RUNNING OUT OF ROOM, RUNNING OUT OF TIME

Grok Headline matches for RUNNING OUT OF ROOM, RUNNING OUT OF TIME

TIME-SAVERS
FOR BLOGGERS

TIME-SAVERS
FOR BLOGGERS 01/07/2004 01:26 PM

As much as I enjoy blogging, there are times it becomes an ordeal, especially when I am plagued by deadlines or a heavy workload. As I've reported before, being an empty-nester and night-owl allows me to devote 2-3 hours per day to the hobby -- most of the time. When I can't, it shows. How can you maintain a good blog in less time? Here are a few ideas.

Read less. Whether you use 'push' tools (RSS feeds) or 'pull' tools (browsing your blogroll), you're probably trying to read far too much every day. How much of what you read, and see in the news, really matters? I've cut the number of periodicals I read by a factor of 5, and I rely on the people in my blogging and other communities to catch what little I miss as a result.
Read what you do read less often. I used to scan 150 blogs three times a week, and now I read a selected few twice a week, and the rest only every 14 days. One day a week (usually Saturdays, when the blogosphere is quietest) I spend an hour serendipitously scanning my beloved Salon blogs (especially new ones) and specialized online journals.
Filter your reading. Use news filters to capture only articles on subjects that are of particular interest to you. If that still produces too much, narrow the filters until you're down to a manageable volume (for me that's 20 carefully selected articles a day). A good way to tell if you're filtering out important news is, after reviewing the news that makes it through your filters, check out Technorati's Breaking News or Google's Top Stories or the NY Times' Most E-Mailed Stories. Eventually you'll reach a balance between too much and too little, and you'll no longer be a news junkie.
Read faster. On average I read two books a week, and with practice I've learned to speed read. The key to this is focus -- it's said that our mind can process information at ten times the rate most people read, so you need to avoid distractions and mental wandering and 'read with a mission'. And no, that doesn't take the fun out of it -- in fact because my comprehension is higher I think I enjoy reading more than I used to.
Browse faster. Learn to scan through large numbers of articles, long reports and web pages to recognize the 10-20% that is actually worth reading. Use headlines, synopses and abstracts to decide what not to read, and be critical in deciding what to read. Once you know thousands were killed in the Iran earthquake, what further detail is really useful? Who cares what's happening to Michael Jackson, no matter how lurid the headline? Why get worked up about the latest hysterical Code Orange alert? Instead, use the time to read analysis and background on stories that are unsensational but which have longer-term and more important implications for the world, and for you personally.
Be more focused in your writing. Pick a few topics about which you are passionate, that you think others may or should be passionate about, and write mostly about them, rather than writing a little bit about everything under the sun. Evolve your list of topics over time. Be creative and proactive and attentive in what you write about, rather than being reactive so your blog articles are always 'wrenched from the headlines'. That gives you more scope to differentiate yourself from the A-listers, who have the headlines covered, and while that may cost you Google hits it will ultimately draw a more faithful audience. And of course, as you learn in Journalism 101, write about what you know (or at least do your research).
Write faster. Writing courses can teach you this. It's a matter of discipline -- using outlines, starting with your thesis and your conclusion and then logically filling in the rest, being organized, doing your research first, avoiding distractions and not over-editing.
Write more concisely, and if necessary, less often. Tight writing can actually take longer than concise writing, but it will discipline your thinking, and when you get good at it it will save you time, and your readers will appreciate it too. If your writing is really good, you can write less often -- every second or third day -- without losing your audience.
Tell true stories and provide live, first-hand reports. Write looser. That's not a contradiction of #8. True stories tend to write themselves and require less discipline to recount, and they're engaging to read and they're unique -- no one else can tell your story. (Invented stories are harder, however.)
Split the workload with other bloggers. You can join a group blog like Radio Free Blogistan has become, or you can simply agree with some other bloggers interested in the same things that interest you, to focus on different aspects of the subject and cross-link to each others' blogs. That requires you to write less and brings you readers from the other blogs.
Narrow your audience. If you focus on a narrow group of potential readers, like those interested in Harry Potter or the South Beach Diet, you can develop truly rabid fans, and make it much easier to decide what to write about.
Learn to type properly.
Budget your time. If the time you're spending (or think you should be spending) blogging has you stressed, maybe your blog has become a Quadrant III activity. Time to revisit the purpose, and budget time for your blog, so it either becomes more important or less urgent.
Give yourself time to think, to experience offline, and to think creatively. This is the most important time-saver of all. Don't just react to what you read and see in the news. Get away from reading and your computer and other media, take a walk, do things that stimulate your creativity and give you unique material to write about, talk to people to get different viewpoints and ideas, clear your mind, think about what's really important to you, what you really believe, what you think needs to be done and said, and then write about that. The time you spend in unencumbered thought will be saved many times over in the process of reading and writing: You'll know exactly what you want to say, your enthusiasm and creative energy will make your writing easier, faster and more entertaining and valuable to readers, and you'll find it much easier to say 'no' to wasting time reading and writing about things that are suddenly much less important.

A TIME TO
WEEP

A TIME TO
WEEP 09/16/2004 03:28 PM

Red line: carrying capacity of Earth with wilderness and non-human life sacrificed; Green line: carrying capacity of Earth with some wilderness and non-human life retained, at historical and forecast average consumption and agricultural productivity levels.

My friend Jon Husband has an astounding ability to harvest the most important writing on the Internet and route it selectively through to his very substantial networks, mostly in person (he really gets around) or by personal e-mail rather than through his excellent blog. In the past week he's sent me four articles I missed, each of which has significantly radicalized my thinking. So today, I'm going to pass on the favour to my readers, with a tip of the hat to Jon.

#1: The Coming Energy Crisis: Stan Goff

In this very long article, Goff deconstructs the myth that solar and wind energy, the 'hydrogen economy', biomass and nuclear power all combined are capable of staving off economic collapse as the availability of hydrocarbons peaks around 2010 (or shortly thereafter, if we allow the oil companies to ravage the rest of earth's wilderness to extend the peak a couple of years) just as the demand for them, especially by the exploding Asian economies, is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Goff tilts rather unseemingly at John Kerry and the Sierra Club for not 'getting it', and some of his sources (e.g. Pimentel's arguments about the efficiency of alternative energy) are somewhat dubious, but for the most part Goff's arguments are sound and compelling. The lessons from history that Goff draws from the work of the late (and invisible on the Internet) British historian Mark Jones are particularly striking. By 2030, Goff argues, per capita energy consumption, as a result of rapidly diminishing supply and continued population growth, will have inevitably declined to 1930 levels, followed by a continued downward spiral over the succeeding century to 'stone age' levels. At the same time the initial effects of catastrophic global warming -- weather disasters, damage from desertification and floods, crop failures and more -- will be ramping up. Goff describes the massive inefficiency of our current urban agricultural-industrial model (use of 90 calories of energy in the US to produce one calorie of food, for example), and the inevitable acceleration of costly and destructive imperialist military adventures to hoard the remaining oil for the countries most dependent on it, at precisely the time when conservation and collaboration to solve this massive problem and try to minimize its effects -- mostly through conservation (rationing) -- are most desperately needed. Modern agriculture, which, as Richard Manning has pointed out, consumes more oil energy (in fertilizers etc.) than it produces, will be critically affected, and will itself exacerbate the water shortages, deforestation, ocean life depletion and desertification produced by global warming. After some rambling, Goff gets to the bottom line: (a) The third world cannot be developed, nor can its 'standard of living' (consumption) be raised to first-world levels: There just isn't enough energy and other resources to go around -- it's a zero-sum game, and that means the longer the first-world continues consuming the way it is, the greater the suffering and misery of the third world, and the greater the eco-catastrophe produced by the first-world's extravagant effluent, and (b) The only answer is massive conservation enabled by a social-political revolution, because the powers that be aren't going to give up their power peacefully or willingly.

#2: War Crimes and Imperial Fantasies: Noam Chomsky

In an interview for Alternative Radio, the always-provocative (and sometimes annoyingly condescending) Chomsky suggests that the ideological, imperialist, neoconservative, corporatist agenda that Bush has followed in the past four years, and promises to accelerate in the next four, is nothing new in America. Indeed, he says, it has been the basis of US foreign policy without interruption since the end of WW2, under both Republican and Democratic regimes. It's just that before we weren't told about it. In dozens of countries around the world, the US has tortured and killed thousands, toppled democratic governments, destroyed economies and wrecked social systems. He argues that there has been a decades-long media-supported campaign of disinformation, denial and cover-up to conceal news of America's murderous and anti-democratic adventures abroad -- but just from Americans. No surprise, then, that the rest of the world 'hates' America and Americans don't understand why. He goes on to argue that what Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex" -- in his surprising and oft-quoted warning about his fears of its dangerous influence over political affairs -- is the "core of the modern economy", and that most government programs are designed to "socialize costs" -- to let taxpayers pay for them and take the risks if they fail, and corporations reap the benefits. There will be no significant change in US foreign policy no matter who is elected in November, he says, but the election will have important ramifications for domestic policy. "They [the Bush people] want to destroy the whole array of progressive achievements of the past century. They've already more or less gotten rid of progressive income tax. They're trying to destroy the limited medical care system. The new pharmaceutical bill is a step towards that. They're going after Social Security. They probably will go after schools. They do not want a small government, any more than Reagan did. They want a huge government, and massively intrusive. They hate free markets. But they want it to work for the rich. The Kerry people will do something not fantastically different, but less so. They have a different constituency to appeal to, and they are much more likely to protect some limited form of benefits for the general population." So Chomsky says it's important to get out and support Kerry, as a first essential step towards a longer-term and more fundamental reform of the US political and economic system to restore democracy, end imperialism, and repair America's reputation in the world.

#3: The Death of Progressive Values: George Lakoff

In a lengthy interview, Lakoff urges progressives to wake up and see what's happening before the well-oiled and well-orchestrated neocon propaganda machine wins an inexorable share of the hearts and minds of Americans. You can't persuade people who have bought into the compelling conservative mindset by arguing within their 'frames', he says. You need to 'reframe' the discussion to appeal to people's values by showing and teaching that it is progressive values, principles, and policy directions that have made America great. (A policy direction is something like "Let's have a sustainable environment" and "Working people shouldn't be living in poverty" and "Everybody should have health care.") These principles, not programs and platforms, are what people, including most conservatives, buy into, and if progressives talked about them they would reframe political discourse to their advantage, instead of getting hopelessly mired in conservative frames around 'family values', good vs evil, etc. And progressives need to go on the attack, not against conservative principles, but against the legacy of conservative administrations that have failed to deliver what they promised: "When they have a case to be made on the basis of a pattern of behavior, progressives don't tend to use a grammar that really nails the message, like 'We're weaker in education, and here's why. We're weaker in security, and here's why.' You could write this argument in half a page." Likewise, the discussion on tax cuts should be reframed as a discussion on cuts to investment in our future. People, he says, also need to be educated that business gets far more benefits from government infrastructure and investment than they're paying for in corporate taxes, and that simply isn't fair. And progressives should not even talk about the "war on terror" or other purely metaphorical, unwinnable wars, but should reframe the discussion around how the actions of conservative administrations have weakened the country, made people more vulnerable, destroyed global alliances, endangering troops, and mired the country in costly, damaging, needless wars.

#4: A Time to Weep: Theodore Sorensen

In this brief commencement address, the former JFK aide, laments the "mean-spirited mediocrity" of an America that has begun to decline, and which has destroyed its moral authority -- its greatest weapon against terrorism. Thanks to incompetent, ideologically-driven leaders, he says, the world no longer trusts America to be honest, to keep its word, to respect global values of peace, caring for others, justice, truth, human rights, fair-mindedness, civility. "We are no longer the world's leaders on matters of international law and peace. After we stopped listening to others, they stopped listening to us. A nation without credibility and moral authority cannot lead, because no one will follow", he says. He points out the irony of being accused, and with good reason, both of reckless and imperialist interventionism (in Iraq) and of isolationism (in Sudan and elsewhere) -- Evidence, he says, of atrociously immoral judgement. He concludes with a reminder that the Islamic world had universities and observatories long before the West had railroads, an unsubtle reminder of the dangers of ignorance of the lessons of history. It's an interesting speech in the context of Lakoff's comments, above. Despite its eloquence, Sorensen's speech is largely preaching to the progressive choir, and unlikely to move conservatives who, not understanding his frames, won't even understand where he's coming from.

All of this is very discouraging. It is easy at times to yield to the temptation to wallow in despair, to succumb to the seduction of hopelessness and depression that at least briefly relieves us of the awful responsibility for fixing this horrendous mess. As someone who has dealt with depression all my life, I don't blame those who give up the fight -- they tried their best, and that's all you can ask from anyone. For the rest of us, we can and must fight on. Nothing less than the survival of our planet is at stake. And while our success is far from certain, there is reason for optimism. And as TS Eliot said in Four Quartets:

So each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate -- but there is no competition --
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Most important -- Be good to yourself. We all need to stay healthy for the hard work ahead.

Jon is looking for beta testers for his organization's new information aggregation and publishing tool, which appears to have some of the functionality I was calling for in my Personal Knowledge Management post. If you're interested, you can sign up here.

TOOL
TIME

TOOL
TIME 01/27/2004 01:46 PM

There are several new and improved tools available that make blogging a bit easier:

Technorati, the tool that tells you how many inbound blogs link to your blog, has now released its beta of its improved version -- faster loading, better looking. The old version is no longer spidering for new inbound blogs, so if you want to see where you stand go to the beta page. Technorati also includes the valuable Interesting Recent Blogs list (smaller blogs getting an unusual amount of attention, and why) plus Breaking News (hottests memes in the blogosphere today). They're not yet moved over to the new beta yet. For status on the changeover and other interesting info on the blogosphere, blogroll Technorati founder David Sifry's Alerts.

Next up is David Winer's Share Your OPML, a tool that will answer the question "Who subscribes to my blog's RSS feed". It also lists the Top 100 most RSS-subscribed blogs, and How to Save the World briefly made the list, but now I'm hovering just under the cutoff point. Some other cute tools worth exploring as well, like a page showing all the graphics in the Top 100 blogs in the last two days.

Finally, quite a few bloggers are using Bloglines, a "a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. You can read the latest entries easily within Bloglines". I haven't tried it yet, but it looks interesting.

And if you haven't already discovered Blogstreet, which ranks the Top 500 blogs in different ways, and the Waypath Buzzometer, which tracks how often different words and phrases are appearing in the blogosphere, you owe it to yourself to check them out too.

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.

DEALING WITH
GRIEF: UNPROFESSIONAL ADVICE

DEALING WITH
GRIEF: UNPROFESSIONAL ADVICE 06/03/2004 05:25 AM

I've written twice before about suicide, and a new 'advice column' in Salon.com has provoked me to write about it again. The gist of my earlier articles:

Depression is a 'natural' consequence of stress, and, as the illustration above shows, it is somewhat self-reinforcing: our DNA programs us, in situations of intense or chronic stress, to flight or flee, and if neither of those works, to shut down, withdraw, give up -- and suicide is one manifestation of shutting down and giving up;
If you haven't lived with the Noonday Demon, you can't possibly know what it's like, and you can't possibly know how it can lead someone to take their own life; and
Moral judgement of those who commit suicide is repugnant -- no one has the right to tell another human being that their personal decision to terminate their own life is 'cowardly', 'irresponsible', 'lazy', "petulant', 'immature', 'self-pitying' 'self-indulgent', 'murderous', or 'cynical and cruel'. To call someone who commits suicide a 'self-murderer' is indistinguishable from and as morally reprehensible and outrageous as calling a woman who terminates an unwanted pregnancy a 'baby murderer'.

So you will probably not be surprised to learn that I was horrified to hear Salon 'advice columnist' Cary Tennis encourage a survivor of a friend's suicide to hate and blame the one who took his own anguished life. Hate-mongering offends me at the best of times, and to see it espoused against those suffering a dreadful and incapacitating illness is disturbing. Here are two especially offensive excerpts:

Sentimentalizing suicide only encourages others who, weak-minded, pained, lacking the ability to see how foolish and wrong it is, might succeed all too well in their feeble attempts.

When they go by suicide, they leave us in an insult of dust.

What fucking gall, Mr. Tennis -- and such cruel and inflammatory language. Those who commit suicide are not weak-minded, and if this 'advice columnist' had the faintest inkling what it is like to live with suicidal depression he would know better. And who the hell does he think he is to judge the actions of someone he has never met as 'foolish and wrong'?

Mr. Tennis should also know that suicide is almost never an 'insult' to anyone. It is an act of desperation, usually after years of unimaginable suffering, to escape a living hell that the victim -- yes, victim -- can no longer bear. It usually has nothing to do with anyone else, so the last thing it is is an insult to others.

To counsel people, especially people in pain after an unexpected and shocking loss, to hate and blame the deceased is an affront to human dignity, an abuse of trust, and an offense to the memory of someone who was a victim, not a 'murderer'.

There is a perverse character flaw in some people to always assuage grief by transferring it to anger and blame. Grief is internal, and it can eat you alive. Anger and blame are externally focused. They are much easier emotions to handle. And in some cases -- like rechanneling the grief over 9/11 into anger at Osama bin Ladin -- such transferance is quite rational. But although the exploitative 'vengeance' religions would have you believe otherwise, when people suffer and die there is often no one to blame, no one to get angry at. And reaching closure, like dealing with grief, is an internal process. It is about personally coming to grips with loss, with the realization that the toxic 'what might have been' is irrelevant, a fiction, closed. It is a slow, painful healing process. And it is a process best undertaken honestly. Using some cheap trick like transferring the pain to anger and blame of a phony straw man merely perverts and delays the process, and stirs up inappropriate emotions that can only confuse and inflame, not heal.

Some advice, we're better off without.

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.

CANADA HEADS
INTO POLITICAL CHAOS

CANADA HEADS
INTO POLITICAL CHAOS 06/13/2004 10:15 AM

Two weeks ago I reported on the upcoming June 28 Canadian election, and predicted that there would be a Liberal minority government, with the NDP holding the balance of power. Since then, groupthink has taken hold, and the anger that many Canadians feel about the incompetence of the federal Liberals to detect either wasteful spending or the 'sponsorship' fraud by some government workers, plus the anger of many Ontarians about the new Provincial Liberal government's reneging on promises to avoid tax increases, has led another 8% of Canadians to vow not to re-elect them. This 8% swing has been predominantly older men in Ontario, who seem unwilling to believe that the Conservatives are as right-wing as Liberal Prime Minister Martin has portrayed them, and younger people, whose support for the Green Party has significantly increased.

The province-by-province projections now stand as follows -- 155 of the 308 seats are needed for a majority:

	Liberal	Conservative	NDP	Green	Bloc Québecois
West - 95 seats	27 (28%)	55 (40%)	13 (22%)	0 (10%)
Ontario - 106	48 (35%)	51 (38%)	7 (21%)	0 (6%)
Québec - 75	15 (30%)	0 (10%)	0 (8%)	0 (2%)	60 (50%)
Atlantic - 32	17 (36%)	11 (32%)	4 (26%)	0 (6%)
Total - 308 seats	107 (32%)	117 (33%)	24 (18%)	0 (6%)	60 (11%)

Next week we'll hear the all-important leader debates, but they are likely to change nothing. The Conservatives are muzzling their own right-wing extremists, who are virulently anti-abortion, gay-hating, anti-gun control, anti-immigation, pro closer ties with the US, anti-Kyoto accord, and militaristic (Stephen Harper, the new Conservative leader and former head of a Western separatist party, wanted Canada in the Iraq war). The Conservative strategists are determined to portray Harper as a moderate, despite the fact that he is on record as having taken right-wing positions on many social, economic and environmental position. If this sounds a lot like Dubya, and the spin doctor white-washing of his extremism reminds you of 'compassionate conservatism' in 2000, it should, because the tactics are the same -- say anything to get elected, and then trot out the real agenda of the people who paid for the campaign.

But it's even more frightening than that. Small-c conservatives make up only 30% of Canadians, and the capital-c Conservatives are already above that point, with some of their voters coming from angry liberals. But if the figures above don't change, the Conservatives will get 38% of the seats with 33% of the vote. And the Bloc Québecois, the Québec separatist party that runs candidates only in that province, will get 19% of the seats with only 11% of the vote. Add them together and you get a distortion almost identical to what happened in the US in 2000, where Dubya 'won' with only 46% of the popular vote. If the Conservatives and Bloc combine their seats in a strange-bedfellows anti-federalist coalition, they'll have 57% of the seats with only 44% of the votes, while liberal-centrist parties will have only 43% of the seats, even though they will have received 56% of the votes. There is no other coalition that would have enough seats to form a government.

Problem is, this coalition won't hold for more than a few months. The Bloc is a left-wing, Francophone party, liberal on all social, economic and environmental issues. The Conservatives have diametrically-opposed views on every issue but one: their dislike of federalism. The cost of Bloc support would be to grant Québec limited sovereignty, kind of 'independence light'. The very idea of this is repugnant to core Western Conservatives. And the Bloc has already said that it would not support any Conservative government that tried to recriminalize abortion, and has made it clear that it would not tolerate abandoning Canada's support for the Kyoto Accord, or anti-gay laws, both of which are bedrock principles of the Western Conservatives. And Ontario Conservatives would quickly cross the floor to the Liberals to save their political skin if the Bush-style right-wing social agenda of the Western Conservatives was trotted out.

The role of the media in the final two weeks of the campaign will be interesting. Conservative media are likely to present Harper as the 'heir-apparent', the surprise winner and a fresh new face for Canada. Liberal media will be torn over whether to simply relate the campaign stories as they are spun out by the parties, or to go behind the scenes and surface what Harper has said, in writing, in past, on many issues he is now trying to paint himself as moderate on. The current Liberal campaign has attempted to do just that, but it has backfired, being portrayed as negative 'US-style' electioneering, sour grapes or desperation politics, so the liberal media could be subject to similar admonishments if they get proccupied with the 'secret agenda' of the Conservatives. But media being what they are, expect Harper, the new frontrunner, to face increasing heat over unanswered questions from his decidedly non-moderate past. Not to mention some of his decidedly wacko neophyte candidates.

So what do I think will happen? The Conservatives will win a small plurality, and have to either form a coalition with, or try to manage with the tacit support of, the Bloc Québecois. Paul Martin will resign right after the election, and the Liberals will choose a new leader not tainted by the recent scandals. The Conservatives will start to self-destruct right after the election, with hard-line right-wingers expelled or resigning, and moderates crossing the floor to the Liberals, especially after it selects a new leader. The new government will last 3-6 months, accomplish nothing, and fall when the Bloc Québecois withdraws its support. Then we'll have another election, and perhaps even a third, until the 70% of Canadians with moderate-to-liberal social and political views get a government they can live with.

Ontario and Québec have 60% of Canada's population, and no party has ever successfully governed the country without healthy support from both provinces. Stephen Harper is on record as opposing bilingualism, although he is now waffling on what his precise position on this is, which makes him unelectable in Québec. And his previously stated positions on many other issues will, if they become widely known, make him unelectable anywhere. It's going to be messy, and stay that way for quite awhile. And if the Martin Liberals hadn't been so politically stupid, it could all have been avoided.

Cartoon by Tom Cheney -- buy his stuff at Cartoon Bank.

A
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.

THE DEVIL'S
BARGAIN: CATASTROPHIC AGRICULTURE

THE DEVIL'S
BARGAIN: CATASTROPHIC AGRICULTURE 07/05/2004 04:02 PM

Figure 1

Richard Manning's book Against the Grain is a remarkable work -- succinct, well-researched, solution-oriented and mind-altering. It's an absolute must-read. Please don't settle for the synopsis below, and don't assume that because it's about the history and economy of agriculture it's a dull read. It's riveting. The issues that Manning describes in the book were first raised in his Harper's Magazine article last winter called The Oil We Eat. But the book goes much further.

In my earlier root-cause analysis of what 'caused' us to invent civilization, to abandon our joyful hunter-gatherer cultures, the cause-and-effect went like this:

Ice age OR Overhunting Scarcity of food. After millennia of easy hunting of big, slow game, man suddenly had to start really working for a living...
Scarcity of foodInvention of agriculture. ...So he invented agriculture; if there wasn't enough food, he's 'make' his own...
AgricultureCivilization. ...But agriculture required division of labour, instruction, hierarchies, and constant fighting with 'pests'...
CivilizationEnd of Virtuous Cycle (Fig. 1 above) and Start of Vicious Cycle (Fig. 2 below). ...And brought with it all kinds of unintended consequences.

But Manning has a more intriguing theory of the first two steps:

Fire, Floods & IceGrain monoculture. After natural catastrophes, hardy grains are often the first plants to reappear ...
Grain monocultureAgriculture. ...Man in areas victimized by these natural catastrophes merely 'discovered' this, and then by creating continuous 'catastrophes' (clearing land with fire, flooding land through irrigation) exploited nature's own regeneration mechanism, which we call 'agriculture'...

The third and fourth steps are the same under both theories. Manning therefore calls what we now practice 'catastrophic agriculture' to differentiate it from the simple tending of 'wild' plants and animals as a secondary source of food by hunter-gatherer cultures without interference with natural cycles. The irony, he says, is that it wasn't scarcity of food that compelled us to invent agriculture, but rather the discovery of over-abundance of food in areas of natural catastrophe that seduced us into it.
Fig. 2

Figure 2

The 'discovery' of grain monoculture in areas of recurring natural catastrophe (like floodplains) was only possible where man was already settled, which only occurred in areas where fish were plentiful, which is where all agricultural cultures began (the birthplaces of civilization) before they expanded and merged into the single civilization culture we know today. Sedentary life, and soft grain gruels, also allowed a higher birth rate, since babies no longer had to be carried for four years until they were weaned -- and the population explosion began. The ability to store food also allowed the provisioning of armies, and the need to keep people from going back to their instinctive hunter-gatherer ways and abandon the farms required the use of force, which required hierarchy and government. The provisioned armies conquered the remaining hunter-gatherers (most notably in Africa and the Americas) and made them slaves on the farms. To keep unnatural hierarchy¹ from crumbling, the governors bribed subordinates with extra resources, larger homes, and their own 'private' land, as long as the subordinates kept the slaves and peasants in line². Wealth, and its inevitable partner poverty, were born. Dependence on monoculture, which failed often, gave rise to the first famines. Average human heights plummeted due to disease and poor, unvaried diet, bone deformities from constant stooping became commonplace, and grain monoculture and crowded villages allowed previously rare diseases to flourish: anemia, arthritis, malaria, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and, finally, plague, all of them unknown before agriculture. And the high-carb diet of grain monoculture also brought with it other new and unnatural phenomena: tooth decay, obesity, diabetes, lactose tolerance, and alcoholism, which devastated many hunter-gatherer cultures when they were suddenly exposed to this deadly and seductive diet. So agriculture was irresistible to man, the ultimate devil's bargain.

By doing so, man threw in his lot with a host of life forms that co-evolved with man and grain monoculture: this 'coalition' included the rat, insect pests, weeds and parasites as well as the aforementioned diseases and a handful of animals suited to domestication, all of which thrive with monoculture. In fact much of the 'conquering' of the hunter-gatherer world by 'civilized' man was really accomplished by our coalition partners: it was our diseases, to which hunter-gatherers had no exposure and hence no resistance, that killed most of them, not our weapons or their years of subsequent slave labour. The introduction of our domestic animals likewise altered the New World's terrain, since these animals had few natural predators and exploded in population, literally eating the natural flora to extinction. Like us, these domestic animals paid the price of civilization -- they are smaller, sicker and poorer than their wild counterparts, but the ultimate test of evolution is endurance, and our unholy coalition has passed that test with flying colours. Humans, members of the six domestic animal groups and the big five monoculture grains, and the rodents, insects, weeds and disease parasites that come with them have all flourished, at least in numbers, together, and together they now constitute a huge and growing proportion of Earth's biomass, while the millions of non-coalition creatures almost all face extinction.

Although our diseases did most of the dirty work, Manning argues that our civilization culture committed systematic genocide against every hunter-gatherer culture on the planet, from the Cro-Magnon man in Eastern Europe (whose language, intriguingly lives on only in the tiny Basque community whose culture is still under siege), to the First Nations of the Americas and Oceania. The result was what anthropologists have called "remarkable cultural homogeneity" and "pathological conventionality". Its sustained hallmark has been ever-increasing famines, the "very badge of civilization". The worst famine ever, and one of the most recent, in Mao's China, killed 80 million people. The second worst, in Russia, was also in the past century. Famine, a sudden and severe shortage of vital resources, breeds hunger, and that always breeds imperialism in turn. The alternative, common and legal in China for millennia until quite recently, is an invention called "Swapping Children / Making Food" -- in times of famine you exchange your children for your neighbour's, and then kill them and eat them and use their bones for fuel. Modern mythology would have us believe that famine is a political problem -- a consequence of bad distribution of food and bad government -- and while this is in part true, famine is ultimately an inevitable consequence of our fragile monoculture and massive overpopulation. This quote, describing one such famine in Ireland, where potato blight in one year eliminated 90% of the monoculture potato crop and hence 90% of the food, has given me nightmares:

In the first hovel, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, and their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning that they were alive, they were in fever -- four children, a woman, and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the details. Suffice it to say that, in a few minutes, I was surrounded by at least 200 of such phantoms, such frightful specters as no words can describe.

All of this because we threw ourselves out of the Garden of Eden, seduced by the lure of uniform plenty. Why and how did we get into this mess, and who is to blame? Manning recaps: "A population explosion generates the need to grow more food, but agriculture is the cause of that population explosion, and agriculture creates the need for government. The hierarchical, specialized societies that agriculture builds are wholly dependent on the smooth operation of their infrastructure, on transportation, on stability. Dams must be built, canals must flow, roads must be maintained and government must be established to order these tasks. Government leaders emerge from the social hierarchy that agriculture's wealth makes possible. Failures are human and inevitable. To hold agriculture blameless and government responsible for famine is like holding a lion blameless for a child's death on the grounds that it was the lion's teeth that did the damage. Poverty, government and famine are co-evolved species, every bit as integral to catastrophic agriculture as wheat, bluegrass, smallpox and rats."

Our solution, of course, was not to blame agriculture, but to try to make it more efficient. Although we now produce a massively excess amount of monoculture food, famines, starvation and poverty remain commonplace. So lately we developed the Green Revolution to increase efficiency of grain production, to increase yields and edible mass per acre and per plant. The theory was that these high-yield crops could be grown closer to the starving. But fifty years later this has not solved the problem, and it has in fact increased the fragility of the system. Plants are now patented, and GM now threatens existing plant species and diversity and their utter homogeneity exposes them to new vulnerabilities as nature evolves new pests and diseases to try to bring back into balance this massive, ecologically unsustainable and undifferentiated surplus. And these higher yields come with a huge price tag. Whereas a calorie of your home-grown carrots requires less than a calorie of non-photosynthetic energy to produce, a calorie of grain requires ten calories of energy to produce³, mostly in the form of Mideast-oil-based, highly processed nitrogen fertilizers poured onto severely and evermore soil- and nutrient-depleted land. Ironically, that fertilizer replaces animal manure, which is no longer economical to truck from the new concentration-camp factory farms (also developed to improve 'efficiency'). So most of the oil-based fertilizer runs off into the water supply, along with massive amounts of pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics and other by-products of 'efficient' agriculture and the mountains of shit from the factory farms, which no longer has commercial 'value'. And if the smell of that shit makes living in the area unbearable, that's fine, too, because Archer Daniels Midland and the other handful of companies that run this entire system can then buy up and concentrate the farms more cheaply. Besides, we don't want nosy 'eco-terrorists' and news media poking around and seeing what really goes on in those factory farms anyway. The cost of this is so phenomenally high that government subsidies now exceed the entire 'commercial value' of the food produced. It's a massive corporate welfare scheme originally designed to keep families on farms and now accruing primarily to the few corporations that control the industry. Taxpayers pay for these corporations to produce and process an absurd excess of bad food and to finance governments who pursue Middle Eastern wars to get the oil needed for fertilizer. And in return the taxpayers get cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, polluted food, monstrous animal cruelty, massive pollution of the air and water, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, alcoholism, ruined land, and unemployment. And still there is famine.

So what are we to do? Manning starts by pointing out what not to do -- try to get government to change the system. "The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because the political system is a creation of agriculture, a co-evolved entity". Of course we should try to end agricultural subsidies, but Manning says we are unlikely to succeed. Vegetarianism can help, but not much: As long as the vegetables come from the same commodity system, they're still causing massive environmental and social damage and animal cruelty. And we couldn't go back to hunter-gatherer culture, at least not in our current numbers, even if we wanted to. But reducing human population is a necessary condition: "I do not take human population as a given; if we accept six billion as inevitable, we are doomed". Beyond that, Manning's solution is the same one that a rising chorus of radicals and revolutionaries is calling for: A walking away from this system and its products, and the creation of a new, healthy culture and economy. To Manning, focused on the food economy, this means:

Eating better: Selecting and eating a wide variety of exclusively organic, fresh, local, delicious, unpolluted, quality, unprocessed, non-factory foods.
Eating less: Since these good foods are unsubsidized and hence more expensive, eating less is economically advantageous, and, for most of us, it is also healthier.
Preparing and cooking your own: Not using processed or packaged foods even if they're organic and/or vegetarian.
Natural gardening: Personally producing your own food without use of any fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides or other unnatural products. Nothing more invasive than a fence to keep out the bunnies. On a larger scale this is called permaculture, and it's growing in popularity.
Supporting small, local farms: Going to farmers' markets, and challenging the vendors and operators to allow only local, unprocessed⁴, organic, small-farm products and free-range, grass-fed meats.

I am writing a book on Natural Enterprise, and its recipe is perfectly suited to small, local, responsible farms. I think we all know that such foods are better for us, and better for the environment and the society we live in. We need some pioneers to start, and teach others to start, Natural Enterprises that can break our deadly addiction to catastrophic agriculture. And the rest of us need, in more ways than one, to go back to the (natural) garden.

In nature there are pecking orders and specialized roles to organize and reduce conflict in communities, but no hierarchy that allows the alpha male, the 'queen' bee, or the bull moose to hog a disproportionate amount of the resources of the community.
Manning hypothesizes there is more reason to believe the Great Wall of China was built to keep the stooped slaves in the rice paddies in, than to keep the hunter-gatherer 'Mongol hordes' out.
A calorie of beef requires over 100 calories of energy to produce, despite the 'efficiencies' of factory farms.
Exception: labour-intensive processed foods are OK if they use only local and organic ingredients e.g. artisanal bakeries, microbreweries

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!

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART ONE

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART ONE 04/13/2004 02:25 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 first part below. The remaining parts will follow on successive Tuesdays.

Introduction: Why I'm Here

My modest objective in this presentation is first, to tell you some new, interesting and useful things about innovation, and, second, to persuade you that innovation is the most important determinant of every business' success, and perhaps even the quality of our lives. I want to convince you that in your business, whether it employs one person or one million, innovation is probably the solution to whatever is currently keeping you awake at night -- whether that be sales growth, cost control, customer satisfaction, employee retention, or maximizing shareholder value.

And if you, like me, spend some of your sleepless hours worrying about things more altruistic than your personal and business success, I want to convince you that innovation is probably also the solution to most of the problems that have befallen our suffering planet, in part because past innovations have created many of these problems.

And finally, if I'm successful in this evangelical task, I want you to leave today not only with renewed hope about the future of your company and our world, but with some new tools to make innovation happen in your business.

I would like to ask you to listen to these ideas with an open mind, suspend briefly your disbelief, and give this your full attention. If this was that easy to explain, someone much smarter than I would have done it years ago.

RUNNING OUT OF ROOM, RUNNING OUT OF TIME

RUNNING OUT OF ROOM, RUNNING OUT OF TIME

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

RUNNING OUT OF ROOM, RUNNING OUT OF TIME

TIME-SAVERS FOR BLOGGERS

A TIME TO WEEP

TOOL TIME

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

DEALING WITH GRIEF: UNPROFESSIONAL ADVICE

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

CANADA HEADS INTO POLITICAL CHAOS

A PRESCRIPTION FOR 'WORK EFFECTIVENESS IMPROVEMENT'

THE DEVIL'S BARGAIN: CATASTROPHIC AGRICULTURE

NATURAL ENTERPRISE: FILLING AN UNMET NEED

A PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION - PART ONE

RUNNING OUT
OF ROOM, RUNNING OUT OF TIME

TIME-SAVERS
FOR BLOGGERS

A TIME TO
WEEP

TOOL
TIME

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

DEALING WITH
GRIEF: UNPROFESSIONAL ADVICE

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

CANADA HEADS
INTO POLITICAL CHAOS

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR 'WORK EFFECTIVENESS
IMPROVEMENT'

THE DEVIL'S
BARGAIN: CATASTROPHIC AGRICULTURE

NATURAL
ENTERPRISE: FILLING AN UNMET NEED

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART ONE