Solvation

The election and the Millenials

Sanford Dickert has an interesting post, titled (but it wanders off!): Millennial Makeover: Is there a Lincoln or FDR in the 2008 race? 

(Irrelevant answer: Not unless you believe Hillary is; Obama is GenX.  But I'll get to that in a moment, and why that's spectacularly great news as my second point.)

First: Why GenX is the Entrepreneurial Engine

In the post Sanford makes a few points, mostly about the turning over of generational cycles that are coincident with technological breakthroughs. 

So again to point this out: the technological breakthroughs you see are directly a result of GenX (and equivalent Reactive generations) opting out or being shut out by the generations that precede them. This forces a huge entrepreneurial upswell each time.  Why are they shut out? It's complicated, but the theory has a lot to do with society in general becoming far less cohesive (riotous, actually) when the Reactive cycle (GenX) are children, and so the kids in these generations tend to grow up fending for themselves and without any clear social norms to strive for. It's one thing to leave home as a hippie when you're 15... there's a home to leave, standards that have been drummed into you. It's another to cobble together an ersatz family structure as you go.

Time Out for a little xkcd

This is a micropost. xkcd explains why Mythbusters is good other than the obvious.

 

 

Attention Boomers! This is the new face of Leadership

I love "GenX." I really do.

Wired ran a fabulous article: SXSW: 2008, the Year the Audience Keynoted.  Undoubtedly there are prescient Boomers whether early or late technology adopters, and also Boomers who are current evangelists of these dynamics (I even know a few!), but I gotta step on my drum-beating soapbox for a moment to point out that this is classic change-making GenX power. 

This isn't mob-chaos; it's rapidfire transparent consensus-building: documentable, traceable, and with plenty of post-mortem to evaluate efficacy.  This is fluid.

Any Boomer who is professionally bemoaning issues with succession planning should put on some rose-colored glasses for a moment and really take a look at the strength in this.  Most importantly, understand the trust inherent in this world, which remember is an increasingly diverse community filled with the children of those 50%-divorce-rate years.  The level of communication sophistication and boundary management is astounding.

I've finally begun posting some writing I've done in the past about Generation X leadership style and why it keeps getting overlooked.

Health Post

Well, the EPA -- by minimally protecting air quality -- has shown once again that having regulatory oversight for a first-approximation level economic system just doesn't work well. 

From the Washington Post article:

The EPA estimated that it will cost polluting industries $7.6 billion to $8.8 billion a year to meet the 75-ppb standard, but that rule will yield $2 billion to $19 billion in health benefits.

So, once again, we have this issue that we are accounting in a way that the right hand has no impact on what the left hand is doing, so even though we can see the connections -- and by "health benefits" just imagine how much innovation and productivity isn't happening to think about the magnitude of secondary effects -- we have no true "market mechanism" at work here.

When I was in MBA-land, we had a case in Cost Accounting regarding two Division heads having at it as they lobbied for their own interests.  This is the same issue:  the health people want one thing, and the industry lobbyists want another thing.  As a society, we have no CEO, no ultimate arbiter of whether we're following the mission of the organization, because as a society, we don't have a single mission.  This is where a "market" ends up being a helpful proxy for "wisdom of the crowds".

The good news is that we're on it, as a society; there are many people developing new ways to manage risk and evaluate sustainability in industry so as to enable us to reward those who "do good."

Underlying "doing good," though, is acting in concert with our own long-term self-interests.  We all know that sometimes we don't sleep enough because there's something else more important (work? sick kid?...).  As a society, sometimes we don't act sustainably because we're caught up in something else (economy? feeling self-protective?). Sometimes, it's the right decision, sometimes it's not.

Version 2.0 of the economy will be to have a global model that can account for all facets of humans' lives, not simply the accumulation of financial currency.  Further, it will be robustly sustainable. Our current market system has many components that push us towards accumulating money; that's how the score is kept, after all.  A sustainable system will have many components that push us towards a sustainable equilibrium, incenting us to "do good" simply by following those rules of the system that are now relegated to "morality" or "ethics," but which can (with effort) be part of the main measurement systems.

Scarcity, Abundance, and The Importance of Risk

Chris Anderson at Wired has recently written a fine piece on abundance, scarcity and what's going on with all that there... I generally like the taxonomy at the end; I think that's very helpful.

But, I want to jump in with a bit of a different perspective on the expository section.

For some situations, there's such a thing as "scarcity," and in other situations, it's not relevant at all, which is a bit hard to fathom.  It's like the difference between classical mechanics (where energy can have any value) and quantum mechanics (where energy can only have specific values).  It freaks people out specifically because it's such a big difference from how we perceive reality.

However, I look at things in terms of how they advance several types of capital, and how they have *some* degree of transferability among them: financial, social, intellectual and environment (personal and environmental health).  We used to think about everything in terms of financial capital or precise monetization of other types of capital.

But each type of capital has both a "revenue" or wealth-accumulating component (popularity, knowledge, fitness, brand-identity...) but also an ability to mitigate risk in its own or a different category.

An example: IP