovation, 1997
Wheatley, Margaret -- Leadership & The New Science, 2001
Zuboff, Shoshana et al -- The Support Economy, 2003

GLOBAL
WARMING AND THE CRIME OF DENIAL

GLOBAL
WARMING AND THE CRIME OF DENIAL 03/08/2004 11:08 PM

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.
global warming chart

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.

GOOD,
NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION

GOOD,
NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION 09/11/2004 10:51 AM

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.

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION
-PART TWO

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION
-PART TWO 04/20/2004 03:38 PM

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

Innovation Process

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:

Employees hoard rather than sharing knowledge, including knowledge that could yield innovation, to protect their position and rank in the company
Employees rarely volunteer new ideas, fearing ridicule, retribution, being ignored, or having credit for the idea stolen by their boss if it succeeds
Managers safely and instinctively squelch innovative 'crazy ideas' of subordinates
Managers, fearing the wrath of shareholders (today's 'absentee owners'), are risk averse, preferring to buy ideas once they have been successfully developed by others, over incubating the company's own ideas, even though the latter is cheaper and more effective
Employees compete for credit rather than sharing it
Employees, since they are rated on their individual performance, consider teamwork and collaborative activities less important than individual, solitary ones
Managers instinctively delegate tasks in a project to individuals rather than teams (since it's easier that way to place blame if something goes wrong), and individuals usually prefer being given individual rather than team assignments as well

If people are social by nature, why are corporations so unable to tap into this to leverage the power of teams to enhance innovation? The answer may be simple. In The Hidden Life of Dogs, author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explains that most animals have an inherent desire to socialize with their peers, that seems totally unrelated to survival needs. In fact, dogs that wander from homes where they are well-fed and cared for appear to be looking for social contact with other dogs for its own sake, just as children like to hang out with others doing things they can do just as effectively alone. At the same time, both dogs and children often become extremely jealous, competitive, possessive and unsociable when these same fellow creatures impose on their personal 'territory': family, toys, food bowl, and members of the opposite sex.

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:

A specific, defined problem agreed to and shared by all team-members, and
A sense of urgency that imposes a short-term deadline that the team-members can work towards

There are other factors that affect a team's success, of course, such as the competencies and access to knowledge of the team members, and the effectiveness of the processes by which the team works. What is important here is that nowhere is a competitive threat, competitive challenge or competition of any kind considered essential to team effectiveness. Even in sports, the best teams focus on what they do well (the attributes of their team's excellence) and the achievement of specific objectives (like scoring points) rather than being distracted by competing with the other team, 'winning' and exploiting the other team's weaknesses. Good teams usually take solace in having played well even in a losing cause, and are alarmed when they play badly but still manage to win. In fact, a major competitive tactic in business is to force one's competitors to shift their focus to your agenda, to take their eye off their team's goal to instead compete with you.

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:

Find an analytical tool that identifies all of the relevant selection criteria, rates all of the available alternative products against these criteria, and allows you to identify and 'weight' the criteria that are important to you. This tool would 'remember' and start with the criteria and weightings you used the last time you made a similar decision.
Use the tool to generate a 'first cut' list of alternatives ranked by your personal criteria, and show the sensitivity of the ranking to changes in your criteria weightings (some days you may like to watch a thought-provoking program, and on others you may prefer something light and funny; one year you may want a practical car, and the next something sportier).
Find a tool that uses 'neural network' technology to draw upon your past choices for these and other products, correlate them against the choices of other people whom you trust or who have a history of making similar choices to yours, and generate a second list of alternatives, ranked by the collective consensus of your peer group. This tool would 'learn' from past choices and from your evaluations of them.
Integrate the two lists and use subjective overrides to make your final selection.

In the case of a big-ticket selection like a car, you would probably invest significant time in making the final decision. In a small-ticket selection like a television program, the final decision could be greatly simplified or even fully automated, so your television would automatically go to the highest-ranked program in the two lists, and signal to you a 'score' showing the computed probability you will like it (since your ultimate decision may be not to watch anything).

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:

Decisions are made by democratic consensus rather than by fiat
Persuasion and change occurs by engaging decision-makers in thought processes and finding shared mental models, rather than the wielding of power and authority
Problem-solving teams select (and when necessary, change) their own leader(s) rather than having one imposed on them
Problem-solving teams form themselves, drawing on individuals' networks, and disband themselves when the problem has been solved, much the way the human body's immune system organizes itself to fight infection
Rather than formal permanent roles, positions, and 'up-or-out' career paths, individuals move laterally from project to project, wherever their skills and experiences are best suited, and often wear multiple hats on simultaneously-running projects, rather than having a single title
Rewards and remuneration are based on the depth of developed skills, experiences and networks, the things that have value to the organization in the future, rather then on past performance (which is rewarded with one-time bonuses at the completion of a project) or on seniority or title
'Management' at the top is replaced by 'Improvisational Strategizing' at the centre of the organization

The real contention over this new organizational culture is whether it is efficient enough to justify a new organizational structure to support it, or whether instead some kind of balance between hierarchical and autonomous structures is needed. Is it empowering, or is it naïve, to believe that if an organization sets specific strategies and goals and then 'gets out of the way', the employees will effectively figure out the best way to achieve them? Can the tools, the infrastructure of technologies, knowledge-bases and equipment, needed to achieve organizational and project objectives, be left up to project teams to develop as needed and ad hoc, or must they be rationalized and inventoried and efficiently 'managed'? Who controls the purse-strings, and approves allocation of budgets and resources for each project -- can project teams really do this themselves or do these resources also need to be centrally 'managed'?

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:

Once-innovative companies like Microsoft are being besieged by antitrust authorities
Companies acquire other companies simply to break them up and close them down
New start-ups are designed expressly to be bought out before they actually produce anything
Investment analysts claim that synergies from corporate acquisitions create new value, and that subsequent break-ups into more focused and specialized companies also create value
Large organizations are rewarded for cruelly exploiting weak social and environmental laws in their subsidiary companies' countries and simultaneously creating unemployment at home, when they 'offshore' production to those countries

The recent macro-economic review by Credit Suisse First Boston, echoing the prognostications voiced by many economists at recent economic summits, foresees the evolution of today's corporate structures into three new, prevailing types of enterprise, which could fix the above dysfunctions (since different economists use different names for these, I've used my own):

Global Utilities: Large organizations that provide world-class large-scale communication, asset management and distribution infrastructure.
Producers: Small organizations that assemble resources and 'build to spec' technologies, tools, products and offerings, for entrepreneurs, project teams and consumers.
Innovators: Small organizations that study human problems and needs and create, discover and design solutions to them.

The Global Utilities would be either publicly owned or tightly regulated, operated on a not-for-profit basis. They would be measured on efficiency. The Producers and Innovators would be entrepreneurial partnerships, very project focused. Producers would be measured on agility, quality and customization, and Innovators on creativity, quality and quality-of-life improvement. All three types of enterprise would be measured additionally, of course, on customer satisfaction. None would be hierarchical, and few would spend an entire career with a single organization. I have argued elsewhere that, in fact, with today's technologies there is no need for any of us to have to work more than a few hours a week to provide a high level of well-being for everyone anyway -- the fact that we do work so unnecessarily hard and long is a function of the sustained myths of our modern Western culture and the extravagant and unsustainable wastefulness of our civilization.

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:

Hierarchy and Autocracy are the Enemies of Innovation: There is a strong creative tension between individuals and the communities they elect to or are asked to be part of, caused by divergent needs, drivers, and behaviours. Each individual and each community needs its own space. Flat, small, responsive, democratic organizations are inherently more innovative.
Innovation Needs an Urgent Problem: True innovation only occurs where there is consensus that there is an important problem to solve and a sense of urgency to solve it.
Cooperation is Replacing Competition: Competition is now dysfunctional, a vestige of earlier times of resource scarcity, and cooperation is now essential to effective innovation.
The Customer Rules: The customer is now king and needs only better decision making tools to become the sole driver of economic activity, rendering obsolete the need for marketing, branding, and other producer-driven mechanisms of influencing customer actions.
Female Organizational Style is More Innovative Than Male: As shown in the table below, organizational structures, processes and behaviours more commonly associated with businesses run by women are gaining traction in the New Economy, and that bodes well for innovation.
The Emerging New Economy Will Accelerate Innovation: Despite the current waves of globalization, corporatism and increased concentration of wealth and power, the Internet and other new technologies will inexorably break the strangle-hold of riak-averse oligopolies and unleash a new age of astonishing innovation.

Attribute	Female Organization	Male Organization
Organizational Structure	Networked	Hierarchical
Decision-Making Process	Consensual	Command-and-Control
Team Operation Process	Self-Selected, Self-Directed	Appointed, Managed
Leadership Selection Process	Self-Selected	Imposed
Leadership Style	Unassuming, Demonstrative, Responsive	Dictatorial, Self-Aggrandizing, Condescending
Employment Model	Project to Project	Up or Out
What Gets Rewarded	Potential Value of Skills, Experiences, Relationships	Past Performance
Who Makes Enterprise Decisions	Small, Improvisational 'Centre'	Disconnected 'Top'
Key Advantage	Flexible	Efficient

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.

THE BOSTON
TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM'

THE BOSTON
TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM' 03/06/2004 02:08 AM

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?

AVOIDING THE
LANDMINES IN ENTREPRENEURIAL
BUSINESS

AVOIDING THE
LANDMINES IN ENTREPRENEURIAL
BUSINESS 05/04/2004 09:08 PM

Today, the average North American entrepreneurial business lasts just four years, the average sole proprietorship even less. Yet entrepreneurship is not rocket science; it's nothing more (or less) than making a living for yourself with your business partners, instead of depending on some indifferent corporation to provide you with a living wage. Running a business is certainly no more difficult than raising a family, or landing a job and building a career with a big company. The essentials of entrepreneurship could easily be taught in every school, and there'd still be plenty of time left for the rest of the school curriculum. But, perhaps because big corporations and the governments they control want the 'labour force' to be meek, subservient, fearful and insecure, most people have come to perceive entrepreneurship as a complex and difficult art, fraught with danger, unprofitable, emotionally scarring, and demanding of enormous courage and energy. "It's certainly not for everyone", I keep hearing.

Entrepreneurship requires self-knowledge of what you're happy doing, what you're especially good at, how much you're willing to put into your enterprise and what you expect to get out of it. Without this self-knowledge, you're likely to be as miserable in your own business as working for some unappreciative boss, and that unhappiness will bear directly on its success. Beyond that, all you need are common sense, self-confidence, and a modicum of four key, learnable skills:

creativity (the ability to discover and apply new ideas),
communication (written and oral),
information processing (the ability to distil, analyze and interpret it), and
interpersonal (listening, appreciation, connecting, persuading).

Then it's simply a matter of learning and following the process that every entrepreneur has learned by trial and error, to set up and operate your own business successfully, on your own terms, and actually have fun doing it.

One of the 15 steps in the process of establishing and running an enterprise is avoiding the landmines. In MBA school they now call this Risk Management. This article identifies ten of the major landmines for entrepreneurs, using some real-life examples. I don't believe any of the enterprises described below is still in business (though some of the entrepreneurs have moved on, learned their lesson, and succeeded in other businesses):

Copycat businesses: Thirty years ago I did some financial consulting for a small start-up cruise ship operation. They acquired and completely renovated a ship, which was lovely, got the licenses, hired the appropriate staff, set up the business systems, and then waited for the customers to roll in. After all, the competing operations on the same run were all fully booked. But this operation was an unknown quantity, and before they realized that just being similar to a successful and busy business wasn't enough to succeed, they sailed off into the sunset, empty. Franchisees beware.
Over-estimating the market: Consultants love to sell you spreadsheets that will 'forecast' your income and cash flow. An inventor friend of mine used one of these to persuade himself to produce and sell a new organic nutritional supplement he had developed. His research showed that the annual sales of this type of product North America-wide was $X billion. The spreadsheet encouraged him to plug this number in, along with his estimate of what share of this market he could capture over three years. Needless to say, he never sold anywhere close to this amount of product, because that's not how you go about forecasting sales.
Being too far ahead of or behind the market: A client of mine bought the North American rights to a new technology that would extrude a rugged, colour-fast plastic that could be used in decking, fencing, and other outdoor applications. He spent a fortune setting up the manufacturing plant. Problem is, he did this in the 1980s, when plastics were distrusted as 'cheap', wood was cheap, and creosote in pressure-treated lumber was not yet known to be a carcinogen. Being 10-15 years ahead of the market cost him his life savings.
Biting off too much: A company that I was brought in to help liquidate had been doubling its sales and employee headcount every nine months. They were providing turnkey computer networking equipment and installations to mid-size companies, and had recently moved upscale to large corporations, school boards and government departments. As its receivables and inventories soared, it started paying more money for qualified talent, and its suppliers and bank both put it on short leash. Finally, despite record monthly sales, it simply ran out of cash. The owner turned down two very opportunistic 'investors', who wanted control of the business in return for working capital, and the bank pulled the plug.
Not listening to the customer, or offering a solution in search of a problem: A lot of entrepreneurs are inventors, scientists, artists, artisans, administrators, teachers or managers. Sales is not their forte, and they're more comfortable working with ideas, materials, plans or systems than with those pesky people called customers. If you're not at home spending a lot of face time with customers, better partner with someone who is. If you want to see what happens if you don't, just browse any of the free software sites on the Web and see how many downloads most of them have. Some of them are quite intriguing, but because they don't meet a customer need, they'll never be more than that. Great prescription for a hobby, deadly for a business.
Not consulting with or listening to the right advisors: A client of our firm in the early 1990s, a company which had been in the commercial printing business for 80 years, brought us in for some technology and corporate finance consulting. As we learned about the business it became obvious, first, that they could not afford the new equipment they proposed to buy, and secondly, that their profit margins were going through the floor. They had built their reputation on high quality printing work, but the market was no longer willing to pay for it. The new equipment would allow them to automate and eliminate some labour costs (and keep up with newer competitors with no sunk costs), but the cost of the new equipment would exceed the savings. We advised the company they needed to find some new markets, new higher-margin products, and new customers who would pay more for their quality work, or else drastically cut costs. They were convinced their customers would stay loyal, and the market for quality printing would rebound. They didn't, and the company shut its doors two years later.
Blowing the budget: As most women will tell you (but many men seem unable to fathom), budgeting is simply a matter of ensuring that the cash going out doesn't exceed the cash coming in. The problem is, every start up costs more -- sometimes two or three times more -- than initially expected. It takes enormous self-discipline, patience, pacing, and sometimes financial creativity, to mete out dollars at a rate that will ensure there is enough cash to launch the business under the worst case scenario. I know of a dozen businesses that closed before they opened because they failed to do so, and others that lost control of their business unwillingly because that was the price for a late cash infusion. 'Risk Capital' might be more accurately called 'Heartbreak Capital' -- it is obscenely expensive.
Groupthink: Back in the 1970s I was appointed Deputy Receiver for a computer and peripherals distributor. They had been put on 'close watch' by the bank, and I had to get authorization for, and sign, every cheque. While I was there I attended and took notes at management meetings. I was assailed at each meeting when I presented my factual reports on profit and cash flow. I was nicknamed The Undertaker for my 'relentless pessimism', and almost physically ejected when I questioned the validity of some unsupported fees that had been paid by the much-loved CFO, who was on leave of absence looking after a very sick relative. The six-man management team, intact since the start of the company and each heavily personally invested in the company, used to come out of their meetings with cheers and high fives, confident, contrary to all logic, that the company was poised for turnaround and sales 'in the pipeline' would soon bring a return to happy days. They would feed off each others' boundless optimism. They just needed to work harder. Happier days never came, and the CFO, it turns out, had defrauded the company to pay for his relative's substantial medical bills.
Litigation: A small biotech company whose CEO I met at a conference a few years ago was bemoaning the huge cost of registering and defending patents. He said they had been forced to sell off one promising product to a competitor in order to pay their legal bills to defend their other intellectual capital. That had slowed them down to the point they now feared that another competitor would beat them to market, rendering the results of the litigation largely moot. Big companies can afford armies of expensive lawyers. For small companies, significant litigation can spell disaster. The competitive advantage of the entrepreneur is agility -- when products get mired in legal wrangles, it may be better to cut bait and move on to other ventures than to fight adversaries with much deeper pockets in court.
Buying the MBA hype: Graduates of business school are taught how to be middle managers of large enterprises. Unfortunately, that knowledge often don't translate well to entrepreneurial businesses. A client of mine brought in a young, very successful MBA grad (he had his own daily spot on one of the local radio stations), who had, it appeared, no experience at all with entrepreneurial business. The company, which was modestly profitable, bought the young man's well-delivered 'grow or die' message and decided to 'go upscale'. They spent a small fortune on advertising, and set up a sales office and warehouse in another country. Unfortunately, the media in which the ads appeared were not the ones used by the company's customers, and there was not enough money to properly penetrate the foreign market. The expenses produced almost no growth and almost sank the company. They salvaged the situation, and their business, by finding an enterprising competitor in the foreign country who took over the hemorrhaging 'branch plant', and then striking a reciprocal marketing alliance with them.

Many entrepreneurs I know feel very lonely, exposed, and helpless. The big consulting firms aren't interested in them until they grow bigger or go public. The smaller firms are selling one or two specific products, and rarely have entrepreneurial skills to share. And these suppliers are expensive. The government is cheaper, but with a few notable exceptions they aren't very helpful either. As a result, many entrepreneurs have formed their own 'support groups', helping each other to avoid the landmines, and learning from each other's experiences and failures. Retired entrepreneurs are another good source of advice, and a quarterly business breakfast with a trusted entrepreneur or advisor with some experience in the trenches can be an excellent investment. These breakfasts don't need an agenda -- they're run as an informal 'interview', with the advisor asking pertinent, open-ended questions and listening and offering counsel and options and ideas. They are a critical element of what my new business, The Caring Enterprise Coach, offers.

Another technique entrepreneurs can employ to alert themselves to potential landmines is establishing an Advisory Board made up of people who have well-rounded business experience, knowledge of markets, and skills the entrepreneur and his partners lack. Such Advisory Boards are often reciprocal, offering mutual support and advice in lieu of fees. I am constantly surprised how few entrepreneurs use such 'support groups', relying instead on their own instincts, the counsel of inexperienced and costly 'professional advisors', and others (bankers, customers, franchisors, and various 'agencies') who have only a nominal, and purely financial, interest in the entrepreneur's success. Some 'support groups' and networks have been set up as money-making ventures, but these tend to be unwieldy and their members terribly needy -- ten people looking for advice and new customers for every one capable of offering useful information or counsel in return. It's best to create your own.

The problem, of course, is that most entrepreneurs are paradoxically too busy fighting fires and avoiding landmines, to be able to invest time finding and networking with support groups and other valuable advisors who can help them avoid the next round of fires and landmines. But, despite the failings of the first generation Social Networking tools, such tools hold enormous promise. Although Shoshana Zuboff coined the term The Support Economy to refer to federations of businesses working together to support their shared customers, the first true Support Economy may well be entrepreneurs supporting each other.

THE VICIOUS
CYCLE OF ILLIBERAL 'DEMOCRACY'

THE VICIOUS
CYCLE OF ILLIBERAL 'DEMOCRACY' 03/06/2004 02:08 AM

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.

THE
POPULATION STRESS INDEX, AND SOME
SOLUTIONS

THE
POPULATION STRESS INDEX, AND SOME
SOLUTIONS 03/06/2004 02:08 AM

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:
scatter chart

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:

	Direct Programs	Indirect Programs
Enabling Rational Choices	Provide full legal rights to women Increase legal age at marriage for women	Promote secular education Promote communication between spouses
Providing Motivation	Payments for not having children Priorities in jobs, housing, education for small families Community improvements for achievement of low birth rate Higher taxes for each additional child Higher maternity and educational costs for each additional child ("user fees")	Economic development Increased educational opportunities for women Increased labor force opportunities for women Peer pressure campaigns Lower infant and child mortality rates Child labor laws Compulsory education for children Peer pressure campaigns
Making Means Available	Legalize abortion Legalize sterilization Legalize all other forms of fertility control Train family planning program workers Manufacture or buy contraceptive supplies Distribute birth control methods at all health clinics Make birth control methods available through local vendors Establish systems of community-based distribution	Public campaigns to promote knowlege and use of birth control Politicians speaking out in favor of birth control

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):
war deaths map

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.

THE STOCK
MARKET AS PONZI SCHEME

THE STOCK
MARKET AS PONZI SCHEME 05/07/2004 01:32 PM

(Warning: some financial math ahead.)

s&p 500

A Ponzi scheme, named after its early 20th century inventor Carlo Ponzi, is a form of pyramid scheme. Basically it involves selling a nearly worthless security to a small group of investors, with the promise of great returns if they promote the security to more investors, and so on, ideally, forever. Like any pyramid scheme or chain letter, of course, it eventually collapses when it runs out of suckers. The first ones in get rich, and the last ones in (much greater in number) get shafted.

As we all know, the stock market is focused on the short term, and fluctuates wildly in response to a single quarter's earnings, external economic events, even rumour. If you look at it holistically and long-term, however, it has all the markings of a century-long Ponzi scheme, the most lucrative, and potentially most devastating, in history.

Let's take a look at the US S&P 500 as a surrogate for the entire stock market, the entire market for equity securities of listed public corporations. The index goes back to 1917, but was revamped in the 1940s and recalibrated so that the index for the average of 1941-43 was 10. It slowly rose to 100 over the next 50 years, and then to 1000 over the next 12 years.

This broad index earned, in 2003, about $55 per average share of the component securities, using GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles). So at its current level of about 1100, it has a P/E (price-to-earnings) ratio of about 20. That means investors are willing to pay $1100 now for a share that will theoretically 'pay back' $55 next year, and hopefully successively more in future years, to justify the 'present value' of $1100. To think of ir another way, it's like a bank charging you $55 this year, $65, say, next year, and so on for at least 50 years, as 'interest' on a loan of $1100. The 5% interest in the first year isn't very attractive for such a risky 'loan', but since future 'interest' will be dependent on (hopefully rising) earnings, there is the prospect of a very lucrative return eventually.

So the S&P 500, like all equities, is said to 'discount expected future cash flows'. A general rule of thumb says that the P/E ratio approximates the annual expected growth in earnings, so that means the investor in the market is expecting earnings to grow by close to 20% each year, essentially forever. How is that possible? Well, it isn't. Earnings grow because (a) prices increase, (b) costs decrease, and/or (c) volume increases. In a 'free' market economy, prices are determined (theoretically, now) by competition -- new competitors will enter the market, and/or existing competitors will adjust their prices, to the point that their return on invested capital is just high enough to justify the investment risk. That level, in a low-inflation economy where the alternative 'risk-free' investment in GICs and bonds is only 2%, is roughly a modest 7%, with the extra 5% compensating the investor for the risk implicit in equities. And, in the long run, volume can't increase -- there's only so much market for anything, and once it's saturated, earnings should therefore level off at a flat rate.

Let's suppose we've more or less reached that state now. Let's also set aside the fact that the $55 earned last year by the average share is likely considerably inflated -- there are undoubtedly some more undetected Enron-type exaggerations out there in some of these 500 companies, and GAAP allows capitalization of stock options and other near-fraudulent practices that significantly overstate 'true' earnings. Is the $55 a fair return on investment in these companies? To answer that question we need to calculate what the investment is. According to the S&P, this $55 represents a 17% return on investment. In other words, the net assets or 'book' value of the average share is $55/17% or about $325. We already indicated that a reasonable return, given the risk, was 7%, which on $325 would be about $22 per share.

Why are stocks earnings $55 per share when in a 'free' market they should only be earning $22? To answer this we need to look at the three components that make up ROI (or more correctly, return on equity -- ROE). These three components are: Margin (profit/sales), Turnover (sales/assets), and Leverage (assets/equity). Leverage can be inflated by excessive borrowing, which companies can get away with in times of low interest, but which boomerang when interest rates spike. Leverage can also be inflated by stock buy-backs, where the company essentially uses excess cash flow to buy back its own stock and hence increase the value per share of the remaining stock -- but this is a form of cannibalization, and leads to the same imbalance between debt and equity. Neither is sustainable. Turnover can be increased by lowering inventories, factoring and off-balance-sheet financing, but ultimately tops out -- you need to have a certain amount of money tied up one way or another in assets to be able to run an effective business. So you're left with Margin, which ultimately is the only explanation for the enormous ROE of $55/share, when in a free competitive market someone should be willing to accept $22/share.

The truth is that the market, and big corporations, are far from efficient. Many industries are heavily subsidized by governments to the tune of billions of dollars in kickbacks -- er, I mean, support payments -- per year. Big corporations also work as oligopolies to prevent smaller companies from entering their markets and charging more reasonable prices for their products. We, the consumers, are in fact paying $55 for goods and services that could be sold for $22 and would still provide the corporations with a very reasonable return. If and when government subsidies end, oligopolies are broken up, and the market for goods and services truly becomes free and open, the S&P 500 should then generate $22/share each year, a 7% ROE, still an attractive return in a low-inflation economy.

So we have a number of factors at work, conspiring to drive up stock prices in the unsustainable illusion that double-digit growth can and will continue forever, or at least until we're dead and it isn't our problem anymore. We have big corporations earning exorbitant returns, two and one half times a reasonable level given the risk, paid for by the taxpayer and consumer (the same people who then take what's left of their meagre paychecks and invest it, with insane trust in the brokers' unsustainable recommendations, in the stock market). And we have a P/E ratio that is already assuming that these wildly inflated, taxpayer subsidized, price-gouging levels of profit will continue to rise even further, at close to 20% per year, forever. Voilà, Ponzi scheme, par excellence.

Let's do the math. Take the $22 per share that big corporations should be earning per share in a properly regulated and open market. Acknowledge that the assumption that these earnings are going to grow in the future, when markets are saturated, consumers, corporations and governments are already buckling under grotesque and unprecedented debt loads and cannot afford to buy or pay more than they already are. Discount that annual stream of $22 of earnings for 50 years at a reasonable 7% discount rate. Know what you get for the fair value of the S&P 500 with these calculations? About 300. That is what, when you strip out the growth hype, the subsidies, the price-gouging, and the unsupportable P/E valuation, the S&P 500 should be trading at. Not 1100.

Eventually the Ponzi scheme will collapse. There may yet be time to con yet more foolish investors into believing that it will rise from 1100 to 1500 to 2000 or 5000 or higher, and if investors can be duped into believing that's what shares are worth, that's what they'll trade at. This scheme has been running for a century, and made many people millionnaires. But eventually we, or our children or grandchildren, will realize that the S&P 500 should be at 300, and since stocks always trade at what people think they're worth, that's where the S&P 500 will end up. The millions left holding the bag will lose most of their life savings, their pensions, everything.

(Oh, and if you change the assumptions about inflation and interest rates, the above valuation doesn't change. Future values and discount rates both go up proportionally, so the inflation-adjusted present value stays the same.)

Even the brokers can see the writing on the wall. They will now try to convince you that by wise investing you can 'outperform the market' by buying low and selling high, even if the market is ultimately doomed to do no better than go sideways. This is another great variant on a Ponzi scheme. It's the stuff that has hooked the new breed of gambling addicts called 'day traders'. For every investor whose holdings 'outperform the market' there will be, of course, at least one loser. But the magic of Ponzi is that it's always the other guy, the next guy, the not smart enough guy, who will get burned. You'd be better to play slot machines or buy lottery tickets -- at least the potential payout isn't overstated by 250%.

In addition to the perpetual-growth Ponzi scheme, and the 'outperform the market' con, brokers also make scads of money from IPOs -- initial public offerings. As James Surowiecki has elegantly pointed out, the IPO is a scam by which an aptly-named 'syndicate' of investment firms ('underwriters') buy a mass of shares from the company 'going public', at about half the price per share they know they can flog them to gullible investors, many of whom rely on these very brokers for investment advice. They then dump their shares on these investors, knowing that the price will promptly drop back close to the IPO price. The underwriting brokers get rich, and the unsuspecting customers get burned.

That's the reason Surowiecki and others, most recently Lawrence Fisher in yesterday's excellent analysis over at our mother ship Salon.com, have urged Google, potentially the most lucrative IPO of all time, to screw the brokers and either sell all the shares directly to the public by auction, or, even better, not to go public at all, and save the delirious investors the grief they will suffer when they find out Google has no direct line to God, and hence isn't worth a million dollars a share.

Eventually we, or our descendents, will learn (or have no choice but) to 'just say no' to dysfunctional stock markets and all the evils they breed. Until then, we'll continue to be addicted to short-term thinking, the illusion of perpetual growth, paying too much for everything we buy, subsidizing public companies with our taxpayer dollars, downsizing and outsourcing and offshoring as 'productivity enhancement', and putting up with the atrocious greed, corruption and devastation of insatiable global corporations that pull the strings of politicians like puppeteers, all in the name of 'maximizing shareholder value'. It's addictive gambling with a staggering cost, it's insane, and it's fraud.

WHY SERVICE
STINKS: CORPORATE APARTHEID

WHY SERVICE
STINKS: CORPORATE APARTHEID 09/04/2004 03:52 PM

Some articles have a long shelf life. Case in point: This BusinessWeek cover story from four years ago called Why Service Stinks. Bottom line is that, like everything else in the US, and to a lesser (but growing) extent elsewhere in the West, your value as a consumer (and as a citizen) is a direct function of your wealth and your propensity to spend it. So if the computer of the person who's serving you says you're the buying rep for a ten billion dollar company, believe you're going to get great service. But it that computer says you've only bought one thing from them before, and it required service under warranty: "Sorry, we seem to have a bad connection." *click*

This is part of a larger malaise that tries to make us believe, for the benefit of the corporatist aristocracy that owns and runs more of our lives every day, that we are only what we buy. If it's easier for you to buy a replacement for the shoddy item you bought, than to return it or get it fixed, then if you can afford to do so you'll replace it. The vendor will therefore make sure it's easier to buy new than repair or return it under warranty. And if you can't afford to buy a new one, the vendor doesn't want to know you.

Companies know just how good a customer you are--and unless you're a high roller, they would rather lose you than take the time to fix your problem, says BusinessWeek. They explain how companies allocate service reps according to the amount of business they get from each customer group (which is why, for example, corporate Dell customers are routed to one 'help line' while 'retail and home' customers get the Indian help line). They call this practice of triaging customers by wealth and spending habits corporate apartheid and that's a perfect analogy for it. The world in which corporate aristocrats live today is increasingly separated from all contact with the masses: Private chauffeurs, private rooms in private clubs and restaurants, private schools, private jets (and Elite Class perks when they're forced to travel on the same planes as menials), private rooms in private health care facilities. The people who live in this bubble of fawning privilege have no idea what life in the real world is like: they never see it, and they never have to deal with it. This remains my #1 concern with the concept of The Support Economy (though its author, Ms. Zuboff, was gracious in trying to refute this concern in personal correspondence with me): That only the very wealthy few will be able to afford it.

The BusinessWeek article shows that the customer experience is a function of wealth and spending no matter what industry is supplying the product or service: financial institutions, brokerage houses, retailers, machinery manufacturers, phone companies, airlines, insurance companies, you name it. It's no accident that the code for spending volume on many computerized customer information systems is called Status or Class or Value.

A Maytag exec sees nothing wrong with this. People who buy top-of-the-line "not only want more service, they deserve it", he says. If he had been referring to a racial class rather than an economic one, such a remark would provoke outrage.

BusinessWeek foresees a future in which "the service divide may become much more transparent. The trade-off between price and service could be explicit, and customers will be able to choose where they want to fall on that continuum. In essence, customer service will become just another product for sale." So the discrimination will depend not on your wealth or past spending volume, but on what you're willing to pay now for 'superior' service, or to jump the queue. Is that fairer? Do we all deserve the same level of service, or should service depend on what you can afford? Where do you draw the line? In Canada, we (most of us, anyway) consider the idea of the rich jumping the queue for critical medical services to be morally repugnant, but in the US this is accepted as natural, just 'the way things are'. So much for "give me your huddled masses".

I remember a few years ago I was waiting in a long customs and immigration line-up in a sweltering third-world airport terminal at 1 a.m. chatting with the son of the British High Commissioner to that country who'd come in on the same flight. Suddenly, a boy came rushing up to me, asked my name, and then said "Give me your passport." When I looked alarmed, he pointed to a mezzanine gallery where the friend who was meeting me on my arrival was waving and nodding. The boy took my hand, walked me to the front of the long line, whispered in the ear of the customs agent, and I was whisked through, no questions asked, and into my friend's waiting car. "In this country, it's who you know, not how much money you have, that counts", she said. I was embarrassed and astonished. But is this any worse than the system that rushes first-class airplane passengers in many cities through shorter, less confrontational customs and immigration line-ups?

Call me naive, and idealistic, but all kinds of apartheid offend me. The wealthy and the connected don't deserve any better service than the rest of us. To the corporations that believe that service should depend on what the customer's 'worth', and the rest should either self-serve or go away, my response is: Welcome to my Boycott List. Good-bye.

DISASTROUS
US EMPLOYMENT REPORT FOR FEBRUARY

DISASTROUS
US EMPLOYMENT REPORT FOR FEBRUARY 03/06/2004 02:08 AM

Even the pessimists didn't expect the horrendous February employment report issued by the labour department today. Employment grew by an insignificant 21,000 people, compared to the increase in the labour force of 150,000, and the forecast just last month from Bush's office that between 2.6 million and 5.0 million net new jobs would be created this year. As I promised, I'll be tracking this each month.

But it's even worse if you read the whole report. The entire increase in February was a result of hiring by federal and state governments. Private sector employment actually declined. And the labour department also admitted they had overstated January's and December's employment growth numbers by 15,000 and 8,000 respectively. So total US employment at the end of February was actually 2,000 people less than last month's reported number.

In light of record profits by many large corporations in recent months, no one should have any illusions that Bush's tax cuts for the rich will ever somehow 'trickle down' to the rest of the people. This data shows that profit growth is now occurring entirely on the backs of American workers, and from 'productivity' improvements due to downsizing, outsourcing and offshoring. Big corporations are already gouging as much revenue from struggling American consumers for their overpriced, increasingly imported products as they can, so future 'growth' must come by cutting and exporting jobs.

Not surprisingly, the stock market shrugged off this horrible news, since although it doesn't bode well for consumer buying power, it allows the Fed the excuse to keep interest rates low for another month, keeping the cost of massive corporate borrowing (and the interest cost on the astronomical and still-soaring Bush debt) manageably low. But like everything else in our economy, these stock market levels and interest rate levels are unsustainable. Big bubble ahead.

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EXPOSING THE YOUNG TO NATURE: COULD MODEL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES CHANGE EVERYTHING?

EXPOSING THE YOUNG TO NATURE: COULD MODEL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES CHANGE EVERYTHING?

This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)

EXPOSING THE YOUNG TO NATURE: COULD MODEL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES CHANGE EVERYTHING?

CREATING MODEL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES: SETTING THE EXAMPLE

THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURE, PART ONE

THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURE - PART TWO

THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURE - PART THREE

THINKING LIKE NATURE: WILLIAM MCDONOUGH REDESIGNS THE WORLD

THINKING LIKE NATURE II: AMORY LOVINS RE-INVENTS CAPITALISM

HOW NATURE WORKS AND WHY CIVILIZATION DOESN'T: A SYSTEMS VIEW OF GAIA

THE FEAR OF NATURE

EATING OUR YOUNG

A COMMITMENT TO RADICAL CHANGE

BLOGGING AND PERSONALITY CHANGE

CHANGE YOUR MIND?

THINK GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S ONE WORLD

THE GLOBAL FOOTPRINT STRESS INDEX

PERSONAL CONTENT MANAGEMENT: AN EXPLORATION

DARFUR: A COCKTAIL OF SUFFERING AND GENOCIDE

AUSSIE BREAKTHROUGH ON SOLAR ENERGY?

RED HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR 2005

OUR PERVERSE PLEASURE IN OTHERS' MISFORTUNE

MAKING POLITICS POLITICALLY CORRECT

SALON BLOG DIRECTORY UPDATE - FEB.10/04

ISRAEL VS. PALESTINE: THE INTRACTABLE, ENDLESS WAR

A PRESCRIPTION FOR 'WORK EFFECTIVENESS IMPROVEMENT'

LEADING-EDGE BUSINESS IDEAS

A THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE, AND HOW IT COULD SAVE THE WORLD

NATURAL ENTERPRISE: FILLING AN UNMET NEED

SALON BLOG DIRECTORY UPDATE - APR.10/04

LOVE POLITICS, BY GLENN PARTON

A PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION - PART THREE

GLOBAL WARMING AND THE CRIME OF DENIAL

GOOD, NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION

A PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -PART TWO

THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM'

AVOIDING THE LANDMINES IN ENTREPRENEURIAL BUSINESS

THE VICIOUS CYCLE OF ILLIBERAL 'DEMOCRACY'

THE POPULATION STRESS INDEX, AND SOME SOLUTIONS

THE STOCK MARKET AS PONZI SCHEME

WHY SERVICE STINKS: CORPORATE APARTHEID

DISASTROUS US EMPLOYMENT REPORT FOR FEBRUARY

EXPOSING THE YOUNG TO NATURE: COULD MODEL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES CHANGE EVERYTHING?

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EXPOSING THE
YOUNG TO NATURE: COULD MODEL INTENTIONAL
COMMUNITIES CHANGE EVERYTHING?

CREATING
MODEL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES: SETTING
THE EXAMPLE

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE, PART ONE

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART TWO

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART THREE

THINKING
LIKE NATURE: WILLIAM MCDONOUGH REDESIGNS
THE WORLD

THINKING
LIKE NATURE II: AMORY LOVINS RE-INVENTS
CAPITALISM

HOW NATURE
WORKS AND WHY CIVILIZATION DOESN'T: A
SYSTEMS VIEW OF GAIA

THE FEAR OF
NATURE

EATING OUR
YOUNG

A COMMITMENT
TO RADICAL CHANGE

BLOGGING AND
PERSONALITY CHANGE

CHANGE YOUR
MIND?

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD

THE GLOBAL
FOOTPRINT STRESS INDEX

PERSONAL
CONTENT MANAGEMENT: AN
EXPLORATION

DARFUR: A
COCKTAIL OF SUFFERING AND
GENOCIDE

AUSSIE
BREAKTHROUGH ON SOLAR ENERGY?

RED
HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR
2005

OUR PERVERSE
PLEASURE IN OTHERS' MISFORTUNE

MAKING
POLITICS POLITICALLY CORRECT

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - FEB.10/04

ISRAEL VS.
PALESTINE: THE INTRACTABLE, ENDLESS
WAR

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR 'WORK EFFECTIVENESS
IMPROVEMENT'

LEADING-EDGE
BUSINESS IDEAS

A THEORY OF
KNOWLEDGE, AND HOW IT COULD SAVE THE
WORLD

NATURAL
ENTERPRISE: FILLING AN UNMET NEED

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - APR.10/04

LOVE
POLITICS, BY GLENN PARTON

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART THREE

GLOBAL
WARMING AND THE CRIME OF DENIAL

GOOD,
NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION
-PART TWO

THE BOSTON
TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM'

AVOIDING THE
LANDMINES IN ENTREPRENEURIAL
BUSINESS

THE VICIOUS
CYCLE OF ILLIBERAL 'DEMOCRACY'

THE
POPULATION STRESS INDEX, AND SOME
SOLUTIONS

THE STOCK
MARKET AS PONZI SCHEME

WHY SERVICE
STINKS: CORPORATE APARTHEID

DISASTROUS
US EMPLOYMENT REPORT FOR FEBRUARY