Author: Michael

Last year about this time, as the US was gearing up for war in Iraq, I began telling friends that (independent of my own views on GWBush and Iraq) it was my only slightly twisted opinion that if Bush is elected to a second term, he could end up being the second-to-last American president. The short logic on this is that we as a nation were becoming so divided that if such an administration were to continue for another four years, the divisions would be irreparable. At the time I thought it would take a second Bush term and then another four years for the Union to actually start coming apart.

The longer logic posited that a combination of increased military spending (cost), increased taxes, increasing global protest against us, decreased willingness to buy our products, currency and securities, the rise of the euro and the loss of our status as the printers of the world’s reserve currency… all collude to make the USA brand name really expensive here and not very well liked (or supported) around the world. Notice, too, that the most important “security” forces are fast becoming local police, fire and healthcare workers.

My guess was that education and healthcare, both essentially locally delivered by people we used to call “neighbors,” would be shortchanged by federal funding — then reclaimed by the locals, at the expense of the feds and the federal system. My musing was that California, the world’s 5th largest national economy if it were to stand on its own, could lead the charge and maybe take a few neighbors with it. I wondered if the gubernatorial recall couldn’t be a practice run for doing things previously politically unthinkable. I wondered how much California pays in taxes and how much it gets back, but I never actually looked it up.

Well, it’s made for an interesting year of conversations, especially while I was in Canada last summer. But now I see that the Utne Reader reported in Jan/Feb issue that there is a thriving and remarkable viable secession movement underway in Vermont. I see some big names like John Kenneth Galbraith (noted economist and former ambassador to India) have endorsed the Vermonters plan. I read about some of the horrendous things being supported by essentially invisible government support of some corporations. It makes me wonder if peacefully dissolving the union wouldn’t be the single most beneficial thing I could support with my limited time and energy.

Think of how many more people would be involved in “national” political and economic deliberations if every state needed to make security, currency, trade and human rights policies for themselves. What if smaller-than-national groups got together to deliberate on the benefits of hosting the businesses of some of our more destructive corporate citizens. What if decisions about Alaska’s federally owned oilfields were made by Alaskans rather than federal bureaucrats in Washington? Might get to be a much more livable place, long-term.

So often, activists attack moves like Monsanto’s patenting of strains of special Indian rice and Bechtel’s purchasing rights to South American water supplies. The activists see this as market action and attack the economists who defend open trade and markets. But the market didn’t certify Monsanto’s right to the Indian seeds — the US government Patent Office did. And the local governments down south are the ones who initially and violently enforced Bechtel’s ownership claims. Markets don’t take sides. Markets facilitate movements. It’s the interventions that cause trouble… and the bigger the government, the bigger the intervention and more removed the decision is from We The People.

For me, it’s not even about taking sides on this one. It’s just about getting ready. Given the mounting social, economic and political costs of our federal government, I simply don’t see how it can be sustained. As the Utne article points out, the people of the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia didn’t think they’d come apart as fast as they did. And then there is Arthur Andersen… when the costs go up and the brand name goes to pot, the castles can come down in a hurry.

I see today somebody is selling t-shirts that say “Voting is for Old People.” Yikes! …but local-national elections would be a whole new ballgame. Forget about voting by internet. It’ll be voting by cellphone. Oh yes, and let’s not forget that the mass political media machine would be undone right along with the feds. Or the administrative vacuum that could and would be filled over time by more global groups and structures.

Try this one out: We The People, in order to form a more livable, sustainable, humane and happy State/Region… Or how about one with a decidely Chicago ring: Hail to da Mayor? (Long live da Mayor.) In the end, you see, it doesn’t really matter who is president.

My future starts when I wake up every morning… Every day I find something creative to do with my life. — Miles Davis

via George Nemeth at BrewedFreshDaily.

This from Dan Bassill, founder and director of the Tutor/Mentor Connection:

…T/MC has launched a new Program Locator that we feel will make it much easier for a parent, social service worker, volunteer or donor to find a specific tutor/mentor program in the Chicago area. It enables visitors to search for tutoring and/or mentoring programs based on where they are located (zip code), what type of tutoring/mentoring they offer, what age group they serve, and what time of day the service is offered.

The Program Locator and other services offered by the Tutor/Mentor Connection, are developed primarily with the help of volunteers. If your company or foundation would like to sponsor this service, or help the T/MC expand it, mailto:tutormentor2@earthlink.net.

An important new open marketplace! The T/MC also points out that “no child left behind” should really be “all children in jobs/careers by age 25.” An important clarification of purpose.

Penny Scott blogs Richard Tarnoff’s recent article:

…only within the past century have economists decided that the purpose of human activity is no longer the pursuit of happiness but the pursuit of wealth. Eighteenth- and 19th-century economists, including Britain’s Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, considered happiness to be the goal of all economic activity.

I want to rest on this thought and come back in a bit with a slice of Austrian economist F. A. Hayek. But first, a quiet moment to consider the economics of happiness.

This on corporate ethics from IncMagazine recently…

Like art, hemlines, and marriages, corporations go through cycles. These periodic but powerful historical chapters redefine what companies value as essential to their success and cultural identity. And, in parallel, what their finicky audiences demand from them. One such cycle started with the civil rights movement and elongated itself all the way through women’s issues and diversity. Another cycle started as 1980s environmentalism and has remained relevant as postmillennial sustainability. In the 1990s it was aggressive entrepreneurship and the rate of technology adoption.

We are now entering a cycle where ethical accountability will shape the way companies will be judged and valued. This isn’t ethics as ornament, as the accessory of the moment, but as a new systemic force and reality. [and yet] …there is neither a valid nor proven ethical infrastructure in place to track and monitor business ethics. Our putative watchdogs–auditors, corporate boards–have shown themselves to be easily fooled at best and part of the problem at worst.

This piece goes on to suggest things like televised board meetings, and other structural shifts. These will not be enough. There must and will be shifts of corporate mind. Opening meetings, executive tax filings, and corporate financials is important, but we must also find ways to open the hearts of boards, managers, employees, shareholders.

We (each of us and all of us) need to become more aware of what we do and how it is connected to everyone else, and be willing to do differently as individuals and organizations, to get more of what we all want. Corporate ethics, revised legal structures and third-party watchdogs won’t be enough. We need fierce hearts to begin to openly mediate between corporate power and ethical vision. We need to cultivate Corporate Compassion and Care and Connection, the clarity to distinguish between and the strength to hold all as dearly as we do our ourselves. And, given this tall order, we need to be willing to tolerate uncertainties and mistakes. This might be the toughest part, and real heart, of it all.

Begun a year ago rather quietly, this notion of Corporate Compassion is fast becoming the major theme here at GlobalChicago.

This from my friend and colleague Patrick Lambe in Singapore. Seems they’ve got a nice group blog going on Knowledge Management as an online newsletter for their Info and Knowledge Management Society.

Some interesting info in the blog, but I’m still partial to Calvin. The funny pages and newspapers as a whole just haven’t been the same without him!

Elsewhere but related, it was refreshing to see former cabinet secretary Robert Reich talking about Lifelong Learning as an economic imperative (mentioned in same breath as Wage Stabilization) in yesterday’s NYTimes, too, btw. Used to be just us yahoo Outward Bound instructors and experience-based educators saying such things.

Robert McTeer Jr., president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, as reported by Bloomberg:

“Good economics says you don’t try to stop destruction of jobs in the creative destruction process,” McTeer said in a speech today to Texas community-college teachers in Fort Worth. “We have to have an environment in which new jobs are being created to replace those lost.”

The U.S. economy has lost 1.05 million jobs since the current expansion started in November 2001, creating grist for Democratic Party challengers… Some members of Congress are calling for legislation to help stem the loss of jobs to cheaper labor markets such as India and China.

“I’m kind of concerned about the general trend away from free trade in the rhetoric these days,” McTeer said in response to a question following the speech. “A lot of this talk is the equivalent of saying we want to be inefficient — that we want to do a lot of work to get what we want,” McTeer said. “If we just want jobs, we should outlaw bulldozers and just make people use shovels.”

Consider compassion as a natural view or state that arises from mutuality that can distinguish without separating. Then, we can see that the choice is not whether to preserve jobs to save the people or cutting jobs to save the companies. When we see them as not separate, the obvious solution is better training and support for people between companies. Feed the market, feed the movement.

The resilience and confidence that also arises, with that view and that training, in individuals and the nation as a whole, automatically dissolves any need to fear, separate from, or defend against India or China, as well.

This is just too cool. Play with the balls.

via DocSearls

Doc Searls posting on generalized passivism and the need for widespread activism reminds me to share this from the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation:

…NCDD has been working with Utne Magazine, Conversation Caf

This is the kind of local/global marriage that I’ve been suggesting can be an alternative to local versus global. More evidence that we need not “organize” or “build” new, local, sustainable economies from scratch. We need only to surface what is already happening. Google is global (and marketplace), but its users are local (and can be responsible):

According to the Kelsey Group research firm, last year saw a doubling of internet searchers seeking local merchants. One of the popular tools is the GoogleLocalLocator where you search my merchant type and zip code or address – with links and maps.

via SmartMeetingDesign

An interesting view of the depth and power of market, specifically the American labor market, in by Bloomberg columnist John Berry…

According to the most recent quarterly Employment Dynamics survey, 7.69 million jobs that existed at companies last March had disappeared by the end of June. Most of them, 6.14 million, were the result of cuts at companies that reduced employment. The remaining 1.55 million jobs were at thousands of firms that went out of business.

Meanwhile, other expanding companies had added 5.99 million payroll jobs and another 1.52 million appeared at companies that had not been in business in March. In other words, in what was widely regarded as a stagnant job market, 6 million people had found a job.

All that churning left a net loss of 180,000 payroll jobs, the figure to which everyone was paying attention. That relatively small change masked the fact that roughly 12 percent of all payroll jobs were reallocated among businesses over just a three-month period.

Phenomenal really, and all of that managed with nobody really in charge!

Still mulling TheCorporation documentary we saw earlier this week in Toronto. First review would be: sensational, important, confused and misdirected.

The film raises critically important issues related to milk and media, seeds and CEOs, water and world trade. My concern, however, is the film’s intense focus on corporate structure, control and the indirect power held by shareholders and regulators. I think this sort of focus only strengthens our deep cultural belief in, reliance on, and surrender to these things… which necessarily undercuts our deepening of personal awareness, community conversation, individual responsibility, and direct, democratic exercise of personal power.

In taking this focus, I think the film ventures to play a game that it can never win, rather than boldly re-creating and re-bounding the entire field of play. Too often (though not exclusively) it tacitly accepts a popular view of the structure, the lawyers, the traders, the “corporation” as the enemy, the oppressor, the other. Too often, the film feeds on and feeds into the polarities, externalizations, disconnections, and objectifications that are the heart of the a “corporate” consciousness that is creating the conditions that the film seeks to change. It’s the polarities in our consciousness, not the structures of our corporations, that must be transformed and transcended. To focus on the fight, feeds only the fighting.

While the film offers a number of stories of ordinary people effectively claiming and collecting their own personal power to direct their own futures, by far the most prominent of these (in emotional and screen-minutes terms) is the story of South American peasants taking to the streets in violent protest against the corporate (Bechtel) purchase of the entire nation’s water rights. I don’t quarrel with the protest or its outcomes. I do question, however, the screen minutes given to this form of action and the scarcity of attention brought to other, more helpful and whole, ways of taking action. I’m looking for ways that all of us can feed this essential and global shift in our understanding and exercise of power and responsibility. We need to find and feed the peace, not the polarities.

I do hope lots of people see this film — because the stories are important. AND… I do hope there will be a sequel that will do more to cut through the confusion, polarities and disconnections that this first film has — for better or worse — embodied so well.

I don’t have a TV at home, so the hotel TV is its own adventure when I travel. Last night I caught a bit of the old 1972 movie “Westworld.” It’s about a Fantasy Island sort of resort where there are several theme worlds populated with robots who are supposed to create all kinds of pleasures and adventures for guests. Of course, the computers go berserk, can’t be shut down, and almost everybody dies. You might remember Yul Brynner as the computerized gunslinger who hunts one guest, marching relentlessly on like an energizer bunny through all kinds of creative attempts to put him down. Striking was the time period and the fear/distrust of computer technology. Pleasure, adventure, out of control, dangers unstoppable, until the batteries run out.

This morning, I notice that computer, info tech, and network structure are mapped in InvitingOrganizationEmerges to the level below “market.” I wonder if we don’t fear/distrust open markets and the rising tide of globalization in some of the same ways we used to fear the relentless rise of technology. And is the rise global markets any different from how earlier humans feared the shifts ushered in by things like cars and electricity? Profitable, exciting, out of control, dangerous, unstoppable. The new movie with runaway markets as the bad guys might also be called Westworld, but it’s hard to say how scary it will be… or for how long.

Then again, that movie might be called “The Corporation.” We’re heading off to see that one momentarily.

When I’m home all day at my desk, I read the web and blog what I find. When I’m out on the road, like here in Toronto, I read differently. I notice a massive stone building whose construction more than a century ago strikes me as a wonder and a mystery now. Funny, because it’s not as if we don’t have magnificent old stone buildings in Chicago. Our hotel room looks out on what must be a dormitory across the street: its windows offer an Israeli flag, a rainbow flag, a skull and crossbones flag, a 3’x4′ photo of Michael Jackson with FREE in big letters down one side, and eight bright yellow placards protesting high tuition fees. At lunch with friends I savor mushroom soup, client stories, and “accelerated performance.” Afterward, I find a bookstore full of light, space, music, beauty. An outdoor ice rink. Ginger cookies. Exchange rates. Pesto on thin crust. Fresh towels. Mileage. Wind chill, and Celsius. Sky. Kiss. In all senses, we are what we eat. And we blog accordingly. It’s good to be out.

Found this in the latest copy of Utne…

At 29, Eckhart Tolle was a research scholar and doctoral candidate at Cambridge University in England. He was also deeply miserable. As he lay in bed one night, gripped by an intense dread and loathing of his existence, he experienced a profound spiritual transformation. His first sight upon waking was the light of dawn through the curtains. “Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize,” he later wrote. “That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself.” Though the room was familiar, he realized he had never really seen it before. “I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.” …Giving up his doctoral pursuits, Tolle psent almost two years with “no job, no home, no socially defined identity,” sitting on park benches in a state of intense joy. In time, people began to approach him with questions about the power of his presence. Their dialogues became the inspiration for his books…

Heading off to Toronto for a few days of now. If I find a bookstore to get lost in, Tolle’s books will be high on the list of diversions.

…again, from John Engle:

Merline and I do live, witnessing the violence of grinding poverty: hungry people on one’s path so often, children living on the streets, people who are seriously ill but have no money for treatment or pain relievers. The violence that is making the news right now stems from the grinding violence of poverty, which usually doesn’t make the news.

And, in the midst of it all, our lives are full with friends and rich moments. The construction of Kent and Shelly’s house was recently completed. Our neighbor Rosias, oversaw the construction of a simple, well-built house on Merline’s and my land. We decided it was a moment to celebrate. And what fun we had. Fried plantain covered with picklees (spicy coleslaw), chicken, rice and beans, cake, wine, rhum punch, soda and beer…not to mention chocolate cake. We sang and danced and pretended to be possessed by ‘lwa’ spirits, and then to be converted and possessed by the holy spirit. The jokes and laughter flowed as freely as the big bottle of red wine.

There is a time to be sad. There is a time to be joyful.

We like to think such things could never happen here… but we also used to like to think that stocks could not actually go to zero. Seems important to remember how to do joy, not just entertainment or amusement or pleasure, but true joy and happy. We never know when or where it will be needed.

Having posted recently that dualistic, us v. them, thinking is obsolete… I should add to my last posting that the idea is not to defeat speeches and philosophy with policy that springs from conversation, but to transcend and include speeches and philosophy in this next bigger thing, the conversation, the market, the open exchange of, for and by the many.

Seems, then, that it’s not the ability to see the two separately, to see choices, that is becoming obsolete. That’s still essential. The thing that’s getting old is the making of one dominant over the other, at the expense of their union. Public speaking is essential to public conversation. Everyone must speak out, write out. Claim their author-ity, as Jon Husband calls it. Look, listen, and appreciate wisdom. This shift is speeding up, and spreading out, the discourse. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine doing both, speeding and spreading. It’s not how organization used to work… but it is how Movements work!

EricNorlin and DocSearls are talking about the shift from Internet (presentation) to IDENTInet (dynamic exhange, emphasis mine). PeggyNoonan wrote Sunday about our political choice now between Republicans who she says rely on philosophy and communicate best via speeches and Democrats who more readily rely on policy and communicate best through talking points in interviews. I sum Noonan as a choice between talking at and talking with. Control or conversation. I’ve written about the shift from digital organization to InvitingOrganization, from command-and-control to post-and-host, from network-based dominance to market-based community, and care. A-tipping, tipping, tipping… we go!

What’s more, I’m guessing the identity infrastructure Searls and Norlin want to build into the Net is closely akin to our asking conveners of breakout sessions in OpenSpaceTech to put their names on their papers. Passion bounded by Responsibility. We’ve got a Net full of passion… and we’re just starting to harness it to responsibility. www.wow.

ChrisCorrigan has been reading and quoting some stuff that I’ve been saving and want bring out here, as time allows. In the meantime, he adds this to what I posted recently as CorporateCompassion,

Reading this immediately brought to mind a quote from (who else?) Vaclav Havel, out of a short essay he published in the most recent issue of TheWalrus. The essay is called The Culture of Enterprise and it aligns nicely with Michael’s writing and something I posted a few weeks ago on the nature of my business activities:

…it’s worth stressing that entrepreneurship is above all about the creation of values, not about the accumulation of wealth. Of course material gain – profit – is the force that drives the market economy, but it should be understood to a far greater extent as an essential instrument of human creativity, not as an end in itself. By far the best way for an entrepreneur to support culture is by shaping the culture of his or her own enterprise, its quality and its significance. The human and social measures of success, common sense, humility before the mysteries of nature and the world, consideration for future generations, a well-developed conscience – all of these things have to enter into the creation of the culture of entrepreneurship.

Practice first, and profit follows.

This from a recent blog posting by friend and colleague John Engle. He runs the Experiment in Alternative Leadership in Port-au-Prince, Haiti…

Now, once again, we