The Illuminated Innovant

New Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:44:00 -0500

A new blog has been created at http://incollaboration.ning.com

Understanding Chakras

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:24:00 -0600

The Book of Chakra Healing, Liz Simpson, Sterling Publishing Co., 1999, 243 p

This is a good reference book and a good first book to read. The book is illustrated wonderfully in color throughout. And, in a small book is very comprehensive. But, it is not a powerful book to understand chakras form a Western perspective. However, I recommend reading it.

The organization of the book is around the seven major chakras. It begins with a description of the spirit of energy and chakra balancing. Each chapter thereafter is devoted to a chakra. And, the book ends with a discussion of integrated approaches.

She discusses the seven ways to balance your chakras:

Archetypes
Altars
Physical exercises
Crystal healing
Meditation
Daily questions
Affirmations

Each of the seven chapters devoted to a chakra covers each of these seven ways to balance that chakra.

The main chart of correspondences that occupies four pages in the book is extremely valuable as a reference to the chakra system.

She describes the energy flow from the crown to root chakra, and from the root to the crown chakra through the energetic equivalent of the spinal cord, the sushumna.

In the last chapter, she describes four integrated approaches to chakra healing:

Aroma therapy
Reiki
Reflexology
Astrology

Chakras and their Archetypes: Uniting Energy Awareness and Spiritual Growth, Ambika Wauters, The crossing Press, 1997, 164 p

I had great hopes for this book as it purported to relate the chakras to Western archetypes. And, to a certain extent it did that. However, the language got confusing at times, and made it difficult to discern the differences between some of the archetypes and the correlation to the chakras. Never the less, it was a helpful book for me to read, because it helped me take an accounting, in Western terms, of how balanced my chakras were and where I might have blockages. I would recommend it to any Westerner trying to understand chakras.

The book begins with a discussion of archetypes, myths, and chakras. The archetypes she selected for each chakra are:

Root: Victim/Mother
Sacral: Martyr/Empress(Emperor)
Solar Plexus: Servant/Warrior
Heart: Actor(Actress)/Lover
Throat: Silent Child/Communicator
Brow: Intellectual/Intuitive
Crown: Egotist/Guru

In her model, the first of the paired archetypes listed above is the result of a blocked chakra, the second is open chakra spinning freely and allowing energy to flow up and down through the other chakras. It’s possible to have a blockage in one chakra and not another. But, the energy flow is diminished.

These seven pairs of archetypes provide a quick way for a Westerner to understand the health of their chakra system.

The author writes well, sometimes almost poetic as her introduction to chapter six on the heart chakra:

“The Heart chakra functions as the core of our physical bodies and our spiritual essence. As the heart is the most important organ in our body, known as the Emperor in Chinese medicine, so love is the center of our lives. The Heart chakra allows us to imbue our physical life with the radiance of love, joy, unity, and kinship, and stimulates our sense of touch and delight in life. It is from the spiritual heart that the deepest meaning of life is felt and expressed.

To flourish and develop as a compassionate and loving person we need to be receptive to love. When our hearts are open we are at peace with ourselves and with those around us and we feel harmoniously balanced within ourselves. The experience of love helps us make fuller connections to the beauty and light of other people, as well as ourselves. Love is, after all, the foundation of life.

We are born with open Hearts, but as we enter into the illusions of life which separate us off from the eternal presence of love we shut our hearts down. In this world we need protection for our innocence, our purity and our joy. It is not safe to stay open and vulnerable to the harsh reality of other people's negativity and fear. We could not survive feeling totally exposed to others' pain. As we grow older we learn to protect this vulnerability by closing our Heart center down. Unfortunately we lose our capacity to trust in the ever-present goodness of life and find ourselves fixed in a groove of discontent and unhappiness. What we most long for and desire is then unavailable to us and we may find that we are starving for love. We may try many things to cover the feeling of emptiness, from drugs and sex, to overeating or overworking. We can pretend we are sophisticated and that love doesn't matter to us, but we know in our hearts that it is the only thing that truly counts in our lives and there is no substitute to cover its loss.

When we fall in love we are the most alive and joyful we can possibly be. We have found a significant other to share ourselves with and to know all the glory that God intended us to experience. When we are in love we are at one with ourselves and with all life.

The two archetypes which exemplify the energy of the Heart chakra are the Actor/Actress and the Lover. One is an archetypal portrait of the pretense of love which is not truly integrated in its experience. The other archetype is completely open to and enjoys the wonder of love.”

Wheels of Life: A User’s Guide to the Chakra System, Anodea Judith, Llewellyn Publications, 1987, 453 p

This is the most comprehensive of the three books I’ve read on chakras. It’s obviously stood the test of time as it’s been through severed edition and 27 printings.

The book, like the other two is organized around the seven chakras. It begins with a chapter entitled “And the Wheel Turns” that describes the chakra system, its history and its correlations with other systems of thought.

In her model the energy flow through the sushumna represents in Western terms the balancing of the pull of mind and spirit with the pull of soul and body. The journey from the crown to the root chakra she calls the manifesting current for it moves towards form, density, boundaries, contraction and individuality – the pull of soul and body. And, the journey from the root to the crown chakra she calls the liberating current that moves towards freedom, expansion, abstraction and universality – the pull of mind and spirit.

Besides the excellent descriptions of each of the chakras, each chapter begins with a meditation and has numerous exercises and movements that can help balance the chakra. I also found her one word associations for each of the chakras useful:

Root: Solid
Sacral: Liquid
Solar plexus: Fire
Heart: Love
Throat: Communication
Brow: Light
Crown: Thought

The ending chapters are not as powerful those that came before, but it in no ways detracts from the value of the book. Throughout the book, she mentions how chakras interact between people. Her descriptions ring true to my experience. She sums this up in one of the end sections and expands the concept out to cultures. This direction of thought is something that really interests me, for I see the correlation between how groups of people function and the chakra systems of the people in the group.

This is not an easy read, but a book that requires study, and as a result, a book I would recommend for anyone seriously interested in learning about chakras.

Democracy in America

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:42:00 -0500

“Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations…In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all others.” Alexis de Tocqueville

“In Democracy in America, published in 1835, Tocqueville wrote of the New World and its burgeoning democratic order. Observing from the perspective of a detached social scientist, Tocqueville wrote of his travels through America in the early 19th century when the market revolution, Western expansion, and Jacksonian democracy were radically transforming the fabric of American life. He saw democracy as an equation that balanced liberty and equality, concern for the individual as well as the community. A critic of individualism, Tocqueville thought that association, the coming together of people for common purpose, would bind Americans to an idea of nation larger than selfish desires, thus making a civil society which wasn't exclusively dependent on the state.

Tocqueville's penetrating analysis sought to understand the peculiar nature of American civic life. In describing America, he agreed with thinkers such as Aristotle, James Harrington and Montesquieu that the balance of property determined the balance of political power, but his conclusions after that differed radically from those of his predecessors.

The uniquely American mores and opinions, Tocqueville argued, lay in the origins of American society and derived from the peculiar social conditions that had welcomed colonists in prior centuries. Unlike Europe, venturers to America found a vast expanse of open land. Any and all who arrived could own their own land and cultivate an independent life. Sparse elites and a number of landed aristocrats existed, but, according to Tocqueville, these few stood no chance against the rapidly developing values bred by such vast land ownership. With such an open society, layered with so much opportunity, men of all sorts began working their way up in the world: industriousness became a dominant ethic, and "middling" values began taking root.” Wikipedia

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is a classic. His penetrating insights into the nature of American society and our form of democracy enabled him to make predictions about its future, many of which are still valid today. This work is credited at inventing sociology.

Looking back at the history of America’s development Heffner points out that, “…our early leaders, even the Jeffersonians, were themselves far from equalitarian in outlook. They believed in government of and for the people, but not by the people. And, more important, they were much too dedicated to the principles of individual liberty and freedom ever to equate them necessarily and irrevocably with equality and democracy.” When Tocqueville was studying America, a democratization process was underway through Jackson. He questioned ,”…whether American’s older concern for individual differences and freedom, could long survive their new penchant for equality and democracy. For as conditions became more equal, Americans seemed more and more to take pride not in their individuality, in their personal liberties, in their freedom, but rather in their sameness. So that as Tocqueville wrote: ‘…every citizen being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd, and nothing stands conspicuous but the great imposing image of the people at large.’”

“Through out history”, writes Heffner, “kings and princely rules had sought without success to control human thought, that most elusive and invisible power of all. Yet where absolute monarchs had failed, democracy succeeds, for the strength of the majority is unlimited and all-pervasive, and the doctrines of equality and majority rule have substituted for the tyranny of the few over the many the more absolute, imperious and widely accepted tyranny of the many over the few.”

The concept of equality was so important to Tocqueville’s analysis, and to our consideration of the future of democracy, that the history of the concepts’ development is worth repeating. And, since I can’t improve on his writing, bear with me as I allow him to trace the history. “…when the territory was divided amongst a small number of families, who were the owners of the soil and the rulers of the inhabitants; the right of governing descended with the family inheritance from generation to generation; force was the only means by which man could act on man; and landed property was the sole source of power. Soon, however, the political power of the clergy was founded, and began to increase: the clergy opened their ranks to all classes, to the poor and the rich, the vassal and the lord; through the Church, equality penetrated into the Government, and he who as a serf must have vegetated in perpetual bondage took his place as a priest in the midst of nobles, and not infrequently above the heads of kings.

The different relations of men with each other became more complicated and numerous as society gradually became more stable and civilized. Hence the want of civil laws was felt; and the ministers of law soon rose from the obscurity of the tribunals and their dusty chambers, to appear at the court of the monarch, by the side of the feudal barons clothed in their ermine and their mail. Whilst the kings were ruining themselves by their great enterprises, and the nobles exhausting their resources by private wars, the lower orders were enriching themselves by commerce. The influence of money began to be perceptible in state affairs. The transactions of business opened a new road to power, and the financier rose to a station of political influence in which he was at once flattered and despised.

Gradually the diffusion of intelligence, and the increasing taste for literature and art, caused learning and talent to become a means of government; mental ability led to social power, and the man of letters took a part in the affairs of the state. The value attached to high birth declined just as fast as new avenues to power were discovered. In the eleventh century, nobility was beyond all price; in the thirteenth, it might be purchased. Nobility was first conferred by gift in 1270; and equality was thus introduced into the government by the aristocracy itself.

In the course of these seven hundred years, it sometimes happened that the nobles, in order to resist the authority of the crown, or to diminish the power of their rivals, granted some political influence to the common people. Or, more frequently, the king permitted the lower orders to have a share in the government, with the intention of depressing the aristocracy. In France, the kings have always been the most active and the most constant of levelers. When they were strong and ambitious, they spared no pains to raise the people to the level of the nobles; when they were temperate and feeble, they allowed the people to rise above themselves. Some assisted the democracy by their talents, others by their vices. Louis XI and Louis XIV reduced all ranks to the same degree of subjection; and, finally Louis XV descended, himself and all his court, into the dust.

As soon as land began to be held on any other than a feudal tenure, and personal property in its turn became able to confer influence and power, every discovery in the arts, every improvement in commerce or manufactures, created so many new elements of equality among men. Henceforward every new invention, every new want which it occasioned, and every new desire which craved satisfaction, was a step towards a general leveling. The taste for luxury, the love of war, the empire of fashion, and the most superficial as well as the deepest passions of the human heart, seemed to co-operate to enrich the poor and to impoverish the rich.

From the time when the exercise of the intellect became a source of strength and of wealth, we see that every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea became a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of the mind, the glow of imagination, depth of thought, and all the gifts which Heaven scatters at a venture, turned to the advantage of the democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing into bold relief the natural greatness of man. Its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilization and knowledge; and literature became an arsenal open to all, where the poor and the weak daily resorted for arms.

In running over the pages of our history for seven hundred years, we shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality of condition. The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions: the municipal corporations introduced democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post-office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune, and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power.”

And, here we are now with new tools that level the playing field, and value, not in the land, but in ideas growing. Both coming together to open the possibility of new type of democracy. Tocqueville concludes, “…that the gradual and progressive development of social equality is at once the past and future…” of history.

Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
Edited and abridged by Richard Heffner
Signet Classic, 1984

The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 08:03:00 -0500

This is an incredible work of scholarship and insight. It is not an easy read, but a read filled with insights almost on every page. The magnitude of the task to identify and explain the spirit of democratic capitalism that gives the form energy and success is formidable. Michael Novak is almost uniquely qualified to take on this task. He is a theologian, deeply steeped in the Catholic tradition, a history, philosopher and an economist. The Wall Street Journal gave the book high praise when it published that the book was “The most remarkable and original treatise on the roots of modern capitalism to be published in many years.”

Many things, having full reference
To one consent, may work contrariously;
As many arrows, loosed several ways,
Fly to one mark; as many ways meet in one town;
As many streams meet in one salt sea;
As many lines close in the dial’s center;
So may a thousand actions, once afoot,
End in one purpose, and be all well borne
Without defeat.

Shakespeare, King Henry V

Is there anything about human nature that Shakespeare didn’t touch?

Novak begins the book with, “This book is about the life of the spirit which makes democratic capitalism possible. It is about the theological presumptions, values and systemic intentions.

What do I mean by ‘democratic capitalism’? I mean three systems in one: a predominately market economy; a polity respectful of the rights the individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by the ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, and economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is pluralistic and, in the largest sense, liberal.”

He argues that “…political democracy is compatible in practice only with a market economy. In turn, both systems nourish and are nourished by a pluralistic liberal culture.”

“The first of all moral obligations,” he admonishes, “is to think clearly. Societies are not like the weather, merely given, since human beings are responsible for their form. Social forms are constructs of the human spirit.”

Or, in religious terms, he writes, “The world as Adam faced it after the Garden of Eden left humankind in misery and hunger for millennia. Now that the secrets of sustained material progress have been decoded, the responsibility for reducing misery and hunger is no longer God’s but ours.”

The book is divided into three parts. “In Part One, I try to put into words the structural dynamic beliefs which suffuse democratic capitalism: its Geist, its living spirit. In Part Two, I examine briefly what is left of the socialist idea today, so as to glimpse, as if in a mirror, a view of democratic capitalism by contrast. In Part three, I try to supply at least the beginnings of a religious perspective on democratic capitalism.”

Novak comments in the introduction to the book that he was a democratic socialist. He know sees this a unworkable and the second part is devoted to discrediting the concept in theory and practice. As a result, I found Part Two of the book to be the least enjoyable or insightful. Part One provides to foundations of the concept of the trinity of democracy, capitalism and pluralism. Part Three is the most theoretical of the three sections and for me, was an indictment of widely held theological concepts that have kept areas like South America impoverished.

No short book review like this can do justice to this work. It is a work that needs to be studied and discussed in depth.

However, the one profound truth that emerges for me from these 460 pages is how delicate the balance is between democratic polity, capitalistic economy and a pluralistic society. And, any attempt to change this balance ought to be viewed with alarm, because I just believe that people in power are not thinking of our pluralistic, democratic, capitalistic system as a whole.

He does not cover the social technologies that extreme democracy covers. Almost in passing, he states, “…in a world of instantaneous, universal mass communications, the balance of power has shifted. Ideas, always a part of reality, have today acquired power greater that that of reality.”

Ideas are even more important now. And, we have tools beyond the mass communications he mentions. We are all responsible for the careful and thoughtful implementation of these tools to improving our pluralistic, democratic, capitalistic system.

The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Michael Novak
Madison Books, 1991

First Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:41:00 -0500

I really enjoyed this book, and I want to thank Paul Woodruff for making this academic research accessible. I think we need a lot more of this right now. We are in a time period of radical change, when much of what we accepted as “truth” is shifting out from under our feet. During times of great change, it’s wise to relearn the basics. Who are we? What are we all about? And, where do we want to go?

Woodruff opens his introduction with, “Democracy is a beautiful idea – government by and for the people. Democracy promises us the freedom to exercise out highest capacities while it protects us from our worst tendencies. In democracy as it ought to be, all adults are free to chime in, to join the conversation on how they should arrange their life together. And no one is left free to enjoy the unchecked power that leads to arrogance and abuse.

Like many beautiful ideas, however, democracy travels through our minds shadowed by its doubles – bad ideas that are close enough to easily mistaken for the real thing. Democracy has many doubles, but the most seductive is majority rule, and this is not democracy. It is merely government by and for the majority.”

So Woodruff goes back to the first democracy – the ancient Athenians. He traces the development of the first democracy and describes its principles. Voting, majority rule, and elected representatives are generally accepted ideas in American democracy, but they were not part of the first democracy.

“These three doubles are not democracy. Voting is not, by itself, democratic. Majority rule is positively undemocratic. And, elected representation makes for serious problems in democracy. I have begun to say what democracy is not. Can I give a positive account?

Democracy is government by and for the people. That is hardly a definition, but it will do for a start. As a next step, I shall propose that a government is a democracy insofar as it tries to express the seven ideas of this book: freedom from tyranny, harmony, the rule of law, natural equality, citizen wisdom, reasoning without knowledge, and general education.”

The tools of the first democracy are unique to the time, culture and size of Athens:

Legal system: No professional judges or prosecutors. Any citizen could bring charges against another, and any citizen could serve on panels of judges that correspond to both our judges and juries.
Governing body: The Assembly consisted of the first 6,000 men to arrive at the Pnyx (a hillside not far from the Acropolis)
Checks on majority rule: The powers of the assembly were limited by law.
Lottery: The lottery, chosen equally fro the ten tribes, was used for juries, for Council of the 500, and for the legislative panel.
Elections: Some important positions were filled by election, especially those that required expert knowledge in military or financial affairs.
Accountability: On leaving office, a magistrate would have his record examined in a process called euthunai (setting things straight)

Woodruff describes the progression of ideas that preceded the Athenian democracy. Then he devotes a chapter to each of principles of the first democracy:

Freedom from Tyranny: “Tyrant (tyrannos) was not always a fearful word, and freedom (eleutheria) was not always associated with democracy. The two shifts in ideas were gradual and simultaneous. By the time democracy was mature, Athenians at least knew what they meant by tyranny – a kind of rule to be avoided at all costs. And, in contract to that, they knew what they meant by freedom. These two ideas we have inherited. And they are priceless.” Woodruff writes. “No one sleeps well in tyranny,” he continues. “Because the tyrant knows no law, he is a terror to his people. And, he lives in terror of his people, because he has taught them to be lawless. The fear he instills in others is close cousin to the fear he must live with himself, for the violence by which he rules could easily be turned against him.” He warns that democracy itself can be come tyrannical, the tyranny of the majority, “…democracy could be come a tyranny of hoi polloi, literally, of the many.” In Athens this became to mean the poor who banded together, acting as tyrants, supporting the interests of the poor over the rich. This led to a two party system, as the rich banded together to form the party of the few (hoi oligoi), the oligarchs. “If the people’s party went too far towards tyranny, then the oligarchs plotted civil war. If the oligarchs succeeded in gaining power, then, the people’s party would withdraw to plot their own violent return.” The Athenians recognized this oscillation and came to agreements to limit the rise of tyranny.
Harmony: “Without harmony there is no democracy.” Woodson comments. “What would government FOR the people mean if the people are so badly divided that there is nothing they want together? Without harmony the government rules in the interests of one group at the expense of another. If harmony fails, many people have no reason to take part in government; others conclude that they must achieve their goals outside of democratic politics altogether; or, violence, or even the threat of terror.”
The Rule of Law (Nomos): “When law is the ruler, no one is above the law. This seems like an idea that everyone would welcome, but in truth if has had many enemies, and still does. Individuals are always looking for ways to put themselves or their government above the law. Big business seeks endless protections against the law, world leaders scoff at international law, and ordinary citizens see nothing wrong with obstructing justice.”
Natural Equality: “James Madison did not believe in the equality of the rich and poor, and so he and other founders of the United States Constitution made sure that the rich would have greater power than the poor. Voters would have to show that they enjoyed a certain level of wealth. Not so in democratic Athens. Penniless citizens – and there were many of these – insisted that they should be free to take part in their government. They went to battle for this. And they won.”
Citizen Wisdom: “In First Democracy, ordinary people were asked to use their wisdom to pass judgment on their leaders.” Woodruff concludes, “…the heart of democracy is the idea that ordinary people have the wisdom to govern themselves.”
Reasoning Without Knowledge: “Reasoning without knowledge is essential in government,” he writes. “Doing it well requires open debate. Doing it poorly is the fault of leaders who silence opposition, conceal the basis of their reasoning, or pretend to an authority that does not belong to them.”
Education (Paideia): “Paideia is the lifeblood of democracy,” he writes. “…paideia should give a citizen the wisdom to judge what he is told by people who do claim to be experts. So we should call it super-expert-education.”

Woodruff concludes the book with an afterword entitled Are Americans Ready for Domocracy? wherein he takes each of the principles and asks questions about the present state of democracy in America. He ends the book with, “Are we ready to shake off the idea that we are already a perfect exemplar of democracy? Are we ready to put the goals of democracy foremost in our political minds, as many Athenians did? Are we ready to admit our mistakes and learn from them, as they did? Most important, are we ready to keep the great dream alive, the dream of a government of the people, by the people and for the people?”

First Democracy: the Challenge of an Ancient Idea, Paul Woodruff, Oxford University Press, 2005

Applebee's America

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 3 Nov 2006 10:14:00 -0600

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin

This book is at the same time engaging and appalling. Either which way you might interpret it; it is a book that you have to read. It provides clues into some of what has been happening in America. By tying together the success of the Republican Party in the last several elections, companies like Starbucks and Applebee’s, and the mega churches, the authors have pulled the curtain back on the tools, principles and mechanisms of manipulating people into doing what an organization wants them to do.

Life targeting, or micro-targeting, as it has been recently tagged, is a methodology of predicting the behavior of micro segments of a society based on lifestyle and demographics. Then identifying specifically who these people are by name and contacting them with a message targeted to their micro sector. It is not necessary that the organization really hold the values held by the members of the micro segment, only that the organization can make the people believe that the organization does.

In the 1980’s I came to realize that organizational values were the key to success in the marketplace. While at IBM, I developed an organizational change methodology to determine the values of the customers, and change the values of an organization to reflect those values. This was described in a book I coauthored entitled Innovate! (McGraw Hill, 1994). We pointed out that here must be a values match between the customers and the values those customers perceived from the organization. And, that it was set of values that differentiated one organization from another. Moreover, that same set of values controlled the type of innovation most likely to be produced by the organization. Efficiency and effectiveness of the organization depends respectively on the target of the values focus and the spread of the values focus.

We, the authors of Innovate!, assumed naively that organizations were really interested in changing their values…

Do I hear protests from the readers? Some of you may be saying, “But lifestyle targeting has been used by consumer companies for a number of years.” That’s true, but not in the same way. Examples in Applebee’s America are described such as Applebee’s convincing individuals that they really cared about what happened to them. (Remember the ad showing the coach retiring?) When’s the last time you believed that a large corporation really cared about what happens to you. It is a business and until business stops being totally driven by shareholder value, concern for the individual will remain a lost value. Yet many of us need to believe that the message is true, and the corporation continues to grow.

Sosnik, Dowd and Fournier repeatedly give example from politics, business and mega churches that can be interpreted as I have. Politics goes one step further however. With American divided nearly equally between the two major parties, and low voter turnout, a small group of voters actually determine who wins. Using concepts like business, politicians can calculate the cost per vote in these micro segments and allocate money accordingly. The message they delver to these micro segments, if effective, swings the election, even if the candidate holds the values projected or not. It’s not about the issues. The American public glazes over when issues are discussed. It’s about the values connection between the candidate and the voters. This technique will win elections but it will forever divide us for there is no benefit of collaboration among differences. It exploits the differences.

Hypocrisy is defined as “a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.” This is the line we have crossed over in the current use of micro-targeting.

Eventually hypocrisy is revealed. It is just too difficult to sustain a pretense, and actions do indeed prove louder than words. But what America’s powerful have learned is that it takes a long time for people to perceive the pretense.

In First Democracy, Paul Woodruff points out that in Athens the primary role of public education was to prepare Athenians to be able to participate in their democracy. Unfortunately, we haven’t done that.

To the author’s credit, while they do not take the low view I have of micro-targeting as it is now practiced, they do point out that the values connections has to be real to be sustained:

“Navigating the Stormy Present - How to Be a Great Connector:

I. Make and Maintain a Gut Values Connection. Voters felt President Bush was a strong and decisive leader. They felt President Clinton cared about them and would work hard on their behalf. Both presidents fell out of favor when they were not true to their Gut Values, proving that authenticity matters in this era of spine, not spin.

2. Adapt. President Clinton realized he needed to change his message and methods to appeal to Swing Is and Swing IIs. Eight years later, President Bush determined that there were no longer enough swing voters to make a difference and that he had to find new Republican voters.

3. LifeTarget. President Clinton barely scratched the surface of the potential to find and motivate voters based on their lifestyles. President Bush took it to a new level in 2004.

4. Talk Smart. Both presidents broke new ground in niche and local advertising, constantly looking for ways to communicate to their voters through the channels those voters used to get information.

5. Find Navigators. President Bush's campaign identified more than 2 million people who could influence how their friends, family members, and associates make political decisions.”

In each of the three markets they analyzed, they provide the above roadmap.

Applebee’s America describes a methodology that is borrowed from Myer’s Briggs Personality Type, the concepts of lifestyle, the concepts of generations, demographics and the concepts of the tipping point. It’s pieces of these sets of concepts lashed together in a way that is incredibly effective, according the authors.

Oh, by the way, how did the Republican’s get the specific names, addresses, telephone numbers and in some cases e-mail addresses for the members of the micro-target sectors? Well, they got them the same way that business do from credit card transactions, and from the membership of some of the mega churches. Is this ethical?

So far I’ve been writing about the first part of the book – Great Connectors. I personally found the second part of the book – Great Change – much more professionally interesting. The chapters on anxious Americans, the 3 C’s (connectors, community and civic engagement), navigators and generation 9/11 give a good, insightful view of present day America with some views of the future. However, as a professional I would have preferred to get accessible references to the data they quoted to make a point (none are given). Example:

“…’protecting the family’ rose to become the No. 1 value of American’s (cited by 53 percent of respondents in a 2000 Roper analysis.”

Anyone who works with data taken from surveys knows that it is important to know the context and how the data was collected and what else the data indicates in order to interpret it.

The author’s provide:

“Ten steps for political, business, and religious leaders who want to take advantage of the public’s yearning for community:

1. Clearly define your purpose. It’s what galvanizes your community.

2. Give your staff the clear sense that they’re vital to achieving a common purpose.

3. Build your organization from the bottom up, not the top down. Technology makes grassroots organizing easier than ever.

4. Give your customers/voters/worshipers a say in how the product/campaign/church is marketed. Recognize that the consumer has more control than ever.

5. Tap into existing networks when possible. Create networks where none exist.

6. Be true to your purpose. Authenticity, accountability, and trust are the keys to building a bond or a brand.

7. Join the online community of bloggers to catch the first whiff of a crisis and to make sure your message is heard in the cyberspace community.

8. Wherever possible, make your enterprise a Third Place, a community outside home and work for people in search of connection.

9. Donate time and money to community causes. Customers are inclined to support civic-minded companies such as Home Depot, according to Bridgeland, the former head of UDSA Freedom Corps.

10. Identify the community’s leaders (Navigators) and get them on your side. Better still, use the Internet and other tools to create products that draw people together in online communities.”

In spite of my negative reaction to what they were saying in the first part of the book, I liked the book. It’s a book that should be read by many and the focus for a lot of discussion.

It was very curious to me that the book (inadvertently?) undercut the approach of the first part of the book with the second part. In politics, the battle between micro-targeting and grass roots civic engagement is being fought out in present and future elections. If I have a vote, I vote for the latter.

Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community
Douglas Sosnik, Matthew Dowd and Ron Fournier
Simon & Schuster (2006)

Urban Shaman

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 14:28:00 -0600

Serge Kahili King, the author of Urban Shaman, defines a shaman in the following way, "For the purposes of this book and my teachings, I define a shaman as a healer of relationships between mind and body, between people, between people and circumstances, between Humans and nature, and between matter and spirit. In practicing his or her healing, the shaman has a view of reality very different from the one most of the world uses..."

That last sentence is key. Shamanism is a very different paradigm than the commonly accepted paradigm in the west. I was constantly amazed and intrigued by the differences throughout this book. King writes about the shaman in straightforward, practical way, making the ideas accessible to the uninitiated.

I enjoyed the book immensely and I think I "learned" a lot. I put learned in quotes because the paradigm is so different, I'm not sure I can really learn through just reading a book. At the very least, I think I would have to practice the principles often, and perhaps I would need to apprentice, to really learn Hawaiian shamanism.

He clarifies one of the differences of the Hawaiian tradition, "...while all shaman are healers, the majority follow the 'way of the warrior'; some, a minority which includes the Hawaiian shaman tradition, follow what we might call 'the way of the adventurer'."

"A 'warrior' shaman tends to personify fear, illness, or disharmony and to focus on the development of power, control, and combat skills in order to deal with them. An 'adventurer" shaman, by contrast, tend to depersonify these conditions (i.e., treat them as effects, not things) and deal with them by developing skills of love, cooperation, and harmony."

It is apparent to me that we need healing in the world - as individuals, groups, corporations and nations. Albert Einstein is quoted as writing; "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." Well, I'm ready to at least look at something different. What we've tried isn't working too well. And, my guess is that if you've read this far, you're open to new ideas as well.

"But," you may ask, "what does this have to do with innovation?" I am dedicated to innovation that improves wealth and health (the common weal). I would like to not only make the workspace more innovative, but a healthier, gentler place of open collaboration. The Urban Shaman provides a different way to help make this happen. In addition, the Urban Shaman speaks effectively to our creativity.

Hawaiian shamanism is well adapted to modern times for four reasons:

"It is completely nonsectarian and pragmatic. Shamanism is a craft, not a religion, and you can practice it alone or with a group.
It is very easy to learn and apply, although, as with any craft, the full development of certain skills may take awhile.
The Hawaiian version in particular may be practiced anywhere at any time, including at home, at work, at school, at play, or while traveling. This mainly because the Hawaiian shamans primarily worked with the mind and body alone. They did not use drums to induce altered states and they did not use masks to assume other forms or qualities.
The nature of shamanism is such that while you are healing others you are healing yourself, and while you are transforming the planet you are transforming yourself."

The author's view on openness is refreshing. "Widely spread knowledge actually has more potency than secrets locked up and unused. Knowledge held secret is about a useful as money under a miser's mattress. And the sacredness of knowledge lies not in its reservation for a few, but it's available to many. He goes on to say, "...shamans recognize no hierarchy or authority in matters of the mind; if ever a group of people could be said to follow a system of spiritual democracy, it would be the shamans of the world."

The three aspects of consciousness according to Hawaiian shamanism are the ku (the heart, the body or subconscious), the lono (the mind, or conscious mind) and the kane (the spirit or super conscious).

Ku is a close equivalent of the western concept of the subconscious, but it is not identical. In this paradigm, memory is stored as a movement pattern or vibration. Genetic memory is stored at the cellular level and experiential memory is stored at one or more muscular levels. "The area of storage seems to be related to which part of the body was active or energized during the learning. When the part of the body in which memory was stored is under sufficient tension, then that memory is inhibited or even inaccessible."

"When muscle tension is released, any memory stored in that area and inhibited by the tension is also released." In this paradigm, this is why massage works.

The implications of the concept of ku are many. "This means that whatever memories you dwell on will be affecting your body in the present moment, producing more or less the same chemical and muscular reactions that occurred when the event first happened. A good memory can produce endorphins and a bad memory can produce toxins, all in the present moment."

It also implies that the ku does not distinguish between whether the experience came from an actual situation or a book, dream, intuition or imagination. "All the ku cares about is the intensity of the experience; that is, how much physiological (emotional, chemical, muscular) reaction occurred during the experience. That is the ku's only basis for how 'real' the experience was. The practical side of this is that an intensely imagined experience is just as good as the real thing, as least as far as memory-based behavior is concerned." Athletes use this fact when they imagine the body motions that have to go through to perform. King assets, "The same process can be used to train yourself in any skill, state, or condition whatsoever."

"The primary function of the ku is memory," writes King, "and its primary motivation is pleasure. To put it more accurately, the ku's motivation is towards pleasure and away from pain." This is the reason why we like to do some things and not others, and why certain things are very difficult. "The ku automatically moves towards what is pleasurable and does its best to avoid what is painful."

Remembering that the ku does not distinguish between actual and imagined experience, it becomes clear that imagination has extreme power. "If you create a future memory - in other words, if imagine what will happen if you do a certain thing - your ku's behavior will be strongly influenced by whether the memory carries the expectation of pain or pleasure. If you have created the expectation/memory that human encounters may result in painful rejection, you will find it hard to meet or be with people, to make phone calls (especially sales calls), and possibly even to write letters."

In this paradigm, the ku will provide the least painful solution if no pleasurable alternatives exist in memory. For example, if you have a stressful job, that is your job is creating pain, your ku will make you sick to get out of the job because it is less painful to be sick.

"In order to operate its memory function and engage motivation, the ku uses its primary tool of sensation. According to this concept, all memory is kinesthetic, or body related; all pleasure and pain as well; and all experience, even of emotions and ideas, produces physical sensation."

The second aspect of consciousness is lono. "The lono is that part of yourself which is consciously aware of internal and external input; of memories, thoughts, ideas, imaginings, intuitions, hunches, and inspirations, as well as sensory impressions of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, depth, movement, pressure, time, and others. It hangs out on the border, so to speak, between the inner and outer worlds. The primary function of the lono is decision making." And, decision making requires attention, intent, choosing and interpretation: "...lono decides what's important and what is not and attention follows the decision."

"Intent is a kind of decision making that directs awareness as well as activity. It is a powerful way to manage your ku, with tremendous effects on health, happiness, and success when used properly." There are three ways to manage your ku - authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire.

"When you intend to walk across the room, the intention is followed by awareness, which is followed by action." If a controlling, authoritative style is used, the resulting movements are awkward and halting. If a cooperative style is used, a smooth, fluid movement results. An uncontrolled style results in too many distractions, too many pleasurable paths to follow.

In speaking, "A controlling lono interferes with the process by trying to make sure that the right words are said in the right way and usually creates havoc in the form of halting speech with a lot of 'uh's or 'ya know's or even stuttering. The cooperative lono holds the intent and lets the ku do its thing, which often produces spontaneous humor and unexpectedly good insights or phrases. The uncontrolling lono lets the ku wander off the subject or even speak gibberish."

"Choosing is what most people think of as decision making. Choosing is making a decision to turn your attention to one direction rather than another."

"Interpretation is a decision about the meaning or validity of an experience."

"I spoke of the primary motivation of the ku being pleasure which explains a lot of human behavior. Even more behavior can be explained by the primary motivation of the lono, which is order. Order doesn't necessarily mean neatness although some lonos may interpret it that way. It has more to do with rules, categories, and understanding."

"The primary tool of the lono is imagination. Since the lono is the only part of you under your direct control, the development of this tool is of supreme importance..."

The third aspect of consciousness is kane. "Kane is conceived of as a 'source' aspect; a purely spiritual essence which manifests or projects into realty our physically oriented being. It might also be called the soul or oversoul as long as you don't get the idea that that it is something that can be lost or separated form you."

"The primary function of the kane is creativity in the form of mental and physical experience. Simplified, the lono generates a pattern by deciding that something is true, ku memorizes the pattern, and kane uses the pattern to manifest experience. At the same time, kane is constantly giving inspiration to improve the pattern because its primary motivation is harmony." Kane's "motivation is to help the whole self integrate patterns more harmoniously with others in the community and environment."

"The primary tool of the kane is energy. The universe is made of energy and it is energy that that maintains and changes the dreams of life. The imagination of the lono directs the energy and the sensation of the ku lets us experience its effects."

King describes seven principles and fourteen corollaries of urban shamanism (Hawaiian word shown first in caps):

IKE - The World is What You Think It Is
Corollary: Everything is a dream

"...shamans also hold the exceptionally subtle idea that life is a dream; that in fact, we dream our lives into being. This does not mean that dreams are real and reality is a dream. It means that the reality you are experiencing right now is only one of many dreams," writes the author. He goes on to explain that the only way we "know" anything reality is through the detection of energy through our senses. Reality is our mind's interpretation of what our senses are reporting. The reality we experience in that sense is no different than a dream. And, sometimes we can't tell the difference. It also stands to reason that no two people will experience reality, even the same reality, in the same way. It's put together differently in different minds. We therefore tend to test for reality by whether other people share the same dream of reality. "Hallucination," writes the author means 'your dream doesn't match my dream'."

"For the shamans, the experience we call ordinary everyday reality is a mass hallucination, or to put it more politely, a shared dream. It's like we are all having our own individual dreams about life and the sharing occurs at points of agreement or consensus."

"If this life is a dream," he writes, "and if we can wake up fully within it, then we can change the dream by changing our dreaming."

Corollary: All systems are arbitrary
King comments, "The meaning of experience depends upon your interpretation of it or your decision to accept someone else's interpretation, and the decision to accept a basic assumption is also arbitrary."

KALA - There Are No Limits
Corollary: Everything is connected
Corollary: Anything is possible
Corollary: Separation is a useful illusion

The universe has no limits and therefore our experiences are limitless. However, in everyday life, we experience limits. There are two kinds of limits - filtered and creative. Filtered limitation is "imposed by ideas and beliefs that inhibit creativity rather than enhance it..." "Filtered limitations generate focus without the potential for positive action."

"...creative limitation assumes the purposeful establishment of limits within an infinite universe in order to create particular experiences." When we play a game, we follow the rules of the game; otherwise it has no meaning. "The rules of the game are limitations created so you can play the game." Later he writes, "Creative limitation allows us to improve our creative abilities by enforcing a focus on a certain range of interpretation of experience." "Even in the limited game of chess, human minds have not figured out all the possibilities," he points out.

MAKIA - Energy Flows Where Attention Goes
Corollary: Attention goes where energy flows
Corollary: Everything is energy

In discussing the third principle, King considers mediation and hypnosis. He explains that both are two aspects of the same thing - conditions of sustained focused attention. He writes, "You are meditating whenever you are engaged in sustained focused attention on anything, and according to this philosophy such attention channels the energy of the universe into manifesting the physical equivalent of the focus. However, the manifestation is not just the equivalent of what you are looking at, saying, listening to, or doing. It is the equivalent of the sum total of your entire attention, including habitual expectation, during the meditation. To put it another way, whenever lono is meditating, ku is meditating, ku is meditating too. Part of one's development as a shaman involves learning how to get lono and ku to meditate on the same thing at the same time. Then the magic happens."

In discussing the first corollary, the author writes, "Attention is quite naturally attracted to bright lights, shiny objects, and loud noises, but we may not realize that the common factor of all three is their energy intensity. Attention is attracted to any strong source of energy that stimulates any of our senses, even those subtle senses of which most people are unaware." He goes on to explain that we are likewise attracted to certain people or geographic regions because of their energy. In his view, the sacred geographic spots are actually spots of low energy where people can de-stress.

King stops short of calling on physics to explain that everything is energy, but I think that physics is the best way to explain his second corollary. Einstein proved that energy and mass were transformable one into the other. The conversion factor was the speed of light squared, E=MC². Mass or matter is just highly condensed energy. Therefore our bodies and our thoughts are energy as well.

MANAWA - Now is the Moment of Power
Corollary: Everything is relative.
Corollary: Power increases with sensory attention.

Some Eastern and Western traditions focus on the past or future. With the concept of karma we are trapped into either good or bad karma depending upon our actions in the past, and we create good or bad karma for our future depending upon actions now. "In these traditions karma isn't usually something you can change; all you can do is reap the rewards or work off the debts of the past."

Many Western traditions hold that you are rewarded in life or after life for obeying specific social or religious rules, and punished if you don't.

"The shamanic tradition, both warrior and adventurer versions, is in stark contrast to the above views. It says that the past did not give you what you have today, nor make you what you are. It is your beliefs, decisions, and actions today about yourself and the world around you that give you what you have and make you what you are."

"Now is the moment of power. But, how do we define what now is? The easiest and most practical definition is: the area or range of present attention." In other words, if your attention span is a second, or less, so is now. But, if you can focus longer, now becomes longer.

"Unfortunately, some people are obsessively locked onto the past, future, or elsewhere because of great fear and anger...Much of the fear and anger can be dissipated by shifting focus to the sensory present..."

ALOHA - To Love Is to Be Happy With
Corollary: Love increases as judgement decreases.
Corollary: Everything is alive, aware, and responsive.

In English, the use of the word love has become sloppy. "In Hawaiian the meaning of love is very clear and it provides a useful guideline for loving and being loved. Aloha is the word for love. The root alo means to be with, to share an experience, here and now. The root oha means affection, joy."

MANA - All Power Comes From Within
Corollary: Everything has power.
Corollary: Power comes from authority.

Many other traditions teach that power exists outside of us and that we are relatively powerless. "In complete and, for some, shocking contrast, Huna philosophy teaches that all the power that creates your experience comes from your own body, mind, and spirit. Logically speaking, if there are no limits, then the Universe or Source of Life is infinite, and if it is infinite, then all of its power is at every point of it, including the point which you define as you. Keeping the discussion at a practical level, nothing ever happens to you without your participation. For every event that you experience you creatively attract it through your beliefs, desires, fears and expectations, and then react to it habitually or respond to it consciously."

"Power comes from authority" is the second corollary to this sixth principle. But the authority is inside you, not external. "Speaking with authority means speaking with confidence that your words will produce results," he writes.

PONO - Effectiveness Is the Measure of Truth
Corollary: There is always another way to do anything.

"Many people have trouble with this one at first because they think that it says that the end justify the means. Actually it says just the opposite, that the means determine the end. Violent means will produce violent results, and peaceful means will produce peaceful results."

Other topics covered in the book are, the seven shaman talents, creating harmony in the body, initiating change through intuition, changing the world with shaman dreaming, shape changing and community service, increasing your creative energy, from inner peace to outer peace, the healing power of symbols, the healing art of ceremony and ritual, and the pooling of minds.

The book has many short exercises throughout. They are easily doable by an apprentice shaman, or just someone curious. King uses them to reinforce points he has made.

The book is about radical new paradigm for the western mind, but it is written very clearly and simply. It contains more wisdom than can be obtained from a simple reading so I suggest that if you are serious about learning from the author that you create a study group. That way you can learn and practice together at a pace slow enough to absorb more of what he has to offer.

Urban Shaman: A Handbook for Personal and Planetary Transformation Based on the Hawaiian Way of the Adventurer
Serge Kahili King
Simon & Shuster, 1990

To read a poem by King from this book, Ode to a Toad, go to the Innovation Road Map Travelogue.

The World is Flat

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 09:42:00 -0600

This book is a must read for anyone interested in an innovation commons. Much of the book revolves around and depends upon the successful creation of innovation commons in many different forms. The following are some excerpts from the book that seem to me to be most directly related to the subject of the innovation commons.

"…Satyam Cherukuri, of Sarnoff, an American research and development firm, has called ‘the globalization of innovation" and an end to the old model…" p29-30

His premise is that the "world is now flat", i.e. the global competitive playing field is being leveled. The world is being flattened. He identifies ten driving forces for leveling of the competitive playing field. The first three are events that marked the change:

When the walls came down and the windows went up
When Netscape went public
Work flow software

The next six represent the new forms of collaboration, which the new platform created by the first three forces made possible:

Self organizing collaborative communities
Outsourcing Y2K
Offshoring
Supply chaining
Insourcing
In-forming

The last force is an enabler:

The steroids: Digital, mobile, personal and virtual

Quoting Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM, "This emerging era is characterized by the collaborative innovation of many people working together in gifted communities, just as innovation in the industrial era was characterized by individual genius." p93

In discussing some of the problems of an innovation commons, he raises the following question:
"If everyone contributes his or her intellectual capital for free, where will the resources for innovation come from? And won’t we end up with in endless legal wrangles over which part of any innovation was made by the community for free, and meant to stay that way, and which part was added on by some company for profit and has to be paid for so that the company can make money to drive further innovation." p96

"How do you push innovation forward if everyone is working for free and giving away their work?…if innovators are not going to be rewarded for their innovations, the incentive for path-breaking innovation will dry up and so will the money for the really deep R&D that is required to drive progress in this increasingly complex field." (Paraphrasing Microsoft) p100

"Open source is an important flattener because it makes available for free many tools, from software to encyclopedias, that millions of people around the world would have had to buy in order to use, and because open source network associations – with their open borders and come-one-come-all approach – can challenge hierarchical structures with a horizontal model of innovation that is clearly working in a growing number of areas." p102

Writing about the power of search engines for collaboration: "How does searching fit into the concept of collaboration? I call it ‘in-forming’. In-forming is the individual’s’ personal analog to open sourcing, outsourcing, insourcing, supply chaining and offshoring. In-forming is the ability to build and deploy your own personal supply chain – a supply chain of information, knowledge and entertainment. In-forming is about self collaboration…" p153

"…this tenth flattener - the steroids – is going to amplify and further empower all the other forms of collaboration. These steroids should make open-source innovation that much more open, because they will enable more individuals to collaborate with one another in more ways and from more places than ever before." p 170-171

He then introduces the concept of the triple convergence: "First, right around the year 2000, all ten flatteners…started to converge and work together in ways that created a new, flatter, global playing field. As this new playing field became established, both businesses and individuals began to adopt new habits, skills and processes to get the most out of it. They moved from largely vertical means of creating value to more horizontal one. The merger of this new playing field for doing business with the new ways of doing business was the second convergence, and it actually helped to flatten the world even further. Finally, just when all this flattening was happening, a whole new group of people, several billion in fact, walked on the playing field from China, India and the former Soviet Union. Thanks to the new flat world, and its new tools, some of them were able to collaborate and compete directly with everyone else. This was the third convergence." p175

Writing about the parallel between the work of economists of the impact of major technologies on productivity, he stated: "The same thing is happening today with the flattening of the world. Many of the ten flatteners have been around for years. But for the full flattening effects to be felt, we needed not only the ten flatteners to converge, but also something else. We needed the emergence of a large cadre of managers, innovators, business consultant, business schools, designers, IT specialists, CEOs and workers to get comfortable with, and develop, the sorts of horizontal collaboration and value creation processes and habits that could take advantage of this new, flatter playing field. In short, the convergence of the ten flatteners begat the convergence of a set of business practices and skills that would get the most out of the flat world. And then the tow began to mutually reinforce each other." p178

"In the future globalization is going to be increasingly driven by individuals who understand the flat world, adapt themselves quickly to its processes and technologies, and then start to march forward…They will be of every color of the rainbow and from every corner of the world." p183
"The flatter the world gets, the more we are going to need a system of global governance that keeps up with all the new legal and illegal forms of collaboration." p217

"In the flat world, the division of labor is steadily becoming more and more complex, with a lot more people interacting with a lot of other people they don’t know and may never meet. If you want to have a modern complex division of labor, you have to put more trust in strangers." p326

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Friedman

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005

A Simpler Way

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 09:29:00 -0600

This is a beautiful book with beautiful pictures and mental images. It is a hopeful book, and it is a profound book. Its mission is no less than to change our paradigm from competition to collaboration in how we perceive, think and act in all that we do. The authors opening line is "We want life to be less arduous and more delightful. We want to be able to think differently about how to organize human activities."

They question the "survival of the fittest" paradigm for evolution and our mechanistic view of the world. "The mechanistic image of the world is a very deep image, planted at subterranean depths in most of us. But it doesn't help us any longer."

The authors pose the question, "How could we organizes human endeavor if we developed different understandings of how life organizes itself?" They have six beliefs about human organizations and the world in which they come into form:

"The universe is a living, creative, experimenting expereince of discovering what's possible at all levels of scale from microbe to cosmos.
Life's natural tendency is to organize. Life organizes into greater levels of complexity to support more diversity and greater sustainability.
Life organizes around a self. Organizing is always an act of creating an identity.
Life self-organizes. Networks, patterns, and structures emerge without external imposition or direction. Organization wants to happen.
People are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing, and meaning seeking.
Organizations are living systems. They too are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing, meaning-seeking."

They argue that life has a natural and spontaneous tendency towards organization. "Whatever chaos is present at the start, when elements combine, systems of organization appear. Life is attracted to order - order gained through wandering explorations into new relationships and new possibilities."

The central part of the book is organized around a poem by A. R. Ammons:

"I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in
so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:
I look for the forms
things want to come as
from what black wells of possibility
how a thing will
unfold:
not the shape on paper - though
that, too - but the
uninterfering means on paper:
not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours."

The authors write, "Life is creative. It plays itself into existence, seeking new relationships, new capacities, new traits. Life is an experiment to discover what's possible."

They believe Darwinism has led us to believe that life wasn't supposed to happen, that it was an accident, and that life has to fight to continue to exist. In their view, "Life is about invention, not survival. We are here to create, not defend."

They point out that all of us are trying to describe our reality to others. But reality outside of us, in an absolute sense, evades us. "We peer out through our senses, describing our experiences of what we think reality to be. We choose images to convey our expereince. We create metaphors to connect what we see. We explore new ways of understanding what seems to be happening and what we think it means."

Peering out at the world, they describe seven principles of life's process of creating:

"Everything is in a constant process of discovery and creating. Everything is changing all the time: individuals, systems, environments, the rules, the processes of evolutions. Even change changes. Every organism reinterprets the rules, creates exceptions for itself, creates new rules.
Life uses messes to get well-ordered solutions. Life doesn't seem to share our desires for efficiency or neatness. It uses redundancy, fuzziness, dense webs of relationships, unending trials and errors to find what works.
Life is intent on finding what works, not what's 'right'. It is the ability to keep finding solutions that is important; any one solution is temporary. There are no permanently right answers. The capacity to keep changing, to find what works now, is what keeps any organism alive.
Life creates more possibilities as it engages with opportunities. There are no 'windows of opportunity', narrow openings in the fabric of space-time that soon disappear forever.
Possibilities beget more possibilities; they are infinite.
Life is attracted to order. It experiments until it discovers how to form a system that can support diverse members. Individuals search out a wide range of possible relationships to discover whether they can organize into life-sustaining system. These explorations continue until a system is discovered. The system then provides stability for its members, so that individuals are less buffeted by change.
Life organizes around identity. Every living thing acts to develop and preserve itself. Identity is the filter that every organism or system uses to make sense of the world. New information, new relationships, changing environments - all are interpreted through a sense of self. This tendency toward self-creation is so strong that it creates a seeming paradox. An organism will change to maintain its identity.

Everything participates in the creation and evolution of its neighbors. There are no unaffected outsiders. No one system dictates conditions to another. All participate together in creating the conditions of their interdependence."

"There is no ideal design for anything, just interesting combinations that arise as a living thing explores it space of possibilities", Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers write, a combination of words that could be used to describe how an organization innovates.

Their assertion is that "life tinkers itself into existence". "It tinkers toward order - toward systems that are more complex and effective...Almost always what begins in randomness ends in stability...generates systems that sustain diverse individuals." But they conclude, "Life seeks order in a disorderly way."

"All this messy playfulness creates relationships that make more available...," they write. "Who we become together will always be different that who we were alone. Our range of creative expression increases as we join with others. New relationships create new capacities."

"Life invites us to create not only the forms but even the process of discovery," they conclude.

"The environment is invented by our presence in it. We do not parachute into a sea of turbulence, to sink or swim. We and our environments become one system, each influencing the other, each co-determining the other." Living systems they believe create more possibilities and more freedom for individuals.

In this systems behaviors emerge. "Science writer Kevin Kelly describes these systems as a 'messy cascade of interdependent events ...What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important'."

One of the important features of viable living systems is simultaneity. "Simultaneity reduces the impact of any one error. More errors matter less if the actors are not linked together sequentially. The space for experimentation increases as we involve more minds in the experiment, as long as they can operate independently. What links people together is their focus on a needed solution. But in discovering what works, they are not waiting for one another to act."

They very carefully describe the discipline of play required for success. "Playful tinkering requires consciousness. If we are not mindful, if our attention slips, then we can't notice what's available or discover what's possible. Staying present is the discipline of play. Great concentration and focus are required." As a result, "Playful enterprises are alert. They are open to information, always seeking more, yearning for surprises."

Over and over again they stress the role that diversity plays in creation. "Parallel process requires both diversity and freedom. There is more than one workable solution, and these solutions arise from many different forms of self-expression...Life is not driving us toward one solution. The world is interested in pluralism. Only in this way can it discover more about itself...The world's desire for diversity compels us to change."

Systems offer the possibility for more stability. But in a curious paradox, that stability for the system depends upon its member's ability to change. "When individuals fail to experiment or when a system refuses their offers of new ideas, then the system becomes moribund. Without constant, interior change, it sinks into the death grip of equilibrium. It no longer participates in coevolution. The system becomes vulnerable; its destruction is self-imposed...This broad paradox of stability and freedom is the stage on which coevolution dances. Life leaps forward when it can share its learnings. The dense web of systems allow information to travel in all directions, speeding recovery and adaptation."

If systems of life are self-organizing then we don't have to design how they will organize. We live in a universe where we get order for free. "If order is for free, we don't have to be the organizers. We don't have to design the world. We don't have to structure its existence."
And, in a prescription for systems that has a lot to do with an innovation commons, "As we organize, we need to keep inquiring into the quality of our relationships. How much access do we have to one another? How much trust exists among us? Who else needs to be in the room?"

"Stability is found in freedom - not in conformity and compliance. We may have thought that our organization's survival was guaranteed by finding the right form and insisting that everyone fit into it. But sameness is not stability. It is individual freedom that creates stable systems. It is diffferentness that enables us to thrive," they propose.

In writing about self, they suggest, "Life wants to happen. It calls itself into existence. Out of all information and all possibilities, an entity comes into form. An identity emerges. A self has created itself...No externally imposed plans or designs are required. The process of invention always takes place around an identity. There is a self that seeks to organize and make its presence known. The desires of self set a self-organizing world into motion."

Research suggests that we perceive the world based on who we have decided to be, "...at any moment, what we see is most influenced by who we have decided to be...At least 80 percent of the information that the brain works with is information already in the brain." The corollary to this is that "We will change our self if we believe that the change will preserve the self."

In answering the question about what conditions will allow self-organization to flourish, they state "We need to trust that we are self organizing...We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With all these wonderful and innate desires calling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structures or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear and coherent identity, a self that we can organize around...Identity includes such dimensions as history, values, actions, core beliefs, competencies, principles, purpose, mission...Identity is the source of organizations. Every organization is an identity in motion, moving through the world, trying to make a difference."

In search of that illusive concept of emergence, they write, "Emergence is the surprising capacity we discover only when we join together. New systems have properties that appear suddenly and mysteriously. These properties cannot be predicted. They do not exist in the individuals who compose the system. What we know about the individuals, no matter how rich the details, will never give us the ability to predict how they will behave as a system. Once individuals link together they become something different.

One of the current quandaries facing free, open collaboratives is compensation. It is very clear that participants benefit in many other tangible and intangible ways from the collaboration. However, in our present form of capitalism, no standard form of monetary compensation has emerged. The authors don't provide much hope of one being developed, "Once systems are called into the world by our individual explorations, it becomes impossible to work backwards. Systems cannot be deconstructed. We can't figure out cause and effect or who contributed what. There are no heroes or permanent leaders in an emergent, systems creating world. There are too many simultaneous connection; individual contributions evolve too rapidly into group efforts."

We often talk about synergy in a group, where 1 + 1 > 2. Their paradigm revolutionizes the way to think about a system, "A system is an inseparable whole. It is not the sum of its parts. It is not greater than the sum of its parts. There is nothing to sum. There are no parts. The system is a new and different and unique contribution to its members and the world. To search backwards in time for its parts is to deny the self transforming nature of systems. A system is knowable only as itself. It is irreducible. We can't disentangle the effects of so many relationships. The connections never end. They are impossible to understand by analysis."

In amplifying their concept that self-organizing systems merge through trust, they write, "Every act of organizing is an experiment. We begin with desire, with a sense of purpose and direction. But we enter the expereince vulnerable, unprotected by the illusionary cloak of prediction. We acknowledge that we don't know how this work will actually unfold. We discover what we are capable of as we go along. We engage others in the experiment. We are willing to commit to a systems whose effectiveness cannot be seen until it is in motion...in systems of trust, people are free to create the relationships they need. Trust enables the system to open. The system expands to include those it had excluded. More conversations - more diverse and diverging views - become important. People decide to work with those from whom they have been separate."

We long for meaning in our lives. "Each of us embodies the boundless energies of life. We are creating, systems-seeking, self-organizing, meaning-seeking beings. We are identities in motion, searching for the relationships that will evoke more from us."

A Simpler Way
Margaret Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers
Berrett-Koehler, 1996

The Fourth Turning

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 10:53:00 -0600

This book by Strauss and Howe proclaims itself on the cover as "An American Prophecy", and the book has the subtitle of "What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny". Those are strong words when speaking of the future. H. G. Wells commented that demography is destiny. I believe that. For example, we know a lot about all the 20-year-olds in the U.S. in 2025. Why? Because they've all been born, even those that will immigrate into the U.S. But when you couple demography with social trends, I become less sure. Humans have a nasty habit of doing the unexpected, as well as responding to events in unexpected ways. Strauss and Howe couple demography with sociology and add in some ideas about generations to produce a prophecy. In doing so I think they fall prey to a weakness we all succumb too occasionally, especially me, of pushing their insights too far into specifics and detail. However, if their prophecy is 10% right, they still deserve to be listened to, and maybe even to take actions to prepare for the America they prophesize.

The book begins with a summary of their prophecy in Chapter 1. Winter Comes Again. "America feels like it's unraveling. Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort, we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long term future, fearful that our superpower nation is somehow rotting from within.

Neither an epic victory over Communism nor an extended upswing of the business cycle can buoy our public spirit. The Cold War and New Deal struggles are plainly over, but we are of no mind to bask in their successes. The America of today feels worse, in its fundamentals, than the one many of us remember from our youth, a society presided over by those of supposedly lesser consciousness...We yearn for civic character but satisfy ourselves with symbolic gestures and celebrity circuses. We perceive no greatness in our leaders, a new meanness in ourselves. Small wonder that each new election brings a new jolt, its aftermath a new disappointment. Not long ago, America was more than the sum of its parts. Now, it is less."

Remember as you read this that the book was published in 1997 - before 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The authors' views have been developed through several books including Generations and 13th-GEN. To understand their work, I recommend that you read all three of these books. However, The Fourth Turning is the best of the three.

The fundamental building block of their paradigm is that there are cycles in history of society called the saeculum by the "ancients".

According to the authors, there are three ways of thinking about time*: chaotic, cyclical, and linear. "In chaotic time, history has no path. Events follow one another randomly, and any effort to impute meaning in their whirligig succession is hopeless."

*Authors' note: I think that their description of chaotic time is really confusing. There are really four ways of thinking about time - random, cyclical, linear and chaotic. The characteristics they ascribe to chaotic time really apply to random time. In chaotic time, there is order, events are not random, but follow a higher order of organization not easily perceived. I think that the paradigm progression is from random to cyclical to linear to chaotic.

"Cyclical time originated when the ancients first linked natural cycles of planetary events (diurnal rotations, lunar months, solar years, zodiacal precessions) with related cycles in human activity (sleeping, waking; gestating, birthing; planting; harvesting; hunting, feasting). Cyclical time conquered chaos by repetition..."

"...linear time - time as a unique (and usually progressing) story with an absolute beginning and an absolute end...The Persian, Judaic, Christian and Islamic cosmologies all embraced the radically new concept of personal and historic time as a unidirectional drama."
The saeculum is approximately 80 years long and, according to the authors, is observable in Anglo-American history for seven cycles since 1435. The saeculum is divided into four turnings, each about 20 years long - a generation:

1. "The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays." In the current saeculum, this was the American High (1946 - 1964)

2. "The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when civic order comes under attack from a new values regime." In the current saeculum, this was the Consciousness Revolution (1964 - 1984)

3. "The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants." In the current saeculum, this was, and still is, the Culture Wars (1984 - 2005?)

4. "The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one." In the current saeculum, this era is left unnamed but would start around 2005 and end around 2026.

If Strauss and Howe are correct, at this point in time, we are at the cusp of entering a crisis era. The previous crisis era was introduced by the great depression and W.W.II. Prior crisis eras also began with wars - Civil War (1860), American Revolution (1773), Glorious Revolution (1675), Armada Crisis (1569) and Wars of the Roses (1459). Are the wars we are in right now the catalysts for our next crisis era?

The second building block in Strauss and Howe's model is the concept of generations. "Of all the cycles known to man, the one we all know best is the human life cycle. No other societal force - not class, not nationality, not culture, not technology - has a predictable a chronology. The limiting length of an active life cycle is one of civilization's great constants...Biologically and socially, a full human life is divided into four phases: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and elderhood. Each phase of life is the same length as the others, capable of holding one generation at a time. And, each phase is associated with a specific social role that conditions how its occupants perceive the world and act on those perceptions." And, each phase is about 20 years long:

Childhood (0-20) - social role is growth, receiving nurture, acquiring values
Young Adulthood (21-41) - social role is vitality, serving institutions, testing values
Midlife (42-62) - social role is power, managing institutions, applying values
Elderhood (63-83) - social role is leadership, leading institutions, transferring values

Late Elderhood (84+) - social role is dependence, receiving comfort from institutions, remembering values

In this model, only the first four are considered active in shaping American society. This assumption is certainly suspect as the late elderhood bracket swells and people remain mentally and physically active longer.

These two building blocks of the Strauss and Howe model, the saeculum and generations, act together to create the engine for social change. Consider for example childhood. A childhood spent during a first turning, a high, would be vastly different than one spent during a crisis or fourth turning.

But the key thing to consider is the mix of generations in any turning of the saeculum. For example, in a fourth turning, the crisis era the author's predict we are now in:

The Midlife generation, whose role is power, experienced Childhood during a second turning, an awakening
The Elderhood generation, whose role is leadership, experienced Childhood in a first turning, a high
The Young Adulthood generation, whose role is vitality, experienced Childhood during an Unraveling
The Childhood generation, whose role is growth is getting its first life expereince during a Crisis

The Late Elderhood generation, whose role according to the authors, is dependence is the only generation to have experienced the last crisis.

The third building block of the Strauss and Howe model is the naming of generations, depending upon their place in the saeculum at different life stages. The naming implies that we can, to a first approximation, group people in a generation and ascribe some common characteristics. This is a dangerous assumption, but useful if you're going to make any sense of generations and social change. The characterizations are general tendencies and do not apply to individuals within a generation.

The fourth building block of the model is the concept of archetypes. Strauss and Howe identity four archetypes - Hero, Nomad, Prophet and Artist. These four archetypes cycle through our society as generations.

The generations in play right now are:

The Silent Generation (1929-1946) - an Artist archetype, suffocated during childhood, sensitive during youth adulthood, indecisive during midlife and empathetic during elderhood
The Boomers (1946-1964) - a Prophet archetype, indulged during childhood, narcissistic as a young adult, moralistic in midlife
The Thirteen Generation (1964-1984) - also called GenX, a Nomad archetype, abandoned during childhood, alienated during young adulthood
The Millennials (1985-2005) - Hero archetype, protected as a child

If the authors are correct, we have just entered a Crisis that will last for the next 20 years. In this Crisis the elders will be Prophets, those in midlife will be Nomads, young adults will be Heroes and our children will be Artists. According to the authors, families will be strengthening and we will over protect our children. The gap between genders will widen. Ideals will be championed, new institutions will be founded and our culture will be practical. Our interest in community will be growing and our social structure will begin to unify. Our worldview will be moving from complexity to simplicity. What will motivate us socially will be a concern over blots in our record. We will develop a sense of urgency and a sense that we need to fix our outer world. If wars occur, they will be total.

The morphology of a crisis era will is:

"A Crisis era begins with a catalyst - a starting event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood"
"Once catalyzed, a society achieves a regeneracy - a new counter entropy that reunifies and reenergize civic life"
"The regenerated society propels toward a climax - a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and birth of the new."
"The climax culminates in a resolution - a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates the winners from the losers, resolves the big public questions, and establishes the new order."

While I am reluctant to present their recommendations, I do so for your own analysis. To me the recommendations appear to have a political bias. According to the authors to prepare for the fourth turning, or crisis, America should:

Prepare values - forge the consensus and uplift the culture, but don't expect near-term results
Prepare institutions - clear the debris and find out what works, but don't try building anything big
Prepare politics - define challenges bluntly and stress duties over rights, but don't attempt reforms that can't now be accomplished
Prepare society - require community teamwork to solve local problems, but don't try this on a national scale
Prepare youth - treat children as the nation's highest priority, but don't do the work for them
Prepare elders - tell future elders they will need to be more self sufficient, but don't attempt deep cuts in benefits to current elders
Prepare the economy - correct fundamentals, but don't try to fine tune performance
Prepare the defense - expect the worse and prepare to mobilize, but don't precommit to any one response

For individuals they recommend:

Rectify - return to the classic virtues
Converge - heed emerging community norms
Bond - build personal relationships of all kinds
Gather - prepare yourself (and your children) for teamwork
Root - look to your family for support
Brace - gird for the weakening or collapse of public support mechanisms
Hedge - diversify everything you do

It is incredibly important that we as a society understand the predictions in this book. We must decide not only if they are right or wrong, but also even if they are right, are we predetermined to this future, or can we through collective decisions and actions avoid the future they say is inevitable. Is technology a wild card in their scenario? Will it accelerate the Crisis or help us avoid it? And, for all the cases, what are we going to do about it?

The Fourth Turing - An American Prophecy
What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny
William Strauss and Neil Howe
Broadway Books, 1997

Being There

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 15:19:00 -0600

It was Sunday. Chance was in the garden. He moved slowly, dragging the green hose from one path to the next, carefully watching the flow of the water. Very gently he let the stream touch every plant, every flower, every branch of the garden. Plants were like people; they needed care to live, to survive their diseases, and to die peacefully.

Yet plants were different from people. No plant is able to think about itself or able to know itself; there is no mirror in which a plant can recognize itself its face; no plant can do anything intentionally; it cannot help growing, and its growth has no meaning, since a plant cannot reason or dream.

It was safe and secure in the garden, which was separated from the street by a high, red brick wall covered with ivy, and not even the sounds of the passing cars disturbed the peace. Chance ignored the streets. Though he had never stepped outside the house and its garden, he was not curious about life on the other side of the wall.

Thus begins this amazing novel by Jerzy Kosinski. This 1971 book has stayed mostly dormant in my brain for over thirty years only occasionally popping to the surface. However, in my recent studies of McLuhan, it surfaced and requested that I reread it. I believe after rereading the book that Kosinski was drawing a metaphor for the impacts of electronic media on perception and thinking, and the emergence of the post-literate man.

Chance went inside and turned on the TV. The set created its own light, its own color, its own time. It did not follow the law of gravity that forever bent all plants downward. Everything on TV was tangled and mixed and yet smoothed out: night and day, big and small, tough and brittle, soft and rough, hot and cold, far and near. In this colored world of television, gardening was the white cane of a blind man.

By changing the channel he could change himself. He could go through phases, as garden plants went through phases, but he could change as rapidly as he wished by twisting the dial backward and forward. In some cases he could spread out onto the screen without stopping, just as on TV people spread out onto the screen. By turning the dial, Chance could bring others inside his eyelids. Thus he came to believe that it was he, Chance, and no one else, who made himself to be.

Chance, you find out in the story, is a person of unknown origin who lived his entire life tending the garden of a very wealthy man. His education was TV and the garden. When the old man died, his life was abruptly changed.

He rose early as always, found the breakfast that had been left at his door by the maid, ate it, and went into the garden.

He checked the soil under the plants, inspected the flowers, snipped away dead leaves, and pruned the bushes. Everything was in order. It had rained during the night, and many fresh buds had emerged. He sat down and dozed in the sun.

As long as one didn't look at people, they did not exist. They began to exist, as on TV, when one turned one's eyes on them. Only then could they stay in one's mind before being erased by new images. The same was true for him. By looking at him, others could make him clear, could open him up and unfold him; not to be seen was to blur and fade out. Perhaps he was missing a lot by simply watching others on TV and not being watched by them. He was glad now, after the Old Man died, he was going to be seen by people he never been seen by before.

Chance is called in to meet with the executors of the Old Man's will. He is found to have no papers, no record of his existence. The executors are unbelieving and fear a scam. Chance retorts,

"But you have me. I am here. What more proof do you need?"

He is told that the house and garden will be locked the next day and he must leave. On the morning of the next day, he dresses and packs his suitcase with the old, very expensive suits that the Old Man had given him, now back in style, and prepared to leave.

He turned on the TV, sat down on the bed, and flicked the channel changer several times. Country houses, skyscrapers, newly built apartment houses, churches shot across the screen. He turned the set off. The image died; only a small blue dot hung in the center of the screen, as if forgotten by the rest of the world to which it belonged; then it too disappeared. The screen filled with greyness; it might have been a slab of stone.

Chance got up and now on the way to the gate, he remembered to pick up the old key that for years had hung untouched on a board in the corridor next to his room. He walked to the gate and inserted the key; then, pulling the gate open, he crossed the threshold, abandoned the key in the lock, closed the gate behind him. Now he could never return to the garden.

Chance is now on the hero's journey described by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

He almost immediately has an accident. A chauffeur driven limousine crushes his leg. The wealthy man's wife, Eve or EE, brings Chance back to her house to care for him. There through a series of misunderstandings his name gets changed to Chauncey Gardiner. Her powerful husband is old and very ill. The doctors already in the house care for Chance.

Chance thinks,

"When one was addressed and viewed by others, one was safe. Whatever one did would then be interpreted by the others in the same way that one interpreted what they did. They could never know more about one than one knew about them."

Chance wondered whether Mr. Rand would ask him to leave the house. The thought that he might have to leave did not upset him; he knew that he would eventually have to go but that, as on TV, what would follow next was hidden; he knew the actors on the new program were unknown. He did not have to be afraid, for everything had its sequel, and the best that one could do was to wait patiently for his own forthcoming appearance.

Benjamin Rand has a meeting with the President. He is prepared for the meeting by his handlers. Chance comments:

"I hope that you're feeling well, sir. You do look better."

Rand moved uneasily in his chair. "It's all makeup, Chauncey - all make-up. The nurse was here all night and through the morning, and I asked her to fix me up so the President won't feel I'm going to die during our talk. No one likes a dying man, Chauncey, because few know what death is. All we know is the terror of it. You're an exception, Chauncey, I can tell. I know that you're not afraid. That's what EE and I admire in you: your marvelous balance. You don't stagger back and forth between fear and hope, you're a truly peaceful man! Don't disagree; I'm old enough to be your father. I've lived a lot, trembled a lot, was surrounded by little men who forgot that we enter naked and exit naked and that no accountant can audit life in our favor."

Chance participates in the meeting with the president. The President and Rand are discussing the economy, which has recently taken a turn for the worse. Chance observes trying to emulate what he has seen on TV about how to act making sure that he looks straight into the President's eyes. The President turns to Chance and asks him a question.

"And you, Mr. Gardiner? What do you think about the bad season on The Street?"

Chance draws on the only knowledge he possesses, gardening, and replies.

"In a garden, growth has its seasons. There are spring and summer, but there is also fall and winter. And then spring and summer again. As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well."

Rand and the President are pleased. The President incorporates Chance's philosophy into his thoughts and in a national TV speech quotes him. This leads quickly to a TV appearance for Chance on a talk show.

Chance turned on the TV. He wondered whether a person changed before or after appearing on the screen. Would he be changed forever or only during the time of his appearance? What part of himself would he leave behind when he finished the program? Would there be two Chances after the show: one Chance who watched TV and another who appeared on it?

When Chance went to the studio for his telecast, Kosinski observes and comments.

Chance was astonished that television could portray itself; cameras watched themselves and, as they watched, they televised a program. This self-portrait was telecast on TV screens facing the stage and watched by the studio audience. Of all the manifold things there were in the world - trees, grass, flowers, telephones, radios, elevators - only TV constantly held up a mirror to its own neither solid nor fluid face.

Later:

Facing the cameras and the audience, now barely visible in the background of the studio, Chance abandoned himself to what would happen. He was drained of thought, engaged, yet removed. The cameras were licking up the image of his body, were recording his every movement and noiselessly hurling them into millions of TV screens scattered throughout the world - into rooms, cars, boats, planes, living rooms and bedrooms. He would be seen by more people than he could ever meet in his entire life - people who would never meet him. The people who watched him on their sets did not know who actually faced them; how could they, if they had never met him? Television reflected only people's surfaces; it also kept peeling their images from their bodies until they were sucked into the caverns of their viewers' eyes, forever beyond retrieval, to disappear.

When Chance gives his garden answer to the host's question on the economy, he becomes an instant national, and later even an international, celebrity. The story concludes with Chance being considered as a presidential candidate.

Chance is attending a large party for international dignitaries as the novel ends.

He crossed the hall. Chilled air streamed in through an open window. Chance pushed the heavy glass door open and stepped out into the garden. Taut branches laden with fresh shoots, slender stems with tiny sprouting buds shot upward. The garden lay calm, still sunk in repose. Wisps of clouds floated by and left the moon polished. Now and then, boughs rustled and gently shook off their drops of water. A breeze fell upon the foliage and nestled under the cover of its moist leaves. Not a thought lifted itself from Chance's brain. Peace filled his chest.

Marshal McLuhan wrote about three stages in the development of mankind - preliterate, literate and post literate. Preliterate society existed until the development of an alphabetic phonetic language. Literate society's development was accelerated by the invention of the moveable type printing press. Post literate society began developing with the invention of the telegraph and was accelerated by the development of TV and computers. Most of what we know is based on literate perceptions and means of communication.

McLuhan believed that the real impact of a change in a medium is in the medium's ability to alter our perception of reality. This altered perception of reality is nearly impossible for anyone to consciously notice, and therefore its impacts are profound. Media, which are extensions of man's senses, alter the ratio of our sense usage. Kosinski opens and closes the book with sense driven descriptions of reality.

McLuhan's post literate society has many of the characteristics of the preliterate society of the distant past. He labeled the society "acoustic", not that it was going back to being only an oral - aural environment of the preliterate age, but that it was going to be more "wavelike", as in the wave nature of matter. However, the post literate age was going to rely more heavily on the spoken word, rather than the written word of the literate age. And, instead of gathering around fires, we gather around the TV screens (TV or computer), in our caves.

Chance is Kosinski's conception of what someone would be like if they skipped the literate age entirely. Chance's learning is preliterate and post literate. He learned from nature and TV.

He draws a distinction in the second paragraph between nature and humankind in the ability to be aware and have intention. Later he points out that TV could portray itself, a feat unmatched in nature.

Kosinski gives hints about TV's ability to alter our sense ratios and it's impact on our perception of reality when he writes, "The set created its own light, its own color, its own time. It did not follow the law of gravity that forever bent all plants downward. Everything on TV was tangled and mixed and yet smoothed out: night and day, big and small, tough and brittle, soft and rough, hot an cold, far and near. In this colored world of television, gardening was the white cane of a blind man."

The last phrase is a particularly important piece of advice about how to cope with the changes when he advises the perception of nature as a way to achieve balance.

Chance is so altered by his TV education that he's not sure of his existence outside of the TV, and he thinks that he can change himself by changing channels.

In a literate world, existence is proven through demonstration of literacy and a written record. In Kosinski's post literate world, existence is proven by being seen.

"The cameras were licking up the image of his body, were recording his every movement and noiselessly hurling them into millions of TV screens scattered throughout the world," writes Kosinski. "Television reflected only people's surfaces; it also kept peeling their images from their bodies until they were sucked into the caverns of their viewers' eyes, forever beyond retrieval, to disappear." In a chaotic post literate world where electronic media have altered our perceptions of time, space, sequence, cause and effect, past and future, the present moment and temporality, Chance appears to be a wise man. He is "post literate" and wise in the way of the garden.

Being There
Jerzy Kosinski
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971

Also the movie:
Being There
Lorimar Production
United Artists, 1979
Screenplay by Jerzy Kosinski

For more information about McLuhan read my article The Wave of the Future.

My Quest for Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:15:00 -0600

In 1995, Donna Prestwood, Barbara Benjamin and I, created, produced and hosted 8 two-hour live satellite TV broadcasts for the National Technological University (NTU) on leadership, which we entitled "Leadership in the Interactive Age."

(http://store.yahoo.com/innovationroadmap/leininage.html)

In the session called, Personal Ingenuity and Emerging Technologies, we described three characteristics of inevitable opportunities in technology:

The space between
Synergy
Beauty

My point was, as I presented these three criteria, that if a technology operated on the space between people (things, ideas, concepts), enhanced synergy, and was beautiful (elegant), it probably had a good chance of being a success. I would probably add time shifting now, and still think it's a pretty good list.

I want to focus on beauty right now, because I think it is imperative that we keep our eye on this criteria as we move to more collaborative, emergent behavior types of human systems.
Rollo May was an existential psychologist and a philosopher. I read several books of his in the 1980s. http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/may.html

In My Quest for Beauty, May wrote, "Poincare, the great contemporary mathematician, sounds like Plato when he asks the question of how new mathematical discoveries are made. Then he answers,

'The useful combinations are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all mathematicians know...But only certain ones are harmonious, consequently, at once useful and beautiful.'

Writing about Shiller, May comments, "...we best let him speak for himself.

'Beauty alone confers happiness on all, and under its influence every being forgets that he is limited.'

Shiller hastens to add that this forgetting is temporary, however, for the sense of limitations is crucial to our creating beauty. We actually create beauty out of the endeavor to come to terms with the paradox on the one hand of freedom and on the other of destiny. Our limits come from both nature and spirit, finite and infinite, objective and subjective."

May agrees with Shiller that beauty is born in play. "Play is the one activity where the fusion of inner vision and objective facts is achieved. Out of this comes the living form which is beauty. This living form is vital, alive, dynamic; and at the same time it gives serenity and repose..."

May remarks, "Artists wrestle with fate in the endeavor to make objective their inner subjective vision." And, in order to do that people must be psychologically healthy. Beauty is a result of creativity that is driven by the engine of paradox, the duality of opposites (finite/infinite, life/death, yin/yang, right/left brain). "Death is the mother of beauty", wrote Wallace Stevens.
"Thus creativity brings together what Freud summed up as the two purposes of life: to love and to work. (Otto) Rank was only going further than Freud by pointing out that both of these, love and work, are aspects of creativity."

May later writes, "Let us explore the human mind as it engages in the creative act. The capacity to create - which we all have, although to varying degrees - is essentially the ability to find form in chaos, to create form where there is only formlessness. This is what leads to beauty, for beauty is that form.

Beauty reveals a form in the universe - the harmony of the spheres, as Kepler called it. It is a form which is present in the circling of the planets. It is a form which is felt in the curves and balance of our own bodies. And it is present especially in the way we see the world, for we form and reform the world in the very act of perceiving it. The imagination to do this is one of the elements that make us human beings."

But what is form? "Form is a pattern, an image and an order given to what would otherwise simply be chaos. Form is the nonmaterial structure of our lives, on the basis of which we live and on which we base our own particular character." Henry Miller wrote of creative people that they want "to make of the chaos about them an order that is their own."

In another seeming paradox, May points out that "the form dictates the content." We select a form "because the content can best be formed out of the chaos" and put into "whatever form seems to fit." "Form", he continues, "is nonmaterial, and has its existence only as things are related to other things." Writing about Pythagoras, he explains, "he held that the fundamental element (of the universe) was no substance at all, but was really the form in which everything in nature is related to everything else."

At a personal level, our own quest for beauty through our creativity gives us grace. May writes, "Creativity gives us grace in the sense that it is balm for our anxiety and a relief from our alienation. It is grace by virtue of its power to reconcile us to our deepest selves, to lead us to our own depths where primary and secondary functions are unified. Here the right brain and the left brain work together is seeing the wholeness of the world."

Chaos is essential for creativity and thus beauty. Too much order will stifle creativity. The role of the artist changes depending upon the environment. If too much chaos exists, the artist creates new order. If too much order exists, the role of the artist is to create chaos.

If you have any doubt about beauty being a serious objective of any undertaking, listen to what Rollo May has to say. "Beauty is the expereince that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously. Other happenings give us joy and afterwards a peace, but in beauty these are the same experience. Beauty is serene and at the same time exhilarating; it increases one's sense of being alive. Beauty gives us not only a feeling of wonder; it imparts to us at the same moment timelessness, a repose - which why we speak of beauty as being eternal.

Beauty is the mystery which enchants us. Like all higher experiences of being human, beauty is dynamic; its sense of repose, paradoxically, is never dead, and if it seems to be dead, it is no longer beauty."

Innovation commons, as well as other open, collaborative systems, are by their very nature chaotic systems. The goal is to find the order in the chaos through the individual and collective creativity of its members. This will happen if their is a shared vision, will and significance in the group. The balance of order and chaos is extremely important, as well as the timing of that balance, which should change from more chaotic to more ordered over time, or else the effort will not be productive. The group has to collectively and individually be on a quest for beauty, in addition to functionality, in order to avoid building a termite mound.

My Quest for Beauty
Rollo May
Saybrook, 1985

Understanding Comics

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:46:00 -0600

This book is a pleasure to read and it contains valuable insights. It is a book about comics written and drawn in comic book form. The principles of comics are related to story telling. After all, they both are stories. McCloud defines comics as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an esthetic response in the viewer." The difference between comics and an animated movie is that "each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space - while each frame of comics must occupy different space. Space does for comics what time does for film."

McCloud demonstrates without a doubt the power and validity of comics to tell a story and to explain extremely complex ideas. My interpretation of McLuhan's idea of the post literate age leads me to believe that comics will be a growing form of communication.

Chapter 1 traces the history of comics from early cave art to the present. In Chapter 2 he develops a rather complete model for human written/drawn communication. In doing so, he considers the four dimensions of:

Complex - Simple
Realistic - Iconic
Objective - Subjective
Specific - Universal

From this he develops a model that relates reality, abstract and symbolic types of communication in a triangle. He also populates this triangle (which he alter expands into a pyramid) with examples of the many comic artists of history indicating how they relate to one another.

In Chapter 4, the author explains "closure". Closure is the mind's power to complete an image or an idea with incomplete information. Closure can be involuntary or voluntary. With many modern technologies, McCloud points out that closure is involuntary. However, with comics, the reader is a participant in completing the action or thought. He writes that there are six different types of closure employed in comics:

Moment to moment
Action to action
Subject to subject
Scene to scene
Aspect to aspect
Nonsequitur

He gives examples of each type. In addition he has statistics on which type is used by what artist and the differences between cultures. American and European comics rarely use the aspect to aspect transition, whereas Japanese artists use this type of transition frequently. This may be due to fact that art, like the Japanese garden, changes as you walk through it. With each new aspect, you get a different composition. In the West, the dominant transition is type 2 - action to action.

In a striking example, McCloud shows how different it is to view strips of cartoon, realistic images and abstractions. Closure is easy with cartoon images, very difficult with realistic images (tend to view each image alone), and almost impossible with abstract images (tend to look at the whole strip as a single piece of art).

Chapter 4 discusses time in comics. "Just as pictures and the intervals between them create the illusion of time through closure, words introduce time by representing that which can only exist in time - sound." In comics, it is the panel that is an icon that "acts as a general indicator that time or space is being divided." As a result, the size, shape and arrangements of panels on a page are an integral part of the creative effort for the artist to get the reader involvement he or she wants. The content of a silent panel (without words or action) "offers no clues as to its duration. It can also produce a sense of timelessness." The effects of such a panel can "bleed over" into subsequent panels creating a mood or sense of place. In this chapter he also treats the subject of motion in comics - multiple images, action lines, subjective (putting the reader in the action) and the use of a continuous background.

The techniques of conveying emotion are described in Chapter 5. In comics, emotions are conveyed through the character and spacing of the lines, by icons, the character of the word balloon and of course, the words themselves.

In Chapter 6, McCloud discusses the subject of the combination of words and pictures in comics through time - history and future.

In Chapter 7, he explains the seven steps of creating comics (or any form of art):

Idea/purpose
Form
Idiom
Structure
Craft
Surface

McCloud discusses the use of color in Chapter 8 and in Chapter 9 ties all the elements together. In the closing chapter he writes about the difficulties of an artist getting the ideas on paper and the viewer getting an approximation of the original idea. This is the dilemma of any artist and comics are no different. He sees a great future for comics, best told in his word and image:

After reading this book, you may want to read his second book, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology are Revolutionizing an Art Form, Harper Perennial, 2000.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Scott McCloud
Harper Perennial, 1993

Prisoner of Our Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 15:15:00 -0600

I was looking forward to reading this book when I found that Alex Pattakos had written it. I was not disappointed. I looked forward to reading the book because it was based, at least in part, upon Frankl's classic Man's Search for Meaning. I read and studied Frankl's book 25 years ago at a particularly low spot in my life - my younger brother, Bill, had died suddenly of a heart attack when he was only 40. My father was quite ill with heart disease, and I was about to be diagnosed with cancer. What was the meaning of life? Frankl's answer to that question influenced me in many ways, more than I ever realized until I read Pattakos's book. Since I had not read Frankl in over twenty years, I could now see how his teaching had informed my life.

This is a great book - probably one of the best books on work life yet written. I read the book in one sitting (something I've never done before), marking the book and making numerous notes. I intend to give it to my friends as gifts.

Pattakos writes in his preface, " This book deals with the human quest for meaning and, therefore, was written with you in mind. It is grounded firmly in the philosophy and approach of the world-renowned psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, author of the classic bestseller, Man's Search far Meaning (named one of the ten most influential books in America by the Library of Congress). Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps during World War II, is the founder of Logotherapy, a meaning-centered and humanistic approach to psychotherapy. His ideas and experiences related to the search for meaning have significantly influenced people around the world. In this book, you will find a conceptual foundation, as well as practical guidance, for examining your own questions about meaning in your work and everyday life.

The goal of this book, moreover, is to bring meaning to work-that is, to do for the domain of work what Frankl, as a psychiatrist, was able to do for psychotherapy. Because I am defining the notion of "work" very broadly, the message in this book applies to a very broad audience as well. In fact, it applies to volunteers as well as to paid workers; to people working in all sectors and industries; to retirees; to individuals beginning a job search or career; and to those in "transition." And, because this book demonstrates how Frankl's principles actually work in a generic context, its message can be applied to everyday living too. In this regard, besides introducing you to Frankl's core ideas about life, the book is filled with examples, stories, exercises, and practical tools that can help guide you on your path to finding meaning at work and in your personal life.

"It was in a meeting with Frankl at his home in Vienna, Austria, in August 1996, when I first proposed the idea of writing a book that would apply his core principles and approach explicitly to work and the workplace, to the world of business. Frankl was more than encouraging when, in his typically direct and passionate style, he leaned across his desk, grabbed my arm, and said: "Alex, yours is the book that needs to be written!" As you can imagine, I felt that Frankl's words had been branded into the core of my being, and I was determined, from that moment forward, to make this book idea a reality. And so it is."

We are by nature, creatures of habit. We seek to identify and stay within comfort zones. These comfort zones are patterns of thoughts. As we repeat these patterns of thought over and over again. We begin to believe that life happens to us and limit our own potential. We become prisoners of our own thoughts.

"Viewing life as inherently meaningful and literally unlimited in potential requires a shift in consciousness," writes Pattakos. "It also requires responsible actions on our part for, as Frankl points out, the potential meaning that exists in each moment of life can only be searched for and detected by each of us individually. This responsibility he says is 'to be actualized by each of us at any time, even in the most miserable situations and literally up to the last breath of ourselves.'"

We choose how we respond to life. "...life doesn't happen to us. We happen to life; and we make it meaningful."

Pattakos discusses not only personal transformation, but also the transformation of work itself.

"The transformation of work in the twenty-first century is, in many respects, a call for humanity - a new consciousness that suggests more than simply trying to strike a balance between our work and our personal life. It is a call to honor our own individuality and fully engage our human spirit at work - wherever that may be."

"The goal of this book is to bring meaning to work...," writes Pattakos. I believe he does an excellent job in this 187-page book full of wisdom and insights. It is a must read.

The book is divided into eleven chapters - Life Doesn't Just Happen to Us, Viktor Frankl's Lifework and Legacy, Labyrinths of Meaning, Exercise the Freedom to Choose Your Attitude, Realize Your Will to Meaning, Detect the Meaning of Life's Moments, Don't Work Against Yourself, Look at Yourself form a Distance, Shift Your Focus of Attention, Extend Beyond Yourself and Living and Working with Meaning.

Pattakos has synthesized more than just Frankl's Search for Meaning. He has read and studied most of Frankl's work and interviewed Frankl himself. He occupies a unique position to write this book.

He has created seven principles from his work:

Exercise the freedom to choose your attitude-in all situations, no matter how desperate they may appear or actually be, you always have the ultimate freedom to choose your attitude
Realize your will to meaning-commit authentically to meaningful values and goals that only you can actualize and fulfill.
Detect the meaning of life's moments-only you can answer for your own life by detecting the meaning at any given moment and assuming responsibility for weaving your unique tapestry of existence.
Don't work against yourself-avoid becoming so obsessed with or fixated on an intent or outcome that you actually work against the desired result.
Look at yourself from a distance-only human beings possess the capacity to look at themselves out of some perspective or distance, including the uniquely human trait known as your "sense of humor."
Shift your focus of attention-deflect your attention from the problem situation to something else and build your coping mechanisms for dealing with stress and change.
Extend beyond yourself-manifest the human spirit at work by relating and being directed to something more than yourself.

"All human beings, Frankl would say, ultimately have both the freedom and responsibility to position themselves along two key dimensions of life," writes Pattakos. These two key dimensions are success-failure and despair-meaning. Where are you right now in this continuum? Are you where you want to be?

"There is something in us that can rise above and beyond everything we think possible. Our instinct for meaning, at work and in our daily life, is ours right now, at this very moment. As long as we are not a prisoner of our thoughts," concludes Pattakos.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather recognize that it is he who is being asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and only he can answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
Viktor Frankl

Between stimulus and response, there is a space.

In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response.

In our response lies our growth and our happiness.

Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, Simon and Schuster, 1984

Prisoner of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl's Principles at Work
Alex Pattakos
Berrett-Koehler, 2004

Future Frequencies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 15:13:00 -0600

This is the first really new book about a different way to look at the future in quite some time. It's creative and original. And, it offers the potential of a methodology to stimulate non-linear thinking that could lead to breakthroughs. It is not a book that can be used to forecast the future. The authors are less interested in forecasting the future than in creating a future for their clients - a future that might include disruptive innovations.

The process appears like many other processes:

1. Future Framing: Establishes the context for the present and potential leverage points for the future
2. Future Pulsing: Using leverage points, identify influences and influencers to provide an insight into future triggers.
3. Future Mapping: Sculpting the triggers into future platforms.
4. Future Scaping: Creating the future scenarios from the selected platforms.
5. Future Tuning: Arriving at a preferred future.
6. Future Fabbing: Implementing the preferred scenario.

But looks are deceiving. The words used are unique in this context and have to be studied to be understood.

The key that weaves itself through the entire book and process is the author's encyclopedic knowledge and understanding of international avant-garde arts (music, sculpture, "paintings", writing, visual effects, sonic effects, etc.). They deconstruct the art and artist to get at how they think. Since by definition the avant-garde is radically different from the common, the ways of thinking are also different. If these ways of thinking can be used to help clients see their world in a different way and after perceiving the world differently, think and act differently, the seeds of disruptive innovation may be planted.

Woodgate writes, "In attempting to create a broader initial context and vision for a futures project, it is essential to break out of the framework set by the client's expectations and agreed deliverables. Otherwise we might replicate what the client could achieve without futurist input. Creating future visions is about breaking down traditional thinking, both ours and the client's. In our work at The Futures Lab, we are looking for revolutionary, not evolutionary, outcomes. As such, the process of "thinking the unthinkable" is a crucial part of this initial stage in terms of providing more "out there" input into the "wide angle lens" and systems dynamics models that we use. It is a mindset, not a "mouthset." Having an unfettered frame of mind at the beginning of a project is critical to the final output.

My basis for adopting the "thinking the unthinkable" concept stems from my early contacts with the Fluxus movement. In 1962, I attended the Festival of Misfits in London, an event organized by Daniel Spoemi and Robert Filliou. At the time, I thought of it as simple absurd fun. Later, as I got more involved in the movement, I realized its complexity and the fact that it was about the inclusion of everyday actions, and in doing so, breaking down the values held among traditional artistic disciplines. I was inspired by the power of Claes Oldenburg's statement: I am the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man's metal stick."

The book is filled with great quotes and the descriptions of many avant-garde artists and their work - some mind-blowingly different what is consider normal. It is not an easy read, but a book well worth the investment of time and mental energy to comprehend.

"The impossible attracts me, because everything possible has been done and the world didn't change." - Sun Ra

Future Frequencies
Derek Woodgate with Wayne Pethrick
Fringecore, 2004

Free the Beagle

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 15:08:00 -0600

This is probably one of the most creative business or personal development books you will ever read. Free the Beagle can be interpreted on many levels and can be read by entrepreneurs, business people, innovants, inventors, change agents, children, women and men. Each person who reads it will likely take away a different message, but all the interpretations I've heard are positive.

Free the Beagle is the Hero's Journey described by Joseph Campbell. It is a trip into the workings of our mind. It demonstrates the power of culture and convention to limit our capacity for growth. It is philosophy. It's uncommon sense. Is it autobiographical?

Peering over the rims of his glasses, the towering judge said, "You have questions, Counselor Intellect?"

"What about my cases?"

As he strode toward the exit behind his bench, Judge Grey answered over his shoulder: "They have all been reassigned."

"Surely there is a schedule - charts, maps, a budget?"

Framed now in the doorway to his private chambers, Judge Grey turned to face the lawyer. "Your journey will take what it takes."

And he was gone.

The lawyer is ordered on an unwanted journey with a Beagle in his care, a gift to the Son of the King in Destinae. On his trip he encounters a variety of strangers who befriend him or hurt him, but each teaches a lesson.

A shadowy gentleman in a formal riding coat slipped quietly from behind a tree. "Well, well, well," he said in an elegant whisper. "What brings a man like you so deep onto the Forrest of Confusion?" Seeing that the lawyer was somewhat taken aback, the shadowy fellow bowed like an aristocrat and, with a calculated flourish, produced a card from his ruffled sleeve. "My name is Worry," he smiled, "and I'm here to help you."

Drawing himself quickly up to his full height and straightening his clothes as best he could, the lawyer asked in his best lawyer voice, "Do you know the way through this forest?"

Worry replied softly, "Oh, but I was born in this forest."

Worry introduces the lawyer to Fear and Fear brings in Panic. They rob him of everything that he has. He is left unconscious. He awakens with the Beagle on his chest - the one he had tied to the tree - wondering how the beagle had gotten free.. He still has his duty and obligation to fulfill, but nothing else but the clothes he was wearing and a Beagle named Intuition.

Intellect, the lawyer, and Intuition, the beagle, encounter many adventures together on their way to Destinae as their partnership grows.

If I tell you much more, you won't have to read it and I want you to read the book. It's a fun read with only 125 pages and CD recording of a reading of the book in character.

The Origins of Virtue

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 14:51:00 -0600

To make the next step in our organizations and societies, we need to develop cooperation within ever widening systems. And, if we are ever to develop "innovation commons", we must master cooperation and trust. An "innovation commons", calling on the old idea of a common pasture for a town where all the residents could graze their animals, is a place where ideas can exist, like the early molecules in the primeval sea, free to combine and reproduce to create even more complex ideas. A place where the stability of the complex ideas can be tested and their survival gauged. "Innovation commons" will be required to foster the trans-disciplinary innovation necessary for the merging of information, biological and nanometric technologies on our horizon. Innovation commons are needed now to handle the sociopolitical, economic and demographic problems we face amidst growing partisanship and yes, even hatreds. And, we must assure that we don’t fall prey to the "failure of the commons" where an individual or entity exploits the commons to the detriment of all others, and eventually themselves.

Dawkins writes, "In the beginning was simplicity. It is difficult enough explaining how even a simple universe began. I take it as agreed that it would be even harder to explain the sudden springing up, fully armed, of complex order – life, or being capable of creating life. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is satisfying because it shows us a way in which simplicity could change into complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they end up manufacturing people."

Dawkins uses the phrase "selfish gene" not in the sense that the gene has a motive or emotion, but in the sense that it is convenient to express the actions of genes in human terms. Genes behave as though they were selfish. His perspective is that we humans are "survival machines" for our genes. His revolutionary concept is that genes use our bodies for reproduction and not the other way around. Dawkins asks the question, is there a general principle of all life, even radical life forms unknown now? He answers his own question writing, "…all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating machines."

If our bodies are survival machines for the genes within us, that does explain a lot of human behavior. Some individuals kill, steal, rape, dominate and otherwise consider only their own survival and well being. But, on the surface it does not seem to explain other, higher forms of human behavior – altruism, care for others, cooperation, collaboration and other humanistic traits we have.

These three books address this issue from various viewpoints and offer at least two different perspectives. In addition they provide an insightful look at human behavior in general, and worthy of your study.

"Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another: ‘My hereditary material is the most important on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain and even death’. And, you are one of these organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity" comments Robert Wright.

The basis for cooperation according to Wright and Ridley depends upon our awareness of with whom we share genes. Clearly we share genes with our children and it is advantageous to the survival of our genes that we care for our children and assure their survival. But we do not share genes with our mates. We care for them because they can help in the survival of our own genes through our children. We also share genes with our extended families and likewise will help them survive because it increases the probability of the survival of some of our genes.

I’ve done a lot of consulting work with small towns and I often hear the same phrase, "I like it in a small town because people care for one another. You don’t get that in big cities." In a small town "everyone is related." This is of course not strictly true, but is largely true. People in a small town do share a lot of the same genes. It’s in the gene’s interest to help assure the survival of people who share some of the same genes. This is not true of large cities.

The next factor that comes into play is that our genes dictate cooperation when it is beneficial to the survival of our genes if the group survives. "If a creature puts the greater good ahead of its individual interests, it is because its fate is inextricably tied to that of the group: it shares the group’s fate," writes Ridley. He continues, "A sterile ant’s best hope of immortality is vicarious reproduction through the breeding of the queen, just as an aeroplane passenger’s best hope of life is through the survival of the pilot." This also explains cooperative behavior in families and small towns. And, it is useful in understanding why people come together under threat or attack.

One of the more successful of the "innovation commons" experiments is Open Source. Open Source is a project to collaboratively develop software operating systems and applications that are free, available to anyone and not controlled by Microsoft. It has been successful in part probably because the group that joined together to create these programs felt threatened.
The more that you perceive that you as an individual are part of an interconnected web of life, the more likely you are to act selflessly. Random acts of kindness, heroic loss of life in a cause and ecological mindedness are all examples of this enhanced sense of interconnectedness and dependence.

"Our minds have been built by selfish genes," writes Ridley, "but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative. That is the paradox that this book has tried to explain.

Human beings have social instincts. They come into the world equipped with the predisposition to learn how to cooperate, to discriminate the trustworthy from the treacherous, to commit themselves to be trustworthy, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods and information, and to divide labor. In this we are on our own. No other species has been so far down this evolutionary path before us, for no species has built a truly integrated society except among the inbred relatives of a large family such as an ant colony. We owe our success as a species to our social instincts; they have enabled us to reap undreamt benefits from the division of labor for our masters – the genes. They are responsible for the rapid expansion of our brains in the past two million years and thence our inventiveness. Our societies and our minds have evolved together, each reinforcing trends in the other."

These thoughts lead to two conditions for a successful "innovation commons". Participants must perceive that cooperation in the commons – the exchange of ideas and information – helps the individuals assure their genes thrive, and their own genes' survival depends upon the group’s survival. Secondly, a system of trust must exist within the network of participants. The development of workable trust systems will be an essential building block to a successful "innovation commons".

Game theory plays an important role in understanding the types of trust systems that will work. Several different people have proven that the "tit for tat" game survives best in computer simulations. "Tit for tat" says that everyone starts with trust in the participants. Sharing occurs until there is demonstration that an individual is not giving back the equivalent to what they are taking. When this occurs, the person taking more than they are giving is no longer trusted. This is exactly how it worked in a real commons. If someone overgrazed the common meadow, he or she was shunned by the community cutting them off from the benefits of the community and possibly imperiling they ability to survive.

Dawkins writes, "What has all this to do with altruism and selflessness? I am trying to build up the idea that animal behavior, altruistic or selfish, is under the control of genes in only an indirect, but still very powerful sense. By dictating the way survival machines and their nervous systems are built, genes exert ultimate power over our behavior. But the moment to moment decisions about what to do next are taken by the nervous system. Genes are primary policy makers; brains are the executive."

The basis for cooperation according to Dawkins goes beyond. Dawkins introduces the concept of "meme", an idea replicator. Memes are the thought equivalents of genes. Genes last only a few generations before individual gene combinations that make up a characteristic of a person are lost. J. S. Bach’s genes, as prolific as he was (he had 20 children) are no longer present in any recognizable way. But his music continues to exist. Not only does it exist, it continues to replicate itself through all composers that have ever studied his music even after over 300 years. And, even a Bach music lover, has some of his melodies embedded like a virus in their brains ready to spring forth when prompted. Whether this is immortality or not is inconsequential. The point is that memes, the creations of our minds, once released from our minds, join in the generative dance of replicators in the primordial sea of memes awash in the world.

Dawkins writes, "But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong."

"Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over," Dawkins remarks. He stops short of concluding that the sharing of ideas is the equivalent of the sharing of our genes through sexual reproduction in order to secure their survival, but it does not seem much of a stretch to postulate that. We have many cases where individuals were so driven to spread their memes into the world that they gave up their lives to do so. Artists and writers who live in poverty in order to pursue their art. Zealots who gave their lives to promote an idea. Inventors who died broke because they dedicated their lives to their invention.

The individuals who have dedicated their lives to their memes strive for their survival. They also seek to be identified with their memes. It isn’t enough just to have the meme live beyond them. An "innovation commons" must have some system for tagging the meme with the person who originated it. In the scientific world there is a strict cultural code of referencing and footnoting the work. Like a family tree, with this kind of system, the heredity of the idea can be traced. The more often a meme is referenced the more important the meme is likely to be. Plagiarism usually results in severe shunning.

Memes can bind people together. Musical pairs like Gilbert and Sullivan, and Rogers and Hammerstein created many successful meme complexes. Business partners are often held together by meme complexes that tightly bind like genes. Business and entrepreneurial teams are also held together by their memes. Musical groups like the Beatles are also bound together by their memes and the promise of the creation of many more. These teams, pairs and groups stay together as long as the magic is there (the creation of meme complexes) and there is continued trust among the members. When one or more of the members begins to feel that others are taking more than they are giving, the bond is usually broken. "Innovation commons" will hold together as long as the magic is still in the air. A successful "innovation commons" will either be one that has a known limited life or his built in mechanisms to keep it fresh.
Very powerful meme complexes can keep many people together for long periods of time. This is probably another reason why Open Source has been successful. Its vision is very grand. Think of the metaphor of the movie "The Fifth Element" where a cab driver, a young boy, a "priest" and a woman from outer space join together to bring down Zorg and his "evil empire." Other movies like Star Wars and The Ring have similar elements. The United States has been held together by a meme complex created over 200 year’s ago. Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman upon leaving the constitutional convention what type of government we had. He replied, "A republic madam. The question is, can we keep it?" Another principle for a successful "innovation commons" is that the meme complex must be grand to achieve longevity.

Memes can also control us like genes. We are inculcated with meme complexes through our families, tribes and our cultures. These memes can unconsciously control our actions with respect to cooperation and altruism, making an "innovation commons" difficult to obtain.
An ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) in evolutionary genetics is a strategy that does well against copies of itself. There are four generally recognized conditions for ESS – longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity. Fecundity is more important than longevity of a particular copy. If memes are like genes, then how many brains it can infect is critical to its survival. Unlike genes, that have a particulate nature and high copying-fidelity, memes seem to be quickly morphed into new forms, just as I am writing this and putting my own thoughts into the writing and shading it to make the points I wish to make. But the fundamental ideas are those of the original authors.

There are therefor then two additional principles for a successful "innovation commons". It must be a safe environment constructed with the tools and methodologies that allow individuals to breakthrough their limiting memes to become an active member of the network. And, it must provide the equivalent of the primordial sea to allow the memes to freely combine. Survival of individual memes or meme complexes will in all likelihood be governed by ESS.

"We do not have to look for conventional biological survival traits like religion, music and ritual dancing though these may also be present. Once genes provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over," writes Dawkins.

He continues, "One unique feature of man, which may or may not have evolved memically, is his capacity for conscious foresight. Selfish genes (and if you allow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no foresight. They are unconscious blind replicators."

This leads us to another principle of a successful "innovation commons". It has to include and foster foresight.

Later Dawkins writes, "… even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight – our capacity to simulate the future in imagination – could same us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have at least the metal equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the long-tem benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves’, and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."

Our problems today have a high degree of complexity. In the future, they will be even more complex. We do need "innovation commons".

The Origins of Virtue
Matt Ridley
Penguin Books, 1996, paperback, 295 pages

The Moral Animal
Robin Wright
Vintage Books, 1994, paperback, 466 pages

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
Oxford University Press, 1976 (1990), 368 pages

The Globalization of Nothing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 14:48:00 -0600

A sociologist views "nothing" as a social form that, is general, is centrally conceived, controlled, and comparatively devoid of distinctive substantive content. This definition carries no judgment about the desirability or undesirability of such a social form - it is not used here in a pejorative sense. However, it is now clear that there is "a general historical trend away from something and toward nothing." The five major subtypes of the Something-Nothing continuum are:

Unique (one-of-a-kind: a gourmet meal)) vs. generic (interchangeable; a microwave meal cooked centrally or Disney's worlds)
Local geographic ties (hand-made pottery) vs. non-place or lack of local ties (mass-produced pottery)
Specific to the times (the VW Bug) vs. time-less (the Dodge Neon or the Kia)
Humanized (small teaching college) vs. dehumanized (the Internet university)
Enchanted (something with a magical quality) vs. disenchanted (anything mass-produced or McDonaldized).

The precursor polar types are Toennies's gemeinschaft (family, neighborhood, friendships) and gesellschaft (urban, national, and cosmopolitan relationships).

In contrast to the concept of glocalization (the interpenetration of the global and the local resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas), Ritzer coins the term grobalization which focuses on "the imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and the like, and their desire, indeed need, to impose themselves on various geographic areas." Their main interest is in seeing their power and profits grow throughout the world. "Grobalization tends to be associated with the proliferation of nothing, while glocalization tends to be tied more to something." Both processes are under the broad heading of globalization, but they are rooted in competing visions of the contemporary world. Capitalism, McDonaldization, and Americanization are all grobalization processes. The choice of nothing is often the smart thing to do. There are many advantages associated with nothing, which is why so many choose it so often. But "as time goes by, there will be increasingly fewer opportunities to choose something." [NOTE: Awkward and sometimes dense, but original, and somewhat related to Rosenau's "fragmegrative dynamics", Dynamics Beyond Globalization.

Also See: McDonaldization: The Reader edited by George Ritzer (Pine Forge, 2002), and The Substance of Style which contrast sharply with Ritzer in substance and style.

The Globalization of Nothing
George Ritzer
Pine Forge Press (Sage Publications), Aug 2003, 259 pages, hard cover
Future Survey, October 2003

Smart Mobs

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 14:19:00 -0600

This book review is long. So if you don’t want to read a long review of the book and its implications, let me tell you in the first paragraph, "This is a must read book!" It’s well written, exciting and scary. The technologies that the book is about have many potentially positive and negative outcomes. If you believe that society will still be dominated in the future by "zero sum" philosophies, at the individual, corporate and governmental level, then the outcome looks very scary. If you believe that society is ready to adopt "non-zero sum" games then the outlook is exciting and enormous changes will result that are positive. Non-zero sum games are behaviors that include "the unique human power and pleasure that comes from doing something that enriches everyone, a game where nobody has to lose for everyone to win." Zero sum games are best typified by our sports. There is a winner and there is a loser. When the rules are bent or broken, then tragic results can occur, i.e. Enron, which is zero-sum corporate behavior personified. Or, a present nemesis, spam. Spam is where one person wins and everyone else looses.

Robert Write wrote in "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny", "New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature*) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential – that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and size."

The technologies that Rheingold documents that will enable "smart mob" he calls the mobile "infocom" industry. "Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell, govern and create. Some of these changes are beneficial and empowering, and some amplify the capabilities of people whose intentions are malignant."

Rheingold defines smart mobs, "Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in their environment…" as well as other people. Microprocessors and, or with embedded, telecommunications chips are becoming inexpensive. As a result they will permeate our environment. Rheingold mentions furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, box tops, shoes and many others that are being embedded with what he calls "smartifacts". This shifts the emphasis from the creation of an "artificial reality" to the creation of an "augmented reality".

I just made a trip to Boston where I stayed at a hotel in an unfamiliar area. I went out to find a store where I could buy bottled water. You know how difficult a task that is a city center. If the infocom technology was present, I could have pointed my hand held device at a street sign, queried it and it could have told me via text message the directions to a store. Or, if I had wanted to talk to some one else interested in "smart mobs", I could have set up my personal profile indicating that I was open to having a conversation with someone about "smart mobs". If there was anyone else walking around last night with the same profile, say within two blocks of each other, we by mutual assent could have met to have a conversation. While I was typing this, the air conditioned in the room shut off. I got up to check the thermostat and the ac turned back on. It sensed my presence when I moved. The thermostat is already a dumb smartifact. If I had a profile on my portable device that indicated I liked a room temperature of 70°, the smart thermostat would be able to read that as long as I was in the room and keep the temperature like I liked it.

I walked for over an hour last evening, and the same technologies could have been used to bombard me with "spim", text message spam. Everyplace I walked by or things I looked at could have sent messages to the augmented environment that would have triggered an avalanche of advertisements. People could have read my profile and accidentally met me to sell me something. Muggers could have assessed me as a potential target.

The computer started as a military weapon 50 years ago. It has now reached the point where it is changing the way we work and live. This next jump in capability of computer, telecommunication and geographic location technologies is about to start another revolution. The characteristics of mobility, multimedia, high computational ability and location sensitivity multiple each others usefulness, not just add to. The backbone, or spinal cord, for these technologies is the Internet.

Rheingold points out that he believes that there are three factors that are bringing about these changes*:

Moore’s Law (computer chips get cheaper as they grow more powerful)
Metcalf’s Law (the useful power of a network multiplies rapidly as the number of nodes in the network increases)
Reed’s Law (the power of a network, especially one that enhances social networks, multiplies even more rapidly as the number of human groups using the network increases)

Reviewer’s note: These are often stated as "laws" when in reality they depict trends. And, as trends they can be altered by changes in the external environment or the usefulness of the utility factor described. For example, Moore’s law refers to the number of circuits on a memory chip doubling every 2 years. The more circuits, the more function. The more function per chip, the lower the cost. Moore’s’ law has been extended to many other integrated circuit applications with different doubling rates.

The commons is an old concept. Originally, the commons was a shared pasture when peo0le in a village could graze their animals. If everyone juts grazes their share of animals, the commons works. But the temptation is there, since there is no government control, for someone to take advantage of the situation and graze more than their fair share. If everyone responds in kind, the pasture becomes over grazed and there is nothing for anyone’s animals to eat. The commons fails and everyone fails. This was called "The Tragedy of the Commons" by Garrett Hardin. The question is, can we have the freedom of the commons with government oversight? People are crying now for regulation to control spam – laws, fines, judgment. What freedoms do we lose in the exchange?

Reputation is playing a role in avoiding "the tragedy of the commons." Obviously, in the case of the original application of the commons, if a person over grazes their reputation goes down. Will they be allowed to graze the next year? Without force of law or violence, the only avenue open to the community is to shun the over grazer. Reputation systems technology will play an ever increasing role in the "electronic commons" we are building. For example, files sharing systems that are available to everyone that contributes in kind. I donate a file and I can take a file. If I take without donating, I am shunned. The quality and quantity of the exchange are still to be worked out.

The real potential poser of the commons occurs when it becomes an "innovation commons". That is that people joining the commons provide work product towards a common goal or shared vision to produce innovation.

The technologists that believe that an operating system ought to be a public good, are demonstrating daily that this type of innovation system works well. Open source is a viable way to develop software modules and applications. The open source software development model is gaining acceptance and growing.

In many cities, individuals and organizations are providing free wireless access to the Internet. The people and organizations donate their time, expertise and money to provide this free access because they believe that such access ought to be free and because they see the enormous benefit to their community in having a mobile, networked "smart mob". Everyone benefits from this infrastructure. That doesn’t stop people and organizations from setting up commercial systems and charging a toll for access to the "innovation commons". For example, the hotel I stayed at in Boston charged $9.95 per day. The restaurant next door has free wireless Internet access.

The Dean campaign for President, although it failed, is held out as the pioneer in the application of the innovation commons in politics. DeanSpace was the focal point for the gathering of people with a shared vision of Dean as President to meet online, organize, form local groups, solicit memberships, create rallies, fund raising, etc. Furthermore, the software that created DeanSpace is free to anyone who wants to use it for other applications. DeanSpace itself was created from free software developed in Open Source.

One of the key concepts of smart mobs is emergence. A school or fish, a flock of birds or a heard of animals demonstrate the rudimentary form of emergence. A school of fish all turn at the same time. It’s as though out of the collection of the individuals together in a school, they act as if they have a collective intelligence.

Many people were surprised by the popularity of text messaging on cell phones, especially among young people. They shouldn’t have been. Teenagers have the constant need to be told that they are OK. They swarm and text messages provide the means to develop the time and location. They’ve even developed a language for text messaging that fits the technology and the application. This type of behavior among the young, although well developed in the U.S, is most advanced in Japan and Finland. Rheingold calls these youth groups, "thumb tribes". They type with their thumbs without looking, even while walking or talking. However benign the technology application among the young, the technology can also be used by gangs and terrorists.

Termites have an organized society. They build nest, harvest food, care for the young and conduct war. When the warriors return from a battle, they are created by workers that swarm to them and touch them all over with their feelers. It might appear that the workers are solicitors of the warrior. It’s not benign however; if a warrior has been damaged in battle, they are killed upon reentry to the society.

The same type of phenomena can occur with teenagers as well. Reputation is essential to continue to participate in the smart mob. If false, or true, rumors are spread about an individual, that individual can be shunned from the group.

Steven Johnson wrote in Emergence, "In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies on one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher level sophistication is what we call emergence." Smart mob technologies have the potential of reorganizing cities, not by planned development, but by emergence.

Smart mob technologies are already altering the concepts of time and space among the young. A friend of mind told me the following story. He was with his daughter, a college student, and a group of her friends. They decided that they wanted some ice cream. One girl said that she would go get it and left in her car. As the girl was not familiar with the location, my friend asked his daughter how she was going to find an ice cream store. His daughter told him to wait. In a few minutes, the friend called on the cell phone, told her where she was and asked directions. The girl was constantly talking with my friend’s daughter as she steered her to the location. In this type of group there is no need for plan, schedule or map. It’s all in the moment, driven only by the impulse to get ice cream, and the recognition that the intelligence to accomplish the task resides somewhere in the group.

Another important factor affecting how these technologies will emerge is whether the commons is viewed as a scarce or abundant resource. In the case of the original commons, the resource was scarce. There was a limit to the land and the grass. And, there are some applications in the electronic commons where the resources may actually or at least be thought of as scarce.
One great example of where a resource was thought to be scarce was in the SETI program that is searching for extraterrestrial life by analyzing radio signals from space. With limited resources, they recognized that PC’s all over the world are not being used full time. Even if they are in use, as the one I’m using now is being used, the computer has more unused cycles than I’m using as I type. Those are all wasted comp0utational opportunities. The SETI program does not share cycles, but it does share chunks of time on PCs all over the world when they are not in use. "When nobody is using them, the PCs are swarming around the world in an amateur cooperative venture known as SETI@home – a collective super computer spread all over the Net." More than 2 million people donate their computer’s time to this project, creating a supercomputer on unimagined power.

"Distributed computation is only one example of how peer-to-peer arrangements can assemble scattered resources to create collective goods." Rheingold discusses ten different current applications. One, "United Devices, together with the National Foundation for Cancer Research and the University of Oxford, enables participants to contribute their CPU cycles to drug optimization computations involved in evaluating potential leukemia medicines from Oxford’s database of 250 million candidate molecules. Whereas Intel’s first supercomputer, built in the 1990s for Sandia National Laboratory at a cost of $40 -$50 million, is capable of one teraflop (one trillion floating operations*), the United Devices virtual supercomputer is aiming for fifty teraflops ‘at almost no cost’." United Devices is a nonprofit organization.

* per second

What if the resources of the commons are not scarce? What if they were abundant? Going back to the metaphor of the agricultural commons where neighbors grazed sheep, notorious for stripping a field of its grass, what if, in the words of Cory Doctorow, there were "grass shitting sheep". Maybe its not polite language, but the image is powerful. What if in the process of utilizing the commons, the users provision it? The commons then becomes a cornucopia.
Rheingold describes several knowledge systems that approach the cornucopia concept. The general concept is this. If a group of people have a common interest, they install software agents that keeps track of all the files and web sites that each person finds in pursuit of that interest. These are shared with all the others in the network. The software agents keep track of which files you keep and which you throw away learning from your actions. Also reputations grow as the agent learns to trust one contributor’s efforts over another’s. In the process of consuming the information, the system learns and improves its effectiveness and efficiency.
The dark side of this concept was Napster. It facilitated file sharing but the people doing the sharing didn’t own the copyright to the files.

Human creativity is abundant. For all practical purposes, human creativity can be considered limitless. Each person’s brain has 100 billion synapses. Any one synapse can be connected to hundreds of others so the number of combinations is greater than the number of molecules in the known universe. The number of possible combinations becomes unimaginably large when the number people on the planet are considered as all of those brains can be connected in a variety of different ways. Creativity enhancing systems will not only provision existing resources, they will create new resources.

The book has eight chapters, extensive research notes and a good index:

Shibuya Epiphany
Technologies of Cooperation
Computation Nations and Swarm Computers
The Era of Sentient Things
The Evolution of Reputation
Wireless Quilts
Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many
Always on Panopticon … Or Cooperation Amplifier

In the last chapter, Rheingold examines some of the important questions that need to be asked and answered about these new technologies. "If the citizens of the early twentieth century had paid more attention to the ways horseless carriages were changing their lives, could they have found ways to embrace the freedom, power and convenience of automobiles without reordering their grandchildren’s habitat in ugly ways? Before we start wearing our computers and digitizing our cities, can the generation of the early twenty-first century imagine what questions our grandchildren will wish we had asked today? Technology practices that might change the way we think are particularly worthy of critical scrutiny: High-resolution screens and broadband communication channels aren’t widget making machinery but sense-capturing, imagination-stimulating, opinion-shaping machinery."

The question Rheingold asks in the title of the chapter is will the technologies be used to created an all seeing eye, like the one in Tolkein’s Lord of the Ring, or will they create an environment where creativity and freedom flower.

Rheingold provides examples of the dangers of the technologies in three categories:

Threats to liberty
Threats to quality of life
Threats to human dignity

It’s a sobering chapter, but he remains an optimist closing with following remarks. "Over the next few years, will nascent smart mobs be neutralized into passive, if mobile, consumers of another centrally controlled mass medium? Or will an innovation commons flourish, in which a large number of consumers also have the power to produce? The convergence of smart mob technologies is inevitable. The way we choose to use these technologies and the way governments allow us to us they are very much in question. Technologies of cooperation, or the ultimate disinfotainment apparatus? The next several years are a crucial and unusually malleable interregnum. Especially in this interval before the new media sphere settles into its final shape, what we know and what we do matters."

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Howard Rheingold, Basic Books, 2002, Paper Back, 266 pages

Ripples from the Zambisi

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 14:08:00 -0600

"I can't myself raise the winds that might blow us, or this ship, into a better world. But, I can at least put up a sail so that, when the wind comes, I can catch it."
E. F. Schumacher

This was a fun and insightful book to read. Amidst all the discussion about radical, disruptive and breakthrough innovation, this book is a refreshing reminder that small things can make a big difference. It's a reality check for big budget innovation programs and economic development programs that usually end up stealing a company from one community in order to develop the economy of your community (a zero sum game by the way). This book is about dedicated, skilled innovators with a passion for their innovations and facilitators who provided the missing ingredients preventing these passionate innovators from making their ideas a reality. Sometimes, those missing ingredients were connections to the right people. Sometimes they were small sums of money (ridiculously small amounts of money that yielded great returns). And, sometimes it was adding small supportive or enabling innovations that turned an idea into a viable business model. And, always it's about the pattern of product, process and procedure innovation that worked.

Sirolli's journey began as a member of an Italian economic aid organization in Zambia. They noticed that the land along the Zambezi River was incredibly fertile. They thought that if they brought modern farming knowledge and applied it to the land, they would demonstrate to the natives just how much they could benefit. Of course, what did the Italians decide to grow? Tomatoes. The soil and weather were perfect. And, the tomatoes grew - the biggest most beautiful tomatoes the Italians had ever seen. The Italians watched with pride as their crop matured. The natives silently watched and laughed among themselves. One morning, just when the crop was about ready to be harvested, Sirolli reports that they came to the fields to find them totally destroyed. The hippos of the Zambezi had eaten all the tomatoes and laid the fields to waste, and the only tell tale signs were the ripples in the water.

Sirolli quotes Pliny the Elder, "There is always something new out of Africa." Sirolli writes, "Those who have worked in an African country will tell you, if they are honest, that they always learn from the expereince much more than they had bargained for...I am no exception." Later he states, "I became conscious of the fact that we were not doing the right thing - and consciousness is an extraordinary thing."

"Right now, in your community, at this very moment, there is someone who is dreaming about doing something to improve his/her lot. If we could learn how to help that person to transform the dream into meaningful work, we would be halfway to changing the economic fortunes of the entire community," the author comments. This is Sirrolli's credo. It is clear upon reading the book that the author has had a good classical education (formal or informal). His thinking about innovation is colored by Schumacher, Maslow and Rogers.

His advice, based on Schumacher is, "If people don't ask for help, leave them alone. And, there is no good or bad technology to carry out a task - only an appropriate or inappropriate one. Something big, modern and expensive is not necessarily best; it all depends on the circumstances."

"Because of Maslow and Schumacher," he writes, "I came to understand that successful development has to do with the quality, not quantity of life." Human beings are striving creatures. When one level of need is met, people move on to higher levels in an endless cascade. Is it any wonder that this country grew as it did because the founders understood this about people and claimed equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

With this framework, the author was able to explain his experiences in Africa. "They were secure and did love and had self esteem in the same proportions Western people had, maybe even more. Some of them were beautiful, wise, self-actualizing people reaching for the apex of full humanness," Sirolli writes.

The level of what is enough at each stage of development is set by cultural and psychological factors. Some people get stuck in the pursuit of material goods and others have lower levels of satisfaction and move on to the next higher state of development. The natives had enough food, safety and security for them, and they could move on to higher levels of human development.
From Carl Rogers he found that "that it was possible to help people heal themselves by simply being there, listening, facilitating and responding to the client's needs for communication and finding values to live by." "The aim is not to solve one particular problem but to help the individual to grow so that he can cope with the present problem and with later problems in a better, more integrated fashion."

Later, he continues, "Reading about the champions of the human race, I couldn't avoid creating, in my mind, a demonology - that is, a list of the demons oppressing us. Contrary to Dante's Inferno, however, my hell wasn't populated by naked gluttons, greedy merchants, and assorted petty sinners. The torturers had no tails; rather they were well-dressed authoritarian figures who, in the name of an idea, would torture and beat the psychological life out of the people in their power. From unyielding bureaucrats to religious fanatics, from political extremists to avid do-gooders, my demonology started to contain anybody who dreamt up a code of conduct and tried to manipulate or coerce others to follow it."

Sirolli's encourages his facilitators to support clients who have a marriage of both passion and skill. "But becoming what we are is invariably difficult," he writes. "We have to commit ourselves to a course that may prove to be unpopular with our peers, unfashionable among our friends, and unbecoming in the eyes of our parents. Striving for individuality is always a lonely business. Passion is what propels us during our solitary journey." Commenting on skill he writes, "Our generation is a generation without masters. We are still under the impression, and like to think, that The Beatles didn't have to learn how to play music; that Jimi Hendrix picked up a guitar one morning, put a big joint in his mouth, and started to play like a god. Does the next, younger generation, understand that there cannot possibly be art without skill?"

"Facilitation," he writes, "is based on the belief that it is human to dream and desire. Faith in human nature is what makes it work." "The skill of the facilitator is to become available to those who have the dream and to help them acquire the skills to transform it into meaningful and rewarding work. The skill of facilitation is therefore a communication skill with a twist. It isn't so much that facilitators have to communicate to their client; rather they have to be the kind of person one likes to talk to." Their role is to simple remove the obstacles that stifle a client's growth.

He identifies the characteristics of facilitators:

Facilitators are passive
Facilitators are visible
Facilitators provide just-in-time help
Facilitators work in confidence
Facilitators act like swans
Facilitators love action
Facilitators are a loaded spring
Facilitators assess the person and the motivation behind the idea.
Facilitators understand that ideas are cheap, passionate individuals are rare
Facilitators establish true communications and build trust
Facilitators don't play power games

Facilitators are non-threatening, unassuming friendly listeners who make people want to talk to them.

The book is full of examples and case histories, and is divided into 14 chapters:

Out of Africa
The Technology Fix
Homo Cupeins - The Desiring Man
Out of the Mountain Cave Back to School
The Art of Shoemaking
The Esperance Expereince
The Esperance Model Applied
On Facilitation
Training Facilitators
A Word of Caution
Facilitation and Economic Development
A Quiet Revolution
The Politics of Personal Growth
Epilogue - Civic Society, Social Capital, and the Creation of Wealth

As you can see from the outline, the discussion covers a good deal of territory and Sirolli has meaningingful insights in all the topics. For example, "The shift by governments away from resource driven economies to valued-added ones cannot take place without recognizing that our greatest assets are not the ones that lie underground. Our greatest assets must be our energy, imagination, and skill - our commitment to good work and to the pursuit of excellence and the courage to fulfill our ambitions. Every single person is important in the creation of a better, wealthier, smarter society. Whether employed are not, engaged in export service industries, in the arts, sports or tourism, the quality, both of personal and professional, of every single person is what will make a country prosperous."

And, "Thus the freedom to become is the key to unlocking civic society and long term economic prosperity. Wealth can be generated in the short term in exploiting natural resources, but 1,000 years of prosperity can only be created intelligently by working together, exchanging ideas, sharing technology and resources, and helping each other do well in the understanding that a myriad of wealthy self-employed people produce an economic system immensely more resilient than any alternative."

And, "The beauty of Maslow's theory is that it explains that helping each other is not done out of charity, but out of our need to be appreciated, loved and respected."

Michelangelo, who believed his role as a sculptor was to release the images that were already in the stone, wrote:

"The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do. "
To make his point, he carved a series of "unfinished" works depicting humans emerging from the rock (The Prisoners).

Metaphorically, the facilitator's role is the same.

And, if the facilitator is blessed with double insightful vision and can not only see the beauty inside the innovator, but can see the community that could emerge as a result, then a community transformation can occur.

You just have to read this book. And, when you do, write something about it. Better yet, use it.

Ripples from the Zambezi: Passion, Entrepreneurship and the Rebirth of Local Economies
Ernesto Sirolli
New Society Publishers, 2003, 151 pages, paperback

Open Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 14:01:00 -0600

I was very disappointed in this book. The title and the buzz about the book lead me to believe that this book was about the revolutionary idea of "open innovation". Open Source, the approach that developed Linux operating system and other software modules and applications, has demonstrated the power of a loose collaboration that operates in an open environment. This book is not about the "open innovation" that is a generalization of the unique approach that worked in Open Source. Instead this book is about running R&D organizations in a more open way - that is balancing internal R&D with the acquisition of the results of external R&D, and the commercialization of internal R&D internally and externally to the company.

I also think that the book could be misleading for at times the author intermixes the words innovation and technology. Yet, we know that there is a lot of capital to be created with innovations that are not based on technology but exploit the changes caused by technology.

And, as a thirty-year veteran of IBM, it was hard to read that the first time that IBM invented "open innovation" was with the advent of the Internet in the mod 1990s. In reality, there were many "open innovation" efforts within IBM as early as 1970 that produced significant revenue.

The author points to the failure of PARC as an R&D failure. I would argue just the opposite. PARC was extraordinarily successful as an R&D effort. Look at how many fundamental innovations relative to personal computers that got developed. It was operational and executive failure that resulting in Xerox's inability to commercialize on what they had. This is not the fault of a "closed innovation" model. The "closed innovation" model created what it was supposed to create.

I also think kit is misleading in a study of this type to lump research and development together into one - R&D. In reality that are four fundamental functions required:

Research
Technology Development
Technology Management
Product Development

In a good "open R&D" environment, product developers should be free to use the best technologies, subassemblies or even complete products necessary to meet customer needs, stay competitive and return profit to the company. It's the role of technology management to forecast what technologies are going to be needed for what products and acquire or see that the technologies are developed internally to meet the needs of future products. Technology development's role is to identify promising technologies from research regardless of where the research is done and develop that research into useful technologies. Those technologies not used by the company should be sold or exploited in some way outside the company. And, research's role is to identify promising areas of research, conduct that research and communicate the results widely inside and outside the company.

Now this is a giant simplification I know, but this book doesn't offer a completely satisfactory explanation for how R&D should be managed in today's environment either.

Chesbrough begins the book with "Most innovations fail. And, companies that don't innovate die." Later he states, "...innovation is vital for companies of every size in every industry. Innovation is vital to sustain and advance companies' current businesses; it is critical to growing new businesses. It is also a very difficult process to manage." These statements set up the real conundrum of innovation. Pure internal innovation can result in wasted effort and myopia. Pure external innovation can result in the loss of freedom of action with customers. A company should be able to meet their customers needs in the best possible way, and an external innovation strategy can result in access being denied to innovations or innovations just not available.
Chesbrough rightly concludes that what is required is a balance of internal and external innovation, and internal and external commercialization.

The author makes an extremely important point when he writes, "The value of an idea or technology depends upon the business model. There is no inherent value in technology per se. The value is determined instead by the business model used to bring it to market. The same technology taken to market through two different business models will yield different amounts of value."

One of the most valuable portions of the book deals with the concept of a "business model", an often used term, but infrequently defined. "The functions of a business model are as follows:

To articulate the value proposition, that is, the value created for users by offering based on the technology
To identify market segments, that is, the users to whom the technology is useful and the purpose for which it is used
To define the structure of the firm's value chain, which is required to create and distribute the offering, and to determine the complementary assets needed to support the firm's position in this chain
To specify the revenue generation mechanisms for the firm, and estimate the cost structure and target margins of producing the offering, given the value proposition and value chain structure chosen
To describe the position of the firm within the value network linking suppliers and customers, including identification of potential complementary firms and competitors
To formulate the competitive strategy by which the innovating firm will gain and old advantage over rivals."

Chesborough points out that, "An inferior technology with a better business model will often trump a better technology commercialized through an inferior business model." I agree with this completely. It means that technologists have to learn a new language, the language of the business model, to introduce their technology to a company. "Constructing a business model requires managers to deal with a significant amount of complexity and ambiguity", something most managers and technologists don't handle vary well.

To be a company that successfully innovates requires new levels of skills and abilities from its innovators and an open approach to innovation.

Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology
Henry Chesbrough
Harvard Business School Press, 2003, 227 pages, hard cover

Leading the Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 13:49:00 -0600

In a nonlinear world, only nonlinear ideas will create new wealth.
By the time an organization has wrung the last 5 percent efficiency out of the how, someone else will have invented a new what.
Somewhere out there there’s a bullet with your company’s name on it.
The gap between what can be imagined and what can be accomplished has never been smaller.
We are limited not by our tools, but by our imagination.
First the revolutionaries will take your markets and your customers Next they’ll take your best employees. Finally, they’ll take your assets.
In the new industrial order, the battle is not democracy versus totalitarism or globalism versus tribalism, it is innovation versus precedent.

It is a call to "conscious" people in organizations to lead a revolution. The title says so in bold print on the cover. (I was walking through a hotel lobby with the book in my hand with the title clearly visible, a person that could have been someone attached to security stared at the book as I walked past.) He points out that for a company to embrace revolutionary change requires bottoms-up revolutionary thought and someone at the top supporting the change. The middle are almost always slaves to precedent. But, this is not a book aimed at executives, it is aimed at workers.

"Most of us pour more of our life into the vessel of work than into family, faith or community. Yet more often than not the return on emotional equity derived from work is meager. The nomadic Israelites were commanded by God to rest one day in seven – but he didn’t decree that the other six had to be empty of meaning. By what law must competitiveness come at the expense of hope?"

The opening paragraphs of the book encapsulate his view of the world of business:

"The age of progress is over. It was born in the Renaissance, achieved its exuberant adolescence during Enlightenment, reached a robust maturity in the industrial age, and died with the dawn of the twenty-first century. For countless millennia there was no progress, only cycles. Seasons turned. Generations came and went. Life didn’t get any better; it simply repeated itself in an endlessly familiar pattern. There was no future, for the future was indistinguishable from the past.

Then came the unshakeable belief that progress was not only possible, it was inevitable. Life spans would increase. Material comforts would multiply. Knowledge would grow. There was nothing that could not be improved upon. The discipline of reason and the deductive routines of science could be applied to every problem, from designing a more perfect union to produce semiconductors of mind boggling complexity and unerring quality."

He continues, "We are now standing on the threshold of a new age – an age of revolution. Change has changed. No longer is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-first century, change is discontinuous, abrupt, seditious."

And later, "It’s not that things didn’t change back there in the age of progress; they did" he continues, "But to use a metaphor from the theory of biological evolution, it was a world of punctuated equilibrium, where change was episodic. Today, we live in a world that is all punctuation and no equilibrium. To thrive in this new age, every company and every individual will have to become as nimble as change itself."

He asks the question, "Who will create new wealth and who will squander the old?"
"Companies today are rightly obsessed with satisfying stockholders. Spin-offs, de-mergers, share buybacks, tracking stocks, value-based management programs – all these things release wealth, but they don’t create wealth. Neither do mega-mergers. These strategies don’t create new wealth because they don’t create new business models, new markets, new sources of competitive advantage or new customers. So while they may deliver onetime gains to shareholders, they don’t fundamentally change a company’s long-term earning potential.

Industry revolutionaries are in the business of creating new wealth. You won’t find them playing shell games with shareholders. Any company that wants to thrive in the age of revolution is going to have to do more than wring a bit of wealth out of yesterday’s strategies. Revolutionaries don’t release wealth, they create it. They do more than conserve, they build."

He continues, "In truth, CFOs and CEOs have been mistaken the scoreboard for the game. They have spent too much time trying to manipulate quarterly earnings and the share price, and too little time trying to build their company’s capacity for radical innovation. Shareholder wealth may be the scoreboard, but the game is radical innovation."

Hamel makes the point convincingly that we are at the top of an economic s-curve. We’ve squeezed all incremental and imaginary costs out of present business strategy and it’s time for radical innovation, what he calls strategy decay. He also attacks the sameness of business strategies. Through the process of best practices, industries have reached centrality. All the businesses are all so close to each other strategically because they have for years determined best practices and adopted those in their own organization. Revolutionaries can break out of the pack and establish the new rules of competition.

"In the age of revolution, every company must become an opportunity seeking missile – where the guidance system homes in on what is possible, not on what has already been accomplished. A brutal honesty about strategy decay and a commitment to creating new wealth are foundations for strategy innovation. But you can’t be an industry revolutionary unless you’ve learned to see the unconventional. You won’t have the courage to abandon, even partially, what is familiar unless you feel in viscera the promise of the unconventional."

Hamel doesn’t specifically define business concept innovation, but he does give us some of its characteristics. "The goal of business concept innovation is to introduce more strategic variety into an industry or competitive domain. When this happens, and when customers value that variety, the distribution of wealth-creating often shifts dramatically in favor of the innovator." Later he writes, "Business concept innovation is meta-innovation, in that it changes the very basis for competition within an industry or domain." Still later, "Business concept innovation starts from the premise that the only way to escape the squeeze of hyper competition, even temporarily is to build a business model so unlike what has come before that traditional competitors are left scrambling."

To me a business concept innovation is a collection of product, process and procedure innovations with the right mix of incremental, distinctive and breakthrough change. If it is the right mix, i.e. the mix creates unusual value for the customer, then a shift of wealth occurs.
Hamel identifies four components of a business model – core strategy, strategic resources, customer interface and value network. He then unpacks his concept of a business model. He identifies four factors that determine a business model’s profitability (and its potential for wealth) – efficiency, uniqueness, fit and profit boosters. Along the way, he gives examples of radical innovation driven business models.

The book then turns and focuses on the individual, the revolutionary. He spends three chapters on advice to revolutionaries in Be Your Own Seer, Corporate Rebels and Go Ahead! Revolt! These chapters provide some really useful information for people who sense that revolutionary change is required, but aren’t sure what they can do about it.

He then turns his attention to revolution within old hierarchies in Gray-Haired Revolutionaries. He makes the point that an organization is never too old to change if they establish the right climate for change and provide the support and encouragement for rebels within the organization.

The book closes with Design Rules for Innovation and The New Innovation Solution. Hamel’s design rules for innovation are:

Unreasonable expectations
Elastic business definition
A cause, not a business
New voices
A market for innovation
Low risk experimentation
Cellular division
Connectivity

"Most companies use a decidedly unbalanced scorecard – one that is heavily weighted toward optimization rather than innovation. Measures like RONA, ROCE, EDVA and ROI often encourage managers to beat a dead horse ever harder." These and other metrics are not pro-innovation. "Without strong pro-innovation metrics, the default setting in most organizations is ‘more of the same’" He continues, "Traditional metrics do not force a company to consider how it is performing against new and unorthodox competitors in the quest for wealth creation."
Hamel’s suggestion for a radical business concept innovation metric is a Wealth Creation Index (WCI). "The WCI lets a company determine how it has performed against a relevant set of ‘competitors’ in creating new wealth. The process of determining your company’s WCI involves two steps: defining the domain and calculating changes in the market value of your company versus the value of the entire domain."

This is a good start but I don’t believe it’s sufficient to guide a revolution. WCI is a measure of the consequences of previous actions. The examples he gives are over a ten year period. In my experience what is also needed are predictive and present metrics – people, processes, outcomes and consequences.

Hamel ends with a real call to revolutionaries, "Do you care enough about the future to argue with precedent and stick a thumb in the eye of tradition?" He continues with other exhortations ending with, "Do you care enough to lead the revolution?"

This is a powerful book crammed full of ideas. It’s a fun book to read, but a real bear to really understand and implement. My suggestion, if you think you want to be a revolutionary, find a group like your self, read this book and create a study group or discussion group.

The book has nine chapters divided into four sections:

Facing Up to the Revolution

The End of Progress
Facing Up to Strategy Decay

Finding the Revolution

Business Concept Innovation
Be Your Own Seer

Igniting the Revolution

Corporate Rebels
Go Ahead! Revolt!

Sustaining the Revolution

Gray-Haired Revolutionaries
Design Rules for Innovation
The New Innovation Solution

Leading the Revolution: How to thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life, Gary Hamel, Plume Book, 2002, Paperback, 337 pages

The Substance of Style

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 13:40:00 -0600

Former editor of Reason magazine and author of The Future and Its Enemies (Free Press, 1998; FS 22:4/199) argues that the 21" century isn't what the old movies imagined, where citizens of the future wear conformist jumpsuits, live in utilitarian high-rises, or get their food in pills. Rather, "we are demanding and creating an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world." We choose from a diversity of appliances, phones, bathroom fixtures, home interiors, designer coffees, ethnic cuisines, Apple iMacs in many colors, graphics, designer lines at Target and K-mart, eight different types of Goth style, and attention to environment such as planting trees.

Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. Our sensory side is as valid a part of our nature as the capacity to speak or reason. The issue is not what style is used, but rather that style is used consciously, and is more pervasive than it used to be. "Sensory appeals are everywhere, they are increasingly personalized, and they are intensifying."

We still care about cost, comfort, and convenience. But on the margin, aesthetics matters more and more.

How we make the world around us special varies widely, and one mark of this new age of aesthetics is the coexistence of many different styles. Modern design was once a value-laden signal-a sign of ideology promising efficiency and rationality. Now it's just a style, one of many possible forms of personal aesthetic expression. "Ours is a pluralist age, in which styles coexist to please the individuals who chose them." The number of industrial designers employed in the US jumped 32% in five years, and design schools are so full of students they can hardly find teachers. In 1970 there were 3 graphic design magazines worldwide; today, there are at least 50. Home-improvement TV has moved from a fringe oddity to being very mainstream.

The most dramatic indicators of the new aesthetic age relate not to product design but to personal appearance. We have a broader definition of attractiveness, higher beauty standards, and "an explosion of activity designed to produce better looking, and more aesthetically interesting, people." The number of nail salons in the US has nearly doubled in ten years, while the number of manicurists has tripled. The market for skin-care "beauty therapists" is booming in the US and Britain. Tattoos are no longer taboo. Hair coloring is virtually mandatory. The number of cosmetic medical procedures in the US has nearly quintupled in the past decade, from 413,000 to 1.9 million. And mainstreaming gay culture has altered tastes.

NOTE: A compelling and insightful argument, much more so than its opposite, The Globalization of Nothing by George Ritzer, which disapproves of global corporations and mass production. Postrel ignores this, with her ideological driver surfacing on p64: "The extension of liberal individualism-the primacy of self-definition over hierarchy and inherited, group-determined status-has changed our aesthetic universe ...When served by an open marketplace, individualist culture continually multiplies the stylistic possibilities available." Moreover, looking at the bright side, "rising incomes and falling prices mean we can buy more of everything, including aesthetics." Anyone who appreciates the Martha Stewart phenomenon or "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" will like this book, even if one-sided and overblown.

The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness
Virginia Postrel, HarperCollins, 2003, 237 pages

Review by Future Survey, October 2003

© 2003 The Future Survey
Reprinted with permission.
Visit Future Survey online at www.wfs.orf/fs

Leading the Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 6 Jun 2005 10:31:00 -0500

If you haven’t already read this book, you should read it now. It’s one of the best books on innovation I’ve read and innovation is the twelfth word in the long title. It’s also a book about strategy, that forgotten and banned word from business books. And, it’s courageous, full of things I wish I had written like, “…how many times have you heard a CEO or divisional vice president say, ’Our real problem is execution’? Or worse, tell people that ‘strategy is the easy part, implementation is the hard part.’ What rubbish! These worthless aphorisms are favored by executives afraid to admit that their strategies are seriously out of date, executive’s who’d prefer their people stop asking awkward questions and get back to work. Strategy is easy if you’re content to have a strategy that is a derivative of someone else’s strategy. Strategy is anything but easy if your goal is to be the author of industry transformation – again and again.”

The book is well written and full of gems of wisdom like:

"In a nonlinear world, only nonlinear ideas will create new wealth."

"By the time an organization has wrung the last 5 percent efficiency out of the how, someone else will have invented a new what."

"Somewhere out there there’s a bullet with your company’s name on it."

"The gap between what can be imagined and what can be accomplished has never been smaller."

We are limited not by our tools, but by our imagination.

"First the revolutionaries will take your markets and your customers Next they’ll take your best employees. Finally, they’ll take your assets."

"In the new industrial order, the battle is not democracy versus totalitarism or globalism versus tribalism, it is innovation versus precedent."

It is a call to “conscious” people in organizations to lead a revolution. The title says so in bold print on the cover. (I was walking through a hotel lobby with the book in my hand with the title clearly visible, a person that could have been someone attached to security stared at the book as I walked past.) He points out that for a company to embrace revolutionary change requires bottoms-up revolutionary thought and someone at the top supporting the change. The middle are almost always slaves to precedent. But, this is not a book aimed at executives, it is aimed at workers.

“Most of us pour more of our life into the vessel of work than into family, faith or community. Yet more often than not the return on emotional equity derived from work is meager. The nomadic Israelites were commanded by God to rest one day in seven – but he didn’t decree that the other six had to be empty of meaning. By what law must competitiveness come at the expense of hope?”

The opening paragraphs of the book encapsulate his view of the world of business:

“The age of progress is over. It was born in the Renaissance, achieved its exuberant adolescence during Enlightenment, reached a robust maturity in the industrial age, and died with the dawn of the twenty-first century. For countless millennia there was no progress, only cycles. Seasons turned. Generations came and went. Life didn’t get any better; it simply repeated itself in an endlessly familiar pattern. There was no future, for the future was indistinguishable from the past.

Then came the unshakeable belief that progress was not only possible, it was inevitable. Life spans would increase. Material comforts would multiply. Knowledge would grow. There was nothing that could not be improved upon. The discipline of reason and the deductive routines of science could be applied to every problem, from designing a more perfect union to produce semiconductors of mind boggling complexity and unerring quality.”

He continues, “We are now standing on the threshold of a new age – an age of revolution. Change has changed. No longer is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-first century, change is discontinuous, abrupt, seditious.”

And later, “It’s not that things didn’t change back there in the age of progress; they did” he continues, “But to use a metaphor from the theory of biological evolution, it was a world of punctuated equilibrium, where change was episodic. Today, we live in a world that is all punctuation and no equilibrium. To thrive in this new age, every company and every individual will have to become as nimble as change itself.”

He asks the question, “Who will create new wealth and who will squander the old?”

“Companies today are rightly obsessed with satisfying stockholders. Spin-offs, de-mergers, share buybacks, tracking stocks, value-based management programs – all these things release wealth, but they don’t create wealth. Neither do mega-mergers. These strategies don’t create new wealth because they don’t create new business models, new markets, new sources of competitive advantage or new customers. So while they may deliver onetime gains to shareholders, they don’t fundamentally change a company’s long-term earning potential. Industry revolutionaries are in the business of creating new wealth. You won’t find them playing shell games with shareholders. Any company that wants to thrive in the age of revolution is going to have to do more than wring a bit of wealth out of yesterday’s strategies. Revolutionaries don’t release wealth, they create it. They do more than conserve, they build.”

He continues, “In truth, CFOs and CEOs have been mistaken the scoreboard for the game. They have spent too much time trying to manipulate quarterly earnings and the share price, and too little time trying to build their company’s capacity for radical innovation. Shareholder wealth may be the scoreboard, but the game is radical innovation.”

Hamel makes the point convincingly that we are at the top of an economic s-curve. We’ve squeezed all incremental and imaginary costs out of present business strategy and it’s time for radical innovation, what he calls strategy decay. He also attacks the sameness of business strategies. Through the process of best practices, industries have reached centrality. All the businesses are all so close to each other strategically because they have for years determined best practices and adopted those in their own organization. Revolutionaries can break out of the pack and establish the new rules of competition.

“In the age of revolution, every company must become an opportunity seeking missile – where the guidance system homes in on what is possible, not on what has already been accomplished. A brutal honesty about strategy decay and a commitment to creating new wealth are foundations for strategy innovation. But you can’t be an industry revolutionary unless you’ve learned to see the unconventional. You won’t have the courage to abandon, even partially, what is familiar unless you feel in viscera the promise of the unconventional.”

Hamel doesn’t specifically define business concept innovation, but he does give us some of its characteristics. “The goal of business concept innovation is to introduce more strategic variety into an industry or competitive domain. When this happens, and when customers value that variety, the distribution of wealth-creating often shifts dramatically in favor of the innovator.” Later he writes, “Business concept innovation is meta-innovation, in that it changes the very basis for competition within an industry or domain.” Still later, “Business concept innovation starts from the premise that the only way to escape the squeeze of hyper competition, even temporarily is to build a business model so unlike what has come before that traditional competitors are left scrambling.”

To me a business concept innovation is a collection of product, process and procedure innovations with the right mix of incremental, distinctive and breakthrough change. If it is the right mix, i.e. the mix creates unusual value for the customer, then a shift of wealth occurs.

Hamel identifies four components of a business model – core strategy, strategic resources, customer interface and value network. He then unpacks his concept of a business model. He identifies four factors that determine a business model’s profitability (and its potential for wealth) – efficiency, uniqueness, fit and profit boosters. Along the way, he gives examples of radical innovation driven business models.

The book then turns and focuses on the individual, the revolutionary. He spends three chapters on advice to revolutionaries in Be Your Own Seer, Corporate Rebels and Go Ahead! Revolt! These chapters provide some really useful information for people who sense that revolutionary change is required, but aren’t sure what they can do about it.

He then turns his attention to revolution within old hierarchies in Gray-Haired Revolutionaries. He makes the point that an organization is never too old to change if they establish the right climate for change and provide the support and encouragement for rebels within the organization.

The book closes with Design Rules for Innovation and The New Innovation Solution. Hamel’s design rules for innovation are:

- Unreasonable expectations
- Elastic business definition
- A cause, not a business
- New voices
- A market for innovation
- Low risk experimentation
- Cellular division
- Connectivity

“Most companies use a decidedly unbalanced scorecard – one that is heavily weighted toward optimization rather than innovation. Measures like RONA, ROCE, EDVA and ROI often encourage managers to beat a dead horse ever harder.” These and other metrics are not pro-innovation. “Without strong pro-innovation metrics, the default setting in most organizations is ‘more of the same’” He continues, “Traditional metrics do not force a company to consider how it is performing against new and unorthodox competitors in the quest for wealth creation.”

Hamel’s suggestion for a radical business concept innovation metric is a Wealth Creation Index (WCI). “The WCI lets a company determine how it has performed against a relevant set of ‘competitors’ in creating new wealth. The process of determining your company’s WCI involves two steps: defining the domain and calculating changes in the market value of your company versus the value of the entire domain.”

This is a good start but I don’t believe it’s sufficient to guide a revolution. WCI is a measure of the consequences of previous actions. The examples he gives are over a ten year period. In my experience what is also needed are predictive and present metrics – people, processes, outcomes and consequences.

Hamel ends with a real call to revolutionaries, “Do you care enough about the future to argue with precedent and stick a thumb in the eye of tradition?” He continues with other exhortations ending with, “Do you care enough to lead the revolution?”

This is a powerful book crammed full of ideas. It’s a fun book to read, but a real bear to really understand and implement. My suggestion, if you think you want to be a revolutionary, find a group like your self, read this book and create a study group or discussion group.

The book has nine chapters divided into four sections:

Facing Up to the Revolution
1. The End of Progress
2. Facing Up to Strategy Decay

Finding the Revolution
3. Business Concept Innovation
4. Be Your Own Seer

Igniting the Revolution
5. Corporate Rebels
6. Go Ahead! Revolt!

Sustaining the Revolution
7. Gray-Haired Revolutionaries
8. Design Rules for Innovation
9. The New Innovation Solution

Leading the Revolution: How to thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life, Gary Hamel, Plume Book, 2002, Paperback, 337 pages

Ubiquity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 May 2005 09:41:00 -0500

This is not a hard book to read, but it is difficult to integrate into the way you look at the world. Mark Buchanan is a science writer who has worked on the editorial staff of Nature and as a features editor New Scientist. In this book he is writing about the development of a growing field of physics - complexity. Complexity is chaos in critical states. A critical state exists in a system that is not in equilibrium. You may have heard of the "butterfly effect". That is, there is a possibility that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America can cause a storm in Europe weeks later. However, that same butterfly can flap all in wants inside a closed balloon with no effects, other than maybe slightly increasing the temperature of the air in the balloon. The air inside the balloon is in equilibrium, even though the molecules exhibit chaotic behavior. The atmosphere is in a critical, i.e. non-equilibrium, state. A small perturbation somewhere can lead to very big changes.

If the air inside the balloon is in equilibrium, its past, present and future are all the same. It has no "history". When things are in non-equilibrium, history matters since what happens now can never be washed away but affects the entire course of the future.

The applications of this model extend from the piling of grains of sand in an hourglass to economics.

"Despite what scientists had previously believed, might the critical state in fact be quite common? Could riddling lines of instability of a logically equivalent sort run through the Earth's crust, for example, through forests and ecosystems, and perhaps even through the somewhat more abstract "fabric" of our economics? Think of those first few crumbling rocks near Kobe, or that first insignificant dip in prices that triggered the stock market crash of 1987. Might these have been "sand grains" acting at another level? Could the special organization of the critical state explain why the world at large seems so susceptible to unpredictable upheavals?

A decade of research by hundreds of other physicists has explored this question and taken the initial idea much further. There are many subtleties and twists in the story to which we shall come later in this book, but the basic message, roughly speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable organization of the critical state does indeed seem to be ubiquitous in our world. Researchers in the past few years have found its mathematical fingerprints in the workings of all the upheavals I've mentioned so far, as well as in the spreading of epidemics, the flaring of traffic jams, the patterns by which instructions trickle down from managers to workers in an office, and in many other things. At the heart of our story, then, lies the discovery that networks of things of all atoms, molecules, species, people, and even ideas have a marked tendency to organize themselves along similar lines. On the basis of this insight, scientists are finally beginning to fathom what lies behind tumultuous events of all sorts, and to see patterns at work here where they have never seen them before."

The mathematical models of this science don't really exist yet, and may never exist. We have empirical observations and we have games. The empirical data suggests that all these phenomena follow a power curve, and all with roughly the same shape. For example, looking at earthquakes, as the strength of the earthquake doubles, the frequency of occurrence drops by one fourth. This simple rule seems to apply to many examples.

So what does this have to do with creativity, strategy, leadership and innovation in organization? Well, I'm not sure yet. My intuition tells me that this is very important to those concepts. It may help us understand the frequency of occurrence of breakthrough ideas and innovation. It may help explain why some innovations cause such change and others do not. It may help produce better strategies to deal with chaotic and unstable markets. And, it may provide lessons for leaders in chaotic times. I'd welcome a discussion.

Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen
Mark Buchanan
Thee Rivers Press, 2000
273 pages