 Last Spring I told you about my two back-to-back conferences with different generations of workers, which convinced me of the wisdom of Nancy White’s entreaty that we (who understand both the enormous potential value of social networking to business, and the way that business works) need to act as “bridges”, explaining how each generation can be of great value to the other:
A few months ago I went to two conferences back-to-back. The first was a conference for senior executives on social networking, where there was much concern about cost, security, and diversion of people’s attention from their ‘jobs’. They asked me, as one of the panelists, whether they really needed to embrace this ‘social networking’ stuff to attract top new recruits. They could not imagine any other use for it.
The next day I was at a bloggers’ conference where (aside from Nancy and me) the attendees were almost entirely young and tech-savvy. They spent the conference sharing some truly brilliant ideas for social networking, and lamenting how hard it was to get anyone to pay for their skills and ideas. It became abundantly clear to me that most of them didn’t have the faintest idea how business executives make decisions, or even how businesses operate in today’s economy. So here we have two groups of people who need something from each other and who have something to offer each other, but they don’t talk, and probably can’t talk each other’s language to communicate those offerings in ways that the other can understand. They need a bridge, a way to connect with each other. More recently I had a conversation, in conjunction with my presentation From Content to Context and From Collection to Connection, with another group of Gen Millennials about how they were coping with the work world. I had once heard the potential battle for freedom (by Gen Millennium) against security (by restrictive IT departments) described as “nothing short of a war of wills”. Failure to accommodate the social tools that these young people had become accustomed to using was inviting them to either leave (to work for an organization that would) or find workarounds that would pose even greater information risks to the company, I had been told. Not so, said this group. They weren’t concerned about having workplace access to information they might find useful. They didn’t want to access Facebook pages, blogs, or YouTube videos. They had no use whatever for the corporate portals, Intranets or groupware (SharePoint, QuickPlace etc.) They didn’t use e-mail unless they had no choice. They told me that they share information through conversations: face to face, by telephone, IM, Skype, screen-sharing and other real-time tools. They share this information with their own social networks, which transcend organizational boundaries. They get better, faster answers this way than from looking at someone else’s “dead” content — any content. They could do most or all of this with their cell-phones, so they didn’t particularly care what restrictions the corporate security czars put on content access. In some respects this is good news. The great energy and expense that most large organizations invest in content capture, collection, dissemination and security can, for the most part, be saved, and most of this infrastructure abandoned as irrelevant, useless. But in other respects this is terrible news. Aside from the wasted content effort, this means that most young people will learn from peers, not from mentors. How much of what senior people know will never be learned by younger workers, simply because the networks of trust necessary for valuable conversations will not have been forged (and given that Gen Millennium workers are expected to change jobs on average every four years, might never be forged)? If, as JP Rangaswami said, ”More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.”, then how are modern organizations going to enable this learning-by-observation to happen? What’s more, the major incidents of the last decade, from Enron, 9/11 and the Katrina response, to climate change and the latest financial market meltdown, are all ultimately knowledge management failures — problems that arose because critical knowledge transfer never took place. The “cost of not knowing” is in the trillions, perhaps quadrillions of dollars. What is it going to take before we realize that this cost of not knowing, externalized to the taxpayer, struggling nations and future generations though it may be, is simply too high, and start to invest again in people and learning processes that will prevent the next colossal knowledge failure from damaging our weakened society further, maybe even irreparably? |
October 17, 2008
CCK08: Two Conversations with Gen Millennium, and Some Questions on Learning and Knowledge Failures
October 15, 2008
Thoughts on Yesterday’s Canadian Election: Harper Still Doesn’t Speak for Canada
 Tuesday’s election — prompted by the ambition of the right-wing Conservative party leader Harper to split the progressive vote sufficiently to convert his minority support into a majority government under Canada’s antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system — was bound to disappoint everyone. The Canadian electorate remains ornery and angry at the war-mongering Bush-adoring Harper, at the bumbling, scandal-tainted Liberal opposition, at our helplessness in the face of our Southern neighbour’s government’s arrogance, stupidity, self-loathing and thirst for blood, about our dependence on our natural resources and the environmental devastation their extraction wreaks, and about our failure to be the nation of the 21st century that many thought we might be.
But so far we are not angry enough to vote into power a truly progressive government — the three “third parties” (New Democrats, Greens and Bloc QuÈbecois) are all well left-of-centre socially and economically but remain perpetually on the fringes of power, and so enamoured of their parochial interests that they are unable to get together and present a unified and unambiguous progressive voice. So we got treated to a virtual replay of the election of two years ago — the Conservatives got the same 37% of the vote, but nearly won a majority of seats because of a shift in the votes among the two thirds of Canadians who loathe the Conservatives (surveys suggest that in a single-transferable vote system they would get almost no second-place votes). What should be happening is that the Liberal leader should be pulling together a coalition of the four opposition parties to create a government that reflects the interests of the 63% of Canadians who support progressive, not reactionary, government. If we had proportional representation, such as a STV system, the Conservatives would have only 113 seats (they got 143), the Liberals 83 (they got 76) , the NDP 58 (they got 37), the Bloc 31 (they got 50), and the Greens 22 (they got none; in fact, because a lot of Greens voted strategically instead of “wasting” their Green votes, the Greens under a PST system would probably have more than 40 seats today). If that were the case, the idea of an out-of-touch 37% running the government and bragging that they had a “renewed and increased mandate to govern” would be seen as as preposterous as it really is. Such a colossal waste of energy, time and money ($300 million, just to run the election). The fact that the turnout was a record low really says it all. It really shows how dysfunctional our electoral system is. And the fact that Canadians fell for Harper’s Bush-inspired character assassination of the Liberal leader, and Harper’s falsely smearing the idea of a carbon tax as an “additional tax burden” (the scheme is revenue neutral and would only punish polluters and gas gulpers) was really disappointing — it demonstrated how depressingly effective negative, dumbed-down campaign advertising can be. Ugh. Here we are, again, in the same place. Category: Canadian Politics
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October 14, 2008
Now What Should I Do? — The Boomer’s Dilemma
This is the second in a series of articles about my new book Finding the Sweet Spot. The book is available from most booksellers or online from the sites listed in the right sidebar. A synopsis of the book is here. A complete set of reviews of the book (thank you, reviewers!) can be found on Beth Patterson’s site here. My book has three intended audiences:
I want to write about the first and third groups in future articles, but this one is about the second group, the boomers who, by choice or necessity, simply are not retiring from the work force (as the two red circles at right on the chart above attest), even though many are being pushed out of their jobs to make room for younger and/or cheaper replacements. Many of these people must, or wish to, find second careers. Many of them will try, mostly unsuccessfully, to make a living doing what they did as employees, going it alone as “consultants”. While those age 55+ make up 25% of the workforce, they make up 40% of the self-employed. And unlike younger workers, only a minority of this age group has a high school diploma. For many of them, they only know how to do one job, and wouldnít know how to begin starting a business to do anything else. Statistically, the vast majority of them will earn much less than they did as employees, despite working long hours trying to find customers who will value their considerable experience. Many will put a brave face on a very stressful and unprofitable period of self-employment, because they can’t imagine it being easier to do anything else. Workers aged 55-64 (especially women) are the fastest-growing segment of the labor force. Many women in this age bracket are re-entering the labor force after a protracted period outside it, or even entering it for the first time, and finding the prospect, and the experience, demoralizing and terrifying. Increasingly, lower- and middle-income Americans have no option of retiring — their savings are utterly insufficient to support them for the thirty or forty years after age 55 that most can expect to live. We hear about the boomers who have benefited from the decades-long boom in the housing and stock markets (that ended abruptly this year) and can afford to retire and live a long life of leisure, but this is a small proportion of the boomer generation, and it has recently become much smaller. And even for this wealthy minority, the prospect of three or four decades out of the workforce is either fearsome or unimaginably boring — after being burned out from decades in exhausting executive jobs, they are likely looking at second careers that will allow them to give something back, and to do something they love that capitalizes on the immense skills they have acquired over their first careers. These second-career seekers need the skills to create new enterprises, not sole proprietorships that require them to compete with or outsource the work of their former employer. For people who have a lifetime of knowledge that is greatly needed in the challenging 21st century workplace, work as a Wal-Mart greeter is a colossal waste of talent and wisdom. We have to help them do better. It is probably hard to imagine the abject terror that making a living for themselves instills in boomers who have absolutely no experience doing so. Chances are, most of the entrepreneurs they do know went at it the wrong way and failed, perhaps miserably and expensively, so they have most of the same ten ingrained fears of entrepreneurship that the young people I speak to in business schools express: Not having the skills, self-confidence, ideas, money or time; not being able to handle the stress, the failure or the loneliness; not knowing the “process”; and the fear that “the deck’s stacked against entrepreneurs in favour of big business”. In my book I explain how these ten fears are unwarranted, and how the most successful entrepreneurs have discovered ways to make a living for yourself that is not stressful, risky, exhausting or expensive. The process starts with self-discovery: knowing what you’re really good at (your Gifts), what your really love doing (your Passions), and what is needed in the world that you really care about (your Purpose), and finding the “sweet spot” where these three intersect. You might imagine that a worker in his or her fifties would have a pretty good idea what his or her Gifts and Passions are, but you’d be wrong. Most of us did what we were trained to do, and worked at it so hard and so long that we had no chance to even contemplate whether it was really what we were “meant to do.” So, much of Finding the Sweet Spot is exercises that help those with entrepreneurial aspirations try to discover what that “sweet spot” is for them. This is a challenging task (and it changes throughout our lifetime) but it can also be very enjoyable. I’m hoping that the book is successful enough that there will be ‘circles’ of those seeking their “sweet spot” who will get together, not only to help each other explore and imagine the work they were really meant to do, but also to discover partners, people who share their Purpose and whose Gifts and Passions complement their own. Because the biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make, especially those looking for second careers, is to try to do everything themselves, alone. No one has all the skills needed for a successful entrepreneurial venture, and sharing the workload, the challenges and learning of a new enterprise converts the experience from a stressful and lonely one to a joyful, social one — and greatly increases the likelihood of success. If I can get the future entrepreneurs of the world — people whose skills, ideas and efforts are so critical to the economy of the future — to just take these two first steps — to start with a discovery of the work they’re really meant to do, and to do so with partners with complementary Gifts and Passions, I’ll have succeeded in my book’s purpose. Because with this foundation, they’ll be on their way to creating Natural Enterprises, and being a part of a bold new Natural Economy — one that is purposeful, responsible, sustainable, and even fun. The events of the past few months have shown clearly that the time for that newNatural Economy is now. Category: Natural Enterprise
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October 13, 2008
Not Ready Yet to End Our Addiction to Growth
 The value of public companies listed on stock markets has dropped by about a third in the past year. This means that shareholders believe that this group of companies, which are an important but not dominant factor in the global economy (the public sector, notably health and education, and privately-owned enterprises, are collectively much larger, both in what they contributed to productive output and in the number of people they employ) will generate 1/3 less future total profits than had previously been forecast. The response of governments to this assessment has been immediate and unanimous — such a reassessment is unacceptable, so unacceptable that trillions of dollars of taxpayer money (money that governments cannot afford to spend) need to be spent immediately to “increase liquidity”. By increasing liquidity they mean creating enough new cash for investors to need to park somewhere (i.e. in the stock market, pushing prices back up again) and for consumers to buy the stuff these companies are producing. In short, governments and corporations are working furiously together to ensure that all of us — governments, corporations and consumers — remain addicted to growth, which means addicted to ever-increasing consumption and ever-increasing debt. This is the fragile foundation on which this portion of our economy (the publicly-listed private sector) utterly depends. It should be noted that most unlisted (privately-held) private-sector enterprises, companies that do not have outside shareholders with insatiable demands for double-digit annual profit growth, and public sector enterprises (government, education, health and other public services) are not addicted to growth. They can do just fine in a steady-state economy. They are vulnerable to a collapse in the stock market, however, because (a) if the publicly-listed companies lay off millions of workers (which they tend to do in a recession) that affects consumers’ ability to buy from anyone, and (b) most consumers’ wealth and pensions are tied up in publicly-listed company investments, and in housing whose value tends to move in lockstep with stock market values (because they vie for investors’ cash). I recently (before the stock market collapse) wrote a two-part article (part one; part two) about the advantages of moving from a growth economy to a steady-state economy, in part because it is better for our environment, and in part because the growth economy is simply not sustainable and will soon have to end anyway. Does the current stock market collapse provide an opportunity to move there now, instead of waiting until the last possible moment? As I noted in the earlier articles, such a transition would require a major redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, a large investment in entrepreneurial education and infrastructure, fair trade laws and a collective commitment to collaboration instead of competition for resources and jobs. I’m not sure if that’s possible, but perhaps the current free-fall of markets might make the prospect more palatable. What we should not be doing is giving trillions of dollars away to large public corporations. As economist Paul Krugman has noted, if we must invest this money (money, remember, we have no way of knowing how we’re going to collect or repay) to prevent a collapse that will plunge us into the next Great Depression, that investment should be in equity in these companies — we the taxpayers should be buying up these companies so we can own them and determine their future direction, and prevent recurrence of the ignorance- and greed-driven errors they made that has led to this crisis of confidence. In effect, we are nationalizing most of the financial services industry, which in the US accounts for a third of GDP and millions of jobs. For conservatives and libertarians, this is a ghastly process. What drives the entire economy is consumer spending. Since the 1970s, levels of consumer spending, in real terms, have more than doubled, despite the fact that, for 90% of the population, income in real terms has not changed. The doubling has all been financed by increases in personal debt. Much of that debt has been secured by home ownership (which has recently lost much of its collateral value), and much of it has been unsecured. Most of it, arguably, should never have been advanced because the consumers’ ability to repay it depends of endless increases in future income and increases in the value of homes and investments. We have been banking for nearly forty years on the continuance of growth that we knew full well was unsustainable. These loans were simply reckless and speculative. They were gambling on perpetual growth. Now we are seeing the economy unravel because of this. By lowering interest rates and throwing cash at insolvent financial corporations, governments are trying to get consumers to start buying again, to addict them to even more spending and more debt. This is just crazy. What we really need is to rein in our spending to what we can reasonably afford to repay (and that applies to governments and corporations, not just consumers), and then restructure the economy to be able to thrive with zero growth. This will be very difficult (and painful) but not impossible. For a start, what we need to do is increase interest rates to reflect the risk of non-repayment and to provide a sufficient return (especially for those on fixed incomes) to enable pensions and other long-term investments to cover the real inflation in our economy (which is already much higher than the “official” rates, and likely to grow much higher as Peak Oil, water shortages and other resource scarcities come due). We also need responsible limits to credit and spending by consumers, corporations and governments. That means a reintroduction of usury laws. The “deregulation” that eliminated these laws has allowed lenders to charge obscene (20%+) interest rates, and hence has encouraged them to offer credit to people who have no capacity to repay their debts. Lenders need to accept responsibility, and to encourage this, capping interest rates at a few points over prime, and reversing recent laws that restrict individuals’ ability to declare bankruptcy, are necessary. The consequence of all this would be a drastic reduction in consumer spending and consumption. Publicly-listed companies (which are most dependent on ever-accelerating consumer spending) would be most hurt by this, though all companies and most investment and pension portfolios would suffer too. It’s really a matter of whether this can and should happen now, or whether we stall it off a few years and have it hit even harder then (with a disproportionate and unfair impact on future generations that did not incur these reckless debts and did not steal more than their share of the Earth’s resources). The recent drop in share values would already cover part of this shrinkage, but in a zero growth economy shares would really only be worth the present value of future dividends, a steady and no longer perpetually-increasing stream. So these shares will likely have to drop a lot further. The drop in share values would mostly affect high-income earners, which would actually help in the necessary redistribution of wealth and income for a steady-state economy, but it would also hurt line employees and pension plans. A sharp increase in taxes on the rich, and on speculative investments and capital gains, could help fund a “negative income tax” to protect those who do not have enough income to live comfortably after this retrenchment. An end to subsidies to big corporations, and replacing ‘free’ trade laws with fair trade laws would also encourage healthy economic relocalization (moving quality jobs back close to where the goods and services are consumed), enable higher standards of environmental protection and resource conservation, and reduce exposure to spikes in energy prices. The biggest challenge of the shift to a zero-growth economy will be the massive re-learning that is needed by every citizen — re-learning of entrepreneurial skills (since most big multinationals will collapse to make way for many more small, locally-based companies) and of self-sufficiency skills (growing our own food, making our own clothes, maintaining and fixing our homes, appliances and tools instead of relying on others to do this for us). It will require us to live more modestly, and within our means. It will be a much different world. The economists from across the political and philosophical spectrum who are urging the government to step in and either bail out (the conservatives) or nationalize (the progressives) the overextended financial institutions of the world are trying to stave off a panic that could plunge us unnecessarily into another Great Depression. The problem is that the US in particular simply has no money to pay for this. Conservatives have bankrupted the US treasury with tax cuts for the rich and trillions in spending on unwinnable, endless wars and utterly useless, staggeringly expensive “homeland security” programs. So the risk now is that the US dollar, which is really fundamentally worthless, will collapse and plunge us into that global Great Depression anyway. The second risk is that, if the US can persuade or bully its global co-dependent trading partners to keep taking its worthless currency, even after it prints another trillion or two dollars of it with nothing of value to support it, the US and the world will go back to believing in the magical thinking of its publicly-listed companies and capital markets — that double-digit growth can resume and continue forever. My guess is that this is exactly what will happen. This is why my prediction is that the next real Great Depression is still some twenty years ahead, when the whole house of cards will collapse. The problem is that then, the economy will be leveraged and over-extended even more than it is now, and that compounding all this will be the reality of the End of Oil, the End of Water, the first serious climate change catastrophes, massive and global civil strife (fueled with newer and ever-more dangerous weapons available to any desperate individual with a science degree and a good imagination) that the horrific inequity of wealth and income on our planet will inevitable provoke, and ghastly overpopulation and environmental desolation with another two billion humans on the planet fighting for their share of plunging natural resources and exhausted land. The relatively modest setback to wealth and income that the recent greed- and ignorance-induced stock market collapse has wrought is perhaps our final chance to wake up to what we are doing and realize that “business as usual” simply cannot go on. But if this is our wake-up call, we are not heeding it. Instead, the alarms are ringing and we’re just pulling the pillows and blankets up over our heads and refusing to admit that we must act. We want the governments to lull us back to sleep with their trillion-dollar bailout lullabies. We have this terrible hangover from too much growth, too much consumption, too much debt. And we’re hooked bad, unable to break the addiction. Call us when we’re feeling better. Just another few minutes, a couple more decades, then, wepromise, we’ll get up, we’ll act, we’ll do the responsible thing. But not now. Not today. Not this year. Category: Understanding Economics
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October 12, 2008
Saturday Links for the Week — October 11, 2008
 photo by Maren Yumi Mindful Wandering: The coined term (by Barbara Ganley) is “slow blogging“, but I much prefer the term my friend Chris Lott uses: “mindful wandering“. The idea is to see blogging, which is really just a new way of recording your thoughts in a diary, as a meditative practice, taking the time to ponder the meaning of what you’re reading, thinking and writing, letting your mind meander in thoughtful and creative ways to “make sense” of it. I find that some of my best blog posts are those I’ve stopped and restarted several times, allowing time for thoughts to percolate and new ideas to emerge. Letting your readers follow your thought process, putting yourself in context, can greatly enrich the value of what you write, at least for those readers with the patience to allow themselves to be immersed in “where you are” as you are writing, to enter, as much as is possible in a diary, into intimate, tacit conversation with you. Some of the bloggers in my gravitational community (listed at right) are very proficient at diarizing their mindful wandering: Colleen has been doing this delightfully, day by day, chronicling her month-long retreat in Seattle. Beth’s blog is another great example. An Audience Without A Reason to Care Is Just a Bunch of People That You Have to Clean Up After: Justin Kownacki explains the need to engage your audience with something more than spectacle if you hope to build a relationship that endures, and goes on to tell you how to do it. If you haven’t been watching his hilarious online series Something to Be Desired, check it out. The Effort is Worth It: Justin also directs us to Seth’s blog post on our growing propensity (in light of the billions made and lost by lazy, greedy, incompetent financial brokers) to believe luck has more to do with what comes of our life than effort. Seth prescribes a diet of less mindless activity, more effort on important things, more exercise, more volunteerism, more time meaningfully spent with those you love, and more financial frugality. I’m there. Community Effort That Pays Off: Tree pointed me to this amazing list of initiatives and proposals by the work groups of the Corvallis (Oregon) Sustainability Coalition. It’s an ambitious and inspiring list in 12 sectors of public life: community inclusion, economic vitality, education, energy, food, health, housing, land use, natural areas, transport, waste reduction, and water use — let’s hope the town council will listen and implement them. If you have (or should have) a program like this in your community, this would be a great list to get you started. Geoff Brown came up with a similar list for St Kilda Australia, as part of the Sustainable Living At Home community activism project. Story-Telling Resources: From the same vector as the above links, Barbara provides a veritable host of useful links on storytelling, and CogDog Alan Levine provides (with a caveat on not getting preoccupied with tools), 50+ tools that enable storytelling. Thanks to Tree for the links. BTW, a great everyday site for story-telling guidance and ideas is my friend Shawn Callahan’s Anecdote site. Why We Fall for Greenwashing: Cataclysmia explains the dangerous appeal of corporate greenwashing — that it reassures us that we don’t have to change. It is human nature to be resistant to change, to only change when we must, and we are under siege these days to change in so many ways that when a corporation, cynically, dishonestly, tells us that they’re good corporate citizens we are inclined to want to believe it. Explaining the Financial System Collapse: Six of the best articles on the current mess:
The Attempts to Steal the Election Continue: If you can’t defeat the opponent by heavily-financed character assassination, outright lies, gerrymandering, or rigging voting machines, well, then, just don’t let supporters of your opponents vote. In politics, it seems, the end always justifies the means. More on Soldiers in the US Streets: Patrick Leahy weighs in on the decision to deploy a US army unit to the ‘homeland’. This has stirred up no small hysteria, but I’m still not sure what it really means. And the Fuse of the Population Bomb Still Burns On: The Bush Administration’s anti-family-planning ideology has greatly worsened the lives of as many as a billion women deliberately deprived of inexpensive family planning information and tools. The Problem with Monogamy: Daisy gets it: “It’s absolutely clear that no one is meant to love and be loved by just one person, and that we slowly kill ourselves when try to make this happen. No one can meet all of another person’s needs, and there is no reason to expect anyone to do so…The natural outcropping of this, when we do itdaily ó when we form many diverse loving relationships, as many as will grow, and treat their maintenance as important work ó is community.” Sigh. Someday, perhaps, the whole world will understand. Just for Fun: It didn’t really happen, but this ‘sign feud’ between two churches over dogs’ souls is delightful nevertheless. Thanks to my new colleague Miranda for the link.
Thought for the Week: Thanks to Sarah Burridge for putting me on to the poetry of Robert Pinsky (by quoting the sixth line of this poem): The Horses
Barely a twelvemonth after The seven days war that put the world to sleep, Late in the evening the strange horses came. By then we had made our covenant with silence, But in the first few days it was so still We listened to our breathing and were afraid. On the second day The radios failed; we turned the knobs, no answer. On the third day a warship passed us, headed north, Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter Nothing. The radios dumb; And still they stand in corners of our kitchens, And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms All over the world. But now if they should speak, If on a sudden they should speak again, If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak, We would not listen, we would not let it bring That old bad world that swallowed its children quick At one great gulp. We would not have it again. Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep, And then, that evening In the first moment we had never a thought |
October 10, 2008
CCK08 Week Five: Groups vs Networks vs Communities
 Week 5 of the Connectivism MOOC is about the distinction between groups and networks. One of the key readings for the week was written by my friend Stephen Downes when he was obviously high on something (possibly New Zealand, which will do that to you). The point of the lesson is to distinguish groups, which are apparently inherently homogeneous and hierarchical, from networks, which are apparently neither. Members of both are connected to each other. George Siemens asserts that most organized collective activity (like education) fails to recognize the identity of the selves within the collective. Rather than groups vs networks, he distinguishes collectives (in which the self is subsumed) from connectives (in which autonomy of self is retained). ”As we integrate our ideas and concepts with others’” he says, “and we extend them into some kind of collective activity, there is an important protection of self in which we retain our identity and our contributions.” I thought this dichotomy rather interesting in the context of the diagram above (which Chris Corrigan and I collectively, or perhaps connectively, created) of the dynamic of decision making which moves from individual engagement and cognition through collective conversation and consensus and thence to individual action, following a Scharmer “U” pattern. Are we not, I thought, iteratively and simultaneously collective and connective, producing some “work product” that is collective, that of the integrated group, and some that is connective, the individual acceptance of responsibility and resultant actions, whether they be done alone or with others? George goes on to warn that groups will coerce individuals with deviant ideas to conform to the group norm, with the result that groups stifle innovation. Networks are positioned as the compromise in the continuum from highly diverse independent individuals and conforming, structured groups. This model doesn’t jibe with what I’ve observed in workplaces throughout my life. Using the terminology of the Wisdom of Crowds, my experience has been that:
Can groups be dangerous? Of course. Groupthink has ruined many once-great companies. Cults are one of the scourges of civilization. Mobs, of organized criminals, religious zealots or drunken college students, can cause havoc and heartache and ruin lives. But groups of people with a shared purpose and shared set of values and principles have also, as Margaret Mead has said, achieved important changes that would not have been possible any other way. They are what we call communities. Networks are useful for the reasons explained in Granovetter’s “Strength of Weak Ties”. They are ‘farm teams’ for the communities that you do your most important work with, the ‘trade routes’ between communities. They are often delightful, stimulating, and helpful when you need something in a hurry. But to me, networks are too loose, too fragmented to be communities or to accomplish any of the important things that communities can do. Communities are connective and collective and only they can fully enable the powerful activities depicted in the graphic above. As I’ve said before, love, conversation and community are the essence of what it means to be human, alive,connected, part of all-life-on-Earth. |
October 9, 2008
Six Steps to Natural Enterprise: A Synopsis of “Finding the Sweet Spot”
 This will be the first of a series of ‘teasers’ on my new book Finding the Sweet Spot, available from most booksellers or online from the sites listed in the right sidebar. A complete set of reviews of the book (thank you, reviewers!) can be found on Beth Patterson’s site here. I‘ve spent most of my professional life helping entrepreneurs succeed. After I’d worked with over a hundred, I began to notice something special about a small number of them. Their people smiled all the time. They loved their work. They didn’t work especially hard. Their customers loved them, so much that they rarely had to do any marketing — word of mouth was enough. They were partnerships of equals, working together, with no ‘boss’. They had few or no debts, and were beholden to no one. They were connected to, responsive to, and responsible to, their people, customers and the communities in which they worked. They were environmentally sustainable and economically resilient, not vulnerable to vagaries of the market or economy. They had created the kind of workplaces that made you say “Boy! I’d love to work in a place like that!” So I studied them, to try to find what made them special, different from all the rest. I found they had mostly done six things differently from all other entrepreneurs. When I looked at these six things, they seemed obvious to me, until I realized that none of these things is taught in business school, and none of them is the “conventional wisdom” of what starting your own business is about. So I decided to write a book about them, in the hopes that others could use this “formula” to escape from wage slavery and create their own responsible, sustainable, joyful enterprises — what I have come to call Natural Enterprises. Chelsea Green agreed to publish the book under the name Finding the Sweet Spot. Here, in a nutshell, are the six things these remarkable entrepreneurs did differently:
Finding the Sweet Spot starts you on your journey to Natural Enterprise, and contains a full set of resources, including books by successful Natural Entrepreneurs like Dave Smith and John Abrams who tell you their stories in greater detail. As I watch our economy unraveling, I am more and more convinced that we need to create a whole Natural Economy of responsible, sustainable, joyful, Natural Enterprises, and that the time is now. I hope you’ll pick up a copy of the book and help me make it happen. Category: Natural Enterprise
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October 8, 2008
Play
 Johan Huizinga, who wrote a book on the subject, defined play as follows: a free activity standing quite consciously outside ëordinaryí life as being ënot seriousí but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly
Other books have urged the incorporation of more play into health and fitness routines, school activities, work activities, and of course social activities. Play is more engaging, easier to persevere with, more relaxing and stimulating and creative. It helps you to think differently. We use the term to mean many things: hobbies, games, dancing, role-playing, roughhousing and other unstructured physical exercise (alone or socially), story-telling and other imagining and innovating activities, joking, flirting and other empathic activities, using toys, and a variety of sports and recreational activities. We say we ‘play’ a musical instrument. We contrast it to work, which is ‘serious’ activity. Yet for many play is fiercely competitive, and for them it is only ‘fun’ if you win. Is this still play? A few years ago I wrote about Tom Robbins’ concept of ‘crazy wisdom’: Robbins describes his personal experiences with near-suicidal depression, and how he was able to pull himself back from the brink of what he calls Weltschmerz (What a wonderful word! — per dictionary.com it means “Sadness over the evils of the world, especially as an expression of romantic pessimism.”) The trick was to rediscover playfulness, or what the Tibetan Buddhists call Crazy Wisdom. Robbins says it is “the wisdom that evolves when one, while refusing to avert one’s gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, insists on joy in spite of everything”.
Hmmm. For many people I know, what should properly be play (i.e. joyous and fun) is instead essential therapy for coping with their Weltschmerz:
In short, I think we’ve lost the practice, and forgotten the meaning, of play. While I agree with John Perry Barlow that we should not pursue happiness for its own sake, I do think we should make more time for play. How might we do this? I think most of us could probably learn from the masters — young children. Engaging with them, making stuff up with them, or just playing non-competitive games like hide & seek, can re-teach us the value of imagining just for fun. And the key to real play is imagination. And with children of course, the sillier the better. Practicing a piece of music a thousand times is work, and while it is admirable if it leads to excellence, it is hardly play. Improvising with other musicians, on the other hand, just jamming and making it up as you go along is play — just look at the faces of those participating and you’ll know that immediately. Companion animals (and even watching wild creatures) can also teach us about play. It’s how young creatures learn, effortlessly and safely and joyfully, but even older creatures indulge often in play, especially when they’re around the young. Other improvisational activities — dancing, flirting, role-playing — balance imagination (breaking the rules and making stuff up) with the social and physical constraints (‘rules’) of each activity. The tension between them — knowing when to do what’s expected and when to interject the unexpected — is what makes them playful. The role-playing I do in the virtual world Second Life is most enjoyable when it’s creative, whimsical, clever — our island is mostly natural but has a kitschy flying submarine. Likewise, carnivals and masquerade parties and murder mystery evenings give you the chance tobe someone else — to get outside yourself and flex your imagination. What other ideas do you have that could help us all put more play into our lives? Category: Being Human
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October 6, 2008
Finding People to Live With and Make a Living With (Take Two)
My book Finding the Sweet Spot (see right sidebar for details) suggests a variety of approaches to finding people to partner with in Natural Enterprises. One of these is illustrated above. The idea is to approach a problem with an open mind and as much data as possible, and engage others to help solve it. Here’s a brief walkthrough:
The book explains this in a lot more detail, but you get the idea. Need, Shared Purpose, Invitation, Convocation, Conversation, Collaboration, Innovation. It’s a natural method of collective problem-solving, and it has the advantage of helping you find the people you were meant to work with. Recently I wondered: Could such an approach also be used to find the people you were meant to live with — in Natural (Intentional) Community? As I reflect on the recent fracturing of our massively centralized financial system, and the fragility of our massively centralized political, social, health, business, education and other systems, I grow more and more convinced that Natural Communities and Natural Enterprises, if they are to be resilient enough to survive the threats facing us today, will have to be small-scale, bottom-up, networked and as self-sufficient as possible (the last two qualities are by no means contradictory). I’ve referred as well to some surveys that suggest that, while Dunbar’s number (150) is the maximum number we can maintain meaningful social relationships with, the optimal size of networks is either 5-7 or 40-60 (the two sizes being optimal for different purposes). Putting all this together it seems it would be appropriate to try to evolve Natural Communities of 40-60 people made up of Natural Enterprises of 5-7 people. If 5-7 people working together seems a small number, consider that their main customer base is only 40-60 people. Also, there are some very powerful enterprises that have only this small number of partners — they network with other small enterprises with different Purposes to meet larger needs, collaboratively, and the Internet and other conversational, organizational and virtual presence technologies make this increasingly easy to do. Some of the oldest advice for finding the person you were meant to live with is to get out and enroll in some activity where you can meet others who share your Passions. And the method above suggests one way of finding the people you were meant to work with is to get out and enroll others in some activity around a shared Purpose. So which would work best for finding people to live with in a Natural Community? I’m thinking about the amazing group I spent three days with this week on Bowen Island BC. We were, in a way, an instant Natural Community. We shared a Passion for facilitation and a Purpose of enabling better conversations and hence making the world a better place by empowering people, bottom up, in their communities. We talked a lot about the objectivity of the facilitator, and when it was best for the facilitator to be a ‘content provider’, bringing a point of view, new knowledge, ideas, even provocations to the group, and when it was better for the facilitator to be a process manager only. And even when it was appropriate for the facilitator to largely do neither, and let the group find its own natural process. My sense is that what made that group so magic was the fact that, as professional facilitators, they are very astute about the process of opening space, drawing people out, letting solutions emerge etc. and hence are extremely competent self-managers and very effective collaborators in just about any imaginable situation. And they all know themselves very well, which is enormously helpful in optimizing productivity and keeping conflicts and negative emotions in check.
So perhaps the ‘rules’ for people who are meant to live together (in Natural Community) and to make a living together (in Natural Enterprise) are these:
This is a tough recipe, and because of the love factor, it isn’t one that can be orchestrated. It needs to be a self-managed process. In pre-civilization times it would have been much easier — there were far fewer people to choose from, and the self-knowledge and twelve core capacities were present in almost everyone (as a Darwinian necessity). And there was no education system to pound these capacities out of us. Nevertheless, it just makes sense to me that this is the natural way to live. It’s effective, resilient, sustainable, responsible, and joyful. It draws on the best of all of us. It taps into our inherent social nature. To find the people for our Natural Enterprise and Natural Community we need first to know ourselves, and to cultivate as many of the twelve core capacities as possible. Then we need to put ourselves out there, authentically and honestly and fully, by offering and accepting invitations that will connect us with others who share our Purpose and our Passions, and help us find those we were meant to live and make a living with. Perhaps it’s not so difficult after all. It might only take a lifetime. Category: Intentional Community
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October 4, 2008
Saturday Links of the Week: October 4, 2008
 The always-brilliant Charles Barsotti in this week’s New Yorker sums up the real problem behind the financial system collapse Still euphoric over the past week’s retreat on Bowen Island BC, and the possibilities it has allowed me to imagine — a whole world of informed people with the essential capacities, notably the capacities of collaboration, conversation, imagination and self-management, needed to thrive in the 21st century. More on this in coming days. Meanwhile, here’s what made it though my filters this week: Extend Extend Extend Yourself: Communicatrix writes: “Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is to pick up the phone when it rings and talk to the (relative, soon-to-be-not) (and brave!) stranger on the other end.” Or to be brave and initiate that call yourself. The Practice of Sleeping Outside: Chris Corrigan tells us why sleeping outside is important to connecting with ourselves and with all-life-on-Earth. Why don’t we do it more often? Changing Human Behaviour: Taxes vs Caps vs Education: If you want to change consumer (and hence producer) behaviour, there are several ways you can do it. Taxes (and incentives and subsidies, their opposite) are one way, punishing certain behaviours and rewarding others where it hits hardest, in the pocketbook. Caps, limits and regulations are another. prohibiting certain behaviours outright (this only works if you have the will, means and manpower to enforce them). Awareness and education, using knowledge and moral suasion to change behaviour, is a third. While all three are needed, and can be effective, more and more evidence suggests that taxes, and incentives and subsidies for alternative behaviours, are far and away the most effective, and solving modern problems like global warming and peak oil cannot be done without them. The Value of Everything: It’s All Psychology: A NYT story correctly states that what stocks, homes and anything else is worth is no more or less than what most people think (trust) they’re worth. This is the argument that says the trillion dollar bailout, by massively loosening credit and the ability to issue and borrow more money, will reassure investors and borrowers that everything is OK and they can go on spending more and more every day to keep the growth economy afloat. But what this argument misses is that there are fundamentals underlying these investments that suggest that their current value is wildly inflated. The real rate of inflation today, despite the lies of governments, is double digits, so investing your money in anything that pays only single digit returns is waving it goodbye. No house is worth more than the cost of building a comparable new home at rates that reflect the true cost of materials and labour. No stock is worth more than the current value of future cash flows, which as our economy moves to steady-state is a fraction of what most stocks are selling for today, despite their recent plunge. And no currency is worth more than its issuer’s capacity to make good on it by providing real goods and services, repaying the debts it incurred to issue it. The only thing between us and the second Great Depression is the belief that there is no inflation, that houses are worth three times what it cost to build them, that stocks are worth three times future discounted cash flows, and that the US will somehow be able to repay a $12 trillion and rising debt to stave off bankruptcy, so that its currency has a value greater than zero. How long we will continue to believe this is anyone’s guess, but I can’t see it being longer than twenty years. CDS: The Next $55T Bubble: Credit default swaps are completely unregulated (Bush made regulation of them illegal), greater in value (on paper) than the global GDP, and Warren Buffet called them “financial weapons of mass destruction”. They may be next to collapse. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. Bail Out OF Wall Street: Community Economy advocate Catherine Fitts suggests ten ways you can move your money and time from corporatist investments to community-based and local learning investments. Safely Drinking Toxic Sludge: The makers of insecticide-soaked screens and tarps has now come up with a straw that allows you to instantly drink water from anywhere without having to boil out impurities and microbes. I suppose it is a breakthrough for those living in desolated struggling nations whose waters have all turned to sewers and toxic waste lagoons, but am I the only one that sees this type of innovation as alarming, even tragic? Is this what we’ve come to? Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link. Just for Fun: Where the Hell is Matt: A lovable dancing fool infects the world with his message of joy. Thanks to Joan in Vancouver for the link. Thoughts for the Week: from Goethe: “Know yourself — never by thinking, always by doing”. And from Margaret Miller: “Most conversations are merely monologuesdelivered in the presence of witnesses.” |
