Integrated Man

Reflecting on Jobs... Steve Jobs

This tribute is somewhat unlikely coming from me, but well earned by its recipient, though not for the reasons most obviously stated in the news.

First, I mourn Steve Jobs passing as a human being, apart from his accomplishments, his impacts, the externalities of his existence. He is large and unique in my awareness because of all those trappings, but they should not be primary measure of his meaning and value.  Ultimately, he was a human like all of us, born into this life with certain innate abilities and shaped by acquired values that gave those abilities direction and drive.  He was most importantly the embodiment of the potential that all of us possess in varying degrees, but rarely exercise to potential.

End Game

When my daughters were growing up, and coming to me for advice on some crucial problem in their lives, I would put them through a three question drill to clarify the issue (not necessarily resolve it):

1)    What's the worst outcome you can anticipate?

2)    Are you prepared to accept it?

3)    If not, what are you capable of doing and willing to do to prevent it?

Again, these questions do not resolve the issue, but they set the boundaries of possible consequences and responses.  It seems that a lot of adults in high places need to ask these questions on some critical issues.

Capitalist Papers 8: Capitalistic Cannibalism: Self-Destruction by Self-Consumption

Capitalism is a self-destructive paradigm.  I'm not speaking of private enterprise, or a competitive business environment.  I'm speaking of the mutant form of these two economic dimensions that we refer to with unquestioning reverie as 'Capitalism'.

It is self-destructive because it has become addicted to a form of cannibalism that, having devoured its competition, turns on itself in a self-consuming act of gluttony, with the drug of profit stimulating the endorphins for its own destruction.

Three phases of Capitalistic Cannibalism appear to exist: competitive cannibalism; customer cannibalism (what I call "stage 1 death by metrics"); and corporal cannibalism (no, not 'corporate'; corporal -- the consumption of one's own body in a final desperate act of survival(aka: stage 2 or 'terminal' death by metrics)).

Pull the Plug; Walk Away

Concerted Procrastination is an accepted and well worn decision-making practice among senior executives in all venues -- government, business, NPOs.  The theory is that, if you can wait long enough, difficult problems will resolve themselves when all options have been reduced to the worst one by default.  Then the 'decision' is inevitable, and often unarguable.

I,too, though not a senior executive by any means, have practiced it on occasion, most recently in relation to forming my personal opinion on the efficacy of the Government assisting the US auto industry to a soft landing.

Capitalist Papers 2 - Corpocracy and Agency

Capitalism has been a vehicle for vastly improving and advancing the human condition.  But no system is perfect, and Capitalism's flaws are becoming progressively more apparent. While it is unlikely to collapse as dramatically as Soviet styled Communism, neither is it likely to survive in its current mode. 

However, before I delve deeper into this subject, perhaps it would be useful to separate Capitalism from some of its philosophical underpinnings that are as vital to a democracy as to a Capitalist paradigm of economic enterprise.

Inconvenient Truths, Asymmetric Response and Unintended Consequences

I have often thought that the most valuable contribution of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, was its title.  Although it spoke specifically to Climate Change and our unwillingness to face its multifaceted implications, there are many inconvenient truths in our lives, and our unwillingness to address them directly accounts for many of the problems we face. 

Take Iraq for example. 

Binary Thinking

Show me an issue that is framed in terms of two options: A or B, black or white, blue or red, left or right,...
...and, nine times out of ten, I'll show you a dysfunctional dialog.  There is almost always a third choice, if not a fourth, fifth, sixth..., simply because:

1.   rarely does one person or side have all the answers to any issue; and

2.   if they did, rarely would society embrace it.

Yet we persist in couching issues in this context, and we persist in pursuing seriously flawed policies, if we survive gridlock.

Clim-Ergy - It's About Time

2007/12/09

Clim-Ergy:  The combined manifestation of two phenomena - Climate Change and Constrained Energy - into a unified paradigm of impacts, and requiring a unified human response. 

I just made up that definition.  But the term and its meaning have been fermenting in my mind for about nine months since I gave a presentation on Climate Change impacts to the Joint Environmental Committee of the Connecticut Legislature, and subsequently testified on behalf of a bill to study the impacts of Climate Change as they might pertain to Connecticut.   The bill got stalled to death by the end of the legislative session, but the experience of attempting to navigate the bizarre bazaar of the state Legislature (and I'm sure that Connecticut is by no means unusual, our specific quirks notwithstanding) was instructive of why we are, and will be for the foreseeable future, in 'deep twinkies' regarding progress on either Climate Change or Constrained Energy. 

Outsourcing our future

2007/10/27

David Brooks' column in today's New York Times,The Outsourced Brain, touches on an interesting dichotomy. The advantages of our technology that expand our capabilities on the one hand, also have a curious way of rendering us more vulnerable.  While Mr. Brooks addresses this issue on a personal level, it has some profound relevance on social, civic and organizational levels.

The theory of outsourcing as it has evolved in business over the past twenty five years is to focus on your 'core competencies', and leave everything other than those core competencies to others who possess greater efficiencies or economies of scale or competence to execute them.  In the beginning, this was little more than a ruse employed by some corporations to downsize internally to create a lean and mean image for investors and to shed costly internal staff for less expensive 'external staff' (who, coincidentally, were often the same people they previously employed).