CENTRALIZE/DECENTRALIZE

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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.

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART THREE

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

Four years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation: Creating Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I've updated it, broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the third part below. The first part, which reviewed the history of human innovation and technology, is here, the second part, which described the current environment for innovation, is here.

Six: Prescription for an Innovative Organization

Innov Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen

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

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

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

Understand

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

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

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

Organize

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

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

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

Create

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

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

Experiment

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

Listen Again

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

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

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

Design

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

Implement

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

Seven: Applying the Prescription: Some Examples

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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!

WHY SERVICE
STINKS: CORPORATE APARTHEID

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RED
HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR
2005

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

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

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

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

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

THE BOSTON
TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM'

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

A member of the Derrick Jensen mailing list pointed out a brilliantly-written letter to the editor of a small Virginia community newspaper, describing new laws to increase penalties for 'eco-terrorism', a vaguely defined term which appears to include acts of sabotage to corporate 'property', even if they do no harm to any individual. The law was apparently designed to discourage acts against the property of logging, mining, and factory farm corporations, developers and SUV retailers. Here's the letter in its entirety.

Last week, you used the term "ecoterrorist" with regard to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). A note on semantics: The Department of Defense defines terrorism as "The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence against individuals or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives."

Somehow, burning a bulldozer fails to meet these criteria. Unlawful and ideological, yes. But they intended to coerce corporate entities (United Land, Virginia Land, Kessler Group, Regency Centers, and Dierman Realty Group), not governments or societies.

Do you feel "terrorized" by the loss of the Land Company's trackhoe? Even developer Wendell Wood seems non-plussed. "You can go buy another."

What is scary is how terms like "ecoterrorist," "cyber-terrorist," "narco-terrorist" and "special-interest terrorist" are slipping into our vernacular.

Know this: "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act" legislation was proposed in Texas and New York, to officially label many forms of advocacy as "terrorism." Plus, President Bush's proposed Patriot Act II hopes to broaden the definition of terrorism and make it easier to sentence such "terrorists" to death. Now, who's scaring who?

Indeed, the ELF is the FBI's top priority regarding domestic terrorism. But I, for one, would hope they'd instead focus more on whoever mailed U.S. military-manufactured anthrax and ricin to Congress.

Truth is, most people agree with ELF's intentions. A recent national survey found that two out of three people think the environment is more important than property rights, corporate profits, or even creating jobs.

The ELF usually targets only the most egregious of industrial polluters and ecology-destroying profiteers. Take Nestle's Ice Mountain bottled water, which built a plant in Michigan's Mecosta County (despite a 2-1 resident vote to deny them zoning) and then proceeded to violate state and federal water rights by siphoning from public rivers and streams. ELF activists, after exhausting legal avenues of dissent, tried to blow up the plant.

Is the sprawling Hollymead Center as bad? No. But Richmond's SUVs were arguably an environmental and social menace. Objectively speaking, SUVs kill more Americans than al-Qaeda does.

The last word: There was a time when we had a very different term for those who sabotage avaricious corporations. As John Adams said of the Sons of Liberty who dunked East India Company tea into Boston harbor: "There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity in this last effort of the patriots that I greatly admire."

Brian Wimer

Charlottesville

P.S. This week, Bush's Education Secretary called the National Education Association teachers union a "Terrorist Organization" for criticizing the shortcomings of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. Who's next? Editorialists?

THE VICIOUS
CYCLE OF ILLIBERAL 'DEMOCRACY'

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

In his book The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria argues that democracy cannot be imposed on countries that have no foundation of constitutional liberalism. Without such a foundation, he says, there are not sufficient self-imposed checks and balances to prevent the government from falling victim to a predisposition to nationalistic excess and corruption that political power inevitably brings with it. I've been watching the situation unfolding in Haiti and Venezuela, where once well-intentioned and widely-supported populist governments have fallen out of public favour and are in the process of being overthrown by Western-backed opposition groups.

It occurred to me I've seen this all before, and it's like a bad replay of a vicious cycle that seems to play itself out again and again in most of the so-called third world 'democracies'. I've illustrated it, in over-simplified terms, in the chart above. The boxes in red show the phases of the cycle where nationalists and populists are in power, and those in blue show where pro-Western elites are in power. It's an endless cycle of hope, disillusionment, corruption, cynical foreign interference and despair.

In countries with sizeable resources, like Iraq, the West tends to intervene to short-circult the cycle and replace one pro-Western government, when it gets too corrupt or independent, with another. In countries that are resource poor, like Bolivia, the West tends to ignore the woes of the prevailing governments regardless of their political stripe, using economic restrictions to keep them in line, and allowing prolonged crises to remain unsolved, stalling the cycle where Argentina and North Korea are shown on the above chart. This space is the hardest and most important to move forward from, and it is the space that many African nations have occupied for most of the time since they became independent of their colonizers.

Occasionally, countries break out of the cycle. This usually happens of the country's own accord, on its own schedule, and only once constitutional liberalism has taken root. Chile and South Africa, for example, after each going through a particularly bloody cycle, may have finally had enough. They look, at least for now, to have imposed enough checks and balances on government, and enough institutions of constitutional liberalism, to have escaped the cycle.

In his new book, Forging Democracy, Geoff Eley argues compellingly that democracy is a relatively recent, fragile, and hard-won accomplishment, one that still exists legitimately in very few countries. All it takes is a coup, an invasion by a non-democratic neighbour or a stolen election to take a country out of the virtuous cycle of democracy in the upper left of the chart, and hurl it back into the lower right where the cycle begins all over again. For most of the world, for most of human history, that much power has been just too much to handle.

The message, which Zakaria and many others have made, is that countries without a heritage of democracy and constitutional liberalism need our (non-military) investment, our support and our patience. They do not need oppressive and unrepayable debts or 'free' trade rules rigged in favour of heavily-subsidized Western multinationals. They do not need military intervention or political interference every time they slip, as we all did, on the hard road to democracy, and every time they elect or find themselves ruled by a government whose political and economic ideas are at odds with ours. Let them build their own nations, supported by Western humanitarian and educational aid with no strings attached, and democracy may eventually take hold. Fail to do so, and the cycle will continue forever.

THE
POPULATION STRESS INDEX, AND SOME
SOLUTIONS

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

In order to test Edward Hall's hypothesis< /a> that population stress is the fundamental cause of human violence and war, I decided to see if there was a correlation between the state of civil unrest and the density and growth of human population in various countries around the world. Using data from the FAO, I computed the population per arable hectare of land for each country in the world with at least a quarter of a million people. Then, using data from the Population Reference Bureau, I mapped this to annual population growth rates (%) for these countries. Initially, I produced the scatter diagram shown below:
scatter chart

In this chart, about a third of the countries, those with annual growth rates under 0.5%, are excluded to keep it from being too busy. The overall global population per arable hectare (4.0) and overall global annual growth rate (0.8%) are shown by a large blue dot. The sustainable global population per arable hectare (1.0, per a variety of sources I have cited in earlier posts) and the sustainable overall global annual growth rate (0%) is shown by a large green dot. No country has achieved that sustainable level -- every country in the world has either positive growth rate or a density over 1 person per arable hectare.

Sure enough, the countries furthest from the green ideal point are also, almost without exception, the most violent and war-torn countries. At the far extreme, you find Palestine and Kuwait, with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and most of the MidEast countries close by. In the upper central part of the chart you find most of the war-ravaged sub-Saharan African countries, led by the Congo, with its horrendous and incessant war, Sierre Leone, where militias amputate their enemies' limbs as a symbolic warning, and Rwanda & Burundi, site of the bloodiest massacre of the last half-century. Here, too, you'll find Colombia, where anti-drug spraying and civil war have killed thousands, destroyed the economy and poisoned 80% of the arable land. And you'll find Haiti, site of this week's coup, and several Central American states that have witnessed horrendous warfare in recent years.

I then decided to multiply the two factors -- density and growth -- together to produce what I call the Population Stress Index (PSI). The calculations are shown graphically (I have tables if anyone wants them as well) on the map above: Purple for a PSI over 10 (extreme), Red for 4-10 (very high), Orange for 2-4 (high), Yellow for 0.5 to 2 (moderate), and White for less than 0.5 (low).

If you were to correlate this index against the propensity for violence and war in the past few decades, I think you'd find a nearly perfect match. What's more interesting is that if you repeat the exercise using data from a century ago, you find the major belligerants of the world wars have the highest scores. By the middle part of the last century, China, Vietnam and Korea had exceptionally high scores.

So what can be done to bring annual growth down to, and below, zero, to achieve globally a zero PSI, a situation that today exists nowhere on Earth? In his essay How to Influence Fertility, John R. Weeks, Director of the Population Center at San Diego State University suggests the following programs to reduce population growth, and ultimately reduce global human population to the sustainable level of one billion, no more than one person per arable hectare:

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

It's certainly a solution set worth striving for. I am, however, pessimistic that it's sufficient to overcome the enormous population momentum that I've written about on these pages. Nor do I have much confidence that, when we have an American regime that is hell-bent on banning abortion again, which deprives foreign aid and support to countries and agencies that practice family planning, and which funnels money to religious groups hostile to birth control, there will be enough political will or economic investment worldwide to bring these programs to fruition.

You would think that, when evidence indicates that overpopulation is the key cause of environmental degradation, violence and war, and human suffering, there would be an unstoppable groundswell of support for programs to reduce our population back to sustainable levels. But that's the power of our culture: In the face of irrefutable proof of its folly, we continue to chant the mantra of Growth.

Postscript: 3pm -- Just found this interesting site from Matthew White, who tabulated the death rate from war and atrocities during the period from 1975-2000, and conveniently mapped it like I did the PSI. His colour code is: bright red over 1% of the population (extreme), dark red 0.1-1% (high), maroon 0.01-0.1% (moderate), black under 0.01% (low):
war deaths map

Sure looks like a close correlation to PSI to me. I'll have to go back and plug in his data to my table to calculate the r² correlation coefficient, but I'm willing to bet it's very high.

THE MOST
IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003 - PART ONE

THE MOST
IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003 - PART ONE
01/07/2004 01:07 PM

This is the first of five articles in a series that will be published intermittently this month. This article summarizes what I believe were the most important ideas of 2003 in the world of blogs and blogging. The other articles in the series will propose the most important ideas of the year in:

business,
politics & economics,
arts & science, and
the environment.

BLOGS & BLOGGING -- THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003
process

During the year, the blogosphere doubled in size, and began to mature into a true alternative medium for information and connection. My nominations for the most important ideas of the year* in blogs & blogging are:

The Internet is a World of Ends - Doc Searls and David Weinberger finally explained to bloggers and to e-business what the Internet is and how it works. As a result, bloggers (and blogging tool developers) now realize that there will never be 'standards' for blogs, blog censorship, clear rules on what is and isn't appropriate in citing others' work on your blog, standard blog taxonomy and categories, an official definition or list of blogs, unarguable or untamperable rankings of blog popularity, or controls of any kind. It's a jungle out here. There are no rules. The blogosphere, like the Internet, is owned by no one, open to everyone, and made better by each of us. A cornucopia of unrestricted and open innovation. Its value flowers at the ends, and, fellow bloggers, we are the ends.
Blog popularity is subject to Shirky's Power Law - "In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will always get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), by the very act of choosing". It's the old 80/20 rule. The later you are starting to blog, the harder it becomes to find an audience. Not impossible, just harder. There are anomalies: new blogging communities and new 'hot topics' can allow savvy bloggers to quickly galvanize a readership. But if you want to be popular in the blogosphere, it's more important to be first than best.
Blogs have Tipping Points and manifest the Strength of Weak Ties - Ever noticed how hard it is to get your family and close friends ('strong ties') to read your blog? That's because they see no incremental value in doing so. But friends of friends, people two or three degrees removed from your network, do. Weak ties probably got you your job, found your life partner, provoked your most innovative ideas, and sourced most of your blog's readership. And you can exploit these weak ties to push a new idea, find new readers, perhaps even save the world. It's easy: Just Test the credibility of and degree of interest in what you're saying by sending messages to selected mavens (bloggers who incubate new ideas and stick with them until they catch), A-listers (bloggers who already have a huge audience), and connectors (bloggers, like me, who have an audience that crosses diverse communities of interest); focus on a few subjects and address them profoundly and creatively, instead of talking a bit about everything under the sun; and believe: persevere until your message finds its audience.
Blog functionality is a critical component of Social Networking, and Social Networking will transform blogging (and also transform the Internet, the media, the way we communicate, and even the evolution of business) - Social Networking Applications (recently voted Technology of the Year by Business 2.0 magazine) will go beyond just allowing you to publish what's on your mind and browse what's on other people's. They will allow you to map and manage your networks, the communities to which you belong, your strong and weak ties. They will evolve blogging from clumsy, mostly one-way communication to a rich, two-way seamless multi-media communications medium that will allow you to identify and connect simply and powerfully with people you want to know better (for personal, practical or business reasons). Build deep relationships. Collaborate on awesome projects. Find the next president.
Blogs could be the platform for a proxy for each of us as individuals, our electronic filing cabinet and electronic identity - A blog consists of information about you, and knowledge you've accumulated. What if you expanded it to be a repository for all the information about you and all the knowledge you've accumulated, your 'locked' filing cabinet. You control it, you decide what does and doesn't go into it, and who can have a temporary key to what parts of it. Then at work, it could be your proxy, the repository of knowledge that shows your value to your employer and the value you've added to the company. And it could be your resume. At home it could be your medical patient record. Your bookshelf catalogue and refrigerator/pantry inventory and recipe book. Your bio for the dating service. Imagine the applications that could be built on this knowledge. Your intellectual property, under your control. Amazing. Scary.
The abandonment of 80-90% of blogs is a positive phenomenon - Media who just don't 'get it' have pointed to the abandonment of most blogs as an indication they're too technologically complex, or have no broad appeal, no staying power. What this abandonment really represents is a large number of people deciding that writing really isn't that important to them. The focus should instead be on the 10-20% who are still blogging. That's millions, potentially hundreds of millions of people regularly honing their writing skills, getting valuable commentary from readers on their writing and their ideas. Instead of a wasteland of abandoned effort, the blogosphere (along with perhaps IM) could actually be the most important development in written language since the printing press. As newspaper readership plummets and the next generation opts for oral communications over written, the timing of this phenomenon could not be more significant.
Blogging is increasingly a platform for achieving mainstream recognition - Just as the main readers of most business websites are competitors, not customers, the mainstream media are perusing blogs for new ideas and trends. So far they haven't really caught on to how the blogosphere works, so the process is serendipitous, creating brief fame mainly for A-listers who provide alternative viewpoints to stories of the day where no mainstream media pundits are at hand. But the mainstream media and bloggers are both learning how to use each other. Some bloggers have launched books based on their blogs, and some blogging self-promoters now have columns or spots in regular media. Those who think there's no money and fame in blogging are too quick to judge blogs' importance in the information society.
The culture of blogging is evolving faster than the technology - The frustration of bloggers with the tools available to them is palpable. That's not the tool designers' fault: They operate on a shoestring and their 'customers' all want something different. They'll eventually build tools that are both simple and flexible, as both the technology, and the understanding of its use, mature. In the meantime, impatient bloggers are working around the impediments, learning about HTML and CSS themselves. This is World of Ends innovation at work, producing a proliferation of new blog 'products' and hybrids. Group blogs are one example of a blog phenomenon that will only last until more dynamic mechanisms for cross-posting and guest privileging are developed in next generation blogs. The key is to go with the flow. Be part of the evolution or be left behind.
Blogs, like diaries, are a substitute for intimacy - Bloggers (and perhaps all writers) are a million voices howling in the dark. There is an inherent loneliness in writing, and the blogosphere provides an opportunity to make new connections with little risk. You don't need to reveal your identity. You can throw ideas out there that you might not dare voice face-to-face, for fear of being laughed at, or carted away. You can reveal things to 'strangers' that you might not be willing to tell those close to you. You can think out loud. You can test the waters, safely. The only consequence is that when you meet a fellow blogger or reader face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice, it can be psychologically jarring. It's almost as if you've broken the rules.
RSS is blurring the distinction between blogs and other media - RSS, the ability to syndicate your posts and let people subscribe to them, transforms the metaphor of a blog from a diary to a publication. That crosses the main divide that separates it from mainstream media. Although the future of any medium is impossible to predict, I believe RSS has played a pivotal role in forestalling, and perhaps completely subverting, the plan of many of the major print media to start charging money for their on-line editions. I know for a fact that was in the cards as recently as a year ago.

What do you think? Have I missed some important ideas?

* Yes, I know some of these ideas are themselves not new this year. There is nothing new under the sun. But I would argue that the application and implications of these ideas were first manifest some time in 2003

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.

THE
KNOWLEDGE CONSULTANT AS
STORY-GATHERER

THE
KNOWLEDGE CONSULTANT AS
STORY-GATHERER 07/26/2004 02:34 PM

Dave Snowden has a lot of nerve. The founder of the IBM Cynefin Centre doesn't stop at saying that collecting 'best practices' and most other accepted Knowledge Management activities are largely fruitless (he makes an exception for standard practices in highly prescriptive jobs, and proven, authorized practices in high-risk and high-security situations). He is almost as disdainful of many of the idealistic goals of Personal Knowledge Management -- helping front-line workers to do their jobs more simply and effectively and to find experts they can draw on and network with. If the tools to do PKM aren't adequate, he maintains, the answer is to create better tools, not show people how to use deficient ones (and creating tools is IT's job, not KM's). One of the things he thinks KM should be doing is helping management understand and lead their organizations more effectively. Management is, after all, the group paying for organizations' KM activities, and a group that is, in most organizations, far from happy with what KM has delivered. Snowden argues that the best way for KM to help management is to be a kind of 'cultural anthropologist' in the organization you are working in or advising.

One of the ways anthropologists study and understand tribes is by listening to and gathering stories. Analogously, Snowden says, it's important that KM people get out and spend time on the front lines really understanding what the organization's real stories are -- not the ones that appear in the mission statement or the company newsletter, which say what management wishes the company culture was, but the peer-to-peer stories that truly define the organizational culture, drive what people really believe and do and how they act, and make the company, for better and for worse, what it truly is. To gather those stories, you must be as honest as an anthropologist, not try to do it surreptitiously, because people only tell the real stories to people who have gained and earned their trust. Snowden has developed very sophisticated and rigorous processes for doing so, which he details in his 'masterclass' called Using Narrative in Organisational Change,, which you can now buy on CD-ROM.

In Thomas King's book The Truth About Stories, King argues that if you want to change a culture, you need to change its story, because that's all a culture is. I don't know that Snowden would disagree, but he would argue, I think, that changing an organization's real stories is not so easy. That's why mission statements don't work -- they're wishful thinking, myths that management would like to believe everyone buys and is motivated by, but really aren't. If you're in management, he says, you don't change the stories, he says, you understand them, then you act on them, and then you make them your own, retelling them in your own way so that you show the people in the front lines of the organization that you understand the real culture of the organization (and the real problems of front-line workers). In so doing you harness the astonishing power of 'true' stories.

Snowden is acutely aware of the overt class distinctions in Britain that make trust, and hence collecting stories, hard to achieve. While some of us in Europe and North America might argue that our class distinctions are not as formidable barriers as they are in the UK, I think this would be a mistake. Americans, I have observed, make a great effort to pretend that class distinctions don't exist or are permeable, by allowing everyone to use first names, for example, when in fact the hierarchies are at least as strict as they are in the UK. The only real difference is that the determinants and clues of status are subtler -- a bit more tied to wealth and the circles you move in and a bit less pre-determined by heredity. But trust is still deepest peer-to-peer and extremely hard to earn and sustain between management (or their henchman consultants and head-office lackeys) and front-line people. That is perhaps why management is in a constant quandary over decentralizing -- it clearly improves productivity, innovativeness, morale and work effectiveness, but it allows people that management doesn't really trust more control and autonomy, and perhaps even allows them to develop -- heaven forbid -- their own organizational culture. The reality, as Snowden argues, is that management is never in charge of organizational culture, that people behave the way they do partly because they've learned it's the most effective way to do their uni

CENTRALIZE/DECENTRALIZE

CENTRALIZE/DECENTRALIZE

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

CENTRALIZE/DECENTRALIZE

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

A PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION - PART THREE

NATURAL ENTERPRISE: FILLING AN UNMET NEED

WHY SERVICE STINKS: CORPORATE APARTHEID

RED HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR 2005

THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM'

THE VICIOUS CYCLE OF ILLIBERAL 'DEMOCRACY'

THE POPULATION STRESS INDEX, AND SOME SOLUTIONS

THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003 - PART ONE

DEALING WITH GRIEF: UNPROFESSIONAL ADVICE

THE KNOWLEDGE CONSULTANT AS STORY-GATHERER

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

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART THREE

NATURAL
ENTERPRISE: FILLING AN UNMET NEED

WHY SERVICE
STINKS: CORPORATE APARTHEID

RED
HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR
2005

THE BOSTON
TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM'

THE VICIOUS
CYCLE OF ILLIBERAL 'DEMOCRACY'

THE
POPULATION STRESS INDEX, AND SOME
SOLUTIONS

THE MOST
IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003 - PART ONE

DEALING WITH
GRIEF: UNPROFESSIONAL ADVICE

THE
KNOWLEDGE CONSULTANT AS
STORY-GATHERER