| Four years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation: Creating Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I’ve updated it, broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the second part below. The first part, which reviewed the history of human innovation and technology, is here and the third part will follow next Tuesday.
Four: Innovation & Society: How Technologies Limit Freedom, Human Nature Confounds Innovation, and Consumer Decision Tools Doom Marketing Let’s take another look at our proto-human, now equipped with the six basic types of manually powered machine (lever, wheel, screw, pulley, plane, and wedge — the latter in the form of flint-head arrows), plus other early innovations like controlled fire, animal domestication and crop cultivation. Like other creatures he’s adopted the family unit as a social convention, but now he’s experimenting with a more sophisticated social construct, the tribe. Question is, why? Is it Darwinian — Did humans that banded together have a higher likelihood of survival than loners? Or is it purely social — Do humans, like other creatures, have a basic need for social contact with others that goes beyond family? Whichever it is — a survival need or a social need, it required innovations to make it work, innovations like a code of laws and behaviours to prevent and resolve disputes between individuals, and shared language. At this point, in the view of some anthropologists, a tug-of-war began between our essential individual, autonomous nature and the perceived benefits of increasingly advanced, abstract and restrictive ‘technologies’ like division of labour, specialization, private and communal property, governments and other hierarchical social organizations, including the modern corporation. All these social ‘technologies’ limit individuals’ freedom, and much of our civilization has been about trying to find a delicate balance between individual ‘rights’ and the apparent benefits afforded by technologies that compromise them. This tug-of-war continues to play out today, in our suspicion of government, the existence of ‘militias’, libertarian movements, evolution of privacy laws, and struggles over property ownership. The battle is far from over, with slavery, one particularly extreme social construct favouring hierarchical efficiency over individual liberty, still practiced in many countries, and women, children and animals treated as property with no rights or freedoms whatsoever in many others. This tension also plays out in the modern corporation, itself a feudal social construct which is neither egalitarian nor democratic. Corporate efficiencies have produced technologies that have massively improved material wealth and (most believe) quality of life in the few centuries since they were invented. But these advantages have come with a huge cost of personal freedom — In many countries employees are virtual slaves of their employers, with no hope of realizing their full personal potential. In many companies promotion and remuneration have nothing to do with performance or competency. Here are some of the consequences for innovation of this individual/collective tension, in today’s companies:
If people are social by nature, why are corporations so unable to tap into this to leverage the power of teams to enhance innovation? The answer may be simple. In The Hidden Life of Dogs, author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explains that most animals have an inherent desire to socialize with their peers, that seems totally unrelated to survival needs. In fact, dogs that wander from homes where they are well-fed and cared for appear to be looking for social contact with other dogs for its own sake, just as children like to hang out with others doing things they can do just as effectively alone. At the same time, both dogs and children often become extremely jealous, competitive, possessive and unsociable when these same fellow creatures impose on their personal ‘territory’: family, toys, food bowl, and members of the opposite sex. Perhaps this is a universal trait that we need to consider when designing innovation programs: Everyone loves to engage in social activities that are fun, challenging and unthreatening, but when the social activity impinges on individual ‘territory’ or property, or on scarce resources, social and collaborative behaviour ceases and confrontational, competitive behaviour takes over. But isn’t competitive behaviour exactly what business thrives on? Doesn’t the rush of adrenaline and testosterone in the quest for competitive advantage and ‘winning’ yield high productivity, sharpened customer focus, and more new ideas? I would argue that competition is at best a neutral factor in engendering innovation, and may in fact be detrimental. Most of the books on teamwork, such as The Wisdom of Teams, stress two essential preconditions to effective team behaviour:
There are other factors that affect a team’s success, of course, such as the competencies and access to knowledge of the team members, and the effectiveness of the processes by which the team works. What is important here is that nowhere is a competitive threat, competitive challenge or competition of any kind considered essential to team effectiveness. Even in sports, the best teams focus on what they do well (the attributes of their team’s excellence) and the achievement of specific objectives (like scoring points) rather than being distracted by competing with the other team, ‘winning’ and exploiting the other team’s weaknesses. Good teams usually take solace in having played well even in a losing cause, and are alarmed when they play badly but still manage to win. In fact, a major competitive tactic in business is to force one’s competitors to shift their focus to your agenda, to take their eye off their team’s goal to instead compete with you. Furthermore, many businesses are now reaching out to involve customers, alliance partners and even competitors in their problem-solving teams, because they help bring different points of view to the creative process, and because these external partners share both the defined problem and the sense of urgency with the internal team. In a world of accelerating change, no competitive advantage is sustainable — innovations and new technologies can almost instantly reinvent industries, products, services, and offerings, and eliminate any competitive advantage the old ones may have had. Despite massive and sustained oligopolistic efforts to prevent it, customers are beginning to wrest absolute control of business direction and success from almost every industry’s producers, management strategists and marketers, and now set the agenda and reward companies that respond to their needs and build new serving capability, not those that bash the competition, sue their customers, or create barriers to competitive offerings. The Bush regime’s corporatist agenda has been only a temporary setback in this inexorable trend. A side-note about branding: Many marketing people, lamenting over the passage of market control from producer to consumer, cite the increasing importance of branding as an organizational strategy, and of brand loyalty as a success factor. For this reason, they argue, aggressive, proactive marketing is not dead. They fail to appreciate that consumers, faced with the severe scarcity of (a) time to assess product alternatives and (b) objective comparative analysis like Consumer Reports, tend to use ‘brand’ as an unsatisfactory surrogate decision-making tool. If you as a consumer want to buy a car, or select a television program to watch, the ideal decision-making process would be:
In the case of a big-ticket selection like a car, you would probably invest significant time in making the final decision. In a small-ticket selection like a television program, the final decision could be greatly simplified or even fully automated, so your television would automatically go to the highest-ranked program in the two lists, and signal to you a ‘score’ showing the computed probability you will like it (since your ultimate decision may be not to watch anything). Tools like these exist today (Consumer Reports is an example of the former; the Recommendations Lists of Amazon.com are an example of the latter), but they are not yet very robust or reliable. In their absence, brands and brand loyalty are the surrogates: ‘I always buy Chrysler products’ or ‘I usually watch CSI on Thursday nights’ is your brain’s way of substituting brand for the more ideal tools noted above. Once these tools exist (and the Information Age is ripe for them), product brands will simply become community-identification brands (‘I drive Chrysler products because they reflect who I am and I want others to see that and associate with me, or not, because of that identification’). At this point, brand community-association becomes merely one more selection criterion of the analytical tool. With the advent of the near-perfect consumer information these tools provide, traditional marketing has no remaining role, and the knowledge-driven transition of power from producer to consumer is complete. Five: The Structure & Culture of Innovative Organizations: Business Gets Feminine and Consumers Seize Power from Producers
The real contention over this new organizational culture is whether it is efficient enough to justify a new organizational structure to support it, or whether instead some kind of balance between hierarchical and autonomous structures is needed. Is it empowering, or is it naÔve, to believe that if an organization sets specific strategies and goals and then ‘gets out of the way’, the employees will effectively figure out the best way to achieve them? Can the tools, the infrastructure of technologies, knowledge-bases and equipment, needed to achieve organizational and project objectives, be left up to project teams to develop as needed and ad hoc, or must they be rationalized and inventoried and efficiently ‘managed’? Who controls the purse-strings, and approves allocation of budgets and resources for each project — can project teams really do this themselves or do these resources also need to be centrally ‘managed’? These issues are important to the future of business innovation. We must decide whether an organization saddled with the structures and controls of an old ‘management’ style can hope to be sufficiently agile, responsive to customers, creative and focused on new product development, to survive when that survival depends on strategic improvisation and continuous innovation. There are two huge and contradictory trends occurring in organizational structure today: globalization and fragmentation. Globalization is occurring because small organizations cannot achieve the scale and resource capacity needed to be viable, and fragmentation, the spinning off and incubation of small, narrowly focused ‘best of class’ companies, is occurring because large organizations are too unwieldy, inefficient and inflexible to be innovative and respond to customers’ rapidly evolving needs. So we have today the worst of both worlds: large, fat, unresponsive global companies and emaciated unscalable small ones. Furthermore, because of today’s concentration of money and power in the hands of increasing global corporate giants, this system is in disequilibrium, with dysfunctional non value-added consequences such as these:
The recent macro-economic review by Credit Suisse First Boston, echoing the prognostications voiced by many economists at recent economic summits, foresees the evolution of today’s corporate structures into three new, prevailing types of enterprise, which could fix the above dysfunctions (since different economists use different names for these, I’ve used my own):
The Global Utilities would be either publicly owned or tightly regulated, operated on a not-for-profit basis. They would be measured on efficiency. The Producers and Innovators would be entrepreneurial partnerships, very project focused. Producers would be measured on agility, quality and customization, and Innovators on creativity, quality and quality-of-life improvement. All three types of enterprise would be measured additionally, of course, on customer satisfaction. None would be hierarchical, and few would spend an entire career with a single organization. I have argued elsewhere that, in fact, with today’s technologies there is no need for any of us to have to work more than a few hours a week to provide a high level of well-being for everyone anyway — the fact that we do work so unnecessarily hard and long is a function of the sustained myths of our modern Western culture and the extravagant and unsustainable wastefulness of our civilization. Those with an entrepreneurial bent would form, or join, one or more Producer or Innovator enterprises over their working life. Those with a productivity bent would gravitate towards the Global Utilities. Many others would be self-employed, providing niche advisory services to all three types of enterprise. You may think this is a very idealistic view of how ‘organizations should be reorganized’, but it is also a very logical one, and one that could easily be achieved today because of growing dissatisfaction with the dysfunctionality of today’s organizational structures, and the ability, thanks to the Internet and other powerful new ‘organizing’ infrastructure technologies, to bring this ‘reorganization of organizations’ about. Only a poverty of imagination, opposition from elite vested interests, and the inequitable distribution of power and resources, all of them well within human capability to rectify, are preventing us from realizing this potentially liberating, perhaps even Earth-saving, reorganization. In fact, this customer-driven revolution is already happening, quickly, quietly, and non-violently, its first manifestation being what Shoshana Zuboff in her best-seller calls The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and The Next Episode of Capitalism. What does all this mean for today’s company looking to jump-start its innovation programs and processes, and today’s individual looking to participate in making his or her own, or his or her employer’s, enterprise more innovative? From the discussion above we can add six principles of innovation strategy to the eight principles developed earlier:
Attributes of ‘Female’ versus ‘Male’ Organization Structures So now we have fourteen principles to guide us in creating innovative organizations. Next Tuesday: In the final part of this paper, a prescription that draws on these principles, that organizations can use to evolve themselves into innovative companies. It will also explain the new 8-step Innovation Process diagram at the top of this post. |
April 20, 2004
A PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -PART TWO
Those of you with HR backgrounds are probably wondering why I have not spoken about non-individual, community aspects of civilization and why and how these arose if the innovative individual is perfectly able to do it all him- or herself. These issues are relevant because of the role of teams, organizations and other social constructs in the process of innovation.April 19, 2004
A STORY IS LIKE A GIFT
 I‘m currently working on several projects that each require a good story. So I spent most of today researching, and thinking about, what makes a story good. At first I had this chart with two branches, one for ‘information value’ and the other for ‘entertainment value’, but it is now in the recycle bin, since while that may be a valid taxonomy of ‘good’ stories, it is so subjective that it is not a particularly useful one. It doesn’t inform you how to go about crafting a good story.
During my brief tenure as moderator of the Association of KnowledgeWork forum last month, we spent some time discussing this issue, guided by Steve Denning, one of the world’s justifiably respected authorities on (at least) effective business story-telling. There was, of course, the usual mention of the importance of knowing your audience, and Steve reminded us that in a business context the purpose of most stories is to persuade, to bring about a change of mind, and that most effective business stories have (a) a sympathetic protagonist, with whom the audience can relate, (b) a problem that clearly must be overcome, and (c) a satisfactory resolution to the problem that the story recounts in a brief and straightforward yet compelling way. Another issue we dealt with during the forum was the astonishing imprecision of language and communication, the myriad different ways that we think and learn and process information, and the fact that we always tend to wildly overestimate how much learning and communication has actually occurred during a presentation, a conference, or a conversation. In many cases the ‘value’ of such events is therefore intensely personal, and depends more on what each participant thinks was actually accomplished or communicated, than the undoubtedly more modest actual achievement. There is nothing more sobering than objectively debriefing with participants after such an event, and realizing how little was actually understood, and how much was misunderstood. At the same time there is great and earnest desire among audience members that the appropriate communication be received (preferably quickly and with some decent jokes thrown in) — this is, after all, their investment of time. Just watch how one very enthusiastic audience member (unless obviously a plant or a wacko) can get the rest of the audience paying more attention, and how quickly one hostile audience member, walk-out, or nod-off, can sour the whole audience on the presenter’s message. Audiences seem to virtually ‘blow in the wind’ until they collectively make their mind up about the quality, and essential message, of what they are hearing. I have been in movies that I absolutely loathed, but where the audience, by their laughter, applause or rapt attention, actually caused me to doubt or temper my own judgement. So a story can be effective, and hence a ‘good story’, to the teller, and/or, subject to the above-noted tendency for audience groupthink, to each member of the audience, and for very different reasons. It depends entirely on the expectations of each participant, and how each participant uniquely internalizes what they hear and/or say. Is there, then, any common denominator to good stories that the story-teller can draw upon? I re-read some of my favourite stories, and concluded that a story is like a gift. There is no perfect gift for everyone, but with some attention to the audience, what their expectations are likely to be, some thought on an appropriate choice, and some appropriate and attractive but not extravagant packaging, every gift-giving, and every story-telling, can be successful and effective, and for largely the same reasons. Good stories, like good gifts, seem to have one or more of five qualities:
While everyone is different, I think the second quality, transporting, is at once the hardest and most rewarding one to achieve in a story. You never want a great story to end. You just want it to go on and on and never run out, and you are once sad and immensely grateful to the story-teller for the ‘moving’ experience when it does end. The challenge, of course, is how to imbue these five qualities in a story. That is a challenge I’ll have to leave to brighter minds than mine, or at least for another day until I can think about it more. But if you’re interested, here’s an exercise: Just think about the three or four stories that have affected you most profoundly in your life, and go back and re-read them. Ask yourself which of the above five attributes of these stories made them so valuable to you (and tell me if you think my list is incomplete)! And then see if you can find the magic in the words — what it is, in the choice of words, the order, the situation, the unfolding of events, that could convert these clumsy and abstract syllables into something so remarkable, so enchanting. I think you’ll find that most of the magic comes from inside you, and is the result of the work you do to build the story into something larger than life, something evocative and transporting and persuasive and memorable and even useful. Which only makes the accomplishment, the wizardy, and the ‘gift’ of the story-teller even more astonishing. |
April 18, 2004
WONDER
 In reading The Spell of the Sensuous, I am re-learning wonder. Our back yard has become a wonderland, a menagerie. I sit cross-legged on the floor of our Great Room with its larger-than-life picture windows, drinking tea, a foot from a window I have opened just enough to hear the sounds from the bird feeders just three feet on the other side. It is pouring rain, and thunder is rumbling across the sky. I am watching a grey squirrel and three black squirrels, a chipmunk, a rabbit, a noisy group of six grackles, puffing themselves up to twice normal size as they announce themselves at the top of the feeder stand, two lovely epauletted redwing blackbirds, two house finches, two mourning doves, a crow, a tiny nuthatch, a slate-coloured junco, a cardinal, and a multitude of chickadees and sparrows. They each respect and respond to the pecking order of their own species, but seem to ignore the other species, getting within inches of each other as they jockey for open perches on the feeders and the prime space below the feeders where seed is scattered by those above.
I am learning to hear not only the sounds of each species, but the distinctive sounds of each creature. The cardinal is pecking for seeds half-heartedly in the grass, well picked over by the earlier visitors that morning. A few feet away, the junco digs vigourously in the grass, unearthing seeds packed down over the winter. The cardinal watches, head cocked, at this strange behaviour, but a few minutes later I see it, too, scratching in the grass, comically, clumsily, successfully, the morning’s new lesson learned. The grey squirrel and the black squirrels took only a few weeks to master the squirrel baffle, but did so differently. The grey squirrel leaps up on the baffle, wraps his paws around the feeder pole, and steadies himself before pulling himself up onto the wooden feeeder. By contrast, the black squirrels take a long running leap, clear the baffle and scramble paw-over-paw to the top of the feeder pole, then climb head first down the polycarbonate feeder, suspend themselves at an angle from the top perch using their hind paws and scoop the sunflower seeds from the lower openings into their mouths with their front paws. Between them, they made short work of the earlier, plastic feeders, the chewed pieces of which I still find all over the yard. But now I watch one black squirrel spin his paw deliberately and repeatedly clockwise on the lower perch, deftly unscrewing the metal feeder insert from its polycarbonate cylindrical backing, taking no more than a minute to wind the metal nut along the full two inches of thread, and then prying out the metal insert and exposing the now much-more-accessible seeds to himself, many of them tumbling out onto the heads of his family waiting below. Yesterday I found three of the four metal inserts on the ground, and the metal nuts scattered nearby. I thought I had tightened the nuts well when I reassembled the feeder last night, but obviously tonight I will need to use a wrench. I still have it relatively easy — my neighbour has had his feeder pole, which he had triple-braced and pounded two feet into the ground, systematically toppled by a pair of industrious raccoons in less than fifteen minutes. And another neighbour’s beautiful handmade wood feeder was destroyed by a pair of clumsy, amorous, fifty-pound wild turkeys which decided to perform their mating dance on top of it. The thunder is loud, almost continuous, and somewhat alarming to me in its volume, especially since under the low thick grey clouds no lightning penetrates to warn of the next crash. But while the squirrels don’t seem to be crazy about the heavy rain, and scatter for cover in the nearby spruce trees, the birds are oblivious to the bluster, and one of the finches splashes joyously in a puddle. For crows, communal bathing is a favoured social activity, accompanied by a variety of ritual behaviours including end-over-end aerial manouevers, claws locked together in a wondrous sky-dance. When you can’t imagine, you can do anything. You can end the world. If we could imagine, really imagine, what it was like to be a crow, soaring above the world, care-free, astonishingly aware, senses alive in a way that we bored, distracted, abstracted, sensually dulled humans can no longer conceive, if we could put ourselves in the claws of a corvid, surrender to the spell of the sensuous, we could never return to, never again tolerate, the imaginative poverty, the prison that our culture has captured us in. If we could free ourselves from that, if we could imagine such an utterly different way to live, to really live, what could we do? What would we do? I wonder… |
April 17, 2004
THE NYT ON THE ENVIRONMENT
 As much as I value the reporting of the New York Times on political matters, I find their environmental reporting to be…well…strange. Perhaps it’s the result of living in the overwhelmingly man-made environment of the Big Apple, but when they talk about ‘the environment’ it’s almost as if they’re describing what’s happening on Mars, or at least some rarely seen and exotic tourist attraction.
Two recent examples: Last week David Brooks wrote an article called, Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia. In describing urban sprawl, one of the scourges of our time, an epidemic that threatens to devour every inch of American agricultural and wilderness land in this century, Brooks writes almost fondly, nostalgically: The reality is that modern suburbia is merely the latest iteration of the American dream. Far from being dull, artificial and spiritually vacuous, today’s suburbs are the products of the same religious longings and the same deep tensions that produced the American identity from the start. The complex faith of Jonathan Edwards, the propelling ambition of Benjamin Franklin, the dark, meritocratic fatalism of Lincoln — all these inheritances have shaped the outer suburbs.
One can almost imagine Brooks describing an atomic test in Nevada as an “iridescent sheen resplendent of all the hopes and dreams of our technology-driven future”. For urban sprawl, with its waste, its extravagant use of precious space, its depressing sameness and its disrespect — even total disregard — for the unique natural qualities of each community, razed and ploughed under to make every new sprawling blight on the landscape an indifferent imitation of every other, is nothing short of the A-bomb of the 21st century, inexorably destroying everything in its wake. It is an issue that is tearing the Sierra Club and other environmental groups apart. Then this week, Jennifer 8. Lee (anyone know why the NYT uses a period after her middle ‘name’ — what is ’8′ short for, anyway?), in an article called Clear Skies No More for Millions as Pollution Rule Expands, announces that, under ‘new’ 1997 guidelines, many counties will be listed as violating clean air standards that did not make the list under the old guidelines: The revised federal standards have wide economic and environmental implications and the makeup of the list has been the subject of lobbying in Washington. Areas in violation face the loss of federal money for roads. Industrial development can be barred in those areas unless companies prove that they would not make pollution worse. “A lot of counties feel if they are in, it will have negative impact on their economic development plans,” said Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio. Like many members of Congress, he said he has been deluged by letters and calls from local officials worried that the revised standards “will cause the loss of jobs, restrict economic growth, discourage plant location and encourage manufacturers to move overseas.”
Lee reports that the new guidelines survived challenges all the way up to the arch-conservative Supreme Court. But there is no sense of crisis in the story. It’s almost as if the violations, which result in millions of premature deaths, massive costs from disease, and irreparable damage to the entire ecosystem, were some arbitrary and minor zoning violation, waiting for saner heads to prevail and overturn, in order to protect Brooks’ ‘latest iteration of the American dream’. These regulations aren’t designed to placate environmentalists, they’re designed to safeguard human health from egregious and pervasive threats. So where is the sense of urgency, or outrage, that millions will suffer profoundly and unnecessarily and die prematurely because of the self-interested negligence of reckless commercial enterprises? What will it take before Americans realize that rapacious, greedy, destructive corporations do thousands of times more damage to the health, safety, lives and property of the American people than the worst terrorists could begin to imagine in their wildest dreams? What will it take before we realize that restricting immigration to prevent further urban sprawl and population explosion isn’t a matter of racist disregard for human suffering and inequality of opportunity, but a first step to recognize that the growth we worship threatens the very survival of our species and our world? What will it take before we recognize the ‘proximate connection’ between pollution and human disease and death, and prosecute and imprison the officers and directors of polluters as we do murderers? Maybe the venerable reporters of the Times should ‘get out’ more. |
April 16, 2004
GOC SICS LAWYERS ON BLOGSCANADA
| Jim Elve over at BlogsCanada, the site that selflessly promotes the best Canadian blogs, and contains the definitive directory of Canadian blogs, has been set upon by the lawyers of the Government of Canada for his parody of the Government of Canada site. Talk about petty! Only a complete idiot, or a federal civil servant’s lawyer, could possibly mistake Jim’s excellent site for an ‘official’ Government of Canada site. Nevertheless, Jim has been served with a threatening letter ordering him to take down his site or change it so it no longer ‘resembles’ the Feds’ site. This is what gives civil servants, and lawyers, a bad name. Give ‘em hell, Jim! We’re all proud of what you’ve been doing to encourage and celebrate Canada’s bloggers, and give us a sense of community — a damn sight more than what the government has ever done to support blogging in Canada. |
ROBIN GOOD ON VIDEOCONFERENCING
| One of the kind people who have been helping me test desktop video software this week is Robin Good, a veritable alchemist of videoconferencing. I was blown away both by Robin’s deep knowledge of the video tools currently in the market, and his ‘homegrown’ applications that integrate and build on the best features of several of the commercial conferencing apps out there. If you’re looking for high quality, reliable many-to-many videoconferencing capability at an affordable price, just go directly to Robin and he’ll get you set up right. This guy is really sharp (though he neither looks nor sounds like what I expected)!
Robin has two events coming up that you should check out if you’re in the market. Here is more information on them, in Robin’s own words: Kolabora Live! Buyer’s Review: April 22nd: InstantPresenter vs. C3 Collaborator An ongoing series of live events in which I will personally review multiple real-time collaboration technologies and in which end users will be able to ask and to compare differences and advantages for each tool presented. In each 60-minute Buyer Review I will first introduce the competing technologies I have personally selected and I will offer a ìbuyer consciousî, concise and benefit-driven analysis of their features, functionalities, key strengths and weaknesses. The remaining time in the event is used for allowing potential buyers and customers attending the event to ask live questions about the tools presented. The questions can be addressed either to me or to one of the elected representative of the technologies showcased. At the end of the Buyers Questions I poll the audience on key feature, traits, marketing and sales issues relating to these products allowing me to gather specific buyers desires, preferences and needs relative to the tools showcased. On the basis of the polled data The Kolabora Buyersí Pick Award is then assigned to the showcased technology that has been able to stand the toughest test of all: the buyer’s mind. Buyer’s Pick technology is then showcased on Kolabora until the next Buyer’s Review goes live. There is no cost for companies to participate. More info or Sign-up: http://tinyurl.com/3emek Kolabora Live! Monthly Seminar A new unique 75-minute monthly event where I report live (audio/video + slides) on:
Participants can submit specific questions via a text interface and in the final 40 minutes I devote my time exclusively to provide public answers to these. Access to this event is limited to 200 people and is sponsor-supported. Initially the event is accessible for free. Only a registration is needed. Recording of the event is offered as a commercial download. Sign-Up: http://tinyurl.com/358l4 Robin, Skype guru Stu Henshall, and several others have graciously given me the opportunity to test a variety of desktop video tools, and given me the names and specs of many other tools I have not yet had time to test. Although I will issue a full report when I’ve finished testing, so far I am quite impressed with SightSpeed’s video quality, and I have yet to find anything that matches Skype’s audio quality. |
April 15, 2004
WE SHARE THIS LAND
 Nothing cuts through to the core of the debate between those that believe all property should be private (notably the current US Presnit) and those that believe some, or even most, property should be held in common, as public property available for the enjoyment of all, than the issue of lakefront and riverfront (‘riparian’) access rights. Googling the topic brings up a horde of lawsuits, neighbour vs. neighbour fights, and political grandstanding. What is amazing is that, at least in North America, there appears to be no overarching principle, no constitutional right either to access of recreational and wilderness land (notably beach and waterfront), or alternatively to restrict access to such land as part of basic property ‘rights’. So these disputes are decided in the trenches — in municipal courtrooms, based most often on the wording of ancient deeds and easements than on principled grounds. Yule Heibel has a delightful post this week that got me thinking about this again. She lives in Victoria BC, where my wife and I lived for five years, and where public rights of access to much (all?) waterfront areas are sacrosanct, under municipal law, except for rare ‘grandfathered’ cases. She exults in the freedom and the sense of community that such laws engender, and contrasts this with the situation in Massachusetts, where almost all waterfront areas are restricted to individual owners and “residents”. She says she learned how to covet from her years there. My reaction would be anger, not covetousness, and, like Yule, I might be tempted to chalk the difference up to Canadian vs. US culture. In my community, we only put up a fence if it is needed to keep pets in, and only then with permission of the neighbours and an open invitation to use the gates to pass through. The Toronto waterfront is almost entirely public access, with parks and walking trails running the entire breadth of the city. But I would be wrong to chalk this up to Canada-US cultural differences. There are areas in the US where public beach and lake access are enshrined in at least municipal law. And there are areas in Canada where they are not. I remember going for a drive up to Lake Simcoe, about an hour North of Toronto, and being astonished at the signs wherever there was a lake view saying “No parking any time without resident sticker — strictly enforced”. Visitors could drive by, but not stop, not touch, this ‘private’ lake. And right in my own municipality there is a small park with soccer fields, apparently donated by a private citizen, with a municipal sign saying “Park use by permit only — no dogs allowed”. As much as I am offended by these restrictions, no matter where they may be (I was equally astounded to find many beaches in the Caribbean off-limits to citizens, fenced and guarded to allow only foreign, paying guests in), I am perhaps even more amazed that, in the absence of any constitutional principle, the situation is not much worse. It says a great deal for the people of those communities that do protect the rights of citizens to the enjoyment of the ‘best’ land — waterfront, recreational, parkland and wilderness — that they do so in the face of those with money and power who would secrete these special lands for the exclusive use of the privileged. I don’t know how it might be worded, but I believe it is time we enshrined the right of all citizens to access and enjoyment of all such land without discrimination, before the forces of privatization take away what is left, before the final act in the Tragedy of the Commons is writ. What is the law where you live? Is it as patchwork and arbitrary as it is here? Or are you able to say, as Yule does, This is mine, it’s all mine, it all belongs to me, and it belongs to you, and to you, and to you, too! It’s ours, ours, ours! How do you do?, lovely to see you, I hope you, too, are enjoying our beautiful land! This meadow?, this mountain?, this ocean?, this view? Yes, it’s mine, and it’s magnificent, isn’t it? And I know you must believe this, because of course it’s yours, too! We share this!
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April 14, 2004
THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS
 I am working my way through David Abram‘s enthralling book The Spell of the Sensuous. I will have more to say about it when I’ve finished, but it has already affected me so much that I feel the need to write about it.
In his books Ishmael and Story of B, Daniel Quinn describes the “Great Forgetting”, the loss of our memory of, and connection with, the millions of years of human evolution in harmony with the rest of life on Earth prior to the invention of totalitarian agriculture and civilization just a few thousand years ago. This forgetting, in Quinn’s view, has been essential to our modern culture’s reckless and relentless pursuit of unsustainable growth, because we are no longer aware of any other way to live. In A Language Older Than Words Derrick Jensen tells us it is possible to remember, to rediscover the way we lived before this Great Forgetting, and that if we “listen closely to the land we will in time know exactly what to do” to reconnect, to remember, and to make our way not back, but forward to a post-civilization culture that once again respects all life on Earth, restores the balance of our damaged planet, and brings an end to the catastrophic violence, misery and destruction that civilization (though well-intentioned) has wrought. And Peter Jay and a rising number of historical revisionists now reassure us that life before civilization was not short, nasty and brutish, but leisurely, joyful, harmonious and idyllic. Now David Abram adds two more important pieces to the prescription for remembering: A solid philosophical framework, rooted in modern phenomenology (the study of things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to all conceptualizations and definitions), that provides a more rational explanation for how civilization has taken us off-track, away from our true place on Earth (to bolster the instinctive argument which is compelling enough for me, but not for many others), and a recipe, a set of exercises, to teach us to remember, to reconnect, to break free of the abstract moral and intellectual inhibitors of our culture and re-learn how to be part of the Earth. While Quinn tells us that we need only “walk away” from the prison that is our culture, our civilization, he does not make it clear how to do so: The prison is your culture, which you sustain generation after generation. You yourself are learning from your parents how to be a prisoner. Your parents learned from their parents how to be a prisoner. Their parents learned from their parents how to be a prisoner. And so on, back to the beginning in the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago.
Abram, it seems to me, is telling us that this prison has no bars, no locks, and that the only thing keeping us inside is fear of what is outside, of not knowing how to live ‘out there’. But as the birds and the spiders and the frogs show us, every day, living out there is easy. We have blinded ourselves to this simplicity by elevating abstraction above perception, closing ourselves to the learnings about how to live that are all around us. Perception, to Abram, is, unlike abstraction, a dance, a reciprocal activity that engages and involves the perceiver and the perceived indistinguishably. He quotes phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty: My gaze pairs off with colour, and my hand with hardness and softness, and in this transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other. Apart from the probing of my eye or my hand, and before my body synchronizes with it, the sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning…
Synaesthetic [involving all the senses together] perception is the rule [among all life on Earth], and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist sees it, what we are to see, hear and feel. So, to me, Abram is saying that remembering our true place in nature, in the web of life on Earth, is simply a matter of opening ourselves up, to perceiving things we have been taught to block, conceptualize, and define abstractly. Just like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, it is more a matter of unlearning than of learning. Just as we can ‘unlearn’ how not to draw things as abstracted icons, so too can we ‘unlearn’ how not to live in a separate, abstracted world disconnected from our senses and from the incredible world of ever-changing form and life and knowledge and spirit all around us. In a section Abram wryly calls “Returning to our Senses” he describes the journey that will take of most of the rest of the book (and perhaps, most of the rest of our lives): As we reacquaint ourselves with our breathing bodies, then the perceived world itself begins to shift and transform. When we begin to consciously frequent the wordless dimension of our sensory participations, certain phenomena that have habitually commanded our focus begin to lose their distinctive fascination and to slip toward the background, while hitherto unnoticed or overlooked presences begin to stand forth from the periphery and to engage our awareness. The countless human artefacts with which we are commonly involved — buildings, automobiles, television screens — all begin to exhibit a common style, and so to lose some of their distinctiveness; meanwhile, organic entities — crows, trees, rainfalls — all these begin to display a new vitality, each coaxing the breathing body into a unique dance. Even boulders and rocks seem to speak their own uncanny languages of gesture and shadow, inviting the body and its bones into silent communication. In contact with the native forms of the earth, one’s senses are slowly energized and awakened, combining and recombining in ever-shifting patterns.
Even language, the most seemingly abstract of our human inventions, is, in Merleau-Ponty’s and Abram’s philosophy, deeply rooted in the expression of our bodies and our senses. Here’s a delightful excerpt that particularly resonated with me, as I marvel at our ability to develop deep friendships online, and at the amazing depth of meaning that is carried in the tone of a voice, brought to me by Skype or one of the other technologies I’m studying, that is absent in the mere stream of words in an instant message: If, for instance, one comes upon two human friends unexpectedly meeting for the first time in many months, and one chances to hear their initial words of surprise, greeting, and pleasure, one may readily notice, if one pays close enough attention, a tonal, melodic layer of communication beneath the explicit denotative meaning of the words — a rippling rise and fall of the voices in a sort of musical duet, rather like two birds singing to each other. Each voice, each side of the duet, mimes a bit of the other’s melody, while adding its own inflection and style, and then is echoed by the other in turn — the two singling bodies thus tuning and attuning to one another, rediscovering a common register, remembering each other. It requires only a slight shift in focus to realize that this melodic singing is carrying the bulk of communication in this encounter, and that the explicit meanings of the actual words ride on the surface of this depth like waves on the surface of the sea.
That is about as far as I have read. Just before he launches into the next section (which I will start reading this evening), Abram teases us with the promise of explaining the cause of Quinn’s “Great Forgetting”: Nonhuman nature seems to have withdrawn from both our speaking and our senses. What event could have precipitated this double withdrawal, constricting our ways of speaking even as it muffled our ears and set a veil before our eyes?
I will write more about this book. I commend it to those who have not yet discovered it, or those who read it but weren’t yet ready for its challenging and profound message — please read it, or re-read it, with me, and share your thoughts. Let us take this journey, and re-learn, together. |
April 13, 2004
A PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION – PART ONE
| Four years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation: Creating Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I’ve updated it, broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the first part below. The remaining parts will follow on successive Tuesdays.
Introduction: Why I’m Here My modest objective in this presentation is first, to tell you some new, interesting and useful things about innovation, and, second, to persuade you that innovation is the most important determinant of every business’ success, and perhaps even the quality of our lives. I want to convince you that in your business, whether it employs one person or one million, innovation is probably the solution to whatever is currently keeping you awake at night — whether that be sales growth, cost control, customer satisfaction, employee retention, or maximizing shareholder value. And if you, like me, spend some of your sleepless hours worrying about things more altruistic than your personal and business success, I want to convince you that innovation is probably also the solution to most of the problems that have befallen our suffering planet, in part because past innovations have created many of these problems. And finally, if I’m successful in this evangelical task, I want you to leave today not only with renewed hope about the future of your company and our world, but with some new tools to make innovation happen in your business. I would like to ask you to listen to these ideas with an open mind, suspend briefly your disbelief, and give this your full attention. If this was that easy to explain, someone much smarter than I would have done it years ago. One: Learning from our past: How Need Drives Innovation
The catch-phrases of these business-driven thought leadership events are not new: competitive advantage, sustainable development, the connected knowledge economy, globalization, convergence, digitization, moving at the speed of thought. What is new is that there are now three divergent models being used to predict our future, fighting for audience attention (the names assigned to them are mine):
From the perspective of business innovation this matters because almost everyone agrees that the successful businesses of the future will be complex, adaptive, agile, proactive, and creative — they will not wait for market demands to change them, but will instead continuously reinvent their companies, anticipate future demands, and make strategic, risky, value-creating investments and decisions, what John Kotter calls Leading Change. In order to do this — to make intelligent decisions and investments before demand is articulated, to view risk-taking and the creation of future options for action as essential, not foolhardy — requires at least some consensus about ‘where the future is headed’. Selecting one of the above three theories about the future is an important start in doing so. Technophiles who favour the Acceleration Model tend to be infatuated with artifacts of the last thirty years: more digital, faster, smaller, lighter. Advocates of the Chaos Model, on the other hand, believe there are no rules for our brave new world of the 21st century. Their advice for business and other leaders is to be opportunistic and think short-term. I lean towards the Evolutionary Model. I believe that using an understanding of the past, with the right perspective, can help businesses anticipate the future with exceptional clarity and probability of success. There are two reasons I hold this belief, and they form the basis for much of the rest of this presentation:
The report of the 1999 Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum draws together some very powerful innovation models, into a single synthesized model that can be used to explain how technologies have impacted society and civilization since it began about thirty millennia ago: According to this model, innovations like crop cultivation, the printing press, and the harnessing of solar energy, have always arisen in response to an urgent human need — overcoming the sudden food scarcity after the Ice Age, bringing literacy to the masses, and solving the energy crisis respectively in these three examples. Technologies are applications of these innovations. The intriguing organic-looking ovals for each technology are also from the Credit Suisse Synthesis, which proposes are technologies are best developed using the following process: Let’s now take a look at this synthesis model in more detail, to test whether it represents the way in which historical innovations have occurred, and then what this might tell us about innovations of the future. Two: Man’s Earliest Innovations: A Brief History of Technology So picture our poor shivering proto-human looking among the bones of a wolf’s recent meal for new tools beside the greasy bone, and thinking, in true McLuhanesque and 20th century economics terms: ‘If the bone as an extension of my hand helps me to compensate for my competitive disadvantage in the hunter-gatherer marketplace, why can I not use other tools similarly? Then, lacking the appropriate scientific training but still intoxicated over his first innovation, he or she comes across a dead wolf and considers the following applications of this technological insight:
Of course, the correct answer is (c), which, except for the use of a leash or harness instead of a tight strap, remains one of the most important technologies in our short human history: animal domestication. Interestingly, the development of a non-choking animal harness, and a stirrup for riding larger animals, took centuries, according to a review in the Economist of the last millennium’s greatest inventions. What’s more, it occurred first in China, possibly enabling their civilization to develop much more quickly than Western civilization, until, for reasons only hinted at in the Economist , China suddenly stopped developing new technologies in the 15th century. Without animal domestication and crop cultivation, we as a species might well not have survived to come up with newer and more sophisticated innovations like the wheel, paper and the computer. Three: Six Principles about the Innovation Process The first humans used precisely the process shown in Figure Two to develop and ‘commercialize’ the technology applications of the innovations of animal domestication and crop cultivation. It is the same commercialization process taught in business schools today. However, the success of the process is only as good as the idea, the innovation, that lies at its front end. Business schools are actually very good at explaining the recipe, but they, and most educational and business institutions, are absolutely terrible at teaching people how to find the essential new ingredients — the ‘grey matter’ at the left side of Figure Two, the ideas & innovations that make the recipe work. The problem isn’t a scarcity of good ideas either — it is the lack of rigour and investment in infrastructure to surface, capture, develop and qualify new ideas prior to commercialization. Figure Two also recognizes that many innovations and technologies are derived from other innovations and technologies, and often come from applying an idea or a technology from one application domain, or from nature, to an unrelated application domain. The BBC/Discovery program Connections made this point very powerfully, and its author James Burke continues to develop both examples of such non-obvious connections, and exercises to help us learn to discover more — in essence, to become more innovative. Burke’s latest book explains how a problem with the irrigation of Italian gardens led to the invention of the carburetor, for example. Furthermore, Figure Two acknowledges the importance of the story in the successful commercialization of innovations. It is hard to pick up a business book or attend a business conference these days without being lectured on the importance of story-telling, but the idea is neither new nor complicated: Stories convey the context for the application, they explain how it can be used in the user’s or developer’s day to day life. Knowledge transfer is an essential precondition to commercialization. The easiest way to transfer knowledge, i.e. to explain or persuade, is to do so in a way that lets the learner internalize what they are hearing i.e. to fit it into their own mental models of how things work. And the simplest way to enable internalization is by telling a story, be it a Utopia or Future State Vision, a parable with a built in lesson, or a simple recounting of processes and events that lets the learner relive the teacher’s experience as if it were their own. From all this we can derive six basic principles about the Innovation Process (again, the names given to them are mine), to add to the two espoused earlier about cultural resistance to innovation:
(Next Tuesday: Part Two: Innovation & Society, and The Structure & Culture of Innovative Organizations (with six additional Innovation Principles to add to the eight above); The Following Tuesday: Part Three: A 15-step Prescription for an Innovative Organization, with some examples.) |
April 12, 2004
DEJA VU
 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:
What will it take, this time around, to bring about these critical changes, when today’s corporate-owned political parties are moving America, and to a lesser extent the rest of the West, in exactly the opposite direction? Will it take more deaths of demonstrators in the streets, fighting for the rights of ‘ordinary citizens’, or another Great Depression brought about by reckless deficit financing, currency speculation and corporate greed? What will it take for us, finally, to learn the important lessons of history, and stop repeating our mistakes? |
