Worth Remembering for 2007

Heard today, courtesy of one of our ministers:
"No one ever became less by giving their all."
- June McDonald

What if Saddam is the Best Iraq Can Do?

Last night at the gym, the TV news was flitting from one image to another to confirm that Saddam was evil and deserved execution. It's an easy sell to an American audience, raised as we are to be repulsed at the thought of such unchecked power.

But what the media will never allude to is that Saddam may have actually been exactly the kind of leader one would expect for a country like Iraq.

Iraq does not have the foundation of one nation on which to build a nation-state. Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds are three distinct groups that see themselves as Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds before they see themselves as Iraqis. Creating one nation-state with these three groups requires a strong leader.

For a significant portion of the population, the authority of religious dogma far outweighs the authority of the uncertain processes of law or science. Such a population cannot be reasoned with for the simple fact that they've little respect for reason. Force is the one alternative for dealing with such a population.

You don't have to make a formal study of children to know that what is appropriate for a child of 16 won't work for a child of 6. And to be fair to the Iraqi legal system that found him guilty, no people should have to endure the rule of a tyrant, as Saddam clearly was. But the type of rule appropriate for a country at the stage of development of Iraq is going to look more like the rule of Saddam than the rule of, say, contemporary Dutch Parliament.

Afghanistan, freed of Taliban rule, is gravitating back towards Taliban rule. Why? The fundamental social dynamics that led to the rise of the Taliban have yet to be changed. Don't be surprised if the same country that yesterday executed Saddam doesn't soon raise up a leader much like Saddam. History shows us that it is much easier to change individual leaders than it is to change the social reality that allows them to rule. But then, George doesn't even acknowledge the differences in social dynamics of San Francisco and Midland, TX, so how could he be expected to acknowledge differences as vast as those between a quasi-theocracy and modern democracy?

The Corporation is Today's Dominant Institution

Fortunately, you can't see air. If you could, it is unlikely that you could see anything else.

In a similar way, when a particular institution dominates a community, it is nearly invisible. In medieval times, that institution was the church; today, the dominant institution is the corporation. Its influence is so pervasive that we can’t even see it.

Think about the typical day of the average person.
The alarm goes off at 6:30. The programming is courtesy of a corporation - the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The very thoughts that first enter her head aren’t daily prayers sanctioned by her church but are, instead, news items and commentary approved by employees of a corporation. The radio that conveys this programming is made by the Sony Corporation and was bought from a retail outlet the Best Buy Corporation. This person lifts herself off the bed, a bed made by the Select Comfort Corporation. The alarm goes off at 6:30 because the time it takes to commute in her car (made and sold by the Nissan Corporation) plus the time it takes to get ready (using products like toothpaste, shaving gel, hair gel, and deodorant provided by the Proctor & Gamble Corporation) equals the time that the corporate employer expects her to begin working. She has scarcely gained consciousness and already her day is defined by corporate norms, products, and expectations.

Even the context for the use of the products listed in the above paragraph is a product of corporations. The very notion of “body odor” is a product of corporate advertisers trying to create demand for deodorant early in the 20th century. The idea of time zones was not an idea of governments but of railroads that needed uniform time zones in order to create schedules. It is one thing to notice that we’re bombarded by about 3,000 advertisements a day. It is another to notice that the very expectation of wearing deodorant or chewing mints is created by corporations, much less the expectation that we’ll all synchronize our watches and alarm clocks.

Our clothes and transportation are defined by corporations. Our working hours and the number of years that we need to work are also defined by corporations. More than 90% of Americans are employees and their role as employees is either defined by a corporation or an institution that patterns itself after a corporation.

The level of pollution that we accept is defined by the needs of the corporation. Only when health needs of people and the planet are being too obviously ignored is that negotiated or changed. The extent to which children are allowed to be with their parents during the work day is defined by the corporation. Even our diet is defined by corporations and if the health consequences of this are harmful, then corporations are ready to offer prescription drugs that remedy the complications from the diet.

One of the real obstacles to transforming the medieval church was getting enough intellectual distance from it to see it, rather than simply see through the lens it provided. Our situation is little different today. Just take note of how pervasive is the corporation in defining your daily life. Once you do, you can begin to explore ways to define it rather than accept it defining you, taking to heart the warning that Emerson gave: "We have become the tools of our tools."

Why does this matter? It was impossible to change life, to make progress, coming out of medieval times without changing the church - and changing it fundamentally. Today, fundamental progress depends on changing the corporation, today's dominant institution.

George: Hero or Villain?

"By DARLENE SUPERVILLE
WASHINGTON Dec 28, 2006 (AP)— Bad guy of 2006: President Bush. Good guy of 2006: President Bush. When people were asked in an AP-AOL News poll to name the villains and heroes of the year, Bush topped both lists, in a sign of these polarized times."

Somehow, this makes a great deal of sense. This is, after all, the USA, land of contradictions. We have more Olympic athletes and more obese people than any other country. We have more extremes of wealth and poverty than any other developed nation. We lead the world in the export of pornography and religion. We are the United Schizophrenics of America.

Beyond the Church & State

Oddly, the argument about religion and politics continues. On the one hand are those worried about the drift from religious principles that ensure a certain level of morality. On the other hand are those worried about the intrusion of beliefs that can neither be proven nor disproved into our politics, the imposition of the religion of a few onto many. As long as some voters have religious beliefs, there will be a commingling of church and state. This seems inescapable. So what, really, did our founding fathers and their Enlightenment era peers bring us?

The transformation of religion in the West took place through two waves. The first wave was most simply illustrated when Henry VIII made himself the head of the Church of England and severed ties with Rome. The second wave was best articulated by John Locke about 200 years later, arguing that it made no sense for the state to force a particular kind of worship on its citizens. In the first wave, the church was subordinated to the state; in the second wave, religion was made a personal matter that could not be imposed onto the community.

This is worth mentioning because suddenly, in the last few years, this matter of religion and politics has reared its head again. It's as if a drunk at a dinner party has suddenly gained consciousness and forced the polite guests to repeat the conversation of the last hour. The neocons have revived this ludicrous notion that our laws should be based on religion; the neo-atheists have revived this amusingly unreasonable notion that our values and policy should be based only on reason. Personally, I find the revival of this argument tiresome. I find it tiresome because the church and state are so clearly no longer leading the parade of social development and norms that to spend an inordinate time worrying about which of the two deserves first place is like arguing about whether the Brooklyn Dodgers or Philadelphia Athletics are the better team.

A topic that is far more interesting is the question of why we are so endlessly fascinated by this topic of church and state. I suspect that it is because we have a wealth of arguments to draw from (to support either side) and prefer to parade our intellect in familiar garb rather than retire to the back room to sew new garments. More relevant than the separation of church and state is the separation of state and corporation, the role of the multinational corporation in modern communities, and the transformation of national identity as globalization accelerates.

The church and state argument is to intellectuals what the music of, say, Dylan and the Band is to folks born in the late 1950s and early 1960s: an argument that we can admire, that engages us, even as we are comforted by its predictability. Well, if New Year's resolutions are about nothing else they should be about stretching the comfort zone. Perhaps its time to shift our attention from church and state to question the role of the most powerful institution in our modern world: the corporation.

When is a Blog Not a Blog?

When it's a blob.

Blog is a verb, an active, updated, and on-going monologue for others to hear.

Blob is a noun. It suggests something that just sits there - like a street sign or old book.

This next week, R World will be a blob. Tune in next week and witness it's return as a live broadcast, words streaming across your computer monitor like stock quotes across a ticker tape.

Have a very, merry Christmas. Do at least two things that seem unnecessarily kind: one for someone else and one for yourself.

Cash Flow, a Career & a Calling

I think that an inordinate amount of grief is caused because of confusion between cash flow, a career, and a calling. All three represent very real needs and all three can be ignored - for awhile.

It still amazes me that our school system can keep children in class for 12 years and not bother to teach cash flow. It's my opinion that failure to understand this is the cause of a host of problems. A bill for property tax or car insurance or car repair suddenly comes at you, seemingly from nowhere, and that flush feeling you had just last month is suddenly and abruptly taken from you. You go from a feeling of financial relief to a feeling of dread. Why? You had no decent mechanism for seeing these things in advance. Cash flow is also key to building wealth. The person who resorts to financing a purchase with a credit card and subsequently pays it down at 18% over a period of, say, 3 years is going to have much less wealth accumulated than the person who waits 3 years to make that same purchase, accruing interest at, say, 8%. People who pretend that cash flow doesn't matter usually have a safety net of some kind and foist onto others their needs for money.

A career is different from cash flow. Probably the simplest example of the difference between the two is this: a 19 year-old who subordinates his career to cash flow will drop out of college in order to stay out of debt. His career will be set aside as he works a job in order to meet the demands of cash flow. He's being responsible, in a sense, and should be applauded for his good intentions. But he's being irrational, sacrificing a career path that could make his pressing cash flow problems fairly insignificant in about five to ten years. Ideally, a career represents the intersection between three things: what he's good at, what he does well, and what there is demand for - what someone would pay for. It does little good to ignore any one of these three because to do so is unstable - it's like sitting on a two-legged stool. Properly done, a career addresses the demands of cash flow. That is, the very real demands of cash flow will be met when career needs are properly addressed. Initially, however, the demands of a career conflict with the demands of cash flow.

Finally, we come to a calling. This is not merely a ringing in the ears. This is to career what career is to cash flow. What distinguishes it from a career is that it may well represent something that you don't do well and something for which there may be little obvious demand but it is something that seems inescapably fascinating, unavoidably alluring. Buckminster Fuller said that your purpose is to do what obviously (to you) needs to be done that no one else is doing. You may not be great at this, but this is what you need to do. Just as the need for cash flow seems to conflict with the needs of a career, so does the need for a career seem to conflict with the needs of a calling. Perhaps the way this most obviously shows up is when people take assignments or jobs within their career that preclude them putting their creative energies into anything other than work. The good news is that they make a little more than others; the bad news is that they never get time to reflect or define something bigger, something that feeds the soul. In Po Bronson's book What Should I Do With My Life, he quotes Sidney Ross who says, “The moral is to not set yourself goals which don’t leave you any freedom to maneuver.” Just as a college kid accumulating debt may seem to be sacrificing too much to his working class friends, so might a career guy passing on promotional opportunities seem to be sacrificing too much to his peers who think that a calling is just for professional actors or singers.

I'm of the opinion that you should only marry a person if you can't live without them. A calling seems to me similiar. If you can't pull yourself away from this thing, you need to do what you can to feed it, explore it, and somehow work it into your life. The important thing to remember is that even though each of these - cash flow, career, and calling - needs to be met, you want to subordinate them in the proper order. Don't be afraid to sacrifice the demands of cash flow for your career and don't be afraid to sacrifice the demands of your career for your calling.

The bad news is that this takes a long time to all work out. The great news is that you have your entire life in which to do so. And really, what else were you going to do with your life?

Quick, Laura, Grab My Drugs! We're Invading Iran!

Pentagon officials have announced that they're building up forces for an invasion of Iran. This after the November election indicated that this nation has largely lost its confidence in the Bush administration's ability to start and conduct wars.

Baffles the mind, doesn't it? We require drug testing for grownups playing children's games like baseball and football but don't require psychiatric and drug testing for people who make policy? George has got to be doing cocaine again; his administration has been characterized by unmoored optimism interrupted by random bouts of paranoia. Unbelievable.

Love Politics - Hate Policy

The media was obsessed with the question of whether the Democrats would be able to gain influence in DC. WAS. Now that the election is over, even before these newly elected representatives and senators are sworn in, the topic has shifted to the 2008 presidential election. Could Hillary beat McCain? Will Obama run? What is getting completely skipped is any discussion about actual policy changes that will result from the 2006 election.

Apparently the mainstream media and its audience have no interest in policy. Instead, like high school kids who watch study body elections for signs of popularity, they care only about politics. For them, the discussion of candidates is little different than the discussion of celebrities. "Barak Obama has so much charisma." "Paris Hilton is so hot."

Now if only the media would put as much effort and imagination into making policy as engaging to the common voter as they put into getting interviews with Obama or pictures of Britney Spears, we might finally get the media we pay for.

Best Investment for 2007

The business and personal finance magazines are offering their usual advice about the best places to invest for 2007. I’d like to suggest that you look no further than you.

Imagine two 25 year-old people making $30,000 a year. One person invests $1,000 a year into seminars, books, tapes, classes, and activities that improves her productivity by 15% a year, half of which goes into her paycheck. Another spends his on season tickets, and his productivity grows by only 10% a year (more experience means greater productivity, whether or not the person gets further education), half of which goes into his paycheck. In other words, one is getting raises of about 7.5% a year and the other is getting raises of about 5% a year.

10 years into the career, she is making just over $60,000 a year and he is making just under $50,000. A significant, if not huge, difference. By the time they are 45, she is making about $125,000 a year and he is making nearly $80,000. By 55, she makes about a quarter of a million a year and he makes about half that. By 65, she is making about $500,000 a year and he is making about $200,000 a year – a really big deal.

But here is the most amazing thing. During this 40 year career, she makes $3.5 million more than he does. This little difference of 2.5% on an initial salary of $30,000 a year can make that big of a difference. What mutual fund or real estate investment offers that kind of investment return?

So, where best to invest in 2007? Perhaps you should look no further than you.

The Difference Between Crime & Politics

In politics, you change the laws as pleases you; with crime, you ignore the laws as pleases you.

Blogging, Video Games, the Progression of Art & the Future of Politics

I saw a recent report that suggested that blogging has peaked. I'd like to suggest that the full influence of blogging has yet to be felt.

Renaissance art changed how people thought about reality. The art went from iconic to realistic, from celebrating divinity that merely happened to take a human form to celebrating the human form. The Renaissance, with its emphasis on secular issues and response to market forces, represented a shift from heaven to earth. How people perceive the world through their art makes a huge difference in their expectations about how the world ought to be.

In the last generation, video games have become a huge market. It is not just true that the video game industry has become bigger than movie videos, but I would strongly suspect that time spent with any one video game is a multiple of the time spent with any one video; gamers play for hours and movie fans watch for about 100 minutes. Hence, the time spent on video games is even greater than the money spent on video games. These games have changed the consciousness of a generation of youth.

What makes video games unique in the progression of dominant art forms?

Through the history of the West, the dominant art has arguably progressed from the painting and sculptures of the Renaissance (think DaVinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli) the classical music of the Enlightenment (think Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach), and the novels of the age of capitalism (think Dickens, Faulkner, and Twain) and, most recently, movies. In each of these past forms, the spectator is expected to admire. You are expected to gaze in awe at Michelangelo's David, to listen enraptured to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or become engrossed in Faulkner's Sound & the Fury or sit in admiration of Benigni's film, Life is Beautiful. By contrast, I am expected to become a participant in the video games Civilization or Halo. Video games, although not yet the dominant art form, are different from any other “art” form in the history of the West.

Blogging is to news and commentary what video games are to entertainment; blogs thrust the spectator into the role (however briefly and for however small of an audience) of performer. Blogs blur the boundary between spectator and participant.

Has blogging peaked? I doubt it. Rather, I suspect that the real influence of blogging has only begun to be felt. Just as the orchestration and precision of classical music symphony presaged the factories of the industrial age and Renaissance art shifted focus to the here and now, video games and blogging have changed the definition of spectator and will change what it means to be consumers or voters. The generation that grows up blogging and playing video games is going to scoff at being excluded from participation in formulating policy or having to choose options that have been defined by others. Rather, the politics of this generation will be a politics of participation.

The successful politicians and parties won't pretend to offer a tightly plotted narrative like a filmmaker; rather, they will offer a context and platform for participation, like the designer of a video game. The successful policy makers won’t be those who craft the most admirable policy; they’ll be the policy-makers who are best able to create mechanisms for policy formulation that engage the average citizen.

Whoever first makes this shift will win over a new generation of voters. Has blogging peaked? No. Rather, the medium of blogging has only just begun to change our expectations of politics, policy, and community. As with all technology, the really interesting stage of adoption occurs when new technological inventions trigger new social inventions. This is the dance of social evolution and the popularity of blogging is just the first step in that dance. Get ready. Soon the floor will begin shaking.

The Lost Leaders of Viagra

Years ago I remember reading what one historian felt was a contributing factor to the cause of WWII - the fact that so many could-be leaders of that period had been killed in WWI. It's an odd source of speculation, this, wondering what derailed the would-be leaders of a generation.

Perhaps historians of the future will blame Viagra for our lack of leadership. Historically, men have eventually seen the influence of their libido wane, enabling them to think about grander things than mating. Napoleon Hill claims that the really remarkable men did not begin to do remarkable things until they were past 40 and their libido had diminished to the point that it, no longer acting like an excited dog yelping every 3 minutes, actually allowed these same men to divert their drive into something productive. And perhaps this was the way of the world - young men engaged in exploits designed to impress a mate and old men engaged in tasks designed to make the world better for their grandchildren.

Which brings us to today. Thanks to advances in medical science, men no longer have to divert their attention from the yapping dogs of libido. In fact, they can agitate that dog on command. The result? While problems as pressing as those faced by any generation loom before us, we lack the leadership that could formulate and execute a coherent response.

Where are our leaders? Not killed in a past war but, rather, made AWOL because they've perpetuated the distractions of youth.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Bring me Data on the Future

"History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes."
- Mark Twain

Policy that makes perfect sense in the context of the past doesn't always make sense in the context of an ideal future.

People who frame policy decisions out of past events are largely defined by them.

If you want to see starkly different policies described, try this. Have one person or one group talk about the past and what has happened so far. (This could be a personal past, a past for their company or for their nation.) Once you see that they are firmly in that place, have them describe policy, strategy, tactical options. What you will hear will be variations on their past and will be as likely to describe desire to right wrongs as create an ideal.

If you want people to create fresh policy options, get them to tell you about the future. Have them describe an ideal that they could begin making real right now. Don't even let them engage in reminiscing. In that place, in that ideal future, have them describe who they are and what kind of thoughts and feelings they have. Then have them work backwards towards what policies, what choices, what strategies and tactics they've pursued to get there, starting from the present.

In the first instance, people drag the past into the future with them. In the second instance, they drag themselves into the future. In the first, they are busily mending past wrongs. In the second, they are creating future rights.

It's worth remembering that we have no data on the future - unless we chose to define it by our past. I recently made mention of changing the national dialogue. Part of that would be getting people to talk about possible futures and work backwards from that. Maybe it's time to start remembering the future.

Report on Senator Tim Johnson's Condition

CHULA VISTA (RD) — Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson is recovering from emergency brain surgery.

The family is optimistic about the positive signs of his physical recovery. There are lingering concerns though, that if this has diminished his cognitive functioning Johnson may begin voting with Senate Republicans.

Progress Ignored

3,000 years ago, a potential to be good at math didn't matter much. 300 years ago, being good at dance might well be interesting at best. One of the ways that we've made progress is that we've given a wider variety of talents and potentials the opportunity to find a role, to pursue their passion. As we have a wider variety of career paths and increasing levels of specialization, the individual has a greater chance to develop his or her own personal potential. To me, this is perhaps one of the most overlooked and most important dimensions of progress.

Social Evolution and the Next Corporation

The evolution of technology interplays with the evolution of social structures. The cotton gin played a big role in the demise of slavery. Dee Hock, the original CEO of VISA and the man who probably did the most to change our everyday conception of money, tells how critical an information technology development project was to the success of the credit card. (As credit cards became more popular, it became impossible for banks to keep track of the gap between credit and purchases and to track payments from and to businesses and households. The old manual system literally cost the banks hundreds of millions, probably billions, in the 1970s, triggering an audacious IT project to meet demand.)

It has become cliché to mention it, but information technology continues to rapidly drive down the time and money it costs for communication, research, and discovery. Google now fields 100,000,000 queries a day (according to an article by George Gilder, cited at http://info-innovation.blogspot.com/2006/10/george-gilder-information-factories.html).

Ronald Coase won the Noble Prize in Economics for explaining the reason for the existence of corporations where an economist might expect to see markets instead. He explained that information costs were too high to support daily and monthly markets for work and that in its place people formed organizations that made for stable, predictable, easy to communicate roles. But what if information costs plummet? What does that suggest about the future of the corporation? Suddenly, as the cost of markets approaches zero, the value of the corporation potentially becomes less.

This suggests to me a variety of possibilities, two of which I'll mention here. One is that internal markets within corporations will increasingly substitute for employee contracts and formal roles. The other is that decision-making will disperse outwards from the center along with increased capability for information-processing and analysis. Both suggest to me that the corporation will go the way of the medieval church and Enlightenment-era monarchy: its power will be dispersed outwards from the center, as power and wealth will be dispersed from elites to the "commoners."

If your organization is not reconfiguring in order to exploit new information technology, it is likely subordinating possibility to inherited corporate structures. The management generation of the last few decades has increasingly emphasized innovation - but almost invariably in the domain of technology or process. The management generation of the next few decades will also emphasize innovation - but this will be directed at social constructs, at changing the concept and expectation of organizations.

The cotton gin was exciting, ending slavery more so. The revolution in information technology during the last couple of decades has been fascinating. Transforming the corporation and our very notion of institutions will be even more so.

Britney Spears & the Reverse Pyramid Scheme

1,000,000 websites providing commentary.
1,000 websites reporting news.
100 reporters and photographers documenting news.
1 Britney Spears frantically trying to do enough weird and remarkable things to provide work for this odd and unwieldy media pyramid.

Bill Gates, George Bush & The Predictability of the Unpredictable

I don't think that it's a coincidence that the world's richest man is a software programmer.

Software programming reveals the predictability of the unpredictable. Even smart people who write code very quickly find themselves dealing with unexpected, unpredictable results. These are called bugs. Bugs can be trivial, causing text to overlap in places it shouldn't. Bugs can be catastrophic, locking up the system or causing a program to crash. Bugs are inevitable because lines of code interact in ways that our brains are simply too small to predict.

Microsoft has had a history of failures, but those failures are rarely the final story. It's not hard to think that Gates approached the business setbacks like debugging software - problems that were not to be taken personally but needed to be understood and solved. What context did the business fail to take into account? What unexpected interaction with customer needs or competitor actions or technology ecosystem rendered the old plans obsolete? What new plan would be appropriate? Gates seems to have taken the lessons of debugging to heart, applying them even in the formulation and execution of business policy. The approach has seemed to work.

By contrast, George has been meeting this week with ... Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to formulate a plan for Iraq, a session almost guaranteed to be an exercise in defending earlier decisions rather than discarding them as failed. His administration's earlier announcement about unveiling a plan in December has been pushed back to January. Already George has indicated that he's resistant to the solutions offered by the Baker - Hamilton report. His refusal to listen to that commission or anyone else on the topic of talking with Iran and Syria suggests that military action is inevitable, action that will suck him deeper down the rabbit hole.

It's not obvious that George has written a line of code in his life. As George has encountered problems with his Iraq policy, he's failed to get the message that his thinking, his policy, has bugs in it. Instead, he's blamed the computer (the global community), the operating system (the political dynamics of the Middle East), and the user (the Iraqi's). Never once has it occurred to him to take those as givens and adapt his policy to those realities. Never once has it occurred to him that many of the bugs have resulted from unpredictable (or even ignored in advance) interactions between pieces of his own policy. For George, programming (or policy) bugs are personal.

Bill Gates has become the richest man in history. George Bush has become the worst American president in history. The difference could be as simple as their different levels of willingness to acknowledge bugs and go about the difficult business of debugging policy and thinking in order to better understand reality before taking further steps to change that reality.

If there is one bit of certainty in the midst of all this uncertainty it must be this: we can't change reality until we change ourselves and we cannot continue to change reality unless we're willing to continue to change. And this is perhaps the defining failure that has made the rest of George's failures inevitable.

Changing the National Conversation

My buddy Bill often talks about the need for a new conversation in this country, one that transcends the irrelevant banter that substitutes for political discourse in the popular media. It seems to me that the hope for such a conversation lies in this: we begin asking questions that matter instead of offering answers that don't.

Value of a MBA? Negative $100 billion a year

It's worth noting that George W. is the first American president with a MBA. I'm a business consultant privy to the inner workings of many great companies. I'm not particularly convinced that the way George handled Iraq is all that different from the way that senior management in corporate America handles affairs.

He delegated hugely important issues like the reconstruction of Iraq after the invasion, basically showing little or no interest in helping to solve these incredibly difficult problems. He created a "can-do" culture in which dissent, questioning, and pointing out that a particular plan was unlikely to work were all discouraged. He talked in broad strokes about vision of the future regarding a reality he knew about only through PowerPoint presentations that had been heavily filtered. He focused on a series of intermediate deadlines (e.g., capturing Baghdad, approving a constitution) with little consideration for how achieving those intermediate goals might complicate his longer term goals. His approach to managing Iraq shares many of the traits seen in managers throughout corporate America.

The Iraqi debacle is not just a warning for policy makers in DC. It ought to be a warning for every senior executive seeped in the current style of management.

The Paradox of Organizations

Organizations will always be problematic. Organizations have to institutionalize a particular approach. This can be seen in rituals, process, and a particular solution set. Yet organizations have to be flexible, open to change, willing to abandon what no longer works as they strive to survive.

Create predictable processes and worldview? Or be open to re-arranging around unpredictable learning? Without the first, there really is no contiguous organization. Without the latter, the organization is eventually made obsolete by a changing environment, by changing people.

Predicting Education

Think about the real challenge of education. You have five year olds entering the system. It’ll probably be 2026 before their careers begin and 2066 before they retire. If you go backwards in time as far, you’d be in 1986 and 1946. If we agree that the pace of change over the next sixty years will be twice as rapid as the last sixty years, it would be more appropriate to go back to 1966 and 1886. Whether or not you make it explicit, education is aimed towards preparing those precious little five year-olds for this largely unknown future. It seems to me that we would do well to think more about what that suggests about changes to the system of education rather than focus so much on competition within it.

I’m curious. What would you say most needs to change in education? My personal vote would be for education that includes fluency in systems thinking – raising the expectation that high school graduates would be able to model interdependencies through at least a couple of different methods, understand variation inherent in systems and how to work with that, understand tipping points, etc. Sustaining economic advantage during accelerating globalization, protecting the environment in a time of rapid economic growth, adopting policies that mitigate rather than exacerbate terrorism – all of these and other issues are inherently systems issues that will require a popularization of systems thinking to be dealt with by democracies. I would argue that fluency in systems thinking will be as important to sustaining effective democracies in our century as literacy was to creating them. What’s your prediction about the future?

Three Cheers for John Bolton's Exit

One of the biggest illusions any individual can have is that he can just focus on building a good life while ignoring the community he’s a part of.

If the community deteriorates, it'll provide crime that threatens life instead of vaccines that save it, theft that takes goods instead of prosperity that provides them. It is hard to stay happy in the midst of those chronically sad and hard to stay sad in the midst of those who are chronically happy; even our emotional life depends on the state of those around us.

This ought to impact what an individual does. It should also impact what a country does. There are a variety of reasons to formulate policy that deals with the whole world rather than just our country. One of the biggest reasons is that globalization has made it official - we are one humanity with one shared planet and our fate is bound up. Even the simple and ubiquitous yellow number two pencil depends on trade between three continents. We can’t create a good life on a world gone mad.

Patriotism that pretends that the rest of the world doesn't matter, that we don't need to kowtow to international organizations like the UN, that we can fight childhood obesity without caring about starving children abroad - this is not just immoral. It is, ultimately, dangerous. No matter how strong the individual, his safety is a function of whether or not he lives in a safe neighborhood.

For this reason alone, Americans ought to cheer the fact that John Bolton lost his position as US Ambassador to the UN. He embodied the disrespect for international institutions and foreign people that seems to have characterized what is most repugnant about this Bush administration. His leaving offers hope that the US may again join the world community as a participant rather than dictator.

Happy Tangencies and Recovering From Iraq

Look at A on the left. At a low resolution, it looks like one fuzzy line. At a higher resolution, it looks like two lines that mostly overlap.

Now, look at B. In B, you can see that the two lines that sort of overlapped in fact were just tangents to one another. If you trace the line long enough, it eventually diverges from the circle for a simple enough reason: the line is straight and it can only overlap with the circle for a certain period of time.

I'd argue that all philosophies start as happy tangencies - a line that seems to overlap with the circle, a philosophy that seems to overlap with reality. But eventually such philosophies show their true nature - products of minds much smaller than the world they're trying to explain, philosophies, hypotheses, and beliefs are all eventually shown to be limited and eventually diverge from reality. This shows up in a variety of circumstances. For instance, the problems at WalMart are in part due to their institutionalizing the solution to a past situation - one that is becoming less relevant.

Reactionaries are worse. They don't just cling to a particular world view. They try to recreate the conditions that seemed to make that worldview correct - stop the world and take it back to the point at which the tangent was happily coincident.

Ultimately, this has to do with a sense of awareness about how much we can actually know the extent to which we need to be open to changes. William James put it this way:

“But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways. We may talk of the empiricist way and of the absolutist way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another.” [Louis Menand, Pragmatism: A Reader (New York: Vintage, 1997) 77.]

Some have asked whether there is any hope for Iraq. There is, in the meta-sense. If George would only understand that personal conviction has little to do with actual knowledge and were to express that ... If he were to express a mea culpa that included his denunciation of certitude in the face of complexity, arrogance as an approach, of failing to test the null hypothesis ... That could be one way that this debacle could actually translate into something positive for this country.

Secretary of Happiness

I have decided upon my criteria for the 2008 election: vote for the candidate who takes seriously our declaration of independence and, if elected, creates a new cabinet position: the secretary of happiness.

Since about 1950, income has more than doubled in this country and yet levels of happiness have not budged. This is not a strictly American issue; it is true of Europe and Canada as well. Oddly, no politician seem the least interested in this critical issue that, one might argue, is the only one that makes progress on any other issue meaningful.

The secretary of happiness (The official pursuer of happiness?) would be tasked with the most marvelously interesting responsibility - seeking to increase the level of happiness of the nation's population. Probably one of the first policies would be to institute classes on happiness as a fundamental part of education. [Note the psychology of happiness link to the right of this blog as a great example of what that might look like at the university level.] There is a great deal that we know about happiness but too much of it is stuffed into esoteric journals read by crowds of only five or six. It is difficult to think of a more important measure of welfare than the level of happiness, yet our society doesn't even make an attempt to measure it they way we do daily fluctuations in the stock market or quarterly movement of GDP.

We could have a healthy debate about whether the secretary of happiness ought to be a comedian like Robin Williams or a psychologist who has dedicated his life to studying happiness like Martin Seligman or Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. But surely, no one could debate the need for such a position, could they?

So, that is my criteria for judging a presidential candidate. Any candidate who wants my vote will have to take happiness seriously as a national goal. It has been 230 years since Jefferson and his peers dared to found a country on the notion that every individual has the right to pursue happiness. There is no need to delay any more in taking this seriously.

Vouchers for Teachers

Advocates of vouchers define the education system as something that parents consume. In their minds, if parents were given vouchers that were equivalent to money and could "spend" these vouchers on the school they wanted their child to attend, schools would respond to demand for education like companies respond to market demand.

I'd argue that the parents are not the best decision-makers about how to shape schools: teachers are. In that light, perhaps we should set up a system in which teachers had the vouchers and could spend them as they wished. Imagine what it would be like.

Right now schools spend roughly $6,000 per student per year. Now, give that money to teachers. If they had, say, 20 students they'd get $120,000. But here's the catch. From that money, they'd have to lease or rent a building where they could teach, hire janitors for cleaning, hire administrators and assistants to help them, etc. Now, the entire administrative structure would be directed towards helping teachers to succeed. Rather than focus on pleasing the folks in Sacramento (or Little Rock or Albany), administrators would, of necessity, focus on helping teachers in the classroom. If the teacher(s) did not see any value in the school psychologist, teaching materials, or school principal, those entities would get no money. The ones that did help would receive money - perhaps even more than they do now.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I'm married to a teacher. The neighborhood she teaches in is lower income and she regularly brings home stories of her frustration with nonresponsive administrators or supposed helpers with teaching, cleaning, etc. It would be a very different matter if all these resources that were supposedly directed towards helping children learn were dependent on her for their funding. The level of responsiveness would have to go up.

One of the many advantages to this kind of system would be that you'd have the equivalent of about 6 million businesses (there are more than 6 million teachers in the US) all innovating and creating demand for high-value added resources and materials. What this would do to the level of innovation could be amazing.

Tailoring Self to Fit a Job

Far too many jobs are the information age equivalent of flipping burgers. “Two minutes on side one, 90 seconds on side two – slide onto the bun to serve.” “Look at the data from these stores and determine if there are anomalies or trends that are worth analyzing.” (And the unspoken command is to analyze even if nothing significant has occurred, because one doesn’t want to appear less than busy.) There is nothing particularly engaging about this work, nor is it sustainable as a means for making a living. If a job can be reduced to a set of instructions, those instructions can be fed to a worker in any country – even one where costs are so much dramatically lower that an employee needing enough income for housing, services and goods in a country like France or the United States could never hope to compete with what is considered a good salary in places like India or the Ukraine.

Jobs ought to be process oriented, but not in ways that can be replicated by robots. In his study of happiness, Csikszentmihalyi has found some common patterns to what most engages the individual. The task that most engages us is one that represents a balance between challenge and skill, when both the skill called on and the challenge faced are above average for us. One’s sense of time becomes distorted in such activities, typically seeming to accelerate. And, a paradox emerges from Csikszentmihalyi’s study of flow. The more one loses himself in task, that is, the less self-conscious one is during its execution, the more able is self at the task’s completion. The person who loses herself in the task is more likely to find herself in her work. Thus, the state of mind that Csikszentmihalyi calls flow is not just psychologically rewarding – it is a means for development and growth. The strict adherence to process required in too many jobs precludes the attainment of flow and, by extension, development of the self.

As with carrot and stick, forcing process on the individual shifts the locus of control to the institution. Control not only over what is done but also how the individual develops. This is a kind of control over one’s life that certainly mocks the notion of freedom.

In his book, Good Business, Csikszentmihalyi quotes Robert Shapiro, former CEO of Monsanto. He makes a critical point about how individuals are fit into organizations.

“The notion of job implies that there’s been some supreme architect who designed this system so that a lot of parts fit together and produce whatever the desired input is. No one in a job can see the whole. When we ask you to join us, we are saying, ‘Do you have the skills and the willingness to shape yourself in this way so that you will fit into this big machine? Because somebody did this job before you, somebody who was different from you. Someone will do it after you. Those parts of you that aren’t relevant to that job, please just forget about. Those shortcomings that you have that really don’t enable you to fill this job, please at least try to fake, so that we can all have the impression that you’re doing this job.’”

“It’s a Procrustean concept, and it studiously and systematically avoids using the most valuable part of you, the part of you that makes you different from other people, that makes you uniquely you. If we want to be a great institution, that’s where we ought to be looking. We ought to be saying, “What can you bring to this that’s going to help?” Not, ‘Here’s the job, just do it.’”

What does Shapiro mean by “a Procrustean concept?” Procrustes was a figure in Greek mythology who forced travelers to fit into his bed by stretching their bodies when they were too short or cutting off their legs when they were too long. It is probably true that the vast majority of employees are both stretched to the limits of their capacity in some aspects of their job and literally cut off from real and crucial parts of their self in others. In either case, fitting into a job in such a way does little to realize their own potential or, by extension, the potential of the organization.

In fact, such programming of one’s actions is antithetical to what any society would hope to see emerge: genius. “One admires genius because one has the imagination to see that there is no mechanism in him or his work, nothing that can be analyzed and rationalized, ” Barzun writes.

Maslow's Needs, Bad Societies, and the Modern Corporation

The difference between a bad and good society seems to me rather simple. In a bad society, human needs are subordinated to the dominant institution - whether it is church, state, bank, or corporation. In a good society, institutions are subordinated to human needs.

In a bad society, the very real needs of a human to inquire about reality are shut down by a church with a monopoly on truth. Scientists like Bruno are killed - Galileo shut up by the church. In a bad society, the individual is not allowed an opinion that contradicts the head of state - whether that is Louis XIV or Lenin. In a society gone bad, the 9 year-old loses his childhood to factory work, as the demands of capital are allowed to trump the rights of children.

Today's corporations are wonderful. They create more wealth, products, and services for more people than any social invention in history. And yet the role of the individual within the corporation is a role that subordinates basic needs - even the need to contribute.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs still seems a useful way to articulate human needs. Physiological and safety needs are basic. Beyond that are the needs for a sense of belonging and esteem. Finally, the need for self-actualization.

The good news is that our social constructs to date have brought us to the point that most of us in the developed nations have our physiological and safety needs met. Many of us even have the need for belonging met by our inclusion in a corporation and occasionally we have even our esteem needs met.

But given how unique is each one of us, self-actualization is elusive. One might scoff at this as an important need, but one dimension of progress is the capability to meet successively more advanced needs. I would argue that self-actualization is ultimately a creative act that requires that the individual create his or her own context. This context will be in the form of a social construct - a role that works for the individual. Rarely will such a role be assigned or found and more often will it have to be created.

Yet in today's model of the corporation, the individual's need for self-actualization is simply not a consideration. Oddly, management is largely uninterested in its most important resource actually realizing its potential. And by potential I don't mean some strictly subjective and personal definition (although it would certainly include such an element) but potential to contribute, to create value as measured by markets. Rather, the model of the corporation assumes that the entrepreneur or his / her proxies (in the form of senior managers) will define the roles within the organization and the individual will fulfill them.

Social Inventions and Progress

It is time that we gave more praise to entrepreneurs. Not just those that create businesses and the resultant jobs and products but those that invent a variety of social institutions - from Martin Luther's protestant churches to Jefferson's form of democracy and the Rothchilds international bank and bond market.

One way to overcome a limit is through invention. If you want to overcome the limit of gravity, you invent an airplane. If you want to overcome the limit of capital, you invent stock markets, central banks, and fiat money.

Progress occurs when communities break through limits. They typically do this through new social inventions.

So what limits progress today in the G-7 countries? I'd argue that we're no longer limited by capital. Trillions of dollars of capital is sloshing around the world in search of higher returns - alternately driving up prices of stocks, real estate, art, bonds, and other investments. We're not limited by knowledge workers - especially as the confluence of new graduates from China and India and global technology are making it possible to assign tasks to low-costs mechanical engineers, x-ray technicians, and software programmers.

I would argue that the limit to progress is no longer land, capital, or knowledge work (labor). It is, instead, entrepreneurship.

The central question, it seems to me, is how we trigger a series of social inventions that address modern problems. How do we popularize entrepreneurship, devolving power from corporate elites to the common employee, encouraging more applied creativity? How do we create credible institutions that are able to address the problems that defy today’s institutions – problems like global warming, immigration, and intellectual property? How do we get more people thinking like entrepreneurs, questioning how we create relevant institutions instead of questioning how to succeed within them?

The big problems won’t be solved, nor possibilities exploited, by people focused on succeeding within the current social institutions. Rather, as they have been at every major inflection point in history, they will be solved by people who create new social institutions – social entrepreneurs. Progress in the West has not followed from the best efforts of those who struggled to rise up through the Catholic Church or gain the favor of monarch. Rather, it followed from people who struggled to create new ways of worship and new forms of government – dispersing the power once held by elites.

Cost of the War in Iraq

Here's a make-you-think web site. It tracks the on-going cost of the Iraqi war, numbers scrolling like the cost at a gas pump:

http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

Be sure to play with the comparisons to your local community. For instance, the portion of costs they allocate to San Diego County (about $3.6 billion and counting) could have been used to hire about 63,000 teachers.

If Not a Civil War, What Should We Name It?

Re: Iraq

If we don't call it a civil war, what should we call it? How about "the situation which must not be named."

Imagine How Grateful We'd Be to Have Been Invaded

The blame game in DC has a new target - those thankless Iraqis. The new story is that we did so much for them and the way that they thank us to plant roadside bombs in the path of our troops and finally devolve into savage butchery against each other. Our invasion and occupation is now their fault.

It's worth reviewing in simple English just what happened and assess whether Iraqi reaction is actually so very incomprehensible.

What Happened
Around World War One, the British decided that three regions of the former Ottoman Empire would make a tidy little nation-state and drew a border around Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis. It took a dictator's iron rule to make this pretense real. Once liberated, these groups moved towards independence from one another

Imagine if...
About a century ago, someone had decided that Mexico, the US, and Canada should all be one country. And a dictator had made it stick. Once liberated, various militias were intent on moving back towards three (okay, Quebec, four) separate countries.

What Happened
We dropped bombs on the Iraqis and called it liberation. It is worth remembering that the "shock and awe" campaign resulted in more explosive power than we dropped in WW 2. Even Bush admitted that the invasion killed about 30,000 Iraqis. The Red Cross and other international aid agencies have estimated that the death toll was closer to 150,000.

Imagine if...
Saudi Arabia "liberated" us from our hated president. (The hated president could be George or Bill or Jimmy or Ronald or Dick - any president that some credible portion of the population hated at some point.) To do this they lobbed bombs on our major cities and killed (by their own admission) about 300,000 civilians (an equivalent portion of our population). This is the equivalent of 100 9-11 events. International aid agencies estimated that the real death toll from the Saudi's occupation was closer to 1.5 million civilians.

What Happened
We stripped away the power that Sunnis had under Saddam. They lost their places in government and in the military. Unemployment sky rocketed and is now at 50% or more. These Sunnis who were abruptly laid off from careers in the military were still armed. Further, we kicked in doors to find insurgents, occasionally killing and often harassing innocent civilians in the process. Our military vehicles drove down the middle of their streets and would "light up" civilian cars with gunfire when the drivers did not understand the need to stay back. We began a military occupation of Iraq while touting the benefits of freedom. Worse, the troops tasked with this impossible mission did not speak the language.

Imagine if...
All the Republicans were laid off from the defense industry or military or that all the Democrats were laid off from teaching or government jobs. Arabs with guns knocked in the doors of our homes and forced us to the shoulder of our highways every time they passed by. They interrogated us in a foreign language. Most everyone knew someone who had been unjustly detained, tortured, or even killed. Your two nephews and one niece were killed when Saudi troops bombed their neighborhood in retaliation for "insurgent" activities.

What Happened
We came into Iraq excited about making them like us - passing along a constitution, institutions, and laws that we've evolved over centuries in our, very different context.

Imagine if...
Arabic experts came into our country to establish law based on the Koran as the basis for our laws. Explaining that our laws and culture were primitive because they are not based on teachings from the one God, they changed our constitution to look more like theirs.

Really - who is to blame in this?

What Happened to the Stocks?

I am not referring to technology stocks. Rather, those wooden platforms used by our founding fathers to shame someone who had behaved badly. Head and hands were locked in place and the townspeople could stop by to lob a few inedible vegetables at your head.

Now that the general population and media alike have finally seemed to acknowledge that Iraq was the kind of bad idea usually excused only by heavy drinking, it is time to put some folks in the stocks. My nomination for the first session in the stocks? Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and man so clueless that he doesn't know that he's clueless - the media's biggest cheerleader for wars of invasion and occupation.

What Nobody Says About Social Security

One of the reasons that social security is projected to be a problem is that our population is aging. This problem of more retirees per working person is even worse in places like Italy and Japan. Whereas as one point about 7 - 10 people all chipped in to fund the social security payments of the retired, the projection is that once baby boomers retire the ratio will be more like 4 - 5. Obviously this strains the system.

But system boundaries can be redefined. If you instead define the problem of one of working to non-working population, the problem is less onerous. It is not just those over, say, 65 who working people have to carry; they also carry those under, say, 20. It is worth remembering that as the number of children drops, the ratio of working people to children will raise. If at one point there were about 4 - 5 working people chipping in for the schooling, etc., of every minor, the projection is that it'll be more like 7-10 in the future.

Looked at as a problem of working age population to not-working population (a group made up of school-age children and Winnebago-driving seniors alike), the problem is easier to solve.

(Blogger's note - I'm quickly writing this note in between breakfast and the start of my work day. My researcher has yet to show up for work (and I'm not sure what year they are scheduled to start but apparently it isn't this year), so the numbers I've used are for purposes of illustration only and would match reality only by coincidence. Further, the cost of funding retirement is greater than the cost of funding schooling, so the ratio doesn't have to neatly flip in order for the funding to neatly flip. The point is, you get the point.)

Conservatives don't point this out because they don't want to save social security. Like a man who doesn't wake up his wife in a house fire - not because it would have been too dangerous but because he already had his eye on a younger, sexier wife - conservatives are hell-bent on private accounts (a bad idea that deserves its own posting).

Liberals don't point this out because it suggests shifting money from education to retirement, a budget change that sounds like they're giving up on the future - or at least it sounds like they are giving up on the teacher's unions, one of their stronger supporters.

Two Evils

“Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself.”
- Daniel J. Boorstin

There are two evil yet alluring philosophies offered in the world of politics. One is the allure of offering strong leadership under which we can be safe; we give up our freedoms and rights and in return we are protected. The other offers supposed freedom that is really just disconnection from consequences, irresponsibility under the guise of freedom. The first is the tyranny of an abusive father. The second is the tyranny of spoiled children. In neither is there room or expectation that the individual will create a life of consequence.

My Nomination for the 2006 Campaign's Most Amazing Moment

At one point during his campaign, Arnold Schwarzenegger was standing in Chinatown in LA, surrounded by the delightful buildings and sights made to look like China. Arnold - the Austrian immigrant who thinks he governs a place called Callie-forn-ya. And he says, The key to success as an immigrant is to assimilate.

Rather than comment, I will resort to another quote, this one by Bill Moyers, from an interview he did for Salon in April of 2003.

"I just did a six-hour series, five years in the making, on the Chinese in America. I thought the timing would be unfortunate, but it turned out to be fortuitous. This is the first series I've ever done, in 30 years, in which I actually found the answer to the question that provoked me to do it. I wanted to find out what the Chinese had to say about becoming American, about the American dream.

"One woman I interviewed, out of the dozens of people I spoke with while making that series, explained it all to me. She began to talk to me about eating chicken feet. You've seen chicken feet in Chinese restaurants, right?"

"Yeah. They're terrifying."

"Well, yes, they're ugly, they don't look particularly nutritious, people are squeamish about them. She said to me, 'As an American, I can eat chicken feet. But I don't have to eat chicken feet. I can turn around and eat at McDonald's and nobody questions me.' I said to her, 'What the hell does that have to do with the American dream?' She says, 'That is the American dream! That I can compose my own life. That I can invent who I want to be.'

"We are creating a new American identity, and to take our identity as being opposed to the world, instead of being of the world, is the greatest mistake that George W. Bush has made."

Las Vegas is Your Future

I went to Las Vegas last week and am always fascinated by the place. I can't help but wonder whether Vegas is your city's future.

It's not hard to imagine that as we become more anxious about avoiding boredom we'll adopt the themes that garnish their places of commerce. Our restaurants, shops, and public places may be modeled after great sites like the Pyramids, Paris, or Mecca (okay, maybe not Mecca).

If you were to fly someone around in a hot air balloon 100 years ago, floating above the earth's surface, what are the odds that they would have chosen the site of Las Vegas as the world's most popular tourist destination by the year 2000? There is a certain kind of genius there that even I, a guy who has yet to gamble a total of $20 in my entire life, can admire.

What are they marketing besides fascinating sites? Hope. We are creatures of hope and without it life is hopeless. The casinos are merchants of hope and we accept risk in return for hope. And this is the inescapable equation of life -embrace risk to get hope. We see it when we chose a major in school, a partner in life, start a business, or simply plan a vacation. Risk and hope come as a package deal.

And in this Las Vegas offers acceleration for those impatient with how gradually their lives are unfolding. Life is a game of chance but it can take decades for the dice to land. In Vegas, the frenetic energy translates into acceleration: results - good or bad - are played out instantly, the feedback immediate.

In 30 years, you may be wandering through a public place that looks like Stonehenge, complete with Druids chanting poems, and you'll know by then how the dice have fallen for your life. Wherever you are, you'll find yourself in Vegas - either a winner or loser or having oddly broke even and inexplicably caught in a strange place and time that looks vaguely reminiscent of a place you've never been.

Recycling Politicians

The US seems stuck. We can't get out of Iraq and we can't stay in. The Iraqis are rejecting American-sponsored democracy, seeming to favor something more absolute, less given to the vagaries of public opinion - something like the religious leadership and political stability offered by a caliphate. Meanwhile, the Republican Party suffered defeat this month in no small part because it was seen to be too intent on ignoring reason and science in favor of religious beliefs. As a result, a number of Republican politicians are unemployed.

Once again, the very juxtaposition of these problems immediately suggests a solution. We don't leave or stay in Iraq. That is, our troops leave but we exchange them for our leftover politicians. Republicans could offer the religious rule that many Iraqis seem to prefer to democracy. The Iraqis have stability. The politicians who gambled their very careers to bring good government to Iraqis have a chance to be that government. The US is free to move on, continually buffeted by the inevitable turbulence and uncertainty that characterizes this wonderful mess we call religious freedom and democracy. And should he accept the role as Iraq's Defense Secretary, Rumsfeld would finally have the lean military he has wanted for decades.

At last, the happy ending the world has been craving.

At Least This Pope Has a Crazy Sense of Humor

Today's News, courtesy of the AP: "Pope Benedict is calling on leaders of all religions to turn their backs on any form of violence in the name of faith."

From 1981 until he was elected pope, the former Cardinal Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - once known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

What does it mean to turn your back on violence? Apparently it means to ignore it. So often religious leaders get so self-important and somber that it's good to see that this pope has an appreciation for the absurd.

What OJ Tells us About the Media

Once upon a time, in a land not so very far away, the media had a particular role. Its business objectives included making a profit, yes, but its purpose was to make this a better country.

In today's world, the health of the Republic is subordinated to profits. Fox demonstrated their commitment to this principle of profits first when they decided to broadcast OJ explaining how he would have murdered his children's mother if he had. The fact that Fox chose not to go through with this plan says nothing about their conscience and everything about their awareness of the power of consumer boycott.

The enlightened person realizes that one's own fate is always bound up in the community she's a part of. We exist only in a web of relationships and to ignore the health of this web is to ignore any credible definition of self. Yet what are the prospects for a community when their very media forgets this?

Business guru Peter Drucker said that a business's purpose is never to make a profit anymore than a person's purpose is to breathe. Profit is necessary for a business but it is not a purpose. One wonders how well, if at all, the modern media could articulate such a purpose if unable to use the words "ratings" or "profit."

Perhaps the saddest thing about this is how keenly so many journalists realize this and how well they could articulate a mission. Yet one of the things that I repeatedly see as I go into organizations - from medium-size companies to Fortune 10 companies - is that leadership, sadly, sets the bounds for ambition and rarely can any individuals within an organization sustain efforts that transcend the bounds set by management.

Wages at an All-Time Low - and that could be a good thing

Wages and salaries constituted only 45% of the GDP last year - the lowest it has been since records were kept in 1929. I think that could be a good thing.

How could a populist applaud the erosion of the working man's wages? Well, one other large component of the GDP is corporate profit. And the fact that everyone keeps forgetting is that in just the last few decades, the ownership of corporations has been rapidly dispersed to a wider and wider group of people. As corporate profits account for a higher percentage of GDP, profit-sharing can be more widely dispersed. Lower wages doesn't necessarily translate into lower household incomes.

The return to knowledge work is wages and salaries. The return to entrepreneurship is profit. As we manage to popularize entrepreneurship (one component of which is the dispersion of corporate ownership), we should encourage the fact of households getting a higher percentage of income from profits.

The point is not to bemoan a decrease in incomes as a percentage of GDP. The point is to insist on an increase in profit sharing so that individuals' goals are aligned with their employers and so that the resultant increase in shared profits and wealth more than compensates for a relative decline in wages.

el goog - the reverse search engine

Google works by pointing us to the most popular sites. It basically encourages conformity of thought by herding us all in one particular direction on any given topic. It has become the new traffic cop of thought and research.

Because of this, I propose a reverse google - "el goog" - as a means to counter its force. El Goog would point you in the direction of fringe theories, dissident opinions, and marginalized thinkers. Where google might begin with a refernce to Wikipedia or the BBC, El Goog would point you to sites that explain conspiracy theories. It might simply sort the sites returned by means of a random priority algorithm.

El Goog! Resist the herd mentality.

The End of Education as We Know it

I once did a calculation, projecting that we'd increase the level of education as much in this century as we did in the last. In the last century, only a small percentage of 13 year-olds were in school and even a smaller percentage of the twenty-something population was. By 2000, about 97% of the 13-17 year-old population was engaged in formal education and about 20-some percentage of adult population had a college degree. This has helped to fuel a huge increase in productivity and economic growth and the importance of education is widely accepted. The problem is, we can't continue with the same model of more formal education for more people as a means for continued economic growth.

If we continued to increase education as much in this century as we did in the last, we'd have a generation of 50 year-old graduates in 2100. Barring some wild innovation in student loan programs, this is probably not feasible.

So given that education is so vital, how do we improve it as much in this century as the last? The answer will probably take a century to articulate, but I suspect that it will start with an observation made by one of our great thinkers.

Russell Ackoff points out that we've taken a classically analytic view of work, play, and learning - approaching them each as separate. We build schools where people are expected to learn but not play or work. We build stadiums and playgrounds for play. Factories where people are not expected to play or learn. Although the human experience defies such neat boundaries - play, work, and productivity are not so neatly contained within proscribed environments - we nonetheless pretend that it is.

Perhaps the answer to learning is to break down the walls between work and learning and play, changing our expectations of all institutions. Montessori's high schools are much rarer than Montessori preschools. Why? Perhaps part of the reason is that she felt that teens were ready to run businesses as a means to both feel productive and to learn. Imagine how much that could benefit communities? And what of requiring any MBA grad actually manage a community improvement project - some activity directed at addressing a problem of road salt dumped into creeks reducing the number of trout spawned? or homeless populations that lower property values? or intersections with accidents? or creating a voice for residents trying to influence local government? Imagine a work place that actually awarded a group of employees a degree for deciphering the code of their culture and how to change it for the better - a task that may involve a blend of formal education, assessment and practical changes to policy?

How to Measure Fair?

I recently read that the world's two richest men - Bill Gates and Warren Buffet - said that the most important issue facing communities was the issue of economic fairness. To my thinking, there are at least two measures of economic fairness: distribution of income and social mobility.

The first, income distribution, is fairly straightforward. People are born with a variety of skill sets and abilities. Some are able to make millions per year and some can barely tie their shoes. It seems as though a fair economic system would let the folks who make lots of money keep lots (but not all) of their money and would make sure that everyone has at least the first two levels of Maslow's hierarchy (physiological needs and safety needs) met. Communism in its purest form is not fair because it doesn't let those who work harder or smarter or better keep more money. Capitalism in its purest form is not fair because it ignores the plight of the inevitable losers.

The second measure of fairness is social mobility - the degree to which those born to poor parents can and do become rich or those born to rich can and do become poor (and the middle class rise or fall as well). We want an economic system that rewards initiative, creativity, intelligence, and hard work. These character traits are not limited to second and third-generation wealthy, so we would expect to see some variation from generation to generation.

In an economy so dependent on knowledge work, a fair economic system depends on a fair school system - giving each child, no matter how poor his neighborhood, the chance to gain academic and vocational skills that could enable him to make as much money as someone born to affluent parents.

Finally - A Plan for Iraq

Here's a plan that would save us money and lives and might even gain us friends in Iraq. Only Halliburton might lose in this plan.

First, it is worth noting that before the invasion, Iraq's total GDP was $22 billion. We are now spending $100 billion a year on the occupation. The plan follows almost automatically from the juxtaposition of these two facts.

Pull out the troops. In its place, put in a plan to pay each Iraqi a sum that would total up to about $55 billion - about $1,000 per Iraqi and more than twice as much as they had before the invasion. This plan suggests a variety of questions, but it would be an opportunity for the conservatives who so strongly supported the invasion to show their faith in markets.

How to rebuild Iraq? Let every family have money to pay for contractors to repair their portion of the country. This might well prime the pump, stimulating construction projects and new businesses. We could have a plan to pay the sum for, say, two years, and after that draw down the sum by about 20% a year until it reaches a stable point.

What would be the result? We'd save money and lives. Iraqis would have resources to help themselves. And the 50% plus unemployment might even drop as the economy was infused with money that could be used to buy goods and services.

What is the old bumper sticker? Tourists go home (and leave your daughters). This could be similar. Troops go home (and leave your budget). It's time that the conservatives remembered that they don't trust government programs and do trust markets. Let their policy reflect this.

Ugly Residue of Protestant Faith

Martin Luther was able to form a new religion in no small part because he appealed to the desire of German princes for independence from Rome. At one point he wrote "Some have estimated that every year more than 300,000 gulden find their way from Germany to Italy … We here come to the heart of the matter. … How comes it that we Germans must put up with such robbery and such extortion of our property at the hands of the pope?"

The Protestant movement coincided with the emergence of nation-states as the new dominant institution in the West. Having a state religion made it easier for the head of state to maintain control. It also became a catalyst for centuries of wars that were fought by parties who saw little difference between religious affliation and patriotism.

In this is the still unfortunate residue of the Protestant innovation in religion. At its best, the Protestant faith shows an independence from church dogma that characterized centuries of the Roman Catholic monopoly on thought. At its worst, it becomes an adjunct to the feelings of national superiority that justify violence or injustice.

At its best, religion transcends national boundaries. At its worst, it becomes apologist for the meanest of nationalist feelings.

The Invention of Santa Claus

In the late 1800s, factory output soared. Suddenly, factory owners no longer limited by how much they could make were limited instead by how much they could sell. Capitalists had learned to rapidly make products; in order for this new economy to work, consumers had to learn how to rapidly consume them.

One key to this was retail. Department stores emerged about this time – Marshall Field’s in Chicago and Macy’s in New York were doing business during the Civil War. But the success of consumerism depended on two fascinating social inventions that helped make the new retailers successful: window displays and Santa Claus.

Advertising was not new to this period. But a particular form of it was. Department stores had to stimulate interest and one way that was done was through store window displays. In the late 1800s, it was considered rude to stare into windows, so stores hired professional gawkers whose job it was to stare into store display windows and induce others to do the same. A pioneer in store window displays was L. Frank Baum (1856 to 1919) – better known as the author of The Wizard of Oz (1900). Both his books and displays invited observers into a magical world that promised delight.

The second social invention has become as ubiquitous: Santa Claus as we know him was an invention that helped to transform this period of mass production into one of mass consumption. It is no coincidence that Christmas gift giving emerged from this period. “In 1867, Macy’s department store remained open until midnight Christmas Eve, setting a one-day record of $6,000 in receipts.” Around 1870, Christmas made “December retail sales more than twice those of any other month.”[1] Santa Claus and window displays were simply forms of a new and important activity – marketing - changing people's minds about what they considered normal purchases.

In the words of children, what did Santa Claus bring us? By 1870, the United States had the largest economy in the world. “For the first time in history, even ordinary folks could aspire to ownership of those hard goods – watches, clocks, bicycles, telephones, radios, domestic machines, above all the automobile – that were seen in traditional societies as the appropriate privilege of the few. All of this was facilitated in turn by innovations in marketing ... Mass consumption made mass production feasible and profitable; and vice versa.[2]”

Merry Christmas and Happy Shopping.

[1] James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) 260.
[2] David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why some are so rich and some so poor (New York: Norton, 1999) 307.

Fourteen Categories of People

There are a variety of reasons that my politics tend left. One is my sincere confusion about the absolutes that seem so absolutely clear to so many on the right.

For instance, the conservative may think that some are worthy of some kind of public assistance - perhaps orphans and widows - and others should fend for themselves. That is not so clear to me. It seems to me that there is, instead, a spectrum and the lines one draws, the categories that are useful, depends on the situation.

I don't consider myself needy but there was a stage in life when I greatly benefited from public assistance. My parents provided for me. I have no obvious physical handicaps (you have to watch me engage in sports before my lack of celerity, coordination, and skill become glaringly apparent). To a certain brand of conservative, I would likely be an example of someone who needed no public assistance. And yet I could have never afforded to pay for college myself - not private college that is. I was only able to get university degrees because my education was subsidized by the government. Could I have made a living without university degrees? Yes, but I doubt that I would have done as well.

To neatly categorize people as those who need help and those who do not is to set arbitrary categories that ignore the subtleties and grays of reality. As I listen to some conservatives offer their stark truths I think of the delightful (and fictional) Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge that Jorge Luis Borges pretends to quote, as follows:

"For your consideration, friends, the fourteen kinds of animals: those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in the present classification, those that tremble as if they were mad, innumerable ones, those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, others, those that have just broken a flower vase, those that from a long way off look like flies."

I realize that much of liberal policy can seem wishy-washy, to come in shades of gray rather than black and white. I suppose that if the world seemed to me more clearly black and white, I would more readily embrace a philosophical stance that was less nuanced, less full of caveats. But I do know that there are about as many categories of things as there are people to categorize them. Some people look embalmed, some are trained, some are pigs, and some tremble when they are mad. Along this spectrum of people one has to draw the line differently for different reasons.

If we are serious about freedom, we have to allow each individual this most personal of freedoms – the freedom to categorize the world as he or she sees fit. It is this element of freedom of religion that still so few understand. In such a world, to have one group stand up and pretend to talk for everyone is not just scary – it seems as though their description of reality is as odd as Borges’ fourteen categories of animals.

Wealth and Power in the Attention Economy

In the attention economy, there are three classes: those who depend on others for the structuring of their attention, those who are independent, and those who structure the attention of others.

Wealth and power in this attention economy suggests control over the attention of others. You may run the company in which thousands work, able to direct the attention of the company towards a particular market or emphasis. You may control the media that directs the attention of viewers, listeners, or readers. You may write influential books or TV shows that change how people think or write sofware programs that define how they work.

Poverty in this attention economy suggests dependence on others for the structuring of attention. You may depend on a boss to tell you what tasks to think about and how to think about them. You may depend on TV programming to decide where to focus for the evening or weekend.

Who controls your attention? Whose attention do you control? The answer to those questions suggests a great deal about the resources you have command over. Because until you have control over your own attention, you can’t control much else.

Airport Security Made Simple

As a frequent flyer, I spend too much time in airport security lines. I've put time in line to good use and thought up a simple solution for the problems of having to repeatedly show ID: wear a simple t-shirt that has an arrow pointing up to my face and just below it text that says, "Yep, it's me."

Two Paradigms Walk Into a Bar

Two paradigms walk into a bar. The one paradigm says,
“I’m right and can quote myself to prove it.”
The other paradigm sits stunned, looking at his drink. He finally looks up, dazed. “You are a reliable source?”

Paradigm 1 says, “As I was saying just yesterday.”
Bartender: “You’re quoting yourself?”
Paradigm 1: “Sure. Who else can I trust?”

Bartender: “But you aren’t always consistent.”
Paradigm 1: “It seems to me that I am.”
The bartender turns to the second paradigm. “How about you? Do you trust your memory?”
Paradigm 2: “Sure. I mean, what I remember always seems to jibe with everything I can remember.”
Bartender: “Don’t you ever forget?”
Paradigm 2: “Not that I remember.”
Bartender: “What if I could point out to you times when you forgot?”
Paradigm 2: “You have apparently forgotten that I don’t trust anyone else's memory.”

The bartender asks, “You really don’t refer to any other sources?”
“I don’t trust any sources other than me,” say paradigm 1 and 2 simultaneously.
They look at each other, surprised.
“At last,” says the bartender. “Something you two agree on.” He smiles. “You finally have some basis for agreement.”
“I’m not so sure,” say the paradigms, once again in unison.
After staring incredulously, the bartender finally admits, “You may be right.”

A Life of Faith

Faith is a fragile but vital thing. Lives are acts of faith. Relationships require faith. Learning suggests faith in the future relevance of what you’re learning. Many of us are aided through life by faith in a God of love. But one of the hardest things to retain faith in is the self you have yet to become.

Faith is the evidence of things not seen. That is, it is evidence that is created because the individual undertook a task or project not prompted by evidence but, rather, by hope or expectation. A life of faith need not require faith in the supernatural, metaphysical, or God.

All of us have some notion of what we aspire to become. To lose faith in some variation of that is to accept that our life will never be different than what it has been. At best this prospect is tiring. And oddly, such resignation is itself an act of faith – faith that things will never change.

The beauty of faith is that it doesn’t require past evidence. The beauty of faith lived is that it will eventually create its own evidence. If even one person has faith that a God of love works through individuals to show care, there will be evidence that a God of love works through individuals to show care. If you have faith in the you who has yet to be, you will eventually create evidence of that self. Faith is a fragile but vital thing. Nurture your faith until it reaches the point that it has produced its own evidence.

I’ve grown convinced of two things. Most people have little sense of their own potential, of what they could become, of the impact they could have, of the fullness with which they could live life. And almost no one realizes how much work it will be to realize that potential. Getting through it all requires faith. Don’t mock your own sense of potential, no matter how ill-formed or unrealistic it may be. Nurture it, grow it, create something real with it. It just might return the favor, because this is, ultimately, a reciprocal relationship: first we nurture our faith and then it nurtures us.

I Love America

I once again got one of those "America - love it or leave it" kind of emails that always perplex me. I'm never quite sure how to respond.

I guess one could just agree … in a way that disconcerts them. This is a great country. It’s big, beautiful, has lots of opportunity, has helped to create fantastic things like the modern corporation and jazz music. We let our creative people – in the arts, business, or even politics – take their shot at disrupting the status quo. This is a wonderful place.

But which America do they want me to love? The America of Woody Guthrie or Senator Joseph McCarthy? The America of labor union activists or robber barons? The America of hip hop or rock or hymns or jazz? The America of John Steinbeck or Hunter S. Thompson, Eudora Welty or Walt Whitman? Tony Robbins or Billy Graham? Ralph Nader or Pat Robertson? The America of Jimi Hendrix or George Strait? Hells Angels or the KKK? Rednecks or latte-sipping yuppies? Wall Street types who get $30 million bonuses at year end or agricultural workers who get $30 at the end of the day? Evangelicals who get in your face to save your soul or the atheists who get in your face to tell you that you don’t have one? Ivory-tower liberals or sitting-at-the-diner-counter conservatives? Strip miners who leave the ground turned inside out or environmentalists who want all construction projects to stop?

America is such a big sprawl of a place with such diversity that I’m never sure what it means to say that you love it other than to say that you are a cultural omnivore who loves (not just tolerates) diversity. It is an amazing country and the oddest experiment in social diversity that this planet has ever witnessed, a place where worldviews and religions are started like fast-food franchises. To say that you love America is to say everything and nothing, I suppose.

I love America.

500 Years of Modern Science and Still No Way To Un-Scramble an Egg

I don't know why someone doesn't just come out to say, about Iraq, that there is no way to fix the wreck. Sometimes in life things are bungled so badly that they can't be fixed. Perhaps there is no exit strategy, no means to achieve success, not even a stable definition of success. Perhaps we've simply opened a Pandora's Box that can't be closed.

Until the moderates admit this, the neocons will continue to defend their policies from change with the claim that, "They haven't got a plan to improve things," where the "they" is the moderate Republicans and Democrats who oppose their policies. As long as moderates deny that this may be beyond repair, they continue to leave themselves open to the "They haven't got a plan" accusation.

Enough already. The drunk slumped behind the wheel is right; we don't know how to repair the car he has so badly wrecked. That doesn't mean that he should get to keep driving.

Your Media Has Been Hijacked

Again I wake up to morning radio news that is focused on Iraq. My president (sigh, yes, he is my president too) spends roughly half of the state of the union speech on Iraq. Politics, media, and even discussions have been hijacked.

It is as thought the neocons have come to the dinner party and no matter which way the conversation turns, they bring it back to their obsession with car wrecks or dissecting frogs.

What is never mentioned about this chosen fiasco is that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has stolen the bandwidth that would have otherwise gone into domestic and foreign policy issues of great import. Not only do we fail to arrive at a consensus about these issues but these other issues don't even get discussed.

Here is my proposal (realizing that writing into a blog is the equivalent of speaking into a mirror). For one week, the American media ignores Iraq. The situation has reached a stable point - bloody, tragic, chaotic but stable. Neither Democrats or Republicans have a clue about how to extract us from it without triggering even worse chaos that threatens to engulf the gulf. The media is obsessed with Iraq but the attention we pay to it doesn't seem to be of any help.

Instead, for one week we get our country back. Stories are about health care, education, transportation, housing, crime rates, the environment, outsourcing, free and fair trade, the political shift in Central and South America, new discoveries in fields like cognitive science and genetics, and the wealth of events that define the modern world. It is worth remembering that there are 300 million Americans and 6 billion people on the globe who are busily living.

One week with no Iraq. Really, is it too much to ask?