 I‘ve been commenting on others’ contributions to Rayne ‘s and Kriselda’ s Liberty 2004 Meme Project, and recommending that we use The Tipping Point as a process for getting traction for the memes we decide on. I thought it was time to offer up some ideas of my own. Let me start with my biases and blind spots. I don’t understand why so many Americans continue to support Bush. In any other developed country, someone with his approach, extremist policies and record of failures would be soundly trounced if he ran for re-election. I also don’t understand the lack of passion around electoral reform. After the debacle of 2000, when the Supreme Court ended up appointing a president because the electoral system was incapable of doing so, after seeing the abuses that partisan appointed electoral commissions can perpetrate, after seeing large corporations use huge campaign donations to buy both major parties, after seeing the abomination of ‘redistricting’ ridiculed as profoundly anti-democratic at home and around the world, why isn’t serious electoral reform a priority in every American’s mind? How can the country that prides itself as the epitome of democracy tolerate a thoroughly dysfunctional electoral system?
Having said what I don’t understand, what I do understand is that in every country in the world, what’s happening locally trumps what’s happening nationally and internationally. People care more about the domestic economy than the global one, more about domestic security than international security, more about local water quality than global warming. So here are the five principles that I believe should govern the selection of the Liberty 2004 Memes, and the process by which the memes should be used:
At this stage, and with the caveats above, here are my two recommended memes:
I’ll post this to the Liberty 2004 Meme site, and I look forward to your reactions to my ‘outsider’s view’. |
May 25, 2003
LIBERTY 2004 MEME PROJECT
May 24, 2003
CAR RALLY ORGANIZATION: IDEAS NEEDED
 I‘m organizing a car rally around the Caledon countryside next month. I’ve organized them before, many years ago, but a lot has changed since then. This is a group of neighbourhood couple with their kids and/or friends, so it can’t be too serious or competitive. Here’s what I have so far:
Any other ideas? Any landmines I’ll need to avoid? |
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May 23, 2003
SIDEBAR NOW UP
 As promised, Incubating Memes, a list of interesting links that are either self-explanatory or awaiting coverage in my blog posts, is now up in my right-hand sidebar. My rule for updating this sidebar is show newest additions at the top, drop them off the bottom after a week. You already have enough to read, so I’ll try to be selective and put up more than just ‘remainders’ on this sidebar. Unfortunately, I’m not techie enough to add a comments feature to it, so if you really want to talk about them, e-mail me, or write about them on your own blog. The extraordinary artwork above is from Sweden’s Linda Bergkvist, one of the artists posting on GFX Artist, one of the sidebar entries.
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IF WE COULD LIVE OUR LIVES OVER: NO REGRETS
 As I was driving to the office yesterday I saw a billboard that read: No one on their deathbed ever regretted not having spent more time at the office. Rather than savouring the irony, I got to wondering why we go through so much of our lives regretting what we haven’t done, and why we don’t do something about it. I discovered that there is (surprise) a website (regretsonly.com) and a book ( Damn!) on the subject, which suggest that most of our regrets are about relationship choices, passed up opportunities, indiscretions, bad decisions, youthful folly, or procrastination.
Let’s set aside for the moment the regrets for actions that seriously hurt others, where it is too late to do anything but deal with the guilt and atone for the consequences. Why do we regret inaction, the road not taken? Why do we regret past choices that hurt no one but ourselves? On the surface, there does not seem to be any Darwinian logic to regret. As Stephen Stills said “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Seems like sage advice for survival and sanity, so why does it rub so many of us the wrong way? The emotion of ‘regret of inaction’ is not guilt, but grief. Selfish grief to be sure, but grief nonetheless. What possible value does it serve? Such regret is the result of imagination: If we could not imagine the possible outcomes of a road not taken, we could not regret not having taken it. And the fact we did not take that road suggests there was some overriding moral or rational assessment that led us not to take it. The overriding assessment would be that a trade-off was necessary (not all roads can be taken) and in the absence of perfect information or as a result of immaturity the road that was taken (even if that alternative road was to do nothing) had greater emotional or intellectual appeal (e.g. the desire to minimize risk) at the time. In simpler terms, regret stems from if I knew now what I knew then realizations of what we imagine might have been. Suppose we take this out of the human domain for a moment. Suppose a doe makes a decision to steer a predator in a certain direction to distract it from her fawns, and it turns out that she steered in the wrong direction and her fawns were eaten by the predator. She could imagine what the alternatives might have been, and regret the choice not to go in the other direction. This would have a Darwinian purpose: Learning about the consequences of alternatives enhances the survival of the species by improving the decision-making process the next time a similar situation arises. But why should the doe emotionally regret the consequences of a wrong decision, rather than simply intellectually learning from the experience? Why should she beat herself up over having made the wrong decision? Perhaps ‘lingering’ regret is a Darwinian message that more work is needed, that our learning is incomplete. But suppose the fawns exercised some judgement of their own and took some action that saved themselves despite the doe’s error. The doe will feel less regret, less grief over her error because the consequences were less severe. But that means the real grief was over the loss of her fawns, not the judgement error that led to it, and that the regret is a separate (and relatively minor) emotional consequence. So when we regret having married X instead of Y, or regret making a living doing X instead of Y, or regret having done X today instead of Y, are there similarly multiple emotions at work that we lump together as ‘regret’? These cases pre-suppose that we are unhappy, intellectually or emotionally, with the road we did take, which allows us to imagine a better alternative from a better decision. So we are already dealing with two emotions, grief over the consequences of the decision we did take, and regret for what we imagine might have been (grass being always greener, etc.) the consequences of the decision we did not take. The harder we judge ourselves, and the more idealistic we are by nature, the deeper the latter emotion will be. To what purpose? The unhappiness, the grief over our current state is probably designed to be motivational. If the doe is instinctively dissatisfied with the stag she’s with, because of his inability to provide what she thinks she should expect from the relationship, she is motivated to leave and find another mate, especially if there’s one handy so she can imagine the possibilities, and presumably her subsequent action will result in healthier and longer-living progeny. If the doe and stag find their current grazing area unsatisfactory, they are likewise motivated to find and move to a better place, ‘make their living differently’, with improved Darwinian consequences. And what’s the purpose of the regret for the road not taken? Assume for a moment it is too late to choose Y instead of X . The alternative stag has long since picked another mate and moved away, the other grazing area long since been taken over by other herds. Is the lingering regret merely an emotional or intellectual artifact of imagining what ‘might have been’, when it was still ‘what might be’? The imagining of what might be is clearly instructional, it has learning value and thus Darwinian advantage. But if it’s too late, why do we regret what might have been? Here’s Eliot’s answer (yes, I’m quoting Burnt Norton again): Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool. Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. What Eliot is saying, I think, is that when we are unhappy we create stories that provide us with solace, and that our vivid imaginings can become so real that they become alternatives out of time, so that ‘what might have been’ becomes to us a real possibility in the present. As the remarkable film To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday so eloquently showed, if we are unable to let go of these imagined, invented stories, they cease to provide solace (which is positive) and begin to consume us with regret (which is negative). It is like the reverse of the Dragon Story : As important as it is to recognize our dragons when they are real, it is equally important to recognize our stories of ‘what might have been’ as unreal, as merely stories . One cannot regret a story. It is not a possibility, not a road not taken, it does not exist. |
May 22, 2003
RELATIONSHIPS & COMPROMISE
 The latest infectious meme in the blogosphere, which suggests that perhaps the best relationships require no compromise at all, started when one blogger innocently observed that a prime example of how compromise works in marriage is the process of deciding “which movie shall we see”. Before you go see what others have to say on this subject, think about where you stand on this spectrum:
Decided where you stand? Now how about business relationships — is your position different? OK, now you can start with Caterina ‘s post and follow the thread. I’m going to shut up for a change and listen to what others have to say before I add my two cents. AN ASIDE ON SIDELINKS BARS |
FIVE RADICAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES
 Redesign is the fourth ‘R’ — after reduce, reuse, recycle — that could make the world saner, more sustainable and more livable. But most design is unremarkable: Pretentious, imitative, retrospective, incremental. Here are five radical design principles, gleaned from thinking about how few of the over-hyped design mega-award-winners are purple cows :
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May 21, 2003
THE CANADIAN MAD COW FUROR: A MIXED BLESSING?
 Some people have no shame. After a lab report concluded that one cow in Western Canada that died last January was infected with ‘mad cow’ bovine spongiform encephalitis (BCE), the American beef industry had the border closed within an hour to all Canadian livestock (including sheep and goats, which universally carry their own species’ form of BCE, called scapie, and which we’ve been knowingly eating worldwide for years). Shares of McDonald’s tumbled. And today, Michigan started sending back Eastern Canadian waste disposal vehicles on the off-chance they might contain ‘scraps of mad-cow-infected beef’. It’s all right out of a Monty Python sketch.
When you think about it, though, this hysteria might actually be a blessing:
So go ahead, you crazy, greedy guys. Keep banning Canadian stuff on absurd grounds. Mad Cow is not a Purple Cow , but it might just be a Gift Horse. |
NOTE TO BUSINESS READERS: SURFACING INNOVATION
| For some reason, yesterday morning’s post on Surfacing Innovation didn’t show up on the Salon/Radio server until last night. If you’re interested in the subject and missed it, please scroll down or follow the link above. |
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A ‘NAIVE’ TAX SYSTEM THAT MAKES SENSE
 Tax codes are complicated. They needn’t be. Despite what we may be told, most tax laws are politically or pork-barrel motivated, and add to the complexity but not the fairness of the laws. One consequence of complex tax laws is that only the rich can afford the expertise and the elaborate mechanisms that get around the laws, effectively nullifying the progressive (richer people pay higher rates) nature of most tax laws, so that effective tax rates are almost flat.
A second consequence of complex tax laws is that these laws are essentially unenforceable. Inadvertent or deliberate errors in tax reporting are almost inevitable as the number of pages and calculations in the tax form rise, so authorities focus on the larger taxpayers and those in ‘profile’ groups known to evade taxes. The mistakes the rest of us make, whether in our favour or the government’s, may never be caught. Taxes are designed to generate revenues to pay for government programs by appropriating or withholding a portion of people’s and corporations’:
The result is a combination of benefit-based taxation (where tax is proportional to benefits received from government programs) and ability-to-pay taxation (where the more you have, the more tax you pay). Tax systems are very political, since capital moves globally where the tax is lowest, all other things being equal. No government wants its tax system to be significantly out of line with neighbouring states’, or it will lose taxpayers, individual and corporate. Over-hyped and convoluted tax credits deliberately obfuscate their ‘real’ tax benefits for political advantage. The following system would probably therefore never work under current laws, because it is too honest and transparent. If however citizens were to enact laws that required tax regimes in their jurisdiction to be as simple as possible, fair, enforceable and transparent, a system like the following could be instituted:
The diagram above contrasts this tax system to the current one. It would result in large increases in the retail cost of goods that consume natural resources, pollute or use non-renewable energy. Everything else would become cheaper. There would be no income or consumption tax (though user fees would remain). This would drive both a production shift (to cleaner products and processes) and a tax burden shift (to the wealthier). Simple, fair, responsible, enforceable and progressive. And revenue-neutral (total overall tax paid would not change). What more could one ask for from a tax system? |
May 20, 2003
SURFACING INNOVATION: 24 QUESTIONS TO ASK
Opportunities for a business to become more innovative abound, if you know where to look and what questions to ask. Here is a list of some of those questions, organized by the fifteen attributes of your business you can innovate (innovation isn’t limited to products, you know): Business Mission & Model If you’re intrigued by CSFB’s innovation process graphic above, you can read more about it in my paper A Prescription for Business Innovation . |
