stargeek
DEJA VUDEJA
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 Last summer I reviewed Charles Derber's book People Before Profit, and commended him on teaching us an important lesson from history -- that when corporations wield too much power, the consequences are disastrous for all but a tiny elite. Derber reminds us of the terrible era of the corporate "Robber Barons", at the turn of the 20th century: [US sovereignty] shifted
from the people toward the large corporations and financiers. The new
system of American government, essentially federalized democracy with
a
corporate logo was "a government by Wall Street, of Wall Street and
for
Wall Street." As the robber barons integrated the economy from New
York
to California, they deformed democracy and unhinged the social
order...The robber barons "overran all the existing institutions which
buttress society...they took possession of the political government,
the school, the press, the church." Business, that is, began to absorb
all of society into itself.
Drawing parallels to the present day, Derber goes on:
In today's
corpocracy...business and government forge an intimate relationship,
both within the nation-state and the larger world order. In the new
system, government still wields sovereign authority, but sovereign
power has actually been transferred to a partnership increasingly
dominated by the business sector.
Adam Cohen's editorial in yesterday's New York Times echoes Derber's warning, describing a book written by Lincoln Steffens in 1904 called The Shame of the Cities, which laments the extent to which corporate interests corrupt governments and the democratic process: What opened the door to public corruption, Steffens concluded, was the blurring of the line between business and government. The average American "deplores our politics and lauds our business," Steffens wrote, and therefore wants more businessmen involved in government. But this impulse ignores what business is all about: generating profits. It is folly, Steffens argued, to expect businessmen to look after any interest broader than their own...In this age of Enron and Halliburton, of huge campaign contributions and reckless deregulation, [Steffens'] arguments about the corrosive effect of business on government feel up to the minute. Every bit as timely is its call to arms. Steffens believed, as his book title makes clear, that the shame of corruption lay not with those who engaged in it, who could hardly be expected to act otherwise, but with the cities, which is to say their citizens, for not actively stepping in and putting a stop to it. So while Derber's call goes beyond activism and advocates a change to corporate charters, campaign finance reform and a 'firewall' between government and corporations, Steffens' call one century earlier was a more modest call for greater citizen vigilance -- a simple refusal by citizens to re-elect or put up with governments that obviously pandered to corporate interests above citizens'. These different perspectives speak volumes about the changes to education and the social fabric of the West in the intervening century. At the turn of the 20th century, America was still a country proud of its revolutionary recent past, and a country that, shortly thereafter, would rally around labour union leaders and suffragettes to demand equality for all Americans in the political process, and ultimately oust the corrupted politicians who stood in the way of these sacred democratic principles. Though it would take the agony of the Great Depression to finally get there. A century later, calling for revolution is no longer patriotic -- it is more likely to get you branded a terrorist under the ironically named Patriot Act. Although the corrupting influence of large corporations is every bit as evident today as it must have been a century ago, there are very few standing up for the rights of citizens and decrying the evils of concentration of power. In denial of the basic inevitability of the corporate model -- the concentration of more and more power and wealth in fewer and fewer hands -- the poor, the unemployed and the destitute actually feel ashamed, and personally responsible, for their plight, rather than angry and victimized. Our education system has now joined the ranks of corporatist handmaidens, brainwashing our young people to believe that economic growth and unrestricted trade are inherently good and government and regulation are inherently bad. Brad DeLong's dot-com-era paper on the Robber Barons draws the parallels well. And Derber's book clearly describes what is needed to correct the imbalance:
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 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
 As promised in February, here's an update on the US employment data. After a lot of ballyhoo in recent months, the US Department of Labour has released terrible July employment growth data, and quietly revised downwards the employment data for the previous two months. The latest 'preliminary' (subject to additional revision) numbers for June and July are 131.24 and 131.27 million respectively. Even assuming a resumption of the very modest increase rate in the Spring, employment is unlikely to reach 132 million by the end of the year. This compares to 132.4 million when Bush 'took' office four years ago, and 135.3 million promised last January (though by one interpretation of his mangled speech, he was really only promising 132.5 million). This would make Bush the first president since the great depression to record an absolute loss in total employment during his administration. In order just to match the 150 thousand new entrants to the labour force each month due to population increase, employment should be rising by 1.8 million per year, and should now be nearing 139 million. What's worse, the quality of the new jobs created has been exceptionally poor. Rather than creating high value, knowledge-intensive jobs to replace the jobs offshored to lower-wage countries, nine out of ten of the highest-growth sectors of employment are low-wage, low-expectation jobs (food service, secretarial etc.) Most growth continues to be in part-time and temporary jobs. No surprise that so many have just given up looking for work. So much for trickle-down economics, and the promised stimulus of Bush's tax giveaway to his rich friends. Yet a recent AP-Ipsos poll reports 46% of Americans 'approve' of Bush's handling of the economy. Who are these people and what have they been smoking? |
 I have very limited patience with those who deny human responsibility for upper-atmosphere pollution and ozone depletion, or deny their impact on the geothermal dynamics of our planet, or the potentially disastrous consequences of the resultant climate instability on Earth's ecosystems. To me there is no intellectual difference between the Lomborgians who steadfastly refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence of human-caused global warming from scientists of unquestioned reputation, and the neo-Nazi holocaust denyers of Ernst Zundel's ilk. Unfortunately, the Lomborgians are heavily financed in their campaign of misinformation by Big Oil and other corporate oligopolies, who bear a disproportionate responsibility for global warming. Sooner or later they will, like Big Tobacco, be called to account financially and criminally for their negligent actions and fraudulent misrepresentations. In the meantime it has been expedient for George Bush, who received a huge proportion of his campaign moneys from these liars, to reward their thinly-disguised bribes by undoing almost all of the US environmental regulations and enforcement instituted by previous governments to try to limit atmospheric damage, and to exercise political muscle to prevent the ratification of the Kyoto Accord. By the time these regulatory reversals and delays are rectified, it may be too late for our planet.    Should you have to deal with these dangerous idiots, here is a short list of resources that you can call upon to understand and/or dispense with their ludicrous arguments quickly: US NOAA synopsis of US scientists' consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming Bill McKibben's article in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and cynical political expediency, of denial NASA's studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local climate change and instability Union of Concerned Scientists' consensus on global warming and warning< /a> on the Bush regime's distortion of scientific research to forward its own political agenda Fortune Magazine's article on the possibility and chilling implications of global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts Blogger Carpe Datum's brief but thorough explanation of the science behind global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists' connecting it to human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant instability (it includes the charts above) Each of the above sources have links and references to further studies. |
 A few interesting articles on innovation, knowledge and the future of business - worth a read:
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This
is the second in a series of articles that will be published
intermittently this month.
This article summarizes what I believe were the most important ideas
of
2003 in the world of politics and
economics. The first article in the
series covered the world of blogs &
blogging, and future articles will cover business, the arts &
sciences, and the environment.  POLITICS & ECONOMICS -- THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003  I make no apologies for the fact that this list reflects my perspective on the political compass (-8.2, -8.0). Those with conservative or authoritarian views are welcome to make their own lists.
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(Fourteenth of fifteen*
instalments of
the
upcoming book Natural
Enterprise. ) "Find a need and fill it".
I have heard this quote from no fewer than a dozen successful business
leaders. Ted Rogers, son of the inventor of the alternating-current
radio tube (that allowed radios to be powered by electricity), and one
of Canada's most successful entrepreneurs in his own right, recognized
a need for more varied radio and television programming in Canada, so
he bought up some new and very inexpensive licenses, for FM radio
stations (when there were no FM stations and few FM radios), and for
Cable TV distribution (when there were very few cable distributors or
customers). Ted usually starts his speeches with the six-word quote
that began this paragraph.Entrepreneur Magazine lists 'find a need and fill it' as Rule #1 for business start-ups. Chuck Frey's 'Innovation Tools' says these six words lie at the root of any business success. It's the most important business advice you can give. But what does this mean? It means that every successful enterprise's offerings (products and/or services) meet four criteria:
The key to doing this is in research, the difficult, time-consuming (but usually inexpensive) process of discovering the who, what, when, where, why and how of unmet needs. There are two kinds of research: Secondary research entails reading and browsing online to gather information that has already been published about the market, and need, and the possible solutions to it. Primary research entails talking to people directly to answer these questions, gathering unpublished information and intelligence. Successful needs identification usually stems from primary, not secondary research. How do you go about doing this? To some extent it will depend, of course, on what the business idea is. You're going to have to be creative and patient and methodical in solving the all-important problem of identifying what the market needs, which is not already being satisfied by existing products and services. That means you're going to have to take the time to learn a lot about the marketplace, and about customers. Here are some ideas to get you started:
You'll also learn a lot about the research process, and you'll get better and faster at it the more you persevere. I know researchers who are the de facto Subject Matter Experts on a lot of subjects, far more informed, and better able to substantiate their opinions, than the gurus who have worked in the industry all their lives. Good primary researchers have the benefit of current information gleaned directly from the horses' mouths, a lot of them -- the Wisdom of Crowds. You might think it takes a lot of gall to get so many people to give you so much information and to offer their opinions free of charge. But entrepreneurs and researchers I know tell me people are often glad to help, and to offer their opinion, as long as the demand on their time is modest and that the solicitation is polite and personal. That means, ideally, face-to-face, with the telephone used only to secure an interview with them. Prepare to wear out a lot of shoes doing your research. Because business' products and services are so diverse, it's hard to generalize beyond this point about the process of Filling an Unmet Need. As the next three chapters will show, not only does going through this painstaking and time-consuming process almost guarantee you success, it can also dramatically reduce the amount of time, effort and money you need to spend promoting and marketing your product or service (you've already met a lot of your first customers, and if you fill their unmet needs they will spread the word to others -- and take some pride in having played a part in your success), and it can even reduce the amount of money you need to raise to launch the enterprise. But most importantly, you should follow this process, gruelling as it may be, because it works. If you doubt me, talk to any successful entrepreneur about the value of doing this, and you'll be convinced. In fact, this book, and the university-level Distance Learning course being built around it, came about precisely by this process: Prospective entrepreneurs, MBA students and professors I had been talking to over the past year kept telling me there was an urgent need for proven, comprehensive, practical business advice for entrepreneurs, both those looking to start their first business and those disenchanted with the struggle and disappointment that 'traditional wisdom' about entrepreneurship had led to. So I'm confident that this book will be a success and prove the entire point of this chapter, and without the need for a massive book publicity campaign. * As the book nears completion, I've taken the liberty of revamping the order and the organization of the chapters somewhat. Chapter 11 (Day to Day operations) will now become part of an expanded Chapter 5 (Improvisational Planning and Day to Day Management), with additional material on self-managed enterprises (defined goals, roles and collaboration processes), on entrepreneurial decision-making (communication, consultation and consensus-building), personal productivity improvement and management by 'walking around'. Chapter 10 (Launch & Life Cycle) is being renamed Business Evolution and will be the final chapter in the book (an excerpt from this chapter, describing organic life-cycles, complex adaptive systems, succession planning and 'natural death', will appear next week in this blog). The material on Innovation will be spread across three chapters: The Importance of Innovation (why it has been historically the #1 driver of business success); An Innovation Culture (including how to develop core innovation competencies); and The Innovation Process. Confused? A complete table of contents will appear with next week's instalment. The final book will also include about 50 'mini-case studies' drawn from my personal experiences with entrepreneurs, and from some of the leading literature on entrepreneurship: Success stories of companies that have exemplified Natural Enterprise, and war stories of those that, mostly, have not. Many thanks for all the comments from readers that have helped make writing the book a joy, and a truly collaborative experience! |
 My daughter spends much
of her workday at the computer, but has no interest in blogging. Her
hobby is scrapbooking,
a hobby that now supports a $2.5 billion industry. A scrapbook is
essentially a photo album on steroids, replete with souvenirs,
commentary, and now, special thematic papers to make your collage a
work of art. Special scissors are involved, as are many art media
(paint, chalk, etc.). Stores catering to the hobby are springing up
everywhere. People belong to scrapbooking circles (where you share
your
technical skills in scrapbooking, more than the actual scrapbooking
content, with others), and are signing up for classes in scrapbooking
and attending scrapbookng conferences. There is a Scrapbooking for Dummies book. Last week, during a delightful dinner with fellow Canadian bloggers Seb Paquet and Gary Lawrence Murphy, we talked a little about this, and my dinner companions defined the hobby as Blogging + Permanence. Where a blog consists of nothing but bits and is totally etherial, a scrapbook is tangible. It has heft. It has presence. It is also a social hobby, far less solitary than blogging. Mothers and daughters work on their scrapbooks together. And the subject matter is much more personal than most bloggers' writings and photos (livejournal bloggers excepted). This is perhaps because the privacy of scrapbooks allows this intimacy -- no fear of stalkers stumbling on your scrapbook the way they can on your blog. And scrapbookers are overwhelmingly female. They are also, photobloggers aside, of a more artistic bent than the vast majority of bloggers. The whole point of blogs was to make website composition simpler, so the writer could concentrate on the words. Scrapbooks are all about composition, and that composition is getting more sophisticated all the time. Some scrapbookers are even taking art classes so they can supplement their photos with portraits and other works of art. The hobby is even encroaching on genealogy, with much richer stories about, and embellished with artefacts of, one's ancestors than one finds on the usual 'bare' family tree. I keep thinking there should be more overlap between the two hobbies, but while there are lots of websites on how to scrapbook, there are very few blogs devoted to scrapbooking (and those that are seem to have mostly been abandoned, presumably so their writers can pursue their favoured hobby instead). There is certainly a ready opportunity to bring the hobbies together: Scanning the pages of a scrapbook into a blog would not be difficult, and would create a backup copy of the scrapbook that could be given to others or shared with those far away. And if the blogging tools weren't so clumsy, they could allow us to print out our blogs and preserve them, with some of the related real-life scraps, the comments threads etc., in a hard copy archive that those (like my father) who say they find reading online too hard on the eyes could browse. Why doesn't this happen? Probably because the content is different, and the intended audience is different. The audience for your scrapbook (besides yourself) is the person sitting beside you, commenting on each page, sharing your art in a very tactile way. The audience for your blog (besides yourself) is the vast, mostly unknown horde of readers who find your ideas interesting, your compositions provocative or inspiring, your information useful, but who, for the most part, won't miss what you've written next week when it disappears into the impenetrable blog archives. Blog posts are ephemeral, quick flashes, fireworks, left brain stuff. Scrapbook pages are memories, permanent vehicles to recall, richly, again and again, treasured memories. Drawing on the right side of the brain. |
 Global Footprint Stress Index: Extreme (purple, >10), High (orange 3-10), Moderate (yellow 1-3), Low (white <1) Last month I wrote an article suggesting that a propensity for war-mongering and civil violence, i.e. the tendency to take hasty and extreme action rather than a reasoned and responsible response to a crisis, might be attributable to what Edward Hall describes as population stress, the adrenaline-driven aggressive/panic stress response that all creatures exhibit when their population greatly exceeds sustainable carrying capacity. Hall explains that this is nature's 'last resort' method of bringing the population of the species quickly back into balance with the rest of the ecosystem, when the species fails to manage its own numbers and when opportunistic diseases don't do the trick. Earlier I had calculated< /a> a simple Population Stress Index (PSI), which was computed by multiplying density per arable square mile by population growth rate, and I compared it to an astonishingly similar map by another blogger, Matthew White, showing violent death rate by country. As I explained in last month's post, the PSI is an imperfect stress index. It does not show the very different levels of consumption and demand on local resources of people in different countries (which has as much to do with sustainability as population). So I have now computed a Footprint Stress Index (FSI), plotted on the map above, which is computed as follows:
Resource Use Index: Sample
Countries
Footprint Stress Index: Sample
Countries
The US, China, Congo, Colombia, Venezuela, and several Mid-Eastern nations all have FSIs in excess of 10. These are all countries embroiled in war, imperialistic or regional or civil, except for China where dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. These are the countries that are suffering enormous anxiety because not only are they consuming vastly more resources than what they have available domestically, their populations or industrial capacities are also growing rapidly, meaning they will need to find ever more resources outside the country to feed the soaring need. Japan, South Korea and most European nations have very high Resource Use Indices, but because their populations are growing slowly and because they are mostly very aware of conservation, their EFs are not increasing. As a result, their FSIs are more moderate. Because they all depend so heavily (90% or more) on imports of other countries' natural resources, however, as these resources get depleted and as exporting countries realize how cheaply they are giving them away, these nations' unsustainable resource demands will not be able to be met, and that will drive their Footprint Stress Indices way up. Once these scarcities become endemic, there will no longer be any option to increase resource use, and at that point the Resource Use Index itself will become the Footprint Stress Index. What will the world be like when dozens of nations, whose economies are using resources at more than ten times the rate they can sustain them from domestic supplies, suddenly find the price of these supplies quadrupling, or that these supplies are not available at any price? Colour all the countries on the left side of the Resource Use Index table above purple on the map at the top of this article and you'll get the idea. We're talking about a world war for increasingly scarce resources. And all of the countries on the right side of that table then become invasion targets. We all know what we have to do. Immediate massive taxes on resources to finance the development of technologies that conserve or don't require natural resources. Shut-down of corporations that waste resources, that pollute, and that produce non-essential products. An end to subsidies, so that we can begin to realize the true cost of our profligate deficit spending. The pay-down of government debts to reduce the risk of economic collapse when interest and inflation rates spike. Incentives for having no children, or maybe one. Of course, we have no appetite for these draconian solutions. The corporatist Frankenstein monster is perpetuating the waste and madness that is producing this crisis, and they accept no responsibility for the ultimate Tragedy of the Commons that will hit us with colossal force once we simply run out of resources to consume to keep civilization's engine running. The hydrogen economy simply won't occur fast enough to stave off disaster. Our best hope is, ironically, that some crisis will shock us into collective action before the real crunch hits. We learned nothing from the oil line-ups a generation ago, but perhaps it is not too late. If the first crisis to hit is manageable, we may be motivated to combine three massive human efforts: Voluntary negative population growth, global large-scale conservation, and an unprecedented investment in innovation and new low-footprint technologies, that could prevent a social, economic and ecological collapse. We survived a Great Depression three quarters of a century ago by exactly this type of huge, collective intervention. That's what we need now. The 'market' isn't going to fix this mess. |
 Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) recently released its list of the ten most under-reported humanitarian events of 2003. The map above shows which countries these events occurred in. Although the MSF site is temporarily down, you can read the complete details of these stories here. The top 10 stories are:
Why aren't the media covering these stories? None of them is physically close to the West. None of them involves countries with resources of strategic importance to the West. Almost all of them are ongoing, so there is nothing 'new' to report each day. None of the people in these countries has resorted to terrorist attacks against the West to bring attention to our indifference to their plight. And all of them are intractible problems, and therefore issues that those of us in the West would rather not know about. |
| Well, thanks to readers much
more tech-savvy than I am, I think I may be able to get Google to
start
picking up my posts again, and, by tightening up the code of my
blogroll, also make the page load faster for those patient readers
with
dial-up access. So far I have moved the blogroll to the right hand
column, so Google will not get bogged down in the blogroll code and
give up before it gets to the actual posts. In the process I messed up
the masthead, so I've adopted a simple one-piece masthead
temporarily. If this post works properly, I'll then make an additional change to my blogroll, stripping out the table HTML and replacing it with a simple list separated by line breaks. Next post will report on the results of that. Keep your fingers crossed for me. |
 Dave
Snowden has a lot of nerve. The founder of the IBM Cynefin Centre
doesn't stop at saying that collecting 'best practices' and most other
accepted Knowledge Management activities are largely fruitless (he
makes an exception for standard practices in highly prescriptive jobs,
and proven, authorized practices in high-risk and high-security
situations). He is almost as disdainful of many of the idealistic
goals
of Personal Knowledge Management -- helping front-line workers to do
their jobs more simply and effectively and to find experts they can
draw on and network with. If the tools to do PKM aren't adequate, he
maintains, the answer is to create better tools, not show people how
to
use deficient ones (and creating tools is IT's job, not KM's). One of
the things he thinks KM should be doing is helping management
understand and lead their organizations more effectively. Management
is, after all, the group paying for organizations' KM activities, and
a
group that is, in most organizations, far from happy with what KM has
delivered. Snowden argues that the best way for KM to help management
is to be a kind of 'cultural anthropologist' in the organization you
are working in or advising. One of the ways anthropologists study and understand tribes is by listening to and gathering stories. Analogously, Snowden says, it's important that KM people get out and spend time on the front lines really understanding what the organization's real stories are -- not the ones that appear in the mission statement or the company newsletter, which say what management wishes the company culture was, but the peer-to-peer stories that truly define the organizational culture, drive what people really believe and do and how they act, and make the company, for better and for worse, what it truly is. To gather those stories, you must be as honest as an anthropologist, not try to do it surreptitiously, because people only tell the real stories to people who have gained and earned their trust. Snowden has developed very sophisticated and rigorous processes for doing so, which he details in his 'masterclass' called Using Narrative in Organisational Change,, which you can now buy on CD-ROM. In Thomas King's book The Truth About Stories, King argues that if you want to change a culture, you need to change its story, because that's all a culture is. I don't know that Snowden would disagree, but he would argue, I think, that changing an organization's real stories is not so easy. That's why mission statements don't work -- they're wishful thinking, myths that management would like to believe everyone buys and is motivated by, but really aren't. If you're in management, he says, you don't change the stories, he says, you understand them, then you act on them, and then you make them your own, retelling them in your own way so that you show the people in the front lines of the organization that you understand the real culture of the organization (and the real problems of front-line workers). In so doing you harness the astonishing power of 'true' stories. Snowden is acutely aware of the overt class distinctions in Britain that make trust, and hence collecting stories, hard to achieve. While some of us in Europe and North America might argue that our class distinctions are not as formidable barriers as they are in the UK, I think this would be a mistake. Americans, I have observed, make a great effort to pretend that class distinctions don't exist or are permeable, by allowing everyone to use first names, for example, when in fact the hierarchies are at least as strict as they are in the UK. The only real difference is that the determinants and clues of status are subtler -- a bit more tied to wealth and the circles you move in and a bit less pre-determined by heredity. But trust is still deepest peer-to-peer and extremely hard to earn and sustain between management (or their henchman consultants and head-office lackeys) and front-line people. That is perhaps why management is in a constant quandary over decentralizing -- it clearly improves productivity, innovativeness, morale and work effectiveness, but it allows people that management doesn't really trust more control and autonomy, and perhaps even allows them to develop -- heaven forbid -- their own organizational culture. The reality, as Snowden argues, is that management is never in charge of organizational culture, that people behave the way they do partly because they've learned it's the most effective way to do their unique job and partly in their own self-interest, and not because it's in the procedure manual or the role description or aligned with the mission statement or the strategic plan. Once you have collected the true stories in an unbiased manner (Snowden carefully explains how to remove bias, so you don't get 'fed' just what you want to hear or put your own personal 'spin' on the story), the next step is to act on them. Stories tell management important information about what works, and, more importantly, what doesn't work, in the organization. A lot of stories are about how people have solved problems that management hasn't addressed, or which management has in fact created. These are often very comical or very heroic stories that not only have important messages for management, but illustrate exemplary behaviour that management may not realize it's not rewarding, or actually inhibiting. It is critical, Snowden says, to make sure you understand the stories, and to collect and organize and ponder a lot of stories, before charging in and making changes that misconstrue the organizational culture, impede rather than help, and destroy forever the trust that the story-gatherer built up to capture this critical information. And finally, once management has acted carefully and conscientiously on the learnings from the stories, they can actually make these stories their own, not by retelling them in the same words and context as they heard them (that would be disingenuous, a form of intellectual property theft), and not by appropriating them and making models and heroes of their protagonists (that could make the poor protagonists look like head office plants), but by conveying the same messages and lessons with stories from their own personal work context. Crafting such stories is a complex, rigorous and skillful process, and explaining this process takes up much of Snowden's 'masterclass' time. There are different types of stories, like fables, myths and viruses, each with a different purpose and different construction (the course provides templates of each). Even more important is the testing of stories by telling and having others retell them until they are perfected. The impact of an executive telling employees a real story about the organization, credibly and powerfully, can be profound, even transformational. Just imagine -- instead of the boss telling his/her people what to do, and evaluating them on his/her perception of their 'performance' in doing so, picture the boss explaining that he/she understood exactly why his/her people were doing what they were doing, and offering constructive ideas on how management could make the employee's job easier and more effective. Management supporting the staff instead of the other way around. Hey, I know it's a 90s idea and is out of fashion again these days, but stories, properly collected and interpreted by trained KM practitioners, can make it possible. I hope Dave won't object to my sharing one of his stories to illustrate this -- it's hard to write about stories without at least one example. He describes a group of public service utility workers who are subjected to a consultant's efficiency review, which leads to them being given fewer work breaks and being given networked PCs to allow them to save time travelling into the office for paperwork between jobs. What the consultant didn't realize (and what the careful collection of stories finally revealed) was that these workers shared vital information about how to do their jobs properly during these work breaks and office visits, and this information either couldn't (because it's highly contextual and needs conversation to convey effectively) or wouldn't (because of the lack of trust of how stuff posted publicly might be used by management) be captured in databases or messages on their new PCs. So the workers found a surreptitious place for unofficial work breaks and a surreptitious place for 'offline' documentation of information they wanted to share with peers, 'working around' the consultant's well-meaning but wrong-headed and dysfunctional change proposals. [Dave makes this into a long and wonderful story with a brilliant punch line, a resolution in which management finally learns from this mistake and turns it to astonishing advantage, and since I'm not telling a story here, I won't spoil it -- get the CD-ROM to hear the story completely and properly.] But the point is that the organizational culture is what it is, and usually for a good reason, and it's vital to understand that culture by collecting the stories that reveal it, before you try to change processes or behaviour, or the change effort will inevitably fail, as almost every organizational change effort does. I got out of the KM business last December, and since then I've toyed with the idea of becoming a new-age KM or PKM consultant, but then decided I'd had enough of this well-intentioned but endlessly-struggling discipline. But I recognize that there's still important KM work that could and should be done. While I agree that PKM needs better tools much more than it needs process improvement consulting, I still think there is much promise in Personal Productivity Improvement as an offshoot of KM. And now Dave has convinced me that the exercise of capturing and interpreting and acting on an organization's real stories would be worthwhile, especially for large organizations. But I think calling it Cultural Anthropology or Story-Gathering is a non-starter -- try to sell CEOs something with that woolly a name these days and you'll starve. What could we call it that would be accurate and still compelling to CEOs who don't, yet, get what it's all about? |
 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:
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. 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'? When they go by suicide, they leave us in an insult of dust. 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. |
 In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn
says:People will listen
when
they're ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a
time,
you weren't ready
to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let
people
come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate
them.
Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll
keep
you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to
something
new.
When presenting a new
idea, you don't have to have all the answers. It's better to say 'I
don't know' than to fake it. Make people formulate their own
questions.
Don't take on the responsibility of figuring out what their difficulty
is. We each internalize information differently. If you don't
understand
a question, keep insisting they explain it until it's clear. Nine
times
out
of ten they'll supply the answer themselves.
Above all, listen.
Your close attention is sometimes more important than your
articulateness in winning converts. And learning is always a good
thing.
When I've talked to people about the ideas I've presented in this blog, I get the sense that maybe 10% really understand and appreciate what I'm saying. Perhaps another 40% are ready to listen and want to believe, but either my inarticulateness or their internalization mechanism garbles the message. After all, saving the world (or, as one recent commenter 'geo' put it more accurately "changing how humans live so we as a species can continue to survive") is not easy or obvious, or we'd all be busy doing it. This reading list is for that 40%, in the hope that better writers than I can convey more clearly and compellingly what we need to do and why. The remaining 50%, I suspect, are not ready. Five years ago someone gave me The Spell of the Sensuous and I gave up after five pages -- I just wasn't ready. Here's the list -- 56 books and articles that forever changed my worldview, and my purpose for living:: What Life was Really Like Before Civilization: Revisionist History
Radical Analysis, Radical
Solutions (these are the most important readings, but you
probably won't 'buy' their arguments unless you've first read much of
the material above)
Toolkit for Change: Knowledge We Can Use to Save the World
|
 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. |
| A
friend of mine in executive recruiting is looking for a substantial
number of consultants in, believe it or not, business process
re-engineering. Requirements include a good general knowledge of the
discipline, willingness to travel very extensively, and an ability to
deal comfortably with senior executives. The positions are mostly
full-time, starting ASAP, and the work is all over North America.
Salary is in the high five figures Canadian. Probably of greatest
interest to the young and unattached, but I thought I'd ask anyway. If
you're interested, e-mail me your CV, any
requirements/conditions, and any companies you don't want to receive your info.
|
 How can we ever hope to produce effective Expertise Finders when we can't even get people in our own organizations to keep their personal information up to date? That's a question many professional services organizations ask constantly -- the simple internal process of putting together a business proposal, solving a problem or assembling a project team is often, nightmarishly,
A decade ago I read a prediction that, by today, the Internet would have spontaneously (by a self-managed process) developed a database of every consultant in the world and a verification system to go along with it, so the big consultancies would all collapse, and customers would essentially pick their own consultant teams person-by-person, not limiting themselves to the employees of any one consulting organization. This hasn't really happened, because normally the customer picks only a project leader, a consultant (usually in a big consultancy but sometimes an internal person or even an outsourcer) who they then trust to assemble the rest of the project team. If the work's done well, the consultant will be rewarded for his/her choices, but no one really second-guesses those choices or the deeply flawed, sub-optimal way he/she makes them. We use similar processes to assemble project teams of other types of experts: We pick our GP but rely on him/her to refer us to specialists, and we pick a general contractor and usually rely on him/her to pick the subcontractors, for example. The process is fraught with the same suboptimization described in the bullets above. The traditional IT approach to building such a database doesn't work. It entails designing a form, a template of all the data elements about each expert that might possibly apply, and then forcing people to fill in and keep up-to-date all the relevant fields. That's essentially how most social software works, too, and it's proven terribly unsatisfactory. Last year I envisioned an Expertise Finder that would work by crawling people's blog content, penetrating corporate firewalls to find the best people in the world who had the desired expertise and creating a 'map' showing the most direct network path to those people (see sketch above) and how much their expertise costs. I expected that the technology gurus and Googles of the world would be able to build such a 'search' tool quite easily, and the real challenge would be getting the content, getting people to 'buy in' and post information about their expertise, and getting corporations to allow outside customers access to this information from their internal systems (or put a mirror copy on the public Internet). But so far all we have are Ryze and LinkedIn and eCademy (with its well-intentioned 'b2b Marketplace' and Google's Orkut, and they don't work that way at all -- they take the traditional 'form-filling' approach, and are better suited to finding work colleagues (or dates!) than either suppliers or experts. The groups hoping and tryi ng to develop such tools are sanguine of these challenges. Designers appreciate that information needs to be captured in (or converted to) a format useful to the expertise-seeker, which is not necessarily the same format in which the expert normally posts, or finds easiest to post, his or her expertise. And everyone ap preciates that trustworthiness of the content and the tool are paramount. . What do you think?
|
 Diagram ©2004 The Caring Enterprise
Coach
Today, the average North
American entrepreneurial business lasts just four years, the average
sole proprietorship even less. Yet entrepreneurship is not rocket
science; it's nothing more (or less) than making a living for yourself
with your business partners, instead of depending on some indifferent
corporation to provide you with a living wage. Running a business is
certainly no more difficult than raising a family, or landing a job
and
building a career with a big company. The essentials of
entrepreneurship could easily be taught in every school, and there'd
still be plenty of time left for the rest of the school curriculum.
But, perhaps because big corporations and the governments they control
want the 'labour force' to be meek, subservient, fearful and insecure,
most people have come to perceive entrepreneurship as a complex and
difficult art, fraught with danger, unprofitable, emotionally
scarring,
and demanding of enormous courage and energy. "It's certainly not for
everyone", I keep hearing.Entrepreneurship requires self-knowledge of what you're happy doing, what you're especially good at, how much you're willing to put into your enterprise and what you expect to get out of it. Without this self-knowledge, you're likely to be as miserable in your own business as working for some unappreciative boss, and that unhappiness will bear directly on its success. Beyond that, all you need are common sense, self-confidence, and a modicum of four key, learnable skills:
One of the 15 steps in the process of establishing and running an enterprise is avoiding the landmines. In MBA school they now call this Risk Management. This article identifies ten of the major landmines for entrepreneurs, using some real-life examples. I don't believe any of the enterprises described below is still in business (though some of the entrepreneurs have moved on, lear |