I watched this and was astonished that I/we could be slowed even a step by the resurgent denial school who want to push aside the thought that we are building a debt related to CO2 that we must address.

Then Gates on nuclear power brought back thoughts of Marble Hill Indiana when I took a swing at nuclear power and learned how to spell passionate political opposition.

On February 17th 2010 the Postal Regulatory Commission held a hearing to receive comments on the Postal Service’s Annual Compliance Plan.  I participated in the forum and introduced Comments.

In my comments I noted that the Commission had been clear that it wanted to be judicious in “calling balls and strikes” but in a time of economic crisis where the future viability of the Postal Service may be in question its important for the Commission not only to do its assigned job, but also to work with the Postal Service, the White House and the Congress to widen the strike zone.

Bell Labs, AT&T, and China Mobile from industry; MIT and Stanford University from the academic world; and The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control

made the story interesting indeed. In fact, seeing the members made the story about 1,000% improvement and 10,000% gains in efficiency seem somewhat more plausible.

In Copenhagen the talks have broken down as the world awaits the arrival of more than 100 heads of state. As compared with the refinement and protocol of the Nobel Peace Prize Award in Oslo last week, Copenhagen with its police cordons and demonstrations seems to be near chaos.

The Wall Street Journal reported (Peter Walsten)

The United Nations summit that was supposed to galvanize global cooperation against climate change is on the brink of failure, and how it ends will depend on whether President Barack Obama and other world leaders about to descend on the Danish capital can bridge deep disagreements over trillion-dollar decisions.

The controversy does not appear to be solvable. China has remained close to the poor nations, the G-77. As of today China is resisting the notion that there could be any outside inspection of its voluntary agreements.

In the meantime, President Obama’s popularity continues to fall. Less than 50% of the public approves of the way that he is handling his job. This discontent appears to have come from concern with the health care bill that continues to head toward the 11th hour showdown in the Senate. And many American’s, especially some his strongest supporters, disapprove of his war policies.

In a Wall Street Journal NBC poll, a majority of Americans believe that America will be surpassed by China in 20 years. Obama’s popularity has fallen in his first year more than his predecessors. These are all measures that are not lost on the Democrats who must be concerned that as they run for office next year, their own popularity continues to erode.

Global warming could not be a more difficult challenge and the President will have to play his role with resources that are increasingly constrained.

This is a good time to revisit all of the major climate change issues because no matter what happens in Copenhagen, EPA has already announced that it is compelled to act under the Clean Air Act to address the concern with the “endangerment” caused by Greenhouse Gases. The issue of whether action will be taken here is beyond popularity. What is at issue is how limits will be set and what will happen to everyone else as policy plays itself out. Henry the IV would have understood what the President faces tonight.

Only three years ago, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case in which Massachusetts and 12 other states sought to require the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases.  In February of 2007, Al Gore’s documentary, an Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar.  On April 2^nd 2007 in a 5-4 vote the Court agreed that Massachusetts did have standing to bring the case.

Justice Roberts argued on behalf of Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and himself that the President should be allowed to execute the laws.  (Of course there is some irony here since the dispute was about whether the President should be required to act to execute the law.)  The Bush Administration had argued that EPA should not be required to regulate automobile emissions because the science was unclear and it had a much broader program of voluntary compliance, incentives and research.  Conservatives argue that the Executive Branch should be free to devise its own strategies and to negotiate with the less developed countries without interference from the Courts and the Legislative Branch (hence the Unitary Executive).

Of course that was then, and this is now.  Last November, long before he was sworn in as the 44^th President of the U.S., Barack Obama declared that there was no longer any debate, the science was clear.  He declared that during his Administration the US would become a world leader on Climate Change Policy.  President Obama has done many things in the ensuring year to demonstrate that he was serious.  But now he goes to China and then to Scandinavia in December.   The ball is in his hands.

And the science was clear, but the economics?  The Climate Change aficionados have been saying that the recession has given us some breathing room.  But not much.  Today the International Energy Agency forecasts that the demand for electricity (by 2030) that will be generated by coal unless something happens to change things, this will require the equivalent of 5 times the amount currently consumed by the entire US.

More than half of that coal generation will come from China.  Much of the balance will come from the Less Developed Countries.   By 2030 the world will be looking back to this time when the direction changed, indeed pivoted on one Unitary Executive in a very short period of time.

IEA Report

Overall, my argument was that the Postal Service and the mailing community can become a source of innovation that is an engine for creating new postal revenue through the creation of  public private partnerships.

To make the Postal Service viable will require making mail relevant to future customers.  This will mean connecting hard copy mail with the Internet so that it can play a key role in a multichannel marketplace.

But the new revenue for the public postal service is not going to come from making the USPS into an Internet services provider.  If that was ever an option, its time to say “that was then, this is now.”  Fortunately there are a number key opportunities for the USPS to create new revenue and new mail by creating partnerships with private firms. I describe three broad concepts - Enabling the Last Mile, Extending Democracy’s Reach and Promoting Green Routes.

Some highlights include:

By enabling the last mile I refer to the many opportunities that exist for putting technology in the hands of the Letter Carrier, in other words, on the doorstep of the mailing consumer.  One of the areas of greatest interest to mailers has been wanting to know where their mail is while its on route to its destination.  The USPS has been seen as a black hole compared with FedEx and UPS who have invested billions of dollars to enable their higher end services to “track and trace” and much more.

In addition, I argue that

A second broad theme that Chairman Ruth Goldway in particular has championed has been Vote by Mail.  The Postal Service can do this and provide many other government services as well.

Third, there are opportunities for the Postal Service to again serve the nation by carrying parcels that today cause three and four trucks to travel the same route.  We can reduce carbon emissions by creating Green Postal Routes.

What is needed is to create a pathway that connects the challenged Postal Service of today with a viable business model of the future.  The broad framework should be a public policy framework that encourages public private partnerships as the postal reform law of (‘06) and the President’s Commission on the Postal Service (‘03) proposed.

The details of new services to customers will depend on the trials and tests and an innovation platform that has yet to be invented.

The coming years could be an exciting time of transformation or they could be a train wreck.  The difference will be whether there is clear public policy guidance that can define the creative balance between what should be public and postal and what should be a public private partnership.

The talk of new business models is a common discussion in the mailing industry.  For years now there has been discussion of Snail Mail making the posts into Dinosaurs of the Information Age.  Seeing the context of the discussion adds a dark shadow to the picture.

But speculation is one thing, and a trail of ominous markings is another…from Postcom.org comes a series of indications along the pathway.

First, the report that next year’s projection by the postal service is lower than this year’s volume.

The PostalNewsBlog has reported that “The resident officers met with Deputy Postmaster General Pat Donahoe on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, along with representatives from NAPUS and the LEAGUE of Postmasters concerning several issues that had been raised in prior meetings with the Postal Service. DPMG Donahoe briefed us on some of the current issues; The USPS projects that the plan for volume for 2010 is 166 billion pieces. The first month of the fiscal year the volume did not meet the projections.

In Great Britain, where there is a postal strike taking place

According to The Telegraph, “Thousands of people have started to use telegrams – one of the earliest forms of long distance communication – for their urgent messages as the national postal strike deepens.”

During the postal strike in Great Britain, talk of privatization has increased

According to the Financial Times, “Royal Mail is more than a commercial brand. It is a relic of imperial glory, a UK institution that, even under assault from e-mail and private competition, connects every home by means of six-day delivery of letters at a standard price. Yet in spite of the residual affection for it, attitudes to Royal Mail and its future seem confused. According to one poll, two-thirds of people oppose the current strikes. Yet in another, twice as many sympathised with the workers as with the management. Sixty-eight per cent were against privatisation.

For more than a decade there has been discussion of the problems of the Postal Pervice in an Internet Age.  But many have taken comfort from the thought that the 230 year old institution seemed too big to fail.

I was impressed by Eric Schmidt’s sense of reality.  He may be the CEO of a company that is reshaping the world of advertising communications, but he points out that since the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, still own 60% of the company between them – there is really not much of a question of who is working for whom.  Good to start with a sense of reality to make the source credible.

And, with that credibility, Eric has a great deal to say about doing business in the modern marketplace.

He concludes that one of the great opportunities that we all have today is to put what we are thinking “out there” to start the process of collaboration.

Collaboration is a topic that has been getting growing attention.  Firms like McKinsey & Co.  and IBM have been studying the collaboration technologies of Web 2.0 for a number of years now.  In a recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly (“Using Technology to Improve Workforce Collaboration,   James Manyika, Kara Sprague and Lareina Yee) the authors wrote

Knowledge workers fuel innovation and growth, yet the nature of knowledge work remains poorly understood—as do the ways to improve its effectiveness. The heart of what knowledge workers do on the job is collaborate, which in the broadest terms means they interact to solve problems, serve customers, engage with partners, and nurture new ideas. See McKinsey Quarterly.

One of my leading personal motivations for putting what the consulting firms refer to as their “IC” out there is the amazement of learning who else is out there.  I have a personal favorite experience of reaching some INSIGHT that I think is particularly meaningful.  Then because the Internet is moving at accelerating speed, I learn, often within 40 minutes of having reached the plateau that someone else somewhere in the world has been working on the problem for months, even years.  There are times that Wikipedia informs me that I have just made a discovery that is an elementary part of an entire field of study that has been developing for years.

Perhaps this would be sufficient motivation for the series that begins with “IC-1-09.”

Or possibly it was the sense that its not just about putting something new “out there” but also the recognition that if you hold onto it too long, if you give it too much thought, that the good new thinking can go in the wrong direction.  (My editor son put it more economically when he told me that something that I had written was sounding a little “unibomberish” – as if I had been cooped up in a cabin in the woods thinking about it too long without testing it with real people.)

In other words, whether its the nature of things in the knowledge workplace that we will all want to learn how to be more effective collaborators, the opportunity to learn new things and to contribute or whether its for my own good – the start of the IC series was born somewhere between Eric Schmidt and the Unibomber.

His question, won’t it be too late to respond 3 years from now? And his comment at the press conference when he asked, “who has done more to advance the cause of world peace?” expressed his logic and the reasoning of his fellow board members. Since then he has been attacked from many sides, most recently in the Wall Street Journal.

But whether or not the Nobel Peace Prize should have been awarded to the American President only a few months into his Presidency (even President Obama said that he was not sure that he had yet earned a place among the transformational figures who have been awarded the prize), it does raise some interesting questions.

In recent weeks the question of Copenhagen has had to play a much bigger role in the conversations at Rahm Emanuel’s conference table where Presidential schedules are planned. No, not the trip to Copenhagen to make the pitch for Chicago’s bid to host the Olympics, the trip that would outline the U.S. position toward a global Climate Change treaty. Would the President go? Would the Chinese and the Indians do enough to make a US response necessary?

In early October 2009 there are many voices seeking to anticipate or even to influence the Climate Change policy debate. Many are predicting that there will not be the kind of global policy that had been anticipated. Nor do most people think that the US Congress, embroiled in debates over health care, could turn to passage of the Cap and Trade bill that would set US Climate change policy.

And now, President Obama will be going to Oslo on December 10th to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

The website of the Norwegian delegation to the Council of Europe where former Prime Minister Jagland presides, there is an interesting note. “In its awards to Wangari Maathai in 2004 and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore in 2007, the Nobel Committee has indicated that its concept of peace now also embraces efforts to limit the harm done by man-made climate change and threats to the environment.” There is no question that they have their eye on the Copenhagen Climate Change conference as well.

Back to Mr. Emanuel’s conference table where the ghost of former Prime Minister Jagland now has a place. Can the President skip Copenhagen and then go to Oslo? Tricky question indeed.

In fact this summer a former Senior Vice President with the Postal Service and a Vice President from UPS published a paper together congratulating themselves on their collaboration.

Today comes word from the New York Times of a new UPS service, an experiment, to be sure, but a new marketing service direct to the door. (From the New York Times, reported by Postcom.org – see below.)

The description of the service is a milestone of its kind as the UPS innovative product manager explained that the new service will be different from what you would receive from the postal service because (the New York Times adds) you would not feel that you were receiving “junk.” No more Mr. Niceguy?

September 24, 2009
Delivering Something Extra
By STUART ELLIOTT
SINCE 1907, United Parcel Service has been delivering packages ordered by consumers. Next week, the company plans to deliver packages they have not ordered, in a test of an effort to expand into direct marketing.
Beginning on Monday, U.P.S. will experiment in five major markets with a service it calls Direct to Door, giving advertisers and retailers a chance to provide offers and product samples to U.P.S. customers. The marketing materials will come inside small boxes labeled Direct to Door Paks, and will be delivered to customers along with merchandise they actually ordered.
The test, to run through Oct. 2, is intended to gauge whether there is interest in having U.P.S. serve as an alternative to marketing mail delivered by the United States Postal Service or by companies like Valpak.
If Direct to Door goes forward, the added revenue could help United Parcel offset declines in demand for its mainstay package delivery service since therecession started.
In July, U.P.S. reported its sixth consecutive quarter of lower package volume in this country. The decline in the second quarter was 4.6 percent compared with the period a year earlier, which Bloomberg News described as the worst result since United Parcel went public in 1999.
“I wouldn’t say it was developed as a result of the economy,” said Lisa Lynn, marketing director for new-product research and development at United Parcel in Atlanta.
Rather, she said, it stems from “some opportunity we saw at the heart of what we do every day working off our delivery network.”

Read more at the New York Times