Prosperity, Genetics, and Social Invention (And Over What Horizon Progress Lies)

I'd like you to predict which of these three people is fastest.

We have a middle-aged woman, a young man and a young woman.

You might speculate about whether the young man is an athlete. You know the young woman is. Some of you will recognize her as Allyson Felix, 3-time world champion short-distance runner (100, 200, and 400 meters) and Olympic medalist. You will likely predict that Allyson is the fastest, then the young man and then the middle-aged woman. Some people might suggest that saying that out loud makes you biased or prejudiced and some might say that it's just common sense. And if you had to choose between other groups you'd judge based on apparent fitness, sex and age. Data might be on your side and there would be all sorts of things we could say about whether you're unfairly excluding one person over another in spite of not really knowing them as individuals. And there might even be a debate about how silly it is to debate this when we have data to inform us who is faster and who is slower. 

But I'm not done with this question. I did not mention the distance they'd travel. I also did not tell you what inventions they have access to.

Now that you know the distance is 500 miles and you know what inventions they have access to - the young man has a bike, the young woman a car and the middle-aged woman a plane - you have absolutely no trouble predicting who is fastest. And in fact, there is no difference in their speeds running that even begins to compare with the difference in the speed they can reach in these different inventions. 

Usain Bolt was this phenomenon of speed last decade. It was mind blowing what he did. He broke the world  record for the 100 meter run in 2009 in the fastest recorded time. He ran roughly 23 mph, probably humanity's fastest time for that distant. 

He was not, though, the fastest person when he was running his race. That honor goes to Nicole Stott who was traveling at 17,150 mph while Bolt was setting his world record. Nicole and her crew mates on the Space Station were moving 745x faster than Bolt.

We're still fascinated by human potential and raw speed. But we don't depend on it as we go about our day. We use technology to get from place to place because it is so much faster. The incremental gains in speed from evolutionary advances are so tiny and slow in comparison to the incremental gains in speed from technology advances that they're not worth mentioning. The tiny and highly variable differences in genetics in determining speed are noise compared to the differences in technology in determining speed.

Now we move to part two of this pop quiz. Let's look at the same three folks and ask the question, Who is most affluent?

Again, you'd have your ideas. You may realize how subject your generalizations are to variation within groups. If you know Allyson is a star you'd likely think she was most affluent. If you didn't and thought she might just be a high school athlete it would be easy to assume that a young, black woman would be worth less than a middle-aged white woman. Probabilities support that guess. 

Let's now throw inventions back into the mix. This time, though, we're talking about which social inventions our three have access to rather than which technological inventions they have access to. 

If affluence is measured by how much one can spend, the young guy is now most affluent. Our young woman has only cash, the middle-aged woman has a credit card and the young guy has access to venture capital. The first can spend hundreds, the next ten thousand and the young guy millions. People with access to consumer credit have more money than people who have only cash, and so on. 

One of the best social inventions is a stable and prosperous country. If you have access to that you will live better than someone who does not. (I know. I know. There is variation in all things and there are people in poor countries who live better than people who live in affluent countries. Still, if you were talking probabilities you would want to bet on the Norwegian rather than the Syrian, At this point in history anyway; it would have been dramatically different a thousand years ago and could reverse again in a century or two.)

The differences in genes as a determinant of speed are noise in comparison to the differences in what technology we have access to. Similarly, differences in self-sufficiency as a determinant of affluence are noise in comparison to differences in what social inventions we have access to. Groups who have access to a peaceful, prosperous country and great education and dynamic companies to work for will be far more affluent than groups who have access to none of these things. That is as clear as the fact that a group in a plane is faster than a group with sneakers.

And once more, a nod to variation. When we get into a plane we all move at 600 mph. When we get into schools or markets or corporations we don't all move at $60,000 a year. There will always be variation in outcomes from systems like factories, schools, and markets. If you want to understand how to better manage such variation, you may want to search for "deming" on this blog or W. Edwards Deming more generally. The claim is not that all individuals benefit equally from these social inventions: the claim is that communities with different social inventions at different stages of development have very different outcomes. Take two populations of 100 or 100 million and put one in a society where social inventions like universities or financial markets are nonexistent or reserved for just the elite and put another in a society where such social inventions are accessible to a wide swath of people, and it is the latter that will be more affluent. Every time.

For at least the last 10,000 years - maybe the last 100,000 years - social evolution has done more to determine our quality of life than has genetic evolution. There is no conceivable genetic advance that will ever make us capable of running 17,150 mph. Nor is there any genetic advance that will ever enable us to live as well from self-sufficiency as we do in today's modern world. The point is to worry less about differences in individual ability within our current systems than to worry about how to make those social inventions and systems more useful for groups and the distinct individuals within them. Significant progress is never about pushing people harder within current systems; it is about the continual act of invention and reinvention - sometimes tiny and incremental and sometimes sweeping and grand - of those systems to result in longer lives and more autonomy, more choice about how to live a life. We don't live better than our ancestors from 1900 because we work harder or make bigger sacrifices. We live better because the systems we depend on and use - the social technology that makes us more or less affluent - are better. Focusing on the performance of our systems rather than the performance of individuals within them is the direction in which progress lies.

The Illusion and Importance of the Individual

I think Christians, Buddhists, evolutionary biologists, statisticians, and developmental economists are right. There is no way to make sense of a life in isolation. The notion of individuals breaks down under scrutiny.

One of the lessons of systems thinking is that systems emerge out of the interactions of parts.

Systems thinking advocate Russell Ackoff was fond of the analogy of a car to illustrate this point. A car can get you across town. The tires alone can't do that. The steering wheel cannot. The engine, alone, will just sit in your driveway and roar. What makes a car a car is the interaction of its parts, not the actions of its parts in isolation. The quality of a car emerges out of the interaction of its parts.

Your life is a system. What does it mean to be human? No species is born more helpless. A horse can run within minutes of being born. It takes us a year to be able to stagger and another year before we can talk about it. Humans are helpless for the first 10 to 25 years of life. Put aside the necessity of biological parents who "create" you. You don't even get to be human without the assistance of others for the first decade or two of life. We're little different from other primates without our speech and tools and to learn those adds another layer of dependence on others. Language does not emerge from an individual experience; it comes out of interaction with others.

To understand the culture we're born into, the options for work, and the skills needed to contribute to a working society adds yet another layer of dependence.

An individual life is an emergent property. It comes out of interaction with others, it has a particular place in history, economic development, and culture. It does not exist in isolation and to even speak of it as if it does is to strip it of all that defines it. We get defined through relationships and who we can be is hugely dependent on everyone else. Who a peasant woman in 1318 could be is vastly different than who an urban woman in 2018 can be. Each emerges out of her time and place. The notion that either is an individual who chooses her own life is a popular myth but a myth nonetheless.

Paradoxically, this is why it is so important to be an individual as defined in popular myth. The way progress works is that it sends tentacles out into the future in the form of individuals. Some paths work out and some hit dead ends. Your effort to become someone new and different becomes a starting path for those who come along later, even though that effort is absurd to even contemplate in a vacuum. Our life is the variation in the distribution of the system and through our life the distribution has the potential to change over time.

Because the system is twice emergent. Your life emerges out of a system that is a complex mix of culture and technology and that system emerges out of the complex mix of who people were and aspire to be. You define the system that defines you.

It's not paradox but rather perspective that makes two contradictory things true at once: lives emerge out of systems and systems emerge out of lives. The two options that are illusory are the options to believe that you define your own life or that you don't define the world you live in. This means that we have to work through others to even have the hope of changing ourselves. And others have to work through us for any hope to change themselves. We are inescapably created by the world around us and create that very world, sometimes in ways that have less to do with who we ever get to be than who other people get to be - now and in the future.

My Invisible Friend Bernard Uses the Expansion of Space to Illustrate Social Change

Bernard was excited, which delighted me. I knew that his eyes lit up like that only when he'd been seized by a new idea he wanted to share.

"It's been a long time Bernard," I said as I sat down.

"How is this for a long time," he said leaning forward. "13.8 billion years!"

I had to shake my head. "That's a really long time."

"Yep. I heard scientists talking about new experiments that shed light on dark matter," he said. "And the big bang. Did you know that in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second the entire universe expanded from something smaller than an atom to something the size of a grapefruit?"

"That actually sounds kind of good," I said.

"What does?"

"Grapefruit. Do you think they have any grapefruit juice," I asked.

"Out of what I said you heard, 'I think I'll have grapefruit?'" Bernard slumped. "You've got to be kidding."

"Bernard," I leaned forward. "I was! I was only kidding." Some days he was more sensitive than others. "Go ahead. It really sounds interesting."

"That's not even the interesting part," Bernard began anew. "That's just the set up for the interesting part. Get this," he leaned in. "The particles in the universe have to obey the speed limit, can travel no faster than the speed of light. But, the expansion of the universe itself can take place at any speed."

"Hmm," I said in what I hoped sounded like an intelligent tone.

"Hmmm," he shook his head. "You had better find that waiter and order your grapefruit juice," Bernard scoffed. "I think your blood sugar might be low."

I nodded. He shook his head.

"So this is pretty phenomenal to think that while the stuff in the universe - stars and planets and comets and even the light they emit can only travel so fast, the container in which all of this is moving can expand out at some multiple of the speed of light."

"Wow," I responded. "So you're saying that the space in which space happens can expand faster than the speed of light even though things in space can't?"

"Exactly," Bernard grinned. "Exactly." He looked like a seven year old who'd just played a Coltrane solo on a waxed papered comb. He actually rocked as he smiled.

"So this explains cultural evolution," he said. "It explains how it is that we get progress even though we're social creatures."

"The expansion of space explains cultural evolution?"

"Yes! See, we are products of our culture. So much of who we are is defined by that. If you're born in Indonesia there is a 99% chance that you're Muslim. It's hard to move faster than the speed of light if you're a particle or faster than your culture if you're an individual."

"Okay," I took the bait. "So what about a culture?"

"Aha!" Bernard jabbed the air dangerously close to my nose. "That can move rapidly. See Ron," he said. "Context is everything! Culture moves so rapidly that people can barely keep up. One century everybody is Catholic and the next they're Calvinists and Lutherans and Anglicans and Puritans and Deists. One year everyone is trying to be like Bobby Darin and the next it's Mick Jagger and then the next year rock gives way to disco. One decade everyone is embodied  and hang out in clubs and the next they're virtual and hang out on social media."

"So what's the container that can move so much faster than individuals?"

"The container is the code, the DNA, the meme, the new normal. As individuals we can't travel much faster than that but that - that normal - it can change so rapidly. And given we're social creatures, we keep up."

"So who changes the code?"

"Social inventors. You succeed at that experiment and you've just changed the container - maybe even more rapidly than people could ever think to move."

The waiter showed. "What can I get you," he asked.

I looked up. "For like the last ten minutes I have not been able to think about anything but grapefruit," I told him. "Do you have that?"

Before the waiter could say, "Sure," Bernard let out with a groan.

"Something wrong," the waiter inquired, worried.

"Yeah," Bernard said. "I guess that just because the container expands rapidly doesn't mean the people in it move at all."

The waiter looked at me with raised eyebrows. I shrugged. "Excuse me," the waiter asked.

"I said I'll take the lox and bagel," Bernard said. "With sesame seeds."

Modern Corporation: modeled on the medieval church

In two earlier posts, I concluded that the medieval church became evil. This matters because the medieval church is still a model for institutions who could follow it down the same path. It is difficult to overcome a blueprint at the foundation of Western Civilization, a blueprint referenced in the design of the modern corporation. The medieval church had popes and priests who discerned the will of God and directed the congregants; the modern corporation has CEOs and mangers who discern the will of the market and direct the employees.

The US represents for many the apex of progress yet 84% of people here are unhappy in their jobs.

Job dissatisfaction hardly compares with burning at the stake. In the grand scheme of history, it is a fairly petty and pathetic complaint to be unhappy at work. Yet if one can’t enjoy what one does all day – what defines one’s life – it makes one question the progress up to this point. Is this really the culmination of thousands of generations of genetic and social evolution? Or could it be that the transformation of work and what it means to create value and to be valued is the next personal frontier, the domain for the next revolution?

About a decade ago, I went into GM to do some training and consulting work. I left appalled. The managers were conscientious and the employees seemingly sincere and yet they seemed more like parents and children than consenting adults. The distribution of power constrains employees from acting like adults.

The corporation – GM and nearly every business – could learn something about needed change by looking at the huge transformation of the church over the last half millennia.

Two big changes to come out of the Protestant Revolution were the entrepreneurial approach to religion and the shift in authority to the individual. These two are inextricably linked.

Post- Protestant Revolution religion is wildly entrepreneurial. Luther claimed that we are all priests and the germ of this idea – the notion that individual revelation and conviction ought to be the root of religious belief – continues to spark new denominations. The World Christian Database tracks 9,000 denominations.

In terms of freedoms granted, the church may be the most evolved and modern of our institutions. Churches either meet the need of their congregants or the congregants go elsewhere – or nowhere. It is not just freedom across religions but within. Even people who call themselves Catholic can profess and practice very different things from each other.

If the medieval church is the model for the current corporation, we can hope that the post-Protestant Revolution church is the model for the future corporation.

There is a great deal that will be different in the next version of the corporation, but most of these changes will begin with a shift in the notion about where authority ought to lie: in central authorities or in the individual. It means trusting the individual with true freedom. All the needed design changes for the corporation can follow from this profound shift.

Torturous Logic

There is lots of news and commentary addressing the question of using torture. The typical arguments against it revolve around the notion that we are better than that, torture is not effective (a person is pain will tell you what you want to hear, regardless of whether it is true), and torture violates domestic and international law. I haven't heard what is, for me, the most important reason for this.

There was a time in our history (think Spanish Inquisition, witch trials or any inquiry by an angry or frightened dictator) when the interrogation methods were essentially punishment. If such interrogation methods were legal, trials were essentially meaningless. If you could be put on the rack and your bones broken in the process of trying to extract a confession or "gather information," then the fact that you might eventually be found innocent is rather poor consolation. Torture as a means to extract a confession is essentially a guilty verdict without a trial.

The modern world with rights for the individual is at odds with torture for this reason. It is both this simple and this complex. Once you begin torture as a means to determine guilt, you've corroded rights.

An Inane Idea for Education

The Obama administration is set on spending more on education, but they still haven't seemed to confront the basic truth about it: we need to increase the productivity of teachers in order for investments in education to get us more return. There are, as near as I can tell, only three ways to do this: 1. have each teacher teach more children; 2. have each child learn more (because of new methods or approaches); or 3. more directly apply what they learn to a productive life. It seems to me that there is a way to do all three. The first would slash the number of teachers needed and the last would create a surge in demand for the number of teachers needed. The number of teachers would be about the same but the net result would be better and, I think, more gratifying for teachers.

1. Teachers repeatedly teach certain concepts that could be better taught with a combination of video, computer games, and instant tests. Children at the computer doing certain kinds of drills would not only be taught just what they were missing but would provide continual feedback about where they are in learning. If schools got serious about this, they could raise the teacher to student ratio at least 20% - probably more like 100% to 200%. This increase in productivity would show up on the cost side.

2. Teachers would still be needed. They just would be able to focus on exceptions, rather than rote lessons. They could complement the computer aided instruction by coaching individual children on two things: lessons that the individual child seemed unable to get through the computer and by teaching lessons that did not lend themselves to computer aided instruction - such as music, dance, and inter- and intra-personal skills. These kinds of lessons are largely neglected now in schools, in no small part because teachers are so busy teaching the math, language, and logic lessons that could - at least in part - be taught by video and computer.

3. Finally, it seems to me that one of the biggest problems of our current education system is that it fails to help translate the life of the individual into the milieu of the times. We are born into a particular time in history and with a particular potential. Unhappiesness stems from either failing to understand how to apply our potential to the times or from failing to understand how to realize our potential. There is something terribly personal about potential. For a child to realize her potential requires a kind of attention that can't be provided by teachers busily teaching rote lessons.

Educators - school boards - should be busily engaged in the question of the times. It is unclear to me who - outside of educators - can do more to create the future. As they educate children into adults, they inculcate particular values and skills. The question that educators should continually ask is about the direction of history and where society should be steered. This is to address the question of the times in which they expect children will find themselves as adults.

Educators should further be asking themselves about the children they are failing. It is an apt description to say that these children are failing, in reference to children who have to be held back. They have been failed. And even those who are passed along are often failed in that they leave school having received more insight about themselves through horoscopes than through any insights shared by the school. Educators should be continually addressing the question of what potential are we failing to realize in this child, in these children?

This third point, this notion of education as something that steers us into the future and that identifies and realizes the potential of individual children - would create a huge demand for more teachers. This would at least offset the drop in demand that would follow from automating more of education. And it would greatly increase the productivity of teachers not by spinning the engine of education with more energy - more busy work - but by engaging the power of this more directly into the individual lives and times of the children who spend so much time in schools.

It is not enough to just put more money into education. We should demand a greater return on the money we already spend.

Just Try to Change the World and See if it Doesn't Change You

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
[excerpt from a David Foster Wallace speech]

I used to think that social progress and individual development were somehow unrelated. I now think that social progress is the surest form of individual development and would go so far as to suspect that individual development is - at best - unsustainable without social progress.

If you live in amongst a horde of Mongolian warriors, you're not likely to have many career options outside of organized homicide or be much rewarded for advocating peace. Until there is some kind of social progress, your "development" simply won't have a place to unfold.

And yet our social reality is to us almost what the water is to Foster Wallace's young fish. The differences between two 15 year old girls in medieval Europe are almost negligible compared with the differences between a 15 year girl in medieval Europe and a 15 year old girl in modern Australia, yet we tend to focus on differences of individuals within cultures and social constructs rather than focus on changing those cultures and social constructs.

And maybe the real punch line to this is that nothing changes an individual quite like undertaking the task of changing the world. Attempting to change the individual without changing society is a dicey proposition. Attempting to change society without changing the individual is impossible.

Just wondering aloud about the rugged individual's chance at love

Poets, mystics, and romantics talk about love as a loss of self, a transcendence of the ego.

On Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions measure, the US has the highest Individualism ranking in the world.

The US also has the highest divorce rate in the world.

Just wondering about a connection. That's all. I have nothing more to add.

Heaven or Hell - Musings, part 3 in a series

Eternity is not something that starts after you die. That is the afterlife. Eternity is something that’s already going on. It was going on before you were born and will be going on after you die. If you think about heaven or hell, you are talking about what you’re already experiencing, a place you are already in. It’s easy to wait for purgatory, to simply wait for heaven or hell to come to us. But that’s the problem with these eternal things. We can’t out-wait them. That just isn’t going to happen. You’ll be stuck in purgatory forever waiting for heaven or hell to come to you. They’re not moving. Ever.

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It’s not just that the system is against individualism. It’s just that individuals are so difficult to accommodate, so difficult to fit into mass production and standard processes.

It’s easy to pick on the Catholic Church, so I will. Mass is aptly named because we’re talking about an intensely personal spiritual experience that we’re trying to extend from a few mystics to the masses. This is both futile and necessary. It is how civilization proceeds: the work or creation of a genius becomes the tool of a common person. Newton and Leibniz invent calculus in one century and a few centuries later, it is a required subject for children in the early throes of relational passions, young adults distracted by libidinous impulse. Mass is an attempt to broaden an intensely personal experience.

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I suppose everyone has some measure of discomfort with any religion in which they find fellowship. Where we find community isn’t necessarily where we find all our answers or even answers we like or that make sense to us. The people who accept us aren’t always the people who provide answers we can accept.

The Rise of the Individual

Bad governments come in at least two forms: they put up bureaucratic obstacles to those who are pushing beyond the current norms and / or they ignore the plight of those who are failing. Good governments don’t ignore one of these goals at the expense of another.

And this is a trick of the hardest kind: creating a system that makes allowance for the individuals for whom the system does not work. This is the paradox of progress. Systems don’t easily transform for the individual. Too much of what passes for self improvement is actually the act of conforming the individual to the system, to society, to the institution - improvement that makes us better congregants, citizens, or employees. We have not yet lived in a time when social systems were considered disposable and individuals essential to preserve; to date, our experience has been the reverse. Flipping this order would be transformative. Dopeless hope fiend that I am, I think it can be done.

“He didn’t think in human dimensions. Humanity was never of any importance to him. It was always the concept of the superman … the nation, always this abstract image of a vast German Reich, powerful and strong. But the individual never mattered to him. Though he always said he wanted to make people happy – he started a variety of welfare and recreational organizations in the Third Reich – personal happiness was never of the slightest importance to him. “
- Traudle Junge, in Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary

Re-discovering the Individual in a World of Massive Interdependency

How do we reconcile these two realities that seem to seriously clash? On the one hand, we have the reality of our need for autonomy, intrinsic motivation, and motivation that comes from pride and a strong sense of linkage between what we do and the results we get. The importance of the individual. On the other hand we have the reality of massive interdependency, an economic and social reality in which the individual is noise in the signal, static in the crowd. Our own personal experience tells us quite loudly that we’re unique, irreplaceable, and essential. Yet the world continues with the loss of any one individual – whether that loss is to discouragement, distraction, or death. What does progress look like in a world in which individual autonomy and social interdependency have seemingly come into conflict?

The reality seems to be what’s described by systems thinkers – we live in a world that arises out of the interaction of millions and billions of people and can be traced back to no one individual. Yet the societies that have tried to build on this realization have turned into socialist nightmares – exercises in the denigration of the individual that have not only turned out to be spectacular social failures but have invariably crushed the individual.

Hitler’s secretary Taudle Junge shared this about the man. “He didn’t think in human dimensions. Humanity was never of any importance to him. It was always the concept of the superman … the nation, always this abstract image of a vast German Reich, powerful and strong. But the individual never mattered to him. Though he always said he wanted to make people happy – he started a variety of welfare and recreational organizations in the Third Reich – personal happiness was never of the slightest importance to him.”

Happiness of the individual has to matter. Liberation leadership – leadership that leads to the discovery and realization of the self – has been the leadership that has gradually, steadily and surely triumphed over the model of controlling leadership that denies the individual’s experience and need for autonomy.

And yet, societies are emergent realities – products of the interaction of lots and lots of individuals who must, by definition, be expendable, replaceable, ultimately unimportant to the integrity of the whole.

Specialization has meant that we’re increasingly likely to find ourselves a part of some greater whole over which we feel as though we have little or no control. If you are an employee of IBM, you are one of 366,486; at HP, you’re one of 156,000; at Wal-Mart, you’re one of 1.9 million. It’s terribly difficult to make one’s mark, to feel engaged in making a difference, in such loud and crowded places.

Our impact on the whole, our contribution to society, is not some abstraction – it comes through a very real and intimate part of our lives: our work. Einstein changed the world through his work in theoretical physics. Edison changed the world through his work in technological invention. John Lennon changed the world through his work as a singer and songwriter. It is through our work that we do or don’t change the world and as our tools for doing our work become bigger and more unwieldy – as the tools we use are social constructs as massive and full of specialization and process as a corporation – we lose room for self-awareness and realization that seems to precede the acts of genius – or the inspired moments that even the most banal of us experience – the acts that have moved us forward.

The reality is one of massive interdependency – ask anyone who has tried to get a building permit, or make a change to processes within a corporation or tried to change behaviors of groups as varied as gangs prone to violence and consumers prone to carbon emissions. Yet the reality is also one of individuals struggling to hear and be heard, generally resigned to having little or no impact on their world – and by extension the very definition of their lives. Every individual is outnumbered 6 billion to 1.

The beginnings of a reconciliation of this will necessarily come from within the corporation. The corporation is the dominant institution of our time and any significant social change will begin there. Further, the corporation is now the place where the individual most consciously chooses to contribute – the tool for work. Yet this has been made backwards, and too often the individual has instead been expected to be the tool for the work of the corporation rather than the corporation being a tool for the work of the individual.

A large part of what is missing an awareness of systems and systems dynamics. The corporation is a complex system that is, too often, the product of pronouncement and top-down dictates. The West has tried this before, this reliance on dictatorship: the medieval church, the renaissance-era nation-state, and the bank of the era of JP Morgan. Such dictatorship work for a while – for as long as a genius like Rothschild or Henry VIII is creating a social construct and hasn’t time or ability to bring along the masses whose confusion would only slow the process. But once these institutions are living, breathing, essential parts of our daily life, societies next step for progress is the step of dispersion – dispersing the power over these institutions through revolutions like democracy and disintermediation. The corporation has reached a similar place, a place where the genius of founders must become the common sense of the masses – the very definition of civilization and its progress. (Think of the genius of Isaac Newton to have invented calculus and the progress of civilization that now depends on millions of children each year gaining the same tool of calculus. Newton showed genius by creating calculus, but society has massively benefited by its popularization.)

Banking disintermediation – the process of dispersing the power of powerful bankers across the population – relied upon a number of innovations. Computers, fiat money, central banks, monetary policy, Keynesian theory, and credit cards were all essential to reaching the point at which credit was the choice of the individual and not the banker, a world where labor has become the capitalist.

The transformation of the corporation will be similar, reliant on a variety of changes, shifts, and new technologies. No one thing will transform the corporation, yet one technology that will prove essential is technology to better enable the individual to see the global impact of his or her local actions. The absence of such technology today is glaring in its omission. Because it is missing, management cannot trust the individual to act upon individual interests. In lieu of visibility and clear consequences we have control. No one wins in this scenario.

There are some systems tools already, tools that help the individual to see her part in the whole. And this is the paradox: we’re social animals and we can’t realize our individual potential without realizing our place in the whole. Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize winning contemporary of Einstein, said that atoms had always been thought of as things but perhaps should better be thought of as relationships. Desmond Tutu said that “A person is a person through other persons.” Perhaps we, too, should be thought of as defined by relationships. We are wired to compete but less obviously, we’re wired to cooperate, to hold open doors, to feel joy at the accomplishment of others, to see our joy in life echoed in the eyes of another, an echo that amplifies our own.

We’ve woken up in a world of massive interdependency, a world in which we depend on others beyond our line of sight. Major parts of our lives have disappeared beyond the horizon. The response to that is not to retreat back into worlds of our own making. Nor is it to cry out for control over behavior from strong leaders who will save us from our own selfishness and petty interests. Rather, it is to enhance our capacity to see, and enjoy or suffer the consequences of, the ripple effects of our actions.

Individuals need linkage between their actions and the outcomes. Barring this, they become disengaged. Corporations have become places where the game is not so much about the linkage between individual action and outcome as it is the politics of recognition, a game that swings in and out of phase with the larger game of making a real and positive difference. Once corporations put in place tools that allow the individual to choose actions without being coerced, enjoying or suffering the consequences just like an agent in a market economy, the corporation will have begun the transformation towards becoming a tool rather than treating the individual as the tool. And as individuals again gain autonomy and control over their own lives, the individual will thrive. And as happens every time the individual is allowed to become more, society thrives in unpredictable and amazing ways. On the surface, this transformation of the corporation will make it seem as though we’re entering a time of great change. In fact, it will merely be proof again that social transformation begins as it always has – with individual transformation.

What Happy Harvard Students Know

Last year, Harvard student's made Tal Ben-Shahar's happiness class the most popular on campus. And for good reason. His course (from what I got online before Harvard took down (or changed?) the link) synthesized some of the best and most important information about what research has revealed and confirmed about happiness. Here are a few quotes from his final lecture - some points to ponder.

There are some commitments you can make to happiness: Practice gratitude and experiencing nature, and make exercise and socializing regular parts of life.

The questions we ask determine the kind of quest that we take. What gives me meaning, pleasure, and strength?

“Self concept is destiny.” What we believe about ourselves is what becomes true. The mind wants there to be a match between the inside and the outside – we bring either positive or negative reality into being to match what we have in our mind. We see ourselves in a particular way and from that we conclude certain things about ourselves. “This is a person who believes in himself.”

“Learn to fail or fail to learn.” The most successful people in science and arts are people who have failed the most.

Our happiness is not contingent on our status or state of our bank account but on our state of mind. I don’t believe that everything works for the best but I do believe that there are people who make the best of what happens. We don’t have control about what happens but we do have control over what we make it mean and what we do about it.

Give yourself the permission to be human. This class is more about reality psychology than happiness psychology.

Post-peak experience order is the opposite of post-traumatic stress disorder. It is more likely after you have written about a peak event. This is particularly important for males.

Simplify, simplify, simplify. Life is too short to be in a hurry.
- Thoreau

Movies end where love begins. It’s like saying, I have found my calling, its teaching. So that’s it. I don’t need to do any more. Don’t need to prepare for lectures or anything.

Exercise, sleep, and hugs are the wonder drugs. We compromise on the ultimate currency when we are short on these things.

You need to differentiate yourself. How? Determine what you really, really want to do with your life, and then do it. Be respectful and then assertive.

People who enjoy lasting change introduce change immediately. We underestimate our capacity to effect change because we underestimate the growth of an exponential function.

The Power of Love & Trascendance - an excerpt from Csikszentmihalyi's Evolving Self

One of the men who most influenced my perspective on the modern world is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I'm still amazed that Csikszentmihalyi's book The Evolving Self isn't continually cited. It gets my vote as the most overlooked and underappreciated books of our time.

Central to his thesis is the notion that a fully developed self comes from two often competing needs: the movements towards greater complexity and integration of that complexity into harmony, bringing those disparate elements into a whole self. Complexity results from pursuit of what makes us individuals, and he calls a person joyfully invested in complex goals a transcender. What follows is an excerpt of Evolving Self, using the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy as an example.

WHAT TRANSCENDERS ARE LIKE
There are many individuals whose actions demonstrate what a life dedicated to complexity could be like. But they cannot be reduced to a type, for there cannot be a single path to reaching personal harmony. Because differentiation is one-half of a complex consciousness, each person must follow his or her own bent, find ways to realize his or her unique individuality. And because we are born with a different combination of temperamental strengths and weaknesses, and with different gifts, and grow up in different family contexts, communities, and historical periods, each of us displays a characteristic pattern of potentials. Therefore, there is no such thing as a typical transcender, nor a best way to achieve complexity.

[Csikszentmihalyi gives an account of the early life of Faludy, a Jew who ended up imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp. He lived through this, migrated to the US, but returned to socialist Hungary. Again, he was imprisoned by an authoritarian government, somehow surviving this ordeal in a Stalinist-era prison from which few survived.]

Yet it was precisely in this dreadful environment, where inmates were whipped to labor from dawn to dusk, with slops to eat and rags to wear, that Faludy's muse really started to sing. His prison verses are among the most lyrical ever written in that genre. They deal with the most realistic and painful aspects of life in a concentration camp: hunger, frostbite, and brutality of ignorant and frightened men. Yet these clinical accounts of entropy are narrated so concisely and elegantly that their tragic content is transformed into a thing of beauty.

In fact, this was precisely Faludy's intent. In order to maintain his own sanity, and that of his fellow prisoners, he tried to give meaning to an otherwise intolerable existence. In one of his last poems before being released Faludy wrote:

What was the best thing I learned?
That after need
left my ravaged body
love did not leave.
Susy [his wife] became a light, silvery mist; shimmering always
before my eyes
even when shut
in pain, in gnawing hunger, as senses left,
love stayed,
love, the eternal fire, burning without harming,
not born of scalding desire,
no dreg of glands,
no juice of sex organs,
Dante, not Boccaccio,
Apollo, not the world of the dead.

Let Ziggy Freud go soak his head.

In the extremity of a life-threatening situation, the former rebel sought sustenance from the most hopeful aspects of the past, from the most meaningful memes of his civilization - and from the love for his wife. Perhaps one of the most touching aspects of Faludy's oeuvre is that originally it was not written down, for the simple reason that pencil and paper were not available in the camp. At first Faludy memorized each of his poems. Then, to avoid losing them through death or forgetfulness, he had fellow prisoners learn them by heart as well. In one case, toward the end of his captivity, he composed a long elegy for his wife, and each part of it was memorized by different inmates. Some of these prisoners were freed before Faludy, and went to visit his wife, to bring news of her husband and to recite the part of the poem they had memorized. At the end of the recitation they would typically announce: "That's all I learned. But in a few days Jim Egri should be released, and he will come and tell you the next twenty verses."

When Faludy was finally allowed to return to civilization, and then escaped once more to the West during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he published his prison verses, relying on his memory aided by various mnemonic devices. (For instance, he had made certain that the first poem he composed began with the letter "A," the second with "B," and so on.) Soon after, he started to receive letters from all over the world, from Brazil to New Zealand, containing corrections to his poems. They were written by former inmates, now scattered across the globe, who had committed to memory the harmoniously transformed accounts of their deadly experiences. Most of these corrections were incorporated into later editions of Faludy's work.

Faludy's life serves as such a valuable example for two complementary reasons: In the first place, it is so idiosyncratic in its specifics as to be obviously inapplicable to the lives of most people. How many of us have such a gift for language, have suffered so much persecution, and triumphed over so many obstacles? Yet despite - or rather, because of - its uniqueness, Faludy's story is typical of those individuals who have been able to fulfill the potential complexity of their selves. He is certainly not a saint, but he may not qualify as a Confucian sage or a Bodhisattva, either. But he learned to find flow in complexity; he learned to transform entropy into memes that create order in the consciousness of those who attend to them, and so because of him the world is a little more harmonious than it would have been otherwise.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, 1993, pp. 208 - 213.

The Lie That's True

Attitude is everything. As Henry Ford said, "Whether you think you can or think you cannot, you are right." Your life is what you create in your own mind, in your own beliefs.

I think that the above is utter nonsense. I also think that people who are very successful believe this. So, this is a lie that is nonetheless continually made true. I'm not entirely sure whether that makes it a profound truth or the worst kind of lie.

Systems, Individuals & Real Management

Harvard and Stanford are not really such great universities. If they had to take high school graduates at random, it’s not obvious that they’d do any better with them than other universities. Rather, Harvard and Stanford are able to select exceptionally intelligent and able people. The schools aren’t so very different, but their students are.

And this is our model of management. Find the best people and succeed. We don’t quite know what to do with average people. Yet average is all we have - on average.

History is nothing if not repeated proof that “average” people turn out to be quite extraordinary when their situation, context, and understanding change. The serf of the middle ages has evolved into today’s white collar professional – creating more value in a 40-hour week than the serf could create in a life time.

And this is the challenge of management everywhere – a responsibility not just ignored but unseen: make the system better. Among the many skills this requires, it starts with an acceptance of people for who they are. And perhaps in that way, being a real manager is no different than being a real human being.

Organizational Goals are Meaningless Goals

Organizational Goals are Meaningless Goals

I've become an officer for a local Toastmaster's club and we officers are supposed to articulate club goals next week. I have a problem with this, one that is not specific to Toastmaster's but applies to organizations in general.

Faithful readers of this blog - you two know who you are - have read previous posts in which I've talked about a corporate revolution that, in part, turns the corporation into a tool for the individual, reversing the current order in which the individual is a tool for the corporation. Such a shift suggests a change in emphasis, or sequence, for the articulation of goals.

To me, there are few things as meaningless as organizational goals. As near as I can tell, "organizations" are abstractions that have no real interest in whether these organizational goals are met or not. People, though, do have goals and can be seized by care or apathy. Stockholders have goals for returns by a certain date. Employees have goals for engaging work, development, and income. Customers have goals for convenience, affordability, and enjoyment. Management is an art of creating relationships between these parties, making trade offs when needed and but generally designing solutions that allow all of these parties to meet their goals in ways that they couldn't in isolation from one another.

The more management knows about individual goals, the more they can make organizational design and priority decisions that enable these goals. The miracle of an organization is that it enables the realization of individual goals. The opposite, that the miracle of the individual is that s/he enables the realization of organizational goals, is false.

So, let me go back to the Toastmaster's example. Throughout the year, we get probably 40-80 first-time visitors. Of that, we probably gain about 20 new members while losing about 20. Individuals come to the club with particular goals in mind. Some want to learn how to engage audiences as they deliver regular reports. Some want to overcome stage fright, hesitancy, or rapid-fire delivery. Others want to learn how to read an audience, vary the pace, persuade, or simplify complex ideas. The club, or organization, will thrive if its leadership can figure out how to meet those needs. But before it can meet such needs, it needs to determine those needs.

Currently, there is far more emphasis on having new members learn the Toastmaster's process than there is in having Toastmaster's learn the goals of new members. To talk about organizational goals like signing up 20 new members or getting 5 existing members through the competent communications manual seems to me meaningless. Better to translate the goals of real people into organizational events, actions, and forums that enable the goals of individuals. An organization that does this is going to thrive. It may be transformed - may even change regularly - but it will thrive.

Organizations don't have goals or needs. People do. An organization's only justification is as a means to realize the goals of real people. As soon as leaders forget that and begin talking in abstract terms, they risk drifting into irrelevance and eventual obsolescence.

Entrepreneurship Reaches a Tipping Point (Or, the Coming Popularization of Entrepreneurship)

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive."
- Harold Whitman

Entrepreneurs gain autonomy by changing society. When Ray Kroc gets us to change our eating habits or Little Richard get us to change our dance moves, they get rich. Getting rich is part of what gives them autonomy, letting them do what they want. Often what they want to do falls into the category of more entrepreneurship. What Ray Kroc enjoys is building a burger empire and Little Richard loves singing and playing to packed auditoriums. While some of us build model train sets, entrepreneurs actually use social trends as building blocks to “live the life of their dreams,” as the get-rich advertisements put it.

The Beatles were entrepreneurs. They changed society by creating songs about love, consciousness, and Rocky Raccoon. They challenged social conventions.

Henry Crowell was an entrepreneur. When he completed his oatmeal factory in 1882, he had a problem. His factory produced twice as much oatmeal as Americans ate. So, he invented breakfast cereal, packaging bulk meal into 24 ounce boxes labeled with the familiar Quaker Oats brand. He changed eating habits.

Martin Luther was an entrepreneur. He changed how people worship.

We are used to a small elite group playing the role of entrepreneurs. This has defined our history ... so far. Historically, elites change society and the rest of us conform to it.

Entrepreneurship is, basically, an act of social invention and I think that its path will, in some ways, follow the path of product invention. We’ve only gotten good at product invention in the last century. Today, many companies can confidently plan projects that result in patents and new products - a notion that would have seemed preposterous to the inventor in his shop in the early 19th century. There are certain principles behind product invention. We’re less clear about the principles that define social invention, but I predict that within a few decades our attempts at social invention will look more like our current efforts at product invention. That is, we’ll regularly engage in such acts and often succeed at creating new organizations and social changes that change how we live. Groups will regularly and intentionally engage in social invention. We’ll see the popularization of entrepreneurship.

You can work hard to be a better factory worker. Discipline and effort make a difference. But it makes more difference if you change the definition of work, change the system in which someone can work to be disciplined and conscientious. An engineer can produce more value in a day than can a factory worker (who, in turn, can produce more value than a farm worker). An Industrial Revolution or entering an Information Age raises productivity of the disciplined and the not so disciplined alike.

We can try to conform ourselves to the systems as they now stand. We can try to be better engineers or marketing experts or what have you. But we can be more productive if we change those roles to those of entrepreneurs – expecting employees to create new organizations that have equity value. We’ll soon come to expect teams to collaborate in social invention just as we expect today’s teams to collaborate in product invention.

The popularization of entrepreneurship will mean that the individual will come into the world less expectant of finding a place in it than of creating a place in it.

What will be examples of this? The child with the learning disability will have all his learning adapted to his strengths instead of focusing on overcoming his disability. Rather than grade the child on his performance within the educational system, we will adapt the system to the child’s passions, flaws, strengths, and society’s values and markets. (One reason that the very idea of grading is so nonsensical is that it assumes that it is the individual who needs to adapt to an organization that is usually obsolete by decades rather than adapting the organization to the child who is alive and in the world today.) And the child with learning disabilities? That is all of us. Anyone can be made stupid by the right challenge or circumstance. Organizations of all kinds - educational or corporate - will increasingly be expected to adapt to the individual.

Entrepreneurs, finally, are people who look about the social milieu and see the possibility of creating something new. The act of inventing this new organization or social practice is itself an act through which they can create their own potential. Additionally, once they’ve completed their social invention, they now have a vehicle through which they can realize their own potential. After he helps to invent rock and roll, Little Richard can continue to perform within the form.

"Realize their potential for what?" you may ask. If it is an act of successful entrepreneurship, it is the potential to create value for the community. And in this we have the most delightful paradox - the individual can do the most for the community only by changing that community so that it better conforms to the individual.