Tag: Miscellany

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

My new Mac OSX operating system is working beautifully. At first it felt really new, almost foreign, but now I’m sure it’s every bit as Mac as the old Classic system. Maybe more so.

One of the new gizmos is a clock that can be made nearly transparent and floated anywhere you like on the screen. AND… it can be digital or analog. I love the 1950’s-simple analog version, complete with red sweep second hand. After years of almost exclusively digital time-keeping, I can once again see that time and space are the same thing. Somehow 11:25 and 11:35 just don’t look different enough to me, so I just keep working until I’m late for my lunch date. But when that minute hand hits bottom and starts up, I know it’s time to go!

I recently heard of some kids asking their teacher why we said “half-past” or “top of the hour.” I suppose that goes in the same category as “dialing” on radios and telephones — and modems, of all things. I’ve been changing the desktop display on the computer on the solstice and equinox dates, just to keep in touch with the seasons. Posted the moon phases on my homepage. Guess the clock was a natural next step. Hmmm… I wonder, what now?

I’ve been thinking this last year or two about corporation, markets and economy and how they fit with compassion, caring, and openness. A number of recent posts have been tinkering at the edges of this. Perhaps I’ve been settling a bit of frame for myself. An email from Penny Scott (BALLE BC)yesterday gives me an opening to push into the center of this a bit… maybe even on the way to a Center of some kind…

towards restorative economy, markets etc: …if the act of compassion by its definition (mutual) transcends self as separate…and capitalism is a free-market system based on private ownership and is characterized by a free competitive market and motivation for profit (encarta)….then [corporate compassion] as language and action would seem to be the essential evolutionary current?

taken in parts now:

if the act of compassion by its definition (mutual) transcends self as separate…

yes, transcends self as separate… AND includes self as separate. Ken Wilber strikes again after TheObvious brought him back to mind this morn.

…and capitalism is a free-market system based on private ownership and is characterized by a free competitive market and motivation for profit (encarta)

i don’t know “encarta” …but i don’t think that people are after ‘profit’ in markets, not primarily and essentially, anyway. if we say that it’s merely about profit, i believe we flatten (more shades of TheObvious) the life out of market participants (all of us). it reduces our needs for security, freedom, power, well-being. it reduces living beings with needs and wants and interests to economic entities that feed on a monoculture of money profit.

but since we know that profit, per se, is not essential to life, we can say this another way. we can say that if markets and their movements are consistent with the flow of life, and ‘profit’ in itself is not essential to life, then there must be other reasons for our being in markets. life reasons. we can’t get past the ‘profit’ unless we get underneath it to those needs whose satisfaction *is* essential to life. food, shelter, hope, future, direction, support. and if we can see and satisfy those life reasons for entering markets, real needs for living, then i think the interim ‘need’ for profit begins to dissolve.

also worth noting, markets are not only based on private ownership… they are also based on public space. no space, no market. without a commons, then we can only have me crossing over to your territory to deal. or you crossing to mine. if there is no other trading space, there may be the sense that there are no other traders, and no alternative to the prices that we quote to each other.

without some other trading space, real physical trading space or at least mindspace wherein other trading/pricing alternative choices can be plausibly imagined and analyzed, then there may be not movement between us… there is always the chance of deadlock or dominance. have you ever been in a marketplace where the seller tried to convince you that his/her product was the only option, tried to keep you from considering others? i think we naturally recoil from those who would limit our access to the rest of the ‘market’ that we know is out there.

we need big markets, open spaces, and commons because they provide the mental juice that lubricates our individual dealings, they mediate life in the same way parks and streets and meeting halls mediate our living together in physical spaces.

….then [corporate compassion] as language and action would seem to be the essential evolutionary current?

yes, i think so. my teachers, julie henderson (ZapchenSomatics)in particular, have led me to understand compassion as one of the conditions that arises naturally and automatically whenever i am able to let another being be as real to me as i am to myself. i think this mutuality of being and perceiving happens naturally in markets that are open and full of people and information. markets that are open conversations. markets are full of risks. they make us vulnerable. they drive us to look around, pay attention, be more aware.

harrison owen (OpenSpaceTech originator) has pointed out that the agora, marketplace, in ancient greece is the root of agoraphobia, fear of the outside. markets draw us out of ourselves and into the world. in open space, the marketplace we open draws people out of their own smaller issues and departments and into the world of the larger organization. it’s exciting, and can be frightening. we go there, out into the markets, because we need their gifts… we need their compassion… we need to be known and noticed, connected, conversing.

to balance the risks, we look for returns. profits. and we join together in corporations, not to eliminate risk (and liability) but to share it around. so profit and corporation are interim steps in a much bigger and deeper coming together. a fortune 150 company i worked with recenty has gathered 140 nationalities to do work in 100 countries. held up against a backdrop of international tensions and wars, their coming together is truly phenomenal.

everywhere, i think, we are learning to be more aware of self, my needs (willingness to pay), AND aware of others, you and your needs (the costs of my actions). we are learning to see these things simultaneously and directly… and coming into an awareness of a new being that is ‘us’ and is bigger than you or me. it transcends you and me as one ‘us,’ while still including ‘you’ and ‘me’ as separate beings.

i’m told that this simultaneous awareness of two beings or experiential states is quite difficult and rare, that in the U.S. no more than 15% of adults ever learn to do this. julie henderson says it’s quite a bit harder than rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time. i say that this is what we are practicing in markets, a sort of rubbing your tummy and patting my head at once. you scratch my back and i scratch yours, each giving attention the attending and the being attended to.

in the moments that it really works: compassion, love, joy, and new openness show up! the real joy is in the connection, not the calculations. the more directly we can move toward the connections over the calculations, the more these essential states of compassion, love, openness, and joy in our work can feed us all. the connections are in the markets, the spaces we open between us and for ‘us.’

thinking this must eventually point to the ways that we can expand our understanding and practice of corporation, marketplace, ownership and awareness… for more and more compassion, love, joy and openness. noticing too that this must be the Nature sort of shift that Jon Husband (Wirearchy) and Doc Searls are talking about as deepest level changes, taking longest time. but i’m not at all convinced that they are layers as Jon presents. i see them more like four quadrants translated from Ken Wilber: consciousness/awareness/caring (Nature)… culture/story/seeing (Culture)… structure/support/movement (Governance/Infrastructure)… finance/diversity/making (Commerce/Fashion). i think we cycle through them like the seasons.

i draw them in a cycle because each new fashion stretches our awareness of what’s possible. further, i would resolve the timing issues raised by noting simple that each one has its own time. awareness can appear to grow soooooo slowly but then hits in a flash. infrastructure changes are clearly drawn up quickly, but take long time to build out. four seasons. four entirely different times. one cycle. world without end. amen.

Up to my eyeballs in Mac OS X. It’s going to be very sexy as soon as I figure out where everything I used to know about Mac now lives and works on this new platform. A good exercise in noticing all of the subtle ways that imposed structure forces mind into pre-set directions. More and more pre-set file structures in each new version. Might be really helpful for some, but it’s just so much clutter to me. Used to be that there was no open space on the hard drive and plenty of open space on the screen. Now, with the addition of a new external hard drive, there is gobs and gobs of open storage space and almost none on my screen thick with windows. Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. The joys of mind restructuring. argh.

…system, check. browser, check. email, check. blogger, check. what’s next? food, maybe? that would round out the essential first round, anyway…