Solvation

Post-Domestic Replaces Empty Nest

As many of you know, my son and only child left for college over a year ago. The term for my new stage of life had been coined fifty years or so back as "Empty Nester," because, long ago, the sole focus of a woman's life used to be childrearing, so when the child became an adult and moved away, she was expected to have some sort of identity crisis.

However, while there is clearly a transition, childrearing was not my sole identity, so I decided to coin a new term. I chose "Post-Domestic," because I am no longer am a full-time employee with the job "mom" to go along with whatever full-time employment I have had as "head of household." (I also use "single mom" judiciously, since while that states both my marital and parental statuses, it in no way conveys my financial responsibilities.)

I suspect stay-at-home dads will also appreciate avoiding the grief-stricken visual of "empty nest." 

Use it at will.

Why He Hires People Who Fail - An HBR Article

Great thoughts on creating a resilient outlook, by Jeff Stibel, Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. 

Curious about this "fail wall"? Go read the original aricle. I have nothing to add.

Where are the Jobs?

In this article, the assertion is that there aren't enough jobs, because jobs have been taken away by technology or by outsourcing work.

But... Isn't there plenty of work to do to clean up the environment (and possibly help people) around where you live or work? Who's paying people to do that? No one? Why not?

What's broken is structural. What's going on these days is an inability to identify what work needs to be done. This is because our measurement system for productivity making tchotchkies is out of alignment with what makes life worthwhile: lessening suffering and increasing creative expression, and those goods and services that enable these ends. But we don't measure suffering or wellbeing - we only measure profits. We assume that magically, entrepreneurs will design the right products - the products that the market demands.

But how are those market needs identified? How are investment decisions made?  When we align those two questions with actual "first world" needs, we will see the resurgence of jobs.

Until then, due to our economic lack of imagination, we will remain reliant on creating goods for people who don't need them, just want them. "Want" describes a soft market. If we want firmer ground to stand on, we must do the difficult work of identifying what is needed.

Will Millenials Usher in a New National Measurement System?

Chip Conley gives a good talk about he personally began to understand why intangible assets are an important thing for leaders to concentrate on.

There are a few things he says that I'd quibble with, but what really interests me here are two things that don't come up, but which his talk sparked:

(1) The equivalent generation to the Millenials -- the "Greatest Generation" -- were the people who took the precursor to the GDP, which was designed first as a measurement of national accounts, and then refined to manage World War II supply lines, and recast it as a country wide productivity measurement tool. "How many people don't have income or food?" is similar to "What happened to our systems: our food system? education? health system? protective services?"

So I wonder: Are we in the same historical place? Are the millenials poised to play the same role in bringing forward whatever the next measurement system will be? What WILL get us through this economic crisis? I doubt we'll pull out by looking even more critically at book value and EPS, just like I think our communities need to measure volunteerism at least as much as they need to measure household income.

(2) At the same time, many Millenials and GenX are trying to balance both the  lowest and the highest of Maslow's levels: survival and self-actualization as it relates to one's community. It's transformation for extreme environments. There are many ways this is now spoken of, for example gift economy and relationship economy, but it's been around whenever there have been people who are relatively poor in increasingly oppressive environments who must help each other to survive. Just like during the depression.

The time-location similarities are really fascinating.

 

United States-based Extreme Environments: Where are You?

After having conversations about what is maturing in this space and what is emergent, it seems that the big "buzz" is around: what about US?  And by "us" I mean the United States.

Specifically, why are we focused on extreme environments internationally when there are extreme environments in the United States?

This question was first brought up on Social Edge forum in about May 2009. (Can't find the link; will update when I can.) But it has persisted and grown, and every conference makes it more obvious that there is a dearth of socially-oriented businesses incubated in a more survival-oriented culture by those very people who have few resources... that are represented.

Is it real? If so, is it a matter of patronizing attitudes that we're unwilling to face? Is it because of an international infrastructure that makes it easier to get funding for work in Uganda than East Oakland? Something else?

Or is it an artifact of disconnected communities, where the elite-educated go one way, and the grassroots grown innovators go another?

There's no denying there are entrenched problems in the extreme environments within the United States, but there's also no denying that there is massive innovation emerging here, also. However, those stories are not making the news in the way international work is.

#socap10, #impact

Real Marketing vs Mad Men

I have had several conversations recently with people about Marketing's role, and I realized I have internalized a "different kind" of marketing so thoroughly that I've forgotten that only a certain breed of Marketing pros really think this way.

Real Marketing is Facilitative

The role of the marketer is to facilitate the emergence of the market and the connection of the market to the product or service.

You can think of marketing as "becoming the exchange platform."

The questions a real marketer needs to know:

• what are the attributes of people who might need this good or service?
• where are those people?
• how do those people communicate?
• what are their triggers: what makes them act?

And then the work of marketing is to live where the market already is, and create messages that they understand that put the product or service in a place where it's easy for them to buy/adopt.

Then finally, the marketing person needs to learn:

• What just happened?
• How can I improve?
• Are there new people who need the goods or service (or can I conjecture that there might be in the future)? Where are those people and how do they communicate?

So you can see "marketing" methodology can be used for any situation where there's communcation between an institution and a population: non-profit, social enterprise, community group, or business. Also, it can be used to "sell," which is to say facilitate the exchange of money for goods/services, or it can be used to exchange knowledge or messages or ideas. You can use this to explain a product, or you can use this to find a pool of recruits.

Marketing is a community building activity.

How to Rebuild the Economy

The answer is straightforward and known: build intangible assets. (Intangible assets includ knowledge, trusting relationships, new processes, improved health, creativity.)

In his column in the NYTimes, Paul Krugman equates 2010 with 1938, in terms of government stimulus, and in particular comments that we won't have the "benefit" of 1940 to pull us out. He also goes on and on about deficit spending.

But it's not ANY spending! That's as absurd as believing that throwing money at any entrepreneur with any product idea is going to create a viable new industry.

It's not "deficit spending" at all, in fact - it's "debt-based investment" in the future, specifically investment in those building blocks we know will lead to economic growth.

During a war, we "deficit spend" by investing in wartime technology research, which links together scientists and engineers in working relationships, and creates new knowledge, some of which can be applied during peaceful times; plus there's the added market post-war to replace all the stuff that was destroyed.*

We DON'T need to "deficit spend," and we don't need to have work programs just to get people to use their existing skills for the time being -- we're just postponing the inevitable. (Dear my government: please stop paying people to repave existing perfectly good roads! It's a poor investment and I can't get to work!)

We DO need to determine which scenarios to look at going forward, we need to determine what markets will emerge, we need to train people for those markets and encourage forming relationships and facilitating social structures that help people transition from one situation to the next.

Krugman says,

But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

The "miracle"?! Actually I think the inevitability of war after prolonged global depression and partial collapse of the middle class isn't so far-fetched. We may yet experience the "miracle" of 1940 if we don't commit to making ourselves relevant to the future needs of our households and communities, either directly or through the industry of our businesses.

 

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* War looks like a good return on investment, but that's only because we don't monitor the actual costs, we just lump them under "tragic!" and press on. Those costs begin with the people, who are never accounted for financially so we don't notice deaths, emotional trauma or resentment, which can persist for say, 60 years (so far), spawning new wars, economic hardship and suffering. We don't count the destruction of historic record, art, or existing relationships and knowledge. We do count veterans benefit payments; but we don't count the lost productivity of young men and women who have been injured or made ill by the war, nor the cost to their families.

BP Engineers Should Take a Break

Bradley Kreit at The Institute for the Future blogged about how under high pressure situations it's better to take breaks, shift attention, and do other "counterintuitive" things.

I'm here to argue it's not counterintuitive.

Oh, sure it is if you've been raised in an environment that's punitive, where as a kid you learned to act very very concerned so that even if you didn't perform well, no one would doubt you were "trying your best."

But if you have been developed by people (family, schoolteachers, friends' parents) who ASSUME you're trying you're best, then over time you learn how to optimize your own performance, and you can learn not to overschedule yourself, or work frantically with diminishing returns.

And that's my Father's Day post this year. Thanks, dad!

Leadership Coaching

Someone you're managing says, "I know - let's do xyz; it will solve the abc problem." If your reflex is to empower by saying, "Super! Go ahead!" let me do a little translation and let's see if we can come up with a better approach.

When people make suggestions like that, they mean one of two things. They either mean that they're ready to go but they're being deferential to authority, or they mean quite literally that they have simply identified an approach of promising (but unknown) relative merit.

In the first situation, the verbal suggestion is really a proposal (or a proposal for a proposal). Having the leader say "Yes, go!" is an acceptance of the proposal. If everyone is clear on this communication, that's fine.

However, my experience is that most people mean the latter, that they've just simply had an idea.

In that situation, the next steps for the leader are:

(1) Need. Be clear as to what need the idea is addressing in the mind of the person who suggested it. Ask them to explain this.

(2) Implementation Plan. Walk them through a discussion of what they have and what they need to execute leadership of this suggestion. Have them describe how they would go about finding resources for what they suggest doing. And they may need to think about it, which is fine of course.

(3) Resource Gathering. If adequate resources are available or they have a solid plan to pursue them - great! However, if adequate resources aren't readily available, and if they don't know how to approach finding resources, and you don't have anyone to pair with them to coach them through this learning process, then they really aren't appropriate to leading the implementation of their idea. It's not going to happen. Let it go - it was a good learning exercise in planning.

(4) Team Formation. Alternatively, if they aren't able to resource their idea but someone else is, then that can be the nucleus of a team, where the person who created the idea is in charge at a tactical level, and the person resourcing is an advisor. (The one who thought of the idea has the most context, so should make decisions on the fly.)

I hope that helps.