Prisoner of Our Thoughts

I was looking forward to reading this book when I found that Alex Pattakos had written it. I was not disappointed. I looked forward to reading the book because it was based, at least in part, upon Frankl's classic Man's Search for Meaning. I read and studied Frankl's book 25 years ago at a particularly low spot in my life - my younger brother, Bill, had died suddenly of a heart attack when he was only 40. My father was quite ill with heart disease, and I was about to be diagnosed with cancer. What was the meaning of life? Frankl's answer to that question influenced me in many ways, more than I ever realized until I read Pattakos's book. Since I had not read Frankl in over twenty years, I could now see how his teaching had informed my life.

This is a great book - probably one of the best books on work life yet written. I read the book in one sitting (something I've never done before), marking the book and making numerous notes. I intend to give it to my friends as gifts.

Pattakos writes in his preface, " This book deals with the human quest for meaning and, therefore, was written with you in mind. It is grounded firmly in the philosophy and approach of the world-renowned psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, author of the classic bestseller, Man's Search far Meaning (named one of the ten most influential books in America by the Library of Congress). Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps during World War II, is the founder of Logotherapy, a meaning-centered and humanistic approach to psychotherapy. His ideas and experiences related to the search for meaning have significantly influenced people around the world. In this book, you will find a conceptual foundation, as well as practical guidance, for examining your own questions about meaning in your work and everyday life.

The goal of this book, moreover, is to bring meaning to work-that is, to do for the domain of work what Frankl, as a psychiatrist, was able to do for psychotherapy. Because I am defining the notion of "work" very broadly, the message in this book applies to a very broad audience as well. In fact, it applies to volunteers as well as to paid workers; to people working in all sectors and industries; to retirees; to individuals beginning a job search or career; and to those in "transition." And, because this book demonstrates how Frankl's principles actually work in a generic context, its message can be applied to everyday living too. In this regard, besides introducing you to Frankl's core ideas about life, the book is filled with examples, stories, exercises, and practical tools that can help guide you on your path to finding meaning at work and in your personal life.

"It was in a meeting with Frankl at his home in Vienna, Austria, in August 1996, when I first proposed the idea of writing a book that would apply his core principles and approach explicitly to work and the workplace, to the world of business. Frankl was more than encouraging when, in his typically direct and passionate style, he leaned across his desk, grabbed my arm, and said: "Alex, yours is the book that needs to be written!" As you can imagine, I felt that Frankl's words had been branded into the core of my being, and I was determined, from that moment forward, to make this book idea a reality. And so it is."

We are by nature, creatures of habit. We seek to identify and stay within comfort zones. These comfort zones are patterns of thoughts. As we repeat these patterns of thought over and over again. We begin to believe that life happens to us and limit our own potential. We become prisoners of our own thoughts.

"Viewing life as inherently meaningful and literally unlimited in potential requires a shift in consciousness," writes Pattakos. "It also requires responsible actions on our part for, as Frankl points out, the potential meaning that exists in each moment of life can only be searched for and detected by each of us individually. This responsibility he says is 'to be actualized by each of us at any time, even in the most miserable situations and literally up to the last breath of ourselves.'"

We choose how we respond to life. "...life doesn't happen to us. We happen to life; and we make it meaningful."

Pattakos discusses not only personal transformation, but also the transformation of work itself.

"The transformation of work in the twenty-first century is, in many respects, a call for humanity - a new consciousness that suggests more than simply trying to strike a balance between our work and our personal life. It is a call to honor our own individuality and fully engage our human spirit at work - wherever that may be."

"The goal of this book is to bring meaning to work...," writes Pattakos. I believe he does an excellent job in this 187-page book full of wisdom and insights. It is a must read.

The book is divided into eleven chapters - Life Doesn't Just Happen to Us, Viktor Frankl's Lifework and Legacy, Labyrinths of Meaning, Exercise the Freedom to Choose Your Attitude, Realize Your Will to Meaning, Detect the Meaning of Life's Moments, Don't Work Against Yourself, Look at Yourself form a Distance, Shift Your Focus of Attention, Extend Beyond Yourself and Living and Working with Meaning.

Pattakos has synthesized more than just Frankl's Search for Meaning. He has read and studied most of Frankl's work and interviewed Frankl himself. He occupies a unique position to write this book.

He has created seven principles from his work:

1. Exercise the freedom to choose your attitude-in all situations, no matter how desperate they may appear or actually be, you always have the ultimate freedom to choose your attitude
2. Realize your will to meaning-commit authentically to meaningful values and goals that only you can actualize and fulfill.
3. Detect the meaning of life's moments-only you can answer for your own life by detecting the meaning at any given moment and assuming responsibility for weaving your unique tapestry of existence.
4. Don't work against yourself-avoid becoming so obsessed with or fixated on an intent or outcome that you actually work against the desired result.
5. Look at yourself from a distance-only human beings possess the capacity to look at themselves out of some perspective or distance, including the uniquely human trait known as your "sense of humor."
6. Shift your focus of attention-deflect your attention from the problem situation to something else and build your coping mechanisms for dealing with stress and change.
7. Extend beyond yourself-manifest the human spirit at work by relating and being directed to something more than yourself.

"All human beings, Frankl would say, ultimately have both the freedom and responsibility to position themselves along two key dimensions of life," writes Pattakos. These two key dimensions are success-failure and despair-meaning. Where are you right now in this continuum? Are you where you want to be?

"There is something in us that can rise above and beyond everything we think possible. Our instinct for meaning, at work and in our daily life, is ours right now, at this very moment. As long as we are not a prisoner of our thoughts," concludes Pattakos.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather recognize that it is he who is being asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and only he can answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
Viktor Frankl

Between stimulus and response, there is a space.

In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response.

In our response lies our growth and our happiness.


Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, Simon and Schuster, 1984


Prisoner of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl's Principles at Work
Alex Pattakos
Berrett-Koehler, 2004

Future Frequencies

This is the first really new book about a different way to look at the future in quite some time. It's creative and original. And, it offers the potential of a methodology to stimulate non-linear thinking that could lead to breakthroughs. It is not a book that can be used to forecast the future. The authors are less interested in forecasting the future than in creating a future for their clients - a future that might include disruptive innovations.

The process appears like many other processes:

1. Future Framing: Establishes the context for the present and potential leverage points for the future
2. Future Pulsing: Using leverage points, identify influences and influencers to provide an insight into future triggers.
3. Future Mapping: Sculpting the triggers into future platforms.
4. Future Scaping: Creating the future scenarios from the selected platforms.
5. Future Tuning: Arriving at a preferred future.
6. Future Fabbing: Implementing the preferred scenario.

But looks are deceiving. The words used are unique in this context and have to be studied to be understood.

The key that weaves itself through the entire book and process is the author's encyclopedic knowledge and understanding of international avant-garde arts (music, sculpture, "paintings", writing, visual effects, sonic effects, etc.). They deconstruct the art and artist to get at how they think. Since by definition the avant-garde is radically different from the common, the ways of thinking are also different. If these ways of thinking can be used to help clients see their world in a different way and after perceiving the world differently, think and act differently, the seeds of disruptive innovation may be planted.

Woodgate writes, "In attempting to create a broader initial context and vision for a futures project, it is essential to break out of the framework set by the client's expectations and agreed deliverables. Otherwise we might replicate what the client could achieve without futurist input. Creating future visions is about breaking down traditional thinking, both ours and the client's. In our work at The Futures Lab, we are looking for revolutionary, not evolutionary, outcomes. As such, the process of "thinking the unthinkable" is a crucial part of this initial stage in terms of providing more "out there" input into the "wide angle lens" and systems dynamics models that we use. It is a mindset, not a "mouthset." Having an unfettered frame of mind at the beginning of a project is critical to the final output.

My basis for adopting the "thinking the unthinkable" concept stems from my early contacts with the Fluxus movement. In 1962, I attended the Festival of Misfits in London, an event organized by Daniel Spoemi and Robert Filliou. At the time, I thought of it as simple absurd fun. Later, as I got more involved in the movement, I realized its complexity and the fact that it was about the inclusion of everyday actions, and in doing so, breaking down the values held among traditional artistic disciplines. I was inspired by the power of Claes Oldenburg's statement: I am the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man's metal stick."

The book is filled with great quotes and the descriptions of many avant-garde artists and their work - some mind-blowingly different what is consider normal. It is not an easy read, but a book well worth the investment of time and mental energy to comprehend.

"The impossible attracts me, because everything possible has been done and the world didn't change." - Sun Ra


Future Frequencies
Derek Woodgate with Wayne Pethrick
Fringecore, 2004

Free the Beagle

This is probably one of the most creative business or personal development books you will ever read. Free the Beagle can be interpreted on many levels and can be read by entrepreneurs, business people, innovants, inventors, change agents, children, women and men. Each person who reads it will likely take away a different message, but all the interpretations I've heard are positive.

Free the Beagle is the Hero's Journey described by Joseph Campbell. It is a trip into the workings of our mind. It demonstrates the power of culture and convention to limit our capacity for growth. It is philosophy. It's uncommon sense. Is it autobiographical?

Peering over the rims of his glasses, the towering judge said, "You have questions, Counselor Intellect?"

"What about my cases?"

As he strode toward the exit behind his bench, Judge Grey answered over his shoulder: "They have all been reassigned."

"Surely there is a schedule - charts, maps, a budget?"

Framed now in the doorway to his private chambers, Judge Grey turned to face the lawyer. "Your journey will take what it takes."

And he was gone.

The lawyer is ordered on an unwanted journey with a Beagle in his care, a gift to the Son of the King in Destinae. On his trip he encounters a variety of strangers who befriend him or hurt him, but each teaches a lesson.

A shadowy gentleman in a formal riding coat slipped quietly from behind a tree. "Well, well, well," he said in an elegant whisper. "What brings a man like you so deep onto the Forrest of Confusion?" Seeing that the lawyer was somewhat taken aback, the shadowy fellow bowed like an aristocrat and, with a calculated flourish, produced a card from his ruffled sleeve. "My name is Worry," he smiled, "and I'm here to help you."

Drawing himself quickly up to his full height and straightening his clothes as best he could, the lawyer asked in his best lawyer voice, "Do you know the way through this forest?"

Worry replied softly, "Oh, but I was born in this forest."

Worry introduces the lawyer to Fear and Fear brings in Panic. They rob him of everything that he has. He is left unconscious. He awakens with the Beagle on his chest - the one he had tied to the tree - wondering how the beagle had gotten free.. He still has his duty and obligation to fulfill, but nothing else but the clothes he was wearing and a Beagle named Intuition.

Intellect, the lawyer, and Intuition, the beagle, encounter many adventures together on their way to Destinae as their partnership grows.

If I tell you much more, you won't have to read it and I want you to read the book. It's a fun read with only 125 pages and CD recording of a reading of the book in character.

The Origins of Virtue

To make the next step in our organizations and societies, we need to develop cooperation within ever widening systems. And, if we are ever to develop "innovation commons", we must master cooperation and trust. An "innovation commons", calling on the old idea of a common pasture for a town where all the residents could graze their animals, is a place where ideas can exist, like the early molecules in the primeval sea, free to combine and reproduce to create even more complex ideas. A place where the stability of the complex ideas can be tested and their survival gauged. "Innovation commons" will be required to foster the trans-disciplinary innovation necessary for the merging of information, biological and nanometric technologies on our horizon. Innovation commons are needed now to handle the sociopolitical, economic and demographic problems we face amidst growing partisanship and yes, even hatreds. And, we must assure that we don’t fall prey to the "failure of the commons" where an individual or entity exploits the commons to the detriment of all others, and eventually themselves.

Dawkins writes, "In the beginning was simplicity. It is difficult enough explaining how even a simple universe began. I take it as agreed that it would be even harder to explain the sudden springing up, fully armed, of complex order – life, or being capable of creating life. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is satisfying because it shows us a way in which simplicity could change into complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they end up manufacturing people."

Dawkins uses the phrase "selfish gene" not in the sense that the gene has a motive or emotion, but in the sense that it is convenient to express the actions of genes in human terms. Genes behave as though they were selfish. His perspective is that we humans are "survival machines" for our genes. His revolutionary concept is that genes use our bodies for reproduction and not the other way around. Dawkins asks the question, is there a general principle of all life, even radical life forms unknown now? He answers his own question writing, "…all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating machines."

If our bodies are survival machines for the genes within us, that does explain a lot of human behavior. Some individuals kill, steal, rape, dominate and otherwise consider only their own survival and well being. But, on the surface it does not seem to explain other, higher forms of human behavior – altruism, care for others, cooperation, collaboration and other humanistic traits we have.

These three books address this issue from various viewpoints and offer at least two different perspectives. In addition they provide an insightful look at human behavior in general, and worthy of your study.

"Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another: ‘My hereditary material is the most important on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain and even death’. And, you are one of these organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity" comments Robert Wright.

The basis for cooperation according to Wright and Ridley depends upon our awareness of with whom we share genes. Clearly we share genes with our children and it is advantageous to the survival of our genes that we care for our children and assure their survival. But we do not share genes with our mates. We care for them because they can help in the survival of our own genes through our children. We also share genes with our extended families and likewise will help them survive because it increases the probability of the survival of some of our genes.

I’ve done a lot of consulting work with small towns and I often hear the same phrase, "I like it in a small town because people care for one another. You don’t get that in big cities." In a small town "everyone is related." This is of course not strictly true, but is largely true. People in a small town do share a lot of the same genes. It’s in the gene’s interest to help assure the survival of people who share some of the same genes. This is not true of large cities.

The next factor that comes into play is that our genes dictate cooperation when it is beneficial to the survival of our genes if the group survives. "If a creature puts the greater good ahead of its individual interests, it is because its fate is inextricably tied to that of the group: it shares the group’s fate," writes Ridley. He continues, "A sterile ant’s best hope of immortality is vicarious reproduction through the breeding of the queen, just as an aeroplane passenger’s best hope of life is through the survival of the pilot." This also explains cooperative behavior in families and small towns. And, it is useful in understanding why people come together under threat or attack.

One of the more successful of the "innovation commons" experiments is Open Source. Open Source is a project to collaboratively develop software operating systems and applications that are free, available to anyone and not controlled by Microsoft. It has been successful in part probably because the group that joined together to create these programs felt threatened.
The more that you perceive that you as an individual are part of an interconnected web of life, the more likely you are to act selflessly. Random acts of kindness, heroic loss of life in a cause and ecological mindedness are all examples of this enhanced sense of interconnectedness and dependence.

"Our minds have been built by selfish genes," writes Ridley, "but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative. That is the paradox that this book has tried to explain.

Human beings have social instincts. They come into the world equipped with the predisposition to learn how to cooperate, to discriminate the trustworthy from the treacherous, to commit themselves to be trustworthy, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods and information, and to divide labor. In this we are on our own. No other species has been so far down this evolutionary path before us, for no species has built a truly integrated society except among the inbred relatives of a large family such as an ant colony. We owe our success as a species to our social instincts; they have enabled us to reap undreamt benefits from the division of labor for our masters – the genes. They are responsible for the rapid expansion of our brains in the past two million years and thence our inventiveness. Our societies and our minds have evolved together, each reinforcing trends in the other."

These thoughts lead to two conditions for a successful "innovation commons". Participants must perceive that cooperation in the commons – the exchange of ideas and information – helps the individuals assure their genes thrive, and their own genes' survival depends upon the group’s survival. Secondly, a system of trust must exist within the network of participants. The development of workable trust systems will be an essential building block to a successful "innovation commons".

Game theory plays an important role in understanding the types of trust systems that will work. Several different people have proven that the "tit for tat" game survives best in computer simulations. "Tit for tat" says that everyone starts with trust in the participants. Sharing occurs until there is demonstration that an individual is not giving back the equivalent to what they are taking. When this occurs, the person taking more than they are giving is no longer trusted. This is exactly how it worked in a real commons. If someone overgrazed the common meadow, he or she was shunned by the community cutting them off from the benefits of the community and possibly imperiling they ability to survive.

Dawkins writes, "What has all this to do with altruism and selflessness? I am trying to build up the idea that animal behavior, altruistic or selfish, is under the control of genes in only an indirect, but still very powerful sense. By dictating the way survival machines and their nervous systems are built, genes exert ultimate power over our behavior. But the moment to moment decisions about what to do next are taken by the nervous system. Genes are primary policy makers; brains are the executive."

The basis for cooperation according to Dawkins goes beyond. Dawkins introduces the concept of "meme", an idea replicator. Memes are the thought equivalents of genes. Genes last only a few generations before individual gene combinations that make up a characteristic of a person are lost. J. S. Bach’s genes, as prolific as he was (he had 20 children) are no longer present in any recognizable way. But his music continues to exist. Not only does it exist, it continues to replicate itself through all composers that have ever studied his music even after over 300 years. And, even a Bach music lover, has some of his melodies embedded like a virus in their brains ready to spring forth when prompted. Whether this is immortality or not is inconsequential. The point is that memes, the creations of our minds, once released from our minds, join in the generative dance of replicators in the primordial sea of memes awash in the world.

Dawkins writes, "But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong."

"Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over," Dawkins remarks. He stops short of concluding that the sharing of ideas is the equivalent of the sharing of our genes through sexual reproduction in order to secure their survival, but it does not seem much of a stretch to postulate that. We have many cases where individuals were so driven to spread their memes into the world that they gave up their lives to do so. Artists and writers who live in poverty in order to pursue their art. Zealots who gave their lives to promote an idea. Inventors who died broke because they dedicated their lives to their invention.

The individuals who have dedicated their lives to their memes strive for their survival. They also seek to be identified with their memes. It isn’t enough just to have the meme live beyond them. An "innovation commons" must have some system for tagging the meme with the person who originated it. In the scientific world there is a strict cultural code of referencing and footnoting the work. Like a family tree, with this kind of system, the heredity of the idea can be traced. The more often a meme is referenced the more important the meme is likely to be. Plagiarism usually results in severe shunning.

Memes can bind people together. Musical pairs like Gilbert and Sullivan, and Rogers and Hammerstein created many successful meme complexes. Business partners are often held together by meme complexes that tightly bind like genes. Business and entrepreneurial teams are also held together by their memes. Musical groups like the Beatles are also bound together by their memes and the promise of the creation of many more. These teams, pairs and groups stay together as long as the magic is there (the creation of meme complexes) and there is continued trust among the members. When one or more of the members begins to feel that others are taking more than they are giving, the bond is usually broken. "Innovation commons" will hold together as long as the magic is still in the air. A successful "innovation commons" will either be one that has a known limited life or his built in mechanisms to keep it fresh.
Very powerful meme complexes can keep many people together for long periods of time. This is probably another reason why Open Source has been successful. Its vision is very grand. Think of the metaphor of the movie "The Fifth Element" where a cab driver, a young boy, a "priest" and a woman from outer space join together to bring down Zorg and his "evil empire." Other movies like Star Wars and The Ring have similar elements. The United States has been held together by a meme complex created over 200 year’s ago. Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman upon leaving the constitutional convention what type of government we had. He replied, "A republic madam. The question is, can we keep it?" Another principle for a successful "innovation commons" is that the meme complex must be grand to achieve longevity.

Memes can also control us like genes. We are inculcated with meme complexes through our families, tribes and our cultures. These memes can unconsciously control our actions with respect to cooperation and altruism, making an "innovation commons" difficult to obtain.
An ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) in evolutionary genetics is a strategy that does well against copies of itself. There are four generally recognized conditions for ESS – longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity. Fecundity is more important than longevity of a particular copy. If memes are like genes, then how many brains it can infect is critical to its survival. Unlike genes, that have a particulate nature and high copying-fidelity, memes seem to be quickly morphed into new forms, just as I am writing this and putting my own thoughts into the writing and shading it to make the points I wish to make. But the fundamental ideas are those of the original authors.

There are therefor then two additional principles for a successful "innovation commons". It must be a safe environment constructed with the tools and methodologies that allow individuals to breakthrough their limiting memes to become an active member of the network. And, it must provide the equivalent of the primordial sea to allow the memes to freely combine. Survival of individual memes or meme complexes will in all likelihood be governed by ESS.

"We do not have to look for conventional biological survival traits like religion, music and ritual dancing though these may also be present. Once genes provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over," writes Dawkins.

He continues, "One unique feature of man, which may or may not have evolved memically, is his capacity for conscious foresight. Selfish genes (and if you allow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no foresight. They are unconscious blind replicators."

This leads us to another principle of a successful "innovation commons". It has to include and foster foresight.

Later Dawkins writes, "… even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight – our capacity to simulate the future in imagination – could same us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have at least the metal equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the long-tem benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves’, and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."

Our problems today have a high degree of complexity. In the future, they will be even more complex. We do need "innovation commons".


The Origins of Virtue
Matt Ridley
Penguin Books, 1996, paperback, 295 pages

The Moral Animal
Robin Wright
Vintage Books, 1994, paperback, 466 pages

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
Oxford University Press, 1976 (1990), 368 pages

The Globalization of Nothing

A sociologist views "nothing" as a social form that, is general, is centrally conceived, controlled, and comparatively devoid of distinctive substantive content. This definition carries no judgment about the desirability or undesirability of such a social form - it is not used here in a pejorative sense. However, it is now clear that there is "a general historical trend away from something and toward nothing." The five major subtypes of the Something-Nothing continuum are:

1. Unique (one-of-a-kind: a gourmet meal)) vs. generic (interchangeable; a microwave meal cooked centrally or Disney's worlds)
2. Local geographic ties (hand-made pottery) vs. non-place or lack of local ties (mass-produced pottery)
3. Specific to the times (the VW Bug) vs. time-less (the Dodge Neon or the Kia)
4. Humanized (small teaching college) vs. dehumanized (the Internet university)
5. Enchanted (something with a magical quality) vs. disenchanted (anything mass-produced or McDonaldized).
   

The precursor polar types are Toennies's gemeinschaft (family, neighborhood, friendships) and gesellschaft (urban, national, and cosmopolitan relationships).

In contrast to the concept of glocalization (the interpenetration of the global and the local resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas), Ritzer coins the term grobalization which focuses on "the imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and the like, and their desire, indeed need, to impose themselves on various geographic areas." Their main interest is in seeing their power and profits grow throughout the world. "Grobalization tends to be associated with the proliferation of nothing, while glocalization tends to be tied more to something." Both processes are under the broad heading of globalization, but they are rooted in competing visions of the contemporary world. Capitalism, McDonaldization, and Americanization are all grobalization processes. The choice of nothing is often the smart thing to do. There are many advantages associated with nothing, which is why so many choose it so often. But "as time goes by, there will be increasingly fewer opportunities to choose something." [NOTE: Awkward and sometimes dense, but original, and somewhat related to Rosenau's "fragmegrative dynamics", Dynamics Beyond Globalization.

Also See: McDonaldization: The Reader edited by George Ritzer (Pine Forge, 2002), and The Substance of Style which contrast sharply with Ritzer in substance and style.

The Globalization of Nothing
George Ritzer
Pine Forge Press (Sage Publications), Aug 2003, 259 pages, hard cover
Future Survey, October 2003

Smart Mobs

This book review is long. So if you don’t want to read a long review of the book and its implications, let me tell you in the first paragraph, "This is a must read book!" It’s well written, exciting and scary. The technologies that the book is about have many potentially positive and negative outcomes. If you believe that society will still be dominated in the future by "zero sum" philosophies, at the individual, corporate and governmental level, then the outcome looks very scary. If you believe that society is ready to adopt "non-zero sum" games then the outlook is exciting and enormous changes will result that are positive. Non-zero sum games are behaviors that include "the unique human power and pleasure that comes from doing something that enriches everyone, a game where nobody has to lose for everyone to win." Zero sum games are best typified by our sports. There is a winner and there is a loser. When the rules are bent or broken, then tragic results can occur, i.e. Enron, which is zero-sum corporate behavior personified. Or, a present nemesis, spam. Spam is where one person wins and everyone else looses.

Robert Write wrote in "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny", "New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature*) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential – that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and size."

The technologies that Rheingold documents that will enable "smart mob" he calls the mobile "infocom" industry. "Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell, govern and create. Some of these changes are beneficial and empowering, and some amplify the capabilities of people whose intentions are malignant."

Rheingold defines smart mobs, "Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in their environment…" as well as other people. Microprocessors and, or with embedded, telecommunications chips are becoming inexpensive. As a result they will permeate our environment. Rheingold mentions furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, box tops, shoes and many others that are being embedded with what he calls "smartifacts". This shifts the emphasis from the creation of an "artificial reality" to the creation of an "augmented reality".

I just made a trip to Boston where I stayed at a hotel in an unfamiliar area. I went out to find a store where I could buy bottled water. You know how difficult a task that is a city center. If the infocom technology was present, I could have pointed my hand held device at a street sign, queried it and it could have told me via text message the directions to a store. Or, if I had wanted to talk to some one else interested in "smart mobs", I could have set up my personal profile indicating that I was open to having a conversation with someone about "smart mobs". If there was anyone else walking around last night with the same profile, say within two blocks of each other, we by mutual assent could have met to have a conversation. While I was typing this, the air conditioned in the room shut off. I got up to check the thermostat and the ac turned back on. It sensed my presence when I moved. The thermostat is already a dumb smartifact. If I had a profile on my portable device that indicated I liked a room temperature of 70°, the smart thermostat would be able to read that as long as I was in the room and keep the temperature like I liked it.

I walked for over an hour last evening, and the same technologies could have been used to bombard me with "spim", text message spam. Everyplace I walked by or things I looked at could have sent messages to the augmented environment that would have triggered an avalanche of advertisements. People could have read my profile and accidentally met me to sell me something. Muggers could have assessed me as a potential target.

The computer started as a military weapon 50 years ago. It has now reached the point where it is changing the way we work and live. This next jump in capability of computer, telecommunication and geographic location technologies is about to start another revolution. The characteristics of mobility, multimedia, high computational ability and location sensitivity multiple each others usefulness, not just add to. The backbone, or spinal cord, for these technologies is the Internet.

Rheingold points out that he believes that there are three factors that are bringing about these changes*:

1. Moore’s Law (computer chips get cheaper as they grow more powerful)
2. Metcalf’s Law (the useful power of a network multiplies rapidly as the number of nodes in the network increases)
3. Reed’s Law (the power of a network, especially one that enhances social networks, multiplies even more rapidly as the number of human groups using the network increases)
   

Reviewer’s note: These are often stated as "laws" when in reality they depict trends. And, as trends they can be altered by changes in the external environment or the usefulness of the utility factor described. For example, Moore’s law refers to the number of circuits on a memory chip doubling every 2 years. The more circuits, the more function. The more function per chip, the lower the cost. Moore’s’ law has been extended to many other integrated circuit applications with different doubling rates.

The commons is an old concept. Originally, the commons was a shared pasture when peo0le in a village could graze their animals. If everyone juts grazes their share of animals, the commons works. But the temptation is there, since there is no government control, for someone to take advantage of the situation and graze more than their fair share. If everyone responds in kind, the pasture becomes over grazed and there is nothing for anyone’s animals to eat. The commons fails and everyone fails. This was called "The Tragedy of the Commons" by Garrett Hardin. The question is, can we have the freedom of the commons with government oversight? People are crying now for regulation to control spam – laws, fines, judgment. What freedoms do we lose in the exchange?

Reputation is playing a role in avoiding "the tragedy of the commons." Obviously, in the case of the original application of the commons, if a person over grazes their reputation goes down. Will they be allowed to graze the next year? Without force of law or violence, the only avenue open to the community is to shun the over grazer. Reputation systems technology will play an ever increasing role in the "electronic commons" we are building. For example, files sharing systems that are available to everyone that contributes in kind. I donate a file and I can take a file. If I take without donating, I am shunned. The quality and quantity of the exchange are still to be worked out.

The real potential poser of the commons occurs when it becomes an "innovation commons". That is that people joining the commons provide work product towards a common goal or shared vision to produce innovation.

The technologists that believe that an operating system ought to be a public good, are demonstrating daily that this type of innovation system works well. Open source is a viable way to develop software modules and applications. The open source software development model is gaining acceptance and growing.

In many cities, individuals and organizations are providing free wireless access to the Internet. The people and organizations donate their time, expertise and money to provide this free access because they believe that such access ought to be free and because they see the enormous benefit to their community in having a mobile, networked "smart mob". Everyone benefits from this infrastructure. That doesn’t stop people and organizations from setting up commercial systems and charging a toll for access to the "innovation commons". For example, the hotel I stayed at in Boston charged $9.95 per day. The restaurant next door has free wireless Internet access.

The Dean campaign for President, although it failed, is held out as the pioneer in the application of the innovation commons in politics. DeanSpace was the focal point for the gathering of people with a shared vision of Dean as President to meet online, organize, form local groups, solicit memberships, create rallies, fund raising, etc. Furthermore, the software that created DeanSpace is free to anyone who wants to use it for other applications. DeanSpace itself was created from free software developed in Open Source.

One of the key concepts of smart mobs is emergence. A school or fish, a flock of birds or a heard of animals demonstrate the rudimentary form of emergence. A school of fish all turn at the same time. It’s as though out of the collection of the individuals together in a school, they act as if they have a collective intelligence.

Many people were surprised by the popularity of text messaging on cell phones, especially among young people. They shouldn’t have been. Teenagers have the constant need to be told that they are OK. They swarm and text messages provide the means to develop the time and location. They’ve even developed a language for text messaging that fits the technology and the application. This type of behavior among the young, although well developed in the U.S, is most advanced in Japan and Finland. Rheingold calls these youth groups, "thumb tribes". They type with their thumbs without looking, even while walking or talking. However benign the technology application among the young, the technology can also be used by gangs and terrorists.

Termites have an organized society. They build nest, harvest food, care for the young and conduct war. When the warriors return from a battle, they are created by workers that swarm to them and touch them all over with their feelers. It might appear that the workers are solicitors of the warrior. It’s not benign however; if a warrior has been damaged in battle, they are killed upon reentry to the society.

The same type of phenomena can occur with teenagers as well. Reputation is essential to continue to participate in the smart mob. If false, or true, rumors are spread about an individual, that individual can be shunned from the group.

Steven Johnson wrote in Emergence, "In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies on one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher level sophistication is what we call emergence." Smart mob technologies have the potential of reorganizing cities, not by planned development, but by emergence.

Smart mob technologies are already altering the concepts of time and space among the young. A friend of mind told me the following story. He was with his daughter, a college student, and a group of her friends. They decided that they wanted some ice cream. One girl said that she would go get it and left in her car. As the girl was not familiar with the location, my friend asked his daughter how she was going to find an ice cream store. His daughter told him to wait. In a few minutes, the friend called on the cell phone, told her where she was and asked directions. The girl was constantly talking with my friend’s daughter as she steered her to the location. In this type of group there is no need for plan, schedule or map. It’s all in the moment, driven only by the impulse to get ice cream, and the recognition that the intelligence to accomplish the task resides somewhere in the group.

Another important factor affecting how these technologies will emerge is whether the commons is viewed as a scarce or abundant resource. In the case of the original commons, the resource was scarce. There was a limit to the land and the grass. And, there are some applications in the electronic commons where the resources may actually or at least be thought of as scarce.
One great example of where a resource was thought to be scarce was in the SETI program that is searching for extraterrestrial life by analyzing radio signals from space. With limited resources, they recognized that PC’s all over the world are not being used full time. Even if they are in use, as the one I’m using now is being used, the computer has more unused cycles than I’m using as I type. Those are all wasted comp0utational opportunities. The SETI program does not share cycles, but it does share chunks of time on PCs all over the world when they are not in use. "When nobody is using them, the PCs are swarming around the world in an amateur cooperative venture known as SETI@home – a collective super computer spread all over the Net." More than 2 million people donate their computer’s time to this project, creating a supercomputer on unimagined power.

"Distributed computation is only one example of how peer-to-peer arrangements can assemble scattered resources to create collective goods." Rheingold discusses ten different current applications. One, "United Devices, together with the National Foundation for Cancer Research and the University of Oxford, enables participants to contribute their CPU cycles to drug optimization computations involved in evaluating potential leukemia medicines from Oxford’s database of 250 million candidate molecules. Whereas Intel’s first supercomputer, built in the 1990s for Sandia National Laboratory at a cost of $40 -$50 million, is capable of one teraflop (one trillion floating operations*), the United Devices virtual supercomputer is aiming for fifty teraflops ‘at almost no cost’." United Devices is a nonprofit organization.

* per second

What if the resources of the commons are not scarce? What if they were abundant? Going back to the metaphor of the agricultural commons where neighbors grazed sheep, notorious for stripping a field of its grass, what if, in the words of Cory Doctorow, there were "grass shitting sheep". Maybe its not polite language, but the image is powerful. What if in the process of utilizing the commons, the users provision it? The commons then becomes a cornucopia.
Rheingold describes several knowledge systems that approach the cornucopia concept. The general concept is this. If a group of people have a common interest, they install software agents that keeps track of all the files and web sites that each person finds in pursuit of that interest. These are shared with all the others in the network. The software agents keep track of which files you keep and which you throw away learning from your actions. Also reputations grow as the agent learns to trust one contributor’s efforts over another’s. In the process of consuming the information, the system learns and improves its effectiveness and efficiency.
The dark side of this concept was Napster. It facilitated file sharing but the people doing the sharing didn’t own the copyright to the files.

Human creativity is abundant. For all practical purposes, human creativity can be considered limitless. Each person’s brain has 100 billion synapses. Any one synapse can be connected to hundreds of others so the number of combinations is greater than the number of molecules in the known universe. The number of possible combinations becomes unimaginably large when the number people on the planet are considered as all of those brains can be connected in a variety of different ways. Creativity enhancing systems will not only provision existing resources, they will create new resources.

The book has eight chapters, extensive research notes and a good index:

1. Shibuya Epiphany
2. Technologies of Cooperation
3. Computation Nations and Swarm Computers
4. The Era of Sentient Things
5. The Evolution of Reputation
6. Wireless Quilts
7. Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many
8. Always on Panopticon … Or Cooperation Amplifier
   

In the last chapter, Rheingold examines some of the important questions that need to be asked and answered about these new technologies. "If the citizens of the early twentieth century had paid more attention to the ways horseless carriages were changing their lives, could they have found ways to embrace the freedom, power and convenience of automobiles without reordering their grandchildren’s habitat in ugly ways? Before we start wearing our computers and digitizing our cities, can the generation of the early twenty-first century imagine what questions our grandchildren will wish we had asked today? Technology practices that might change the way we think are particularly worthy of critical scrutiny: High-resolution screens and broadband communication channels aren’t widget making machinery but sense-capturing, imagination-stimulating, opinion-shaping machinery."

The question Rheingold asks in the title of the chapter is will the technologies be used to created an all seeing eye, like the one in Tolkein’s Lord of the Ring, or will they create an environment where creativity and freedom flower.

Rheingold provides examples of the dangers of the technologies in three categories:

1. Threats to liberty
2. Threats to quality of life
3. Threats to human dignity
   

It’s a sobering chapter, but he remains an optimist closing with following remarks. "Over the next few years, will nascent smart mobs be neutralized into passive, if mobile, consumers of another centrally controlled mass medium? Or will an innovation commons flourish, in which a large number of consumers also have the power to produce? The convergence of smart mob technologies is inevitable. The way we choose to use these technologies and the way governments allow us to us they are very much in question. Technologies of cooperation, or the ultimate disinfotainment apparatus? The next several years are a crucial and unusually malleable interregnum. Especially in this interval before the new media sphere settles into its final shape, what we know and what we do matters."

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Howard Rheingold, Basic Books, 2002, Paper Back, 266 pages

Ripples from the Zambisi

"I can't myself raise the winds that might blow us, or this ship, into a better world. But, I can at least put up a sail so that, when the wind comes, I can catch it."
E. F. Schumacher

This was a fun and insightful book to read. Amidst all the discussion about radical, disruptive and breakthrough innovation, this book is a refreshing reminder that small things can make a big difference. It's a reality check for big budget innovation programs and economic development programs that usually end up stealing a company from one community in order to develop the economy of your community (a zero sum game by the way). This book is about dedicated, skilled innovators with a passion for their innovations and facilitators who provided the missing ingredients preventing these passionate innovators from making their ideas a reality. Sometimes, those missing ingredients were connections to the right people. Sometimes they were small sums of money (ridiculously small amounts of money that yielded great returns). And, sometimes it was adding small supportive or enabling innovations that turned an idea into a viable business model. And, always it's about the pattern of product, process and procedure innovation that worked.

Sirolli's journey began as a member of an Italian economic aid organization in Zambia. They noticed that the land along the Zambezi River was incredibly fertile. They thought that if they brought modern farming knowledge and applied it to the land, they would demonstrate to the natives just how much they could benefit. Of course, what did the Italians decide to grow? Tomatoes. The soil and weather were perfect. And, the tomatoes grew - the biggest most beautiful tomatoes the Italians had ever seen. The Italians watched with pride as their crop matured. The natives silently watched and laughed among themselves. One morning, just when the crop was about ready to be harvested, Sirolli reports that they came to the fields to find them totally destroyed. The hippos of the Zambezi had eaten all the tomatoes and laid the fields to waste, and the only tell tale signs were the ripples in the water.

Sirolli quotes Pliny the Elder, "There is always something new out of Africa." Sirolli writes, "Those who have worked in an African country will tell you, if they are honest, that they always learn from the expereince much more than they had bargained for...I am no exception." Later he states, "I became conscious of the fact that we were not doing the right thing - and consciousness is an extraordinary thing."

"Right now, in your community, at this very moment, there is someone who is dreaming about doing something to improve his/her lot. If we could learn how to help that person to transform the dream into meaningful work, we would be halfway to changing the economic fortunes of the entire community," the author comments. This is Sirrolli's credo. It is clear upon reading the book that the author has had a good classical education (formal or informal). His thinking about innovation is colored by Schumacher, Maslow and Rogers.

His advice, based on Schumacher is, "If people don't ask for help, leave them alone. And, there is no good or bad technology to carry out a task - only an appropriate or inappropriate one. Something big, modern and expensive is not necessarily best; it all depends on the circumstances."

"Because of Maslow and Schumacher," he writes, "I came to understand that successful development has to do with the quality, not quantity of life." Human beings are striving creatures. When one level of need is met, people move on to higher levels in an endless cascade. Is it any wonder that this country grew as it did because the founders understood this about people and claimed equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

With this framework, the author was able to explain his experiences in Africa. "They were secure and did love and had self esteem in the same proportions Western people had, maybe even more. Some of them were beautiful, wise, self-actualizing people reaching for the apex of full humanness," Sirolli writes.

The level of what is enough at each stage of development is set by cultural and psychological factors. Some people get stuck in the pursuit of material goods and others have lower levels of satisfaction and move on to the next higher state of development. The natives had enough food, safety and security for them, and they could move on to higher levels of human development.
From Carl Rogers he found that "that it was possible to help people heal themselves by simply being there, listening, facilitating and responding to the client's needs for communication and finding values to live by." "The aim is not to solve one particular problem but to help the individual to grow so that he can cope with the present problem and with later problems in a better, more integrated fashion."

Later, he continues, "Reading about the champions of the human race, I couldn't avoid creating, in my mind, a demonology - that is, a list of the demons oppressing us. Contrary to Dante's Inferno, however, my hell wasn't populated by naked gluttons, greedy merchants, and assorted petty sinners. The torturers had no tails; rather they were well-dressed authoritarian figures who, in the name of an idea, would torture and beat the psychological life out of the people in their power. From unyielding bureaucrats to religious fanatics, from political extremists to avid do-gooders, my demonology started to contain anybody who dreamt up a code of conduct and tried to manipulate or coerce others to follow it."

Sirolli's encourages his facilitators to support clients who have a marriage of both passion and skill. "But becoming what we are is invariably difficult," he writes. "We have to commit ourselves to a course that may prove to be unpopular with our peers, unfashionable among our friends, and unbecoming in the eyes of our parents. Striving for individuality is always a lonely business. Passion is what propels us during our solitary journey." Commenting on skill he writes, "Our generation is a generation without masters. We are still under the impression, and like to think, that The Beatles didn't have to learn how to play music; that Jimi Hendrix picked up a guitar one morning, put a big joint in his mouth, and started to play like a god. Does the next, younger generation, understand that there cannot possibly be art without skill?"

"Facilitation," he writes, "is based on the belief that it is human to dream and desire. Faith in human nature is what makes it work." "The skill of the facilitator is to become available to those who have the dream and to help them acquire the skills to transform it into meaningful and rewarding work. The skill of facilitation is therefore a communication skill with a twist. It isn't so much that facilitators have to communicate to their client; rather they have to be the kind of person one likes to talk to." Their role is to simple remove the obstacles that stifle a client's growth.

He identifies the characteristics of facilitators:

• Facilitators are passive
• Facilitators are visible
• Facilitators provide just-in-time help
• Facilitators work in confidence
• Facilitators act like swans
• Facilitators love action
• Facilitators are a loaded spring
• Facilitators assess the person and the motivation behind the idea.
• Facilitators understand that ideas are cheap, passionate individuals are rare
• Facilitators establish true communications and build trust
• Facilitators don't play power games

Facilitators are non-threatening, unassuming friendly listeners who make people want to talk to them.

The book is full of examples and case histories, and is divided into 14 chapters:

1. Out of Africa
2. The Technology Fix
3. Homo Cupeins - The Desiring Man
4. Out of the Mountain Cave Back to School
5. The Art of Shoemaking
6. The Esperance Expereince
7. The Esperance Model Applied
8. On Facilitation
9. Training Facilitators
10. A Word of Caution
11. Facilitation and Economic Development
12. A Quiet Revolution
13. The Politics of Personal Growth
14. Epilogue - Civic Society, Social Capital, and the Creation of Wealth
    

As you can see from the outline, the discussion covers a good deal of territory and Sirolli has meaningingful insights in all the topics. For example, "The shift by governments away from resource driven economies to valued-added ones cannot take place without recognizing that our greatest assets are not the ones that lie underground. Our greatest assets must be our energy, imagination, and skill - our commitment to good work and to the pursuit of excellence and the courage to fulfill our ambitions. Every single person is important in the creation of a better, wealthier, smarter society. Whether employed are not, engaged in export service industries, in the arts, sports or tourism, the quality, both of personal and professional, of every single person is what will make a country prosperous."

And, "Thus the freedom to become is the key to unlocking civic society and long term economic prosperity. Wealth can be generated in the short term in exploiting natural resources, but 1,000 years of prosperity can only be created intelligently by working together, exchanging ideas, sharing technology and resources, and helping each other do well in the understanding that a myriad of wealthy self-employed people produce an economic system immensely more resilient than any alternative."

And, "The beauty of Maslow's theory is that it explains that helping each other is not done out of charity, but out of our need to be appreciated, loved and respected."

Michelangelo, who believed his role as a sculptor was to release the images that were already in the stone, wrote:

"The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do. "
To make his point, he carved a series of "unfinished" works depicting humans emerging from the rock (The Prisoners).

Metaphorically, the facilitator's role is the same.

And, if the facilitator is blessed with double insightful vision and can not only see the beauty inside the innovator, but can see the community that could emerge as a result, then a community transformation can occur.

You just have to read this book. And, when you do, write something about it. Better yet, use it.

Ripples from the Zambezi: Passion, Entrepreneurship and the Rebirth of Local Economies
Ernesto Sirolli
New Society Publishers, 2003, 151 pages, paperback

Open Innovation

I was very disappointed in this book. The title and the buzz about the book lead me to believe that this book was about the revolutionary idea of "open innovation". Open Source, the approach that developed Linux operating system and other software modules and applications, has demonstrated the power of a loose collaboration that operates in an open environment. This book is not about the "open innovation" that is a generalization of the unique approach that worked in Open Source. Instead this book is about running R&D organizations in a more open way - that is balancing internal R&D with the acquisition of the results of external R&D, and the commercialization of internal R&D internally and externally to the company.

I also think that the book could be misleading for at times the author intermixes the words innovation and technology. Yet, we know that there is a lot of capital to be created with innovations that are not based on technology but exploit the changes caused by technology.

And, as a thirty-year veteran of IBM, it was hard to read that the first time that IBM invented "open innovation" was with the advent of the Internet in the mod 1990s. In reality, there were many "open innovation" efforts within IBM as early as 1970 that produced significant revenue.

The author points to the failure of PARC as an R&D failure. I would argue just the opposite. PARC was extraordinarily successful as an R&D effort. Look at how many fundamental innovations relative to personal computers that got developed. It was operational and executive failure that resulting in Xerox's inability to commercialize on what they had. This is not the fault of a "closed innovation" model. The "closed innovation" model created what it was supposed to create.

I also think kit is misleading in a study of this type to lump research and development together into one - R&D. In reality that are four fundamental functions required:

1. Research
2. Technology Development
3. Technology Management
4. Product Development

In a good "open R&D" environment, product developers should be free to use the best technologies, subassemblies or even complete products necessary to meet customer needs, stay competitive and return profit to the company. It's the role of technology management to forecast what technologies are going to be needed for what products and acquire or see that the technologies are developed internally to meet the needs of future products. Technology development's role is to identify promising technologies from research regardless of where the research is done and develop that research into useful technologies. Those technologies not used by the company should be sold or exploited in some way outside the company. And, research's role is to identify promising areas of research, conduct that research and communicate the results widely inside and outside the company.

Now this is a giant simplification I know, but this book doesn't offer a completely satisfactory explanation for how R&D should be managed in today's environment either.

Chesbrough begins the book with "Most innovations fail. And, companies that don't innovate die." Later he states, "...innovation is vital for companies of every size in every industry. Innovation is vital to sustain and advance companies' current businesses; it is critical to growing new businesses. It is also a very difficult process to manage." These statements set up the real conundrum of innovation. Pure internal innovation can result in wasted effort and myopia. Pure external innovation can result in the loss of freedom of action with customers. A company should be able to meet their customers needs in the best possible way, and an external innovation strategy can result in access being denied to innovations or innovations just not available.
Chesbrough rightly concludes that what is required is a balance of internal and external innovation, and internal and external commercialization.

The author makes an extremely important point when he writes, "The value of an idea or technology depends upon the business model. There is no inherent value in technology per se. The value is determined instead by the business model used to bring it to market. The same technology taken to market through two different business models will yield different amounts of value."

One of the most valuable portions of the book deals with the concept of a "business model", an often used term, but infrequently defined. "The functions of a business model are as follows:

• To articulate the value proposition, that is, the value created for users by offering based on the technology
• To identify market segments, that is, the users to whom the technology is useful and the purpose for which it is used
• To define the structure of the firm's value chain, which is required to create and distribute the offering, and to determine the complementary assets needed to support the firm's position in this chain
• To specify the revenue generation mechanisms for the firm, and estimate the cost structure and target margins of producing the offering, given the value proposition and value chain structure chosen
• To describe the position of the firm within the value network linking suppliers and customers, including identification of potential complementary firms and competitors
• To formulate the competitive strategy by which the innovating firm will gain and old advantage over rivals."
  

Chesborough points out that, "An inferior technology with a better business model will often trump a better technology commercialized through an inferior business model." I agree with this completely. It means that technologists have to learn a new language, the language of the business model, to introduce their technology to a company. "Constructing a business model requires managers to deal with a significant amount of complexity and ambiguity", something most managers and technologists don't handle vary well.

To be a company that successfully innovates requires new levels of skills and abilities from its innovators and an open approach to innovation.

Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology
Henry Chesbrough
Harvard Business School Press, 2003, 227 pages, hard cover

Leading the Revolution

If you haven’t already read this book, you should read it now. It’s one of the best books on innovation I’ve read and innovation is the twelfth word in the long title. It’s also a book about strategy, that forgotten and banned word from business books. And, it’s courageous, full of things I wish I had written like, "…how many times have you heard a CEO or divisional vice president say, ’Our real problem is execution’? Or worse, tell people that ‘strategy is the easy part, implementation is the hard part.’ What rubbish! These worthless aphorisms are favored by executives afraid to admit that their strategies are seriously out of date, executive’s who’d prefer their people stop asking awkward questions and get back to work. Strategy is easy if you’re content to have a strategy that is a derivative of someone else’s strategy. Strategy is anything but easy if your goal is to be the author of industry transformation – again and again."

The book is well written and full of gems of wisdom like:

• In a nonlinear world, only nonlinear ideas will create new wealth.
• By the time an organization has wrung the last 5 percent efficiency out of the how, someone else will have invented a new what.
• Somewhere out there there’s a bullet with your company’s name on it.
• The gap between what can be imagined and what can be accomplished has never been smaller.
• We are limited not by our tools, but by our imagination.
• First the revolutionaries will take your markets and your customers Next they’ll take your best employees. Finally, they’ll take your assets.
• In the new industrial order, the battle is not democracy versus totalitarism or globalism versus tribalism, it is innovation versus precedent.

It is a call to "conscious" people in organizations to lead a revolution. The title says so in bold print on the cover. (I was walking through a hotel lobby with the book in my hand with the title clearly visible, a person that could have been someone attached to security stared at the book as I walked past.) He points out that for a company to embrace revolutionary change requires bottoms-up revolutionary thought and someone at the top supporting the change. The middle are almost always slaves to precedent. But, this is not a book aimed at executives, it is aimed at workers.

"Most of us pour more of our life into the vessel of work than into family, faith or community. Yet more often than not the return on emotional equity derived from work is meager. The nomadic Israelites were commanded by God to rest one day in seven – but he didn’t decree that the other six had to be empty of meaning. By what law must competitiveness come at the expense of hope?"

The opening paragraphs of the book encapsulate his view of the world of business:

"The age of progress is over. It was born in the Renaissance, achieved its exuberant adolescence during Enlightenment, reached a robust maturity in the industrial age, and died with the dawn of the twenty-first century. For countless millennia there was no progress, only cycles. Seasons turned. Generations came and went. Life didn’t get any better; it simply repeated itself in an endlessly familiar pattern. There was no future, for the future was indistinguishable from the past.

Then came the unshakeable belief that progress was not only possible, it was inevitable. Life spans would increase. Material comforts would multiply. Knowledge would grow. There was nothing that could not be improved upon. The discipline of reason and the deductive routines of science could be applied to every problem, from designing a more perfect union to produce semiconductors of mind boggling complexity and unerring quality."

He continues, "We are now standing on the threshold of a new age – an age of revolution. Change has changed. No longer is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-first century, change is discontinuous, abrupt, seditious."

And later, "It’s not that things didn’t change back there in the age of progress; they did" he continues, "But to use a metaphor from the theory of biological evolution, it was a world of punctuated equilibrium, where change was episodic. Today, we live in a world that is all punctuation and no equilibrium. To thrive in this new age, every company and every individual will have to become as nimble as change itself."

He asks the question, "Who will create new wealth and who will squander the old?"
"Companies today are rightly obsessed with satisfying stockholders. Spin-offs, de-mergers, share buybacks, tracking stocks, value-based management programs – all these things release wealth, but they don’t create wealth. Neither do mega-mergers. These strategies don’t create new wealth because they don’t create new business models, new markets, new sources of competitive advantage or new customers. So while they may deliver onetime gains to shareholders, they don’t fundamentally change a company’s long-term earning potential.

Industry revolutionaries are in the business of creating new wealth. You won’t find them playing shell games with shareholders. Any company that wants to thrive in the age of revolution is going to have to do more than wring a bit of wealth out of yesterday’s strategies. Revolutionaries don’t release wealth, they create it. They do more than conserve, they build."

He continues, "In truth, CFOs and CEOs have been mistaken the scoreboard for the game. They have spent too much time trying to manipulate quarterly earnings and the share price, and too little time trying to build their company’s capacity for radical innovation. Shareholder wealth may be the scoreboard, but the game is radical innovation."

Hamel makes the point convincingly that we are at the top of an economic s-curve. We’ve squeezed all incremental and imaginary costs out of present business strategy and it’s time for radical innovation, what he calls strategy decay. He also attacks the sameness of business strategies. Through the process of best practices, industries have reached centrality. All the businesses are all so close to each other strategically because they have for years determined best practices and adopted those in their own organization. Revolutionaries can break out of the pack and establish the new rules of competition.

"In the age of revolution, every company must become an opportunity seeking missile – where the guidance system homes in on what is possible, not on what has already been accomplished. A brutal honesty about strategy decay and a commitment to creating new wealth are foundations for strategy innovation. But you can’t be an industry revolutionary unless you’ve learned to see the unconventional. You won’t have the courage to abandon, even partially, what is familiar unless you feel in viscera the promise of the unconventional."

Hamel doesn’t specifically define business concept innovation, but he does give us some of its characteristics. "The goal of business concept innovation is to introduce more strategic variety into an industry or competitive domain. When this happens, and when customers value that variety, the distribution of wealth-creating often shifts dramatically in favor of the innovator." Later he writes, "Business concept innovation is meta-innovation, in that it changes the very basis for competition within an industry or domain." Still later, "Business concept innovation starts from the premise that the only way to escape the squeeze of hyper competition, even temporarily is to build a business model so unlike what has come before that traditional competitors are left scrambling."

To me a business concept innovation is a collection of product, process and procedure innovations with the right mix of incremental, distinctive and breakthrough change. If it is the right mix, i.e. the mix creates unusual value for the customer, then a shift of wealth occurs.
Hamel identifies four components of a business model – core strategy, strategic resources, customer interface and value network. He then unpacks his concept of a business model. He identifies four factors that determine a business model’s profitability (and its potential for wealth) – efficiency, uniqueness, fit and profit boosters. Along the way, he gives examples of radical innovation driven business models.

The book then turns and focuses on the individual, the revolutionary. He spends three chapters on advice to revolutionaries in Be Your Own Seer, Corporate Rebels and Go Ahead! Revolt! These chapters provide some really useful information for people who sense that revolutionary change is required, but aren’t sure what they can do about it.

He then turns his attention to revolution within old hierarchies in Gray-Haired Revolutionaries. He makes the point that an organization is never too old to change if they establish the right climate for change and provide the support and encouragement for rebels within the organization.

The book closes with Design Rules for Innovation and The New Innovation Solution. Hamel’s design rules for innovation are:

• Unreasonable expectations
• Elastic business definition
• A cause, not a business
• New voices
• A market for innovation
• Low risk experimentation
• Cellular division
• Connectivity
  

"Most companies use a decidedly unbalanced scorecard – one that is heavily weighted toward optimization rather than innovation. Measures like RONA, ROCE, EDVA and ROI often encourage managers to beat a dead horse ever harder." These and other metrics are not pro-innovation. "Without strong pro-innovation metrics, the default setting in most organizations is ‘more of the same’" He continues, "Traditional metrics do not force a company to consider how it is performing against new and unorthodox competitors in the quest for wealth creation."
Hamel’s suggestion for a radical business concept innovation metric is a Wealth Creation Index (WCI). "The WCI lets a company determine how it has performed against a relevant set of ‘competitors’ in creating new wealth. The process of determining your company’s WCI involves two steps: defining the domain and calculating changes in the market value of your company versus the value of the entire domain."

This is a good start but I don’t believe it’s sufficient to guide a revolution. WCI is a measure of the consequences of previous actions. The examples he gives are over a ten year period. In my experience what is also needed are predictive and present metrics – people, processes, outcomes and consequences.

Hamel ends with a real call to revolutionaries, "Do you care enough about the future to argue with precedent and stick a thumb in the eye of tradition?" He continues with other exhortations ending with, "Do you care enough to lead the revolution?"

This is a powerful book crammed full of ideas. It’s a fun book to read, but a real bear to really understand and implement. My suggestion, if you think you want to be a revolutionary, find a group like your self, read this book and create a study group or discussion group.


The book has nine chapters divided into four sections:

Facing Up to the Revolution

1. The End of Progress
2. Facing Up to Strategy Decay

Finding the Revolution

1. Business Concept Innovation
2. Be Your Own Seer

Igniting the Revolution

1. Corporate Rebels
2. Go Ahead! Revolt!

Sustaining the Revolution

1. Gray-Haired Revolutionaries
2. Design Rules for Innovation
3. The New Innovation Solution
   

Leading the Revolution: How to thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life, Gary Hamel, Plume Book, 2002, Paperback, 337 pages

The Substance of Style

Former editor of Reason magazine and author of The Future and Its Enemies (Free Press, 1998; FS 22:4/199) argues that the 21" century isn't what the old movies imagined, where citizens of the future wear conformist jumpsuits, live in utilitarian high-rises, or get their food in pills. Rather, "we are demanding and creating an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world." We choose from a diversity of appliances, phones, bathroom fixtures, home interiors, designer coffees, ethnic cuisines, Apple iMacs in many colors, graphics, designer lines at Target and K-mart, eight different types of Goth style, and attention to environment such as planting trees.

Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. Our sensory side is as valid a part of our nature as the capacity to speak or reason. The issue is not what style is used, but rather that style is used consciously, and is more pervasive than it used to be. "Sensory appeals are everywhere, they are increasingly personalized, and they are intensifying."

We still care about cost, comfort, and convenience. But on the margin, aesthetics matters more and more.

How we make the world around us special varies widely, and one mark of this new age of aesthetics is the coexistence of many different styles. Modern design was once a value-laden signal-a sign of ideology promising efficiency and rationality. Now it's just a style, one of many possible forms of personal aesthetic expression. "Ours is a pluralist age, in which styles coexist to please the individuals who chose them." The number of industrial designers employed in the US jumped 32% in five years, and design schools are so full of students they can hardly find teachers. In 1970 there were 3 graphic design magazines worldwide; today, there are at least 50. Home-improvement TV has moved from a fringe oddity to being very mainstream.

The most dramatic indicators of the new aesthetic age relate not to product design but to personal appearance. We have a broader definition of attractiveness, higher beauty standards, and "an explosion of activity designed to produce better looking, and more aesthetically interesting, people." The number of nail salons in the US has nearly doubled in ten years, while the number of manicurists has tripled. The market for skin-care "beauty therapists" is booming in the US and Britain. Tattoos are no longer taboo. Hair coloring is virtually mandatory. The number of cosmetic medical procedures in the US has nearly quintupled in the past decade, from 413,000 to 1.9 million. And mainstreaming gay culture has altered tastes.

NOTE: A compelling and insightful argument, much more so than its opposite, The Globalization of Nothing by George Ritzer, which disapproves of global corporations and mass production. Postrel ignores this, with her ideological driver surfacing on p64: "The extension of liberal individualism-the primacy of self-definition over hierarchy and inherited, group-determined status-has changed our aesthetic universe ...When served by an open marketplace, individualist culture continually multiplies the stylistic possibilities available." Moreover, looking at the bright side, "rising incomes and falling prices mean we can buy more of everything, including aesthetics." Anyone who appreciates the Martha Stewart phenomenon or "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" will like this book, even if one-sided and overblown.

The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness
Virginia Postrel, HarperCollins, 2003, 237 pages

Review by Future Survey, October 2003


© 2003 The Future Survey
Reprinted with permission.
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