How Pragmatists Created Knowledge Workers and the Information Economy

In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations and Thomas Jefferson and associates published the Declaration of Independence. The industrial economy, or capitalism, and modern democracy were products of Enlightenment philosophers who actually shaped their world according to their new philosophy reliant on facts and theories that fit them.

What the Enlightenment was to the Industrial Economy, Pragmatism was to the Information Economy.

Pragmatism – dismissed by Europeans as a curiously American invention – has come to guide how our experts and leaders think about everything even though we don’t much talk about it. To be dismissed in the modern world, tell someone you’re an idealist. To be respected, tell them you’re pragmatic.

One of Molière’s characters was surprised and delighted to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. We’re like that with pragmatism. Most of us have learned to think like this without even being aware that we are thinking like this.

The first published mention of pragmatism was in 1898. Arguing, as I do, that the 20th century was shaped by the rise of the knowledge worker, this timing is fortuitous. The 20th century was a century in which thousands of new jobs and areas of studies emerged. This sort of rise in specialization isn’t the product of people looking for universal truths; it is the product of people looking to solve specific problems.

Pragmatists didn't see ideas as some abstract truth out "there" to discover but instead as tools no different than a fork or knife. Ideas either enabled us to create the world we wanted or did not. William James wrote about the cash value of an idea: did it pay you to have this idea? And of course, for the knowledge worker who began a career with a university education, this was a very relevant question: what did it pay to be able to solve problems in this particular domain?

Enlightenment philosophers like an Isaac Newton were looking for universal truths. The apple falling from the tree as Newton pondered gravity was the aha moment in which he realized that gravity was universal - something that applied to the apple falling from a tree, the moon orbiting earth, or earth orbiting the sun.

Pragmatists had smaller goals. They were less interested in whether an idea was universal than whether it was effective here and now. Will this line of code stop the program from crashing? Will this change to the wing design stop this plane from crashing? This sort of problem-solving and design did, indeed, rely on some general principles but the value of the knowledge worker lay less in her ability to spout these universal truths than to solve this specific problem.

Universities were greatly shaped by pragmatist’s focus on the particular. The 20th century did not just see the rise of the knowledge worker – a person who worked with their knowledge, translating it into cash value as William James had suggested – but of university as prelude to careers. Out of pragmatism’s focus on specifics came a proliferation of new majors and careers. It was not enough to be an engineer. One had to choose whether to major in civil, electrical, mechanical, computer, chemical, industrial, or circuit engineering. None of these specialists were trying to discover the universal truths that a Newton sought; they were focused on solving a particular set of problems, translating their work into the cash value of the market place. For the knowledge worker, ideas were not abstractions; they were a source of income. The knowledge worker is very pragmatic about his knowledge.

The pragmatists were operating in a post-Darwinian world. For the pragmatist, we have minds because they help us to adapt to our environment. Our minds don’t simply mirror our world but help us to generate hypotheticals that let us adapt ourselves or our reality so as to live better.

It may seem innocuous enough for pragmatists to each focus on their own set of problems and possibilities. No pragmatists stood up to challenge the church or British Empire the way that the Enlightenment philosophers who led revolutions had a century or two earlier. But as it turns out, continuously creating new products and solutions is incredibly disruptive. If revolution overturns reality, evolution creates a new reality. The latter may work more slowly but it might actually change us just as much, if not more.

The Enlightenment philosophers who created democracy and capitalism in the US around 1800 gave us a new world. So did the pragmatist philosophers who created public education and the information economy around 1900. That one simply came with less fanfare and violence.

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The brilliant Louis Menand discusses his books The Metaphysical Club here. It is his book which properly introduced me to pragmatism. He does not make the tie between pragmatism and the information economy but he's incredibly insightful and, of course, the pragmatists like William James, Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey are fascinating characters.

Rise of Entrepreneurial Economy and Fal(tering) of the Information Economy

Here is the table from The Fourth Economy. One of the central arguments is that we're living through a shift from the information economy to an entrepreneurial economy.

Google Ngram is an interesting way to track the usage of various words and terms.

Here you can see the steady rise in the use of the term "entrepreneurial economy."

And here you can see how the use of "information economy" has begun to fall (even though it is still used considerably more than the term "entrepreneurial economy").

So apparently a long way to go but the fourth economy does indeed seem to be (oh so slowly) gaining on the third, information economy in terms of mention in writing. My argument is that it is emerging but we're still not quite attuned to it so it is becoming harder to ignore but still not completely appreciated.

Oh, and for bonus points, here are the three most recent intellectual revolutions. Given we build on each previous stage, and given that we've had centuries to become aware of the importance of the Enlightenment and Pragmatism, it makes sense that systems thinking is only now beginning to rise in general use and awareness relative to those.

Just the Way Things Are

Once a myth is seen to be a myth, it no longer is. That is, if you call a myth a myth it no longer functions as a myth, as a way to make sense of the world that people believe in. The people who believe something is a myth no longer believe in it.

I wonder if a philosophy is similar. Today, pragmatism is characterized by the fact that people don't think of this philosophy as a philosophy. To call yourself pragmatic is, of course, to say that you are not ideological or philosophical.

Once we see pragmatism as every bit as philosophical as the Enlightenment before it, we might begin to find it lessen its hold on our collective consciousness.

Could David Cameron Save the American Republican Party?

I watched the final debate between Britain’s current and two contending Prime Ministers this evening. They represented the Conservative Party, Liberal Democrats, and Labour Party. The contrast between the three was not half as stark as the contrast between British and American conservatives.

Let’s hope that American conservatives are paying attention to David Cameron of Britain’s Conservative Party. The Republican Party has been hijacked by policy makers who have decided that the clearest way to distinguish themselves from reasonable and practical policies is to offer unreasonable and ideological polices. Cameron’s campaign will hopefully remind Republicans that it is possible to distinguish yourself from reasonable policies by offering other reasons rather than just blindly opposing the other side.

For instance, Republicans in this country – the party that supposedly represents conservatives here – are mindlessly opposed to financial reform. Without reform, we will again find ourselves in the position of either bailing out bankers or letting them take down our economy. (And of course, no one wants to admit that even with great reforms we’re likely to find ourselves in this situation, the only difference being the probability and severity of the hostage situation.) Republicans simply don’t want to be seen cooperating with Obama – no matter how obvious or sensible his policies seem to be.

David Cameron, by contrast, rather sensibly wants to change things within London’s banking community in the wake of the Great Recession. He wants more regulation and more consequences for banks that pursue reckless policy. This position has the advantage of making sense whether one’s analysis is sophisticated or simply based in a common sense reaction to the last financial crisis. Cameron even mentioned that his plan for financial reform was very much like Obama’s.

In Britain, policies of liberals and conservatives sometimes align and sometimes clash. There does not appear to be a requirement to oppose everything the opposition party proposes. This used to be true in the US as well. Modern Republicans, as near as I can tell, seem to define themselves less by what they think will work than by opposing what Obama seems to think will work.

The curious thing about this is that Republicans are becoming more insistent on blind ideology in a time when the countries whose economies are performing best defy easy categorization: China is nominally communist but often more aggressively capitalist than the G-7 countries; Peru and Brazil’s economies have performed splendidly with some odd hybrid of socialist and free market policies that generally favor the poor. Anymore, the fastest growing economy is as likely to espouse adherence to free markets as socialism (and all the while adopting pragmatic policies). It seems as though the real solution to economic growth is ideological flexibility, not ideological rigidity. And yet Republicans, bucking the trend of conservatives and socialists alike around the world, are becoming more ideological. But if successful policy is pragmatic rather than ideological, having such an ideologically intent party means that we’re robbed of a practically conservative option in this country. No matter what your ideological orientation, you should find this troubling. We can’t steer right in this country because the party trying to pull the wheel in that direction does not want to pull into the other lane so much as go off-roading through the oleander.

I do believe that the Republican Party will look back at this period as the time of their great hijacking, a time when their only answer to any question was lower taxes and when they let themselves get defined on everything else by their automatic opposition to Democrats. As long as ideologues own the party, the country will either suffer from their rule (as under Bush) or conservatives will suffer from Republicans’ inability to win control in DC (as under McCain). As I said, one can only hope that American conservatives are paying attention to Cameron – and humble enough to learn from Cameron and even – on occasion – agree with Obama.

Pragmatism is No Longer Pragmatic

Pragmatism is no longer pragmatic. Generating solutions in a way that depends on focusing on specific problems in a specific context is no longer enough in a world of massive interdependency. If you focus on creating an optimal financial derivative without concern for the larger system of which it’s a part, you might actually trigger a collapse in mortgage markets or the entire banking system. What works best in isolation is increasingly irrelevant or even dangerous: the pragmatic, heads-down solution may have become the problem.

Pragmatism emerged when the same thing happened to Enlightenment thinking. Enlightenment thinking was about universal truths, or principles. Pragmatists discarded the search for the universal and south instead for specific solutions. The birth of pragmatism in the late 19th century was coincident with the birth of the knowledge worker – engineers, marketing professionals, managers, etc. who had to discover or create specific solutions for the specific technological or market problems they faced.

But no one works in a vacuum. We never have. But in today’s world, inter connectivity, connections, the ripples of dependencies, and environment or context are more important than they’ve ever been. What goes on within a nation-state is rarely isolated to that nation-state, for instance; technology in the US can contribute to flooding in India and economic policy in Mexico can contribute to population growth and wage stagnation in the US.

To focus on the particulars of a problem is to miss the context, the larger system of which it’s a part. Pragmatism is no longer pragmatic because solutions cannot simply ignore the context.

Systems thinking begs the question of vision: what larger system do you see yourself as part of? And this is a matter of choice – to a degree – and vision. Obviously, issues of sustainability and systems limits impose constraints on any problem set.

But beyond that, one chooses the history he’s a part of by the choice of context.
Leadership creates a credible narrative that puts specific actions into a larger context. It gives meaning. It provides boundaries for problems. And it suggests goals. It does not dictate choices, it simply provides a context for them.

The most pressing need today may be the need to create a credible context for individual choices. What is the future we’re creating? What do we see as the future of humanity and this planet? How will life be better and different in 10 years? 100? I don’t suppose anyone can impose such a vision – but properly articulated, such a vision could compel behaviors.

Pragmatism that assumes uncoordinated autonomy will no longer work. It's time for leadership that assumes a shared fate rather than individual fatalism.

Enlightenment, Pragmatism, Deconstruction & The Future as Context

It is not enough for the next generation of politicians to give up on old ideas. It is time to give up on old ways of thinking.

Enlightenment thinking, perhaps best characterized by the ideas of friends Isaac Newton and John Locke, suggested that one could rely on universal laws, or principles.

Pragmatism, pioneered in part by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James, emerged about two hundred years later and suggested that the broad universality of general principles might be over-stated. Specific problems needed to be solved within a specific context. The specialists of the last century pride themselves on being pragmatists.

It might seem odd to put deconstruction within this tradition. Comparatively speaking, deconstruction is a minor philosophy and generally thought of in regards to text. But deconstruction, it seems to me, takes pragmatism a step further, pointing to the importance of context in determining veracity. But context can easily be arbitrary: the psychologist might see the relevant context as one's childhood, the sociologist as one's community, the economist as the one's labor market, etc.

Deconstruction proved unsatisfying to most because it pointed out two things: context is key and context is arbitrary.

To me, it seems as though the relevant context for policy is a shared vision. Typically this will take the form of a desired future, but it need not. (Some really powerful exercises in vision can imagine a different now – not just a different later.) A shared context can create the cohesion of enlightenment thinking's universal principles (and it is worth remembering that it was Enlightenment thinking that brought us the modern nation-state, perhaps the defining community for most people living in the West). A shared vision can suggest goals for pragmatists who will necessarily be working on specific problems.

In the world of politics, we generally hear policy framed in Enlightenment terms: in vague generalities that suggest little in the way of specific solutions. Meanwhile, specialists - pragmatists - are busily working within corporations to solve specific problems and are making progress. So within the public arena, universal truths of little relevance are espoused (e.g., "Education is vital." "We must not let greedy executives rob us." "We must not unnecessarily burden businesses." "We should engage only in just wars."). Within the private sector, a thousand separate and conflicting goals are pursued.

Conflict will always define communities, but a measure of cohesion allows alignment of resources and effort. And ultimately, the public arena is defined by what is common, not individual. It seems to me that our politicians and policy makers need to move beyond Enlightenment era platitudes to the point of providing context for specialists, for pragmatists, in the form of a shared vision.

This vision need not - indeed, will not - be monolithic. It is probably more useful to think of visions than a vision. Visions that could provide a context for specialists might include such things as
• Reliance on alternative, or renewable energy, or a world where the cost of energy drops every year just as information processing and storage has.
• Transforming massive swaths of education into digital and interactive content - eliminating the need for teachers to duplicate efforts across the globe. Using teachers liberated from such rote tasks to do things now ignored (e.g., setting the context for learning with individual life goals for each student, making the definition of a career an iterative process that unfolds over years).
• Creating community centers that enhance feelings of engagement and purpose, dramatically mitigating levels of anomie, depression, and alienation (that is, taking the pursuit of happiness seriously).
• Institutions that enable individuals to realize goals that matter deeply to them rather than goals that simply matter to the leaders of those institutions - or even matter simply to the masses.

Ultimately, this role of creating a context by vision is one that calls for something other than Enlightenment, Pragmatism or even Deconstruction. It requires systems thinking - the leader in a role of facilitator and connector rather than dictator (even if by popular consent). Realizing a future vision generally requires the creation of a new system rather than modification of the old one.

We are acutely aware of the importance of changing technology like trains or cars or planes. We are generally less aware of the importance of changing technology like how we frame problems, model our world, or define possibility. Yet these kinds of technologies, too, have to be changed. How we think about the world sets the context for what is possible, even in the world of technology like planes and cars. It is, sadly, hard to see the glasses one sees through. Yet I can think of no technology change more important than a change in how we think. I would argue that just as this country's founding fathers could not have defined this democracy had they clung to Renaissance-era thinking, so will our generation be unable to create what is next by clinging to Pragmatism or Enlightenment thinking.

Social Invention & the Fourth Economy

1. Social Invention & Progress

In the earliest grades, children learn that technological inventions fuel progress. Things like the wheel, the iron plow, the automobile, and computer obviously made ours a different world.

Less obviously, social inventions are essential to progress. Tribes, city-states, nation-states, and international organizations have made it possible for larger groups of increasingly specialized people to cooperate to create a new world. Like microwave ovens, churches, governments, banks, and corporations have also made ours a different world from the one in which our ancestors lived.

We're about to enter a new economy, one in which the act of social invention (a broader application of the notion of entrepreneurship) will become as normal as the introduction of new products. At first, this will seem disorientating, but our grandkids will think it is normal. It will be a period of unprecedented prosperity and individual freedom.

2. Waves of Social Invention

Social invention often looks like revolution. When innovators change how people worship, or challenge the king’s authority, innovation will probably be violent. Indeed, the acceptance of change without violent resistance is a fairly novel experience in humanity’s history, and a big reason that the pace of progress is accelerating.

Social invention can occur in a wide variety of domains, from Macarena dance moves to currency arbitrage. Some of this innovation is random and in some of it one can discern a pattern.

Between about 1300 to 1700, a wave of social and technological inventions produced the first economy. As land, or natural resources, was the basis of wealth in this economy, one can simply refer to this as an agricultural economy. Technological inventions like the seed drill and steel plow enabled farmers to produce more and new technology like the compass made it possible for anyone to sell their products more widely, capturing a higher price as trade emerged across even oceans. Meanwhile, social inventions like Martin Luther’s challenge to the papacy and Henry VIII’s making himself the head of the Church of England were key to the eclipse of the nation-state over the church. This maelstrom of innovation produced an agricultural economy, the first market economy in lieu of a traditional economy.

Once natural resources were being traded widely (think of Italy without the tomato, Ireland without the potato, and England without tea and you begin to get a sense of how transformed Europe was by the flow of new products across oceans), the next step in creating value was processing. Wood and wool has less value than lumber and textiles. Processing natural resources into finished products was the work of the industrial revolution. This, too, required a panoply of technological and social inventions. Democracy did for the nation-state what the Reformation did for the church – dispersing power in the dominant institution outwards to a wider group.

In the last century, the most advanced countries have hosted the latest wave of technological and social inventions, culminating in the information economy. Technology like the computer and telephone, coupled with innovations like the modern corporation and university have produced the most advanced economy yet.

3. Social Evolution is Not Done Yet

But this most recent economy will not be the last. The pattern of invention and revolution since about 1300 suggests that we are on the cusp of one more wave of innovation. One more economy, one more society, has yet to emerge. As with every new economy before it, this one will transform our philosophy, our dominant institution, the social order, and the individual. And unlike the emergence of the first economy that took place over a period of hundreds of years, this one will emerge in about half a century.

Read the rest of the posting here at The Next Transformation.

Why Conservatives Prefer Sedentary (rather than activist) Judges

One of George W's few (only?) inarguable successes is in the area of judicial appointments. Intolerant of activist judges who pretend to be members of the legislative rather than judicial branch (ignoring precedent or strict interpretations of the law) George has moved to reverse a trend of recent decades. His appointments of Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court have been only the most visible of his many court appointments. As with so much about George, success in his goals actually represents a setback for the country. George is judging judges through the lens of an outdated philosophy.

Our founding fathers were Enlightenment thinkers - inspired by the genius of Isaac Newton and John Locke, British thinkers from an earlier generation. Galileo and Copernicus had observed that the earth seems to revolve around the sun, but couldn't explain why centrifugal force didn't send us spinning off of the earth's surface into space. They had data but no theory. Newton, with his theory of gravity, explained both why the earth spins around the sun and why cows, dogs, and fair maidens don't spin off of the surface of the earth and into space as our little planet hurtles around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. Our Renaissance thinkers embraced reality as superior to authority, refuting the Bible and Ptolemy and siding instead with the data resulting from their observations. The Enlightenment thinkers added law to this data. And at their best, Enlightenment thinkers imitated Newton, articulating laws that explained planets and people. For George, Enlightenment thinkers represent the height of intellectual progress.

Renaissance thought was essential to progress, but it was not enough. Enlightenment thought turned out to be no different. In this way, even philosophy is rather like any product invention - delightful at one point and insufficient at another. Imagine people in the 21st century having to use hand cranks on cars and you can imagine the complications arising from governance in the 21st century that relies on centuries-old philosophy. Just as Enlightenment replaced Renaissance thought, so did Pragmatism displace Enlightenment thought. At one point Enlightenment philosophy was the height of intellectual progress. That point has passed.

Teddy Roosevelt - the man who invented the modern presidency - appointed Oliver Wendell Holmes (pictured above) to the Supreme Court. Holmes had helped to invent pragmatism, the philosophy that became to the 20th century what Enlightenment thought was to the 18th century. Holmes' philosophy infected the thought of professionals in every discipline - including the law.

A pragmatist is less concerned with the universal application of a fork than whether it's appropriate for what he's eating. A fork is fine for salad but not for soup and questionable for donuts. A pragmatist wants a specific solution to a specific problem in a specific context. Engineers, thinking like pragmatists, may use equations and principles, but as starting points - not as the final solution. A true pragmatist might question whether such a thing as universals even exists. Einstein's relativity theory is replaced by quantum physics; both go beyond the delightfully clean and predictable and constant world of Newton's universe. Universals give way to the particular.

Activist judges offend conservatives for a couple of reasons. One is the obvious variation in outcomes that simply makes no sense. This month's Atlantic reports on such inexplicable variations in judgment.

Demographics may account for some of this variance, but they don’t explain the discrepancies that the authors found in the judgments of officials in the same buildings: At the federal immigration court in Miami, one judge granted asylum to 88 percent of Colombian applicants, yet another ruled in favor of just 5 percent.

This kind of variation drives conservatives nuts - and for good reason. But there is another reason that conservatives are so offended by activist judges. Conservatives are Enlightenment thinkers - unwilling to accept a world in which seemingly similar cases might be judged differently. They are offended, oddly enough, when judges use judgment.

For many conservatives, progress in technology is all well and good, but for them, there need be no "progress" in philosophy or worldview. Progress from Enlightenment thinking to Pragmatism represents a falling away from the truth - not actual progress.
George has succeeded at getting more conservatives appointed. To the extent that he has, he's succeeded at stifling progress on social issues. As seems to be his legacy, George's personal goals once again conflict with the general pattern of social progress.

Time to Upgrade Civilization's Operating System

Microsoft has just introduced Vista – its new operating system. Change an operating system and you change the context – change an application and you only change the problem before you. An application can be wonderful but if it is not compatible with the operating system, it is ineffective.

Right now civilization faces the problem of climate change and all the attempts to begin addressing this problem seem to be as ineffectual as trying to load an application into the wrong operating system. Indeed, our current philosophical context – civilization’s operating system if you will – is incompatible with this problem.

We simply won’t be able to address the problem of climate change (or any of a number of other problems) without first changing our operating system. Civilization’s current operating system is pragmatism. Until we realize that pragmatism is no longer pragmatic, we’re likely to find ourselves stymied by this problem of climate change.

Pragmatism has become the dominant philosophy during the last century. The pragmatist is less interested in universal truths than in solving a specific problem in a specific context. For the Enlightenment philosopher, the holy grail of thought might best be represented in the laws of physics as articulated by Newton – the laws of gravity or “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” For the pragmatist, the holy grail of thought might be articulating the legal argument that wins her case before the Supreme Court or writing computer code that becomes a best selling application. The pragmatist lives in a shifting world and doesn’t really expect to trip upon any universal or eternal truths. The pragmatist, in the words of William James, is literally interested in the “cash value” of idea. Pragmatism has become the dominant philosophy in circles where it matters – scientists, knowledge workers, and policy-makers (whether in government or business) are all pragmatists.

There is, of course, at least one problem with this: in a world full of pragmatists all focused on specific solutions to specific problems in a specific context, the system as a whole is neglected. Some intelligent experts are hard at work trying to understand how to sell cars, some on how to sell political candidates, others on how to understand climate warming, but none are at work trying understand how the interaction of all these (and other) pieces come to together to inexorably move us towards a calamitous collision of culture and climate. Working towards such a solution is terribly un-pragmatic, suggesting a course of action that is both improbable and implausible. Intelligent experts are unlikely to pursue the solution to such a problem set.

What is needed are groups of people who think through what it means to transform the foundational philosophy of our modern world. What would our corporations, government agencies, and schools look like if civilization’s operating system were systems thinking rather than pragmatism?

This is not merely a rhetorical question. Just such a transformation is exactly what happened about two to three hundred years ago when our notion of government was transformed.
Our founding fathers were deeply influenced by Enlightenment philosophy. The historian Walther Kirchner went so far as to write:
“The first great assault upon the traditional social system occurred in England’s thirteen colonies. They were comparatively free and prosperous and subject to rather generous, progressive government. The assault was not led by the oppressed, but by those who had little to gain except the fulfillment of certain ideals rooted in the spirit of the Enlightenment.”

How do we address problems that spill across boundaries and seem to thumb their nose at our current institutions? I’d argue that the solution to how we transform society begins as it always has – with a transformation in our philosophical operating system. The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, and Pragmatism all represented upgrades to civilization’s operating system – a transformation to the philosophy and paradigm of society. It’s time to upgrade again. Before the system crashes.

Coming Soon to a Cubicle Near You - Revolutionary Ideas About Your Corporation

It's quite delightful to point readers off to a kindred thinker. Jeff Jarvis, fresh from his meeting with the world's elites at Davos, has come to believe that

"Perhaps the most important ‘ding’ moment I had at Davos was that the powerful are, no surprise, one step behind in their understanding of the true significance of the internet: They think it is all about individual action when, in truth, it’s about collective action. And so they don’t yet see that the internet will shift power even more than they realize."
[read it all at http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2007/02/01/davos07-my-big-conclusion/]

You can read my take on this same shift in a few posts at this blog, three of them here:
http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2006/12/social-evolution-and-next-corporation.html
and
http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2007/01/be-rupert-murdoch-for-only-5000.html
and
http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2007/01/employees-becoming-entrepreneurs.html

Vladimir Dzhuvinov has a blog through which he's working out a model that could effectively disperse power. You can find him at:
http://www.thetransactioncompany.com/

Russell Ackoff is perhaps one of the best known thinkers in management to espouse internal markets (just one of his many profound ideas), something that I'm beginning to believe will be an essential part of the dispersion of power from corporate elites to the common man. You can find information about his ideas at:
http://ackoffcenter.blogs.com/

Not all of the corporate transformation talk is actually about transforming the corporation. Pamela Slim has a blog directed towards helping people to escape the cubicle farm - no longer keen to waste her energy helping corporations to transform, she's directly helping the people stuck within them. Even these actions will help to hasten a transformation of the corporation, forcing business to reconsider the role it has defined for its employees. You can find Pam's brilliant "open letter" here:
http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/get_a_life_blog/2006/05/open_letter_to_.html


Such ideas are infectious memes. The ideological immune system of the current social system will first miss these ideas, then mock them, and then point out their flaws. But these ideas will eventually transform society. When you change the dominant institution, you invariably change all of society.

Just think about it. What if this chorus (of often harmonizing, sometimes discordant voices) is right? Maybe it's time to ask yourself what exciting things are possible if power were to disperse outwards from the elites within the corporation as they have previously done within the church, the state, and the bank. And what if this pattern of revolutions, the rise of the individual, has been the pattern of progress throughout the history of Western Civilization? And if you think about that, the meme is already in, already past your defenses. What was it Supreme Court Justice and co-inventor of Pragmatism Oliver Wendell Holmes said? “Man’s mind stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension.”

Iraq and the Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda

I remember how frustrated conservatives would get talking to liberals in the 70s. "Sure it would be wonderful to end poverty," they'd say. "But the question is whether it can be done with policy."

At the time I was what you might call politically agnostic. I lurched about from Libertarian to Socialist views before settling down into what Rush Limbaugh would call a "racial liberal" and what the Europeans would call a moderate. I no longer believe that markets or governments offer one-stop panaceas.

The left began to lose their lead in politics in this country was when they stubbornly held to the pursuit of policy that was noble (e.g., ending poverty) but for which they had no real solution. That is, while a majority of voters may have agreed that their policy objectives should been pursued, they stopped believing that the Democrats could have achieved those objectives. At this point, they cashed in their idealism for practical promises.

I say all this because George and his defenders have gotten themselves trapped in the “should have” box. It almost seems irrelevant to them whether the democratization of Iraq could be done - what matters to them is that it should be done. Yet the world is full of should be done tasks (Darfur not the least among them) that are not being done. There are a variety of reasons for this but one is that policy makers don't know how they could do the task.

And perhaps this is the definition of an ideologue - someone who sees adherence to practicality as akin to selling out. And ideologues do get their followers. But the critical mass of Americans are ultimately pragmatic and are, finally, less interested in the woulda and the shoulda than the coulda.

It is, finally, not George's intentions that are going to put his political successors into the dust bin of irrelevance. Rather, it will be his refusal to acknowledge that, in the end, the success of a policy must be realized outside of the minds of voters and in the real world. That is, no matter how "should have" it is, a policy must prove that it qualifies as"could have."

How to Make a Trillion Dollars: Dee Hock, Systems Thinking & Modern Management

One of the proponents of systems thinking is Dee Hock (although he calls it by a more interesting name, one that reflects how he has customized many of the notions and principles of systems thinking: chaordic, a state on the border of chaos and order). You probably don't know his name but you should. It is yet another thing that baffles me about the modern world: so many people know of Bill Gates and Jack Welch and so few know about Robert Beyster and Dee Hock. (Beyster I'll save for another story.)

Dee Hock was the first CEO for a company that has now passed $1 trillion in sales. That's right. $1 trillion. The company is VISA and it represents Hock's attempt to fundamentally rethink the foundational notions of an organization. Before going into that, I'd like to speak briefly about what he was up against, as it was nothing less than the dominant and pervasive intellectual perspective of the 20th century.

Pragmatism is today's dominant perspective. This matters because it is this that the systems thinking proponent finds himself up against. A pragmatist (as most every manager and employee is) will want to know the answer to how. "How do I do this?" It is no coincidence that pragmatism’s creation and popularization has followed the creation and rise of the modern knowledge worker, a sea of experts who make their living because they know how to diagnosis an X-ray, write computer code, or negotiate legal contracts. A pragmatist looks at how to make it through the obstacle course more quickly; a systems thinker challenges the design of the obstacle course, wondering why it should be so difficult to navigate if, indeed, the goal is to reduce time. One doesn't get to trillion in sales by simply performing better inside of a million dollar company.

Back to systems thinking and Dee Hock. What Hock really did was create two things. One, he understood that money was, ultimately, a measure and symbol of exchange. Its natural evolution from sea shells to gold to fiat currency was to finally take the form of blips and bytes on a computer. The credit card was a perfect medium for this. Secondly, Hock created an ecosystem. He knew that any card that gained acceptance had to simultaneously be accepted by banks, merchants, and consumers. And yet no one party would accept a card that the other two parties had not accepted. Hock didn't tell banks how they could sign up households. Rather, he created a set of fairly minimal rules that allowed players within this context to perform. Dee Hock was not so much a Willie Mays or even Sparky Anderson. Rather, he was Abner Doubleday - inventing the game rather than telling people how to play or even playing himself. In this alone he could stand as an archetype of systems thinking.

YouTube recently sold for $1.65 billion. Those founders did not create content, generating millions of hours of video. That would have been as impossible as Dee Hock's quest to make a trillion in loans or sales. Rather, the YouTube founders created a context in which people can voluntarily create and distribute content, just as the sea of bankers who minute by minute grant loan approvals to consumers within the ecosystem Dee Hock helped to create.

There is so much to say about the distinction between pragmatism and systems thinking, but I will limit myself to this observation. A manager asks "how" will I get this done. An entrepreneur asks, "who" will I need to get this done? A pragmatist focuses on problem solving and making something work. A systems thinker focuses instead on creating a context (like Hock's credit card ecosystem or YouTube's site) that encourages participation and natural consequences for individual imitative and actions.

How does systems thinking change anything if it doesn’t directly address the question of how, leaving that instead to the pragmatists and players who will inevitably show up? As it is gradually adopted as a worldview, replacing pragmatism as pragmatism replaced Enlightenment philosophy before it, systems thinking will change the context of how we frame our world, articulate problems, and choose goals. How will systems thinking change anything? By changing the context and rules of the game, it will, eventually, change everything.

Out with the wild-eyed ideologues!

American people are fairly pragmatic. The vote results in today's election are not a vote for liberals - most of the Democrats who are winning tonight are not anybody's idea of wild-eyed liberal. Many of them are social conservatives.

Instead, the "vote the bums out" attitude is a rejection of what is widely perceived as wild-eyed ideologues who to this day cannot admit that their policy does not work. Some Americans are conservative and some are liberals. The swing voters are pragmatic. When you move into a state of denial, you can expect to lose their vote.