Solvation

Millenials and Leadership

I was re-reading the proposed topic area I had suggested to IFTF a couple years ago on Generation X Leadership style, and how it's particularly appropriate in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world.

At the end I point out that while unfettered nationalism was the pivotal issue for Boomers, it was unfettered corporatism that was the pivotal issue for GenX.

But after meeting someone from the Social-M Challenge, that got me thinking: and what is if to Millenials?

I might guess that it's unfettered duty - when we blend work and livelihood, is there ever anything that isn't urgent? do high-functioning millenials get ANY downtime? Is everything about goals and multitasking? If seven activities are good, 14 must be better? Or is it about unfettered rationality: if everything from video to storytelling to comics are co-opted to be purposeful, where is soulfulness?

2020 Forecast: Fire and Ash with a good chance of Phoenix

Here are my forecasts. The gist is this: it's going to be a decade of transformative change, and if we get stuck in the transitions, we'll protract the agony. If we can agree on broad goals and a process -- a life -- that involves respecting the journey to meet those goals and the people we travel with on our roads, then we may see some amazingly wonderful things emerge.

(1) Community and Government: Regardless of financial stability, social systems will crumble. Schools will bifurcate into "bare necessity" and "elite." At least one emergency (but probably several) will point out just how utterly incapable our medical system is at caring for everyday, insured middle class working people when large masses need hospitalization. Protective services (fire, police) will similarly face a few overwhelmingly impossible tasks because of weather-, earthquake- or social unrest-related crises.

The emerging solution to this will be that young people ("digital natives"), marshalled by the middle-aged ("diversity natives") will reach across the socio-economic aisles as never before.  The challenges are so pervasive that only collaborative teams will be able to address them, and team-creation is easier than ever. 

Look for alliances: alliances among young adults to solve specific innovation challenges; alliances between educational and other services to provide emergency resources; alliances to share personal resources, skills and expertise that tie communities back together again.

(2) Finance and Regulatory: Financial stability won't happen. No, not for the whole decade; not until the uncertainty surrounding global warming, toxicity, and other health issues are addressed -- at a minimum. In fact, an entirely new financial system -- or rather set of systems -- will continue to develop. It will be like "the internet in the 1990's" where decreasing numbers of people think the new system is a fad but the technology just isn't quite there to bring everyone on and up to speed.

That's called Social Entrepreneurship and Social Capitalism, and is represented by some amazing innovations that run the gamut from reinventing the traditional (investing a philanthropy's endowment is far more powerful as a social change agent than the relatively small amount they give away as grant money) to the novel (new risk management exchanges -- like the Housing Index, or the Peace Index), and the hybrid mechanisms of evaluating (paradoxically real) intangible assets and removing the focus from the abstraction, "money."

Look for innovations in just about everything, from traditional philanthropies treated as financial funds, grant money coming from for-profits, to new instruments like "social bonds," new exchanges, and the merging of data as it flows across the boundaries between corporate, governmental, and community organizations.

(3) Personal: Love and loving will continue to become increasingly traditional, with women shouldering immense caretaking loads due to smaller families that are widely spread out, higher incidence of everything from asthma to autism and alzheimers. Women will want to marry earlier and choose again according to "prospects" rather than sensitivity; men will want to capture younger women. Boomers will pool their resources and recreate communes where at least some children will be enlisted to provide caretaking services. 

Amidst the resurgence of spirituality, where people recommit to some sort of faith: faith in God or society or their family, will be an eventual understanding of who is NOT the enemy.  As people from the LGBT community, as immigrants, and as people formerly known as "minority" become included in the real work of monitoring and healing society, empathy will increase.

That said, the tolerance for uniqueness, "Too Much Information," will continue to contract. People will consider themselves very transparent but share less and less. A lot of us will block much from ourselves. The small children will watch this.

Look for a resurgence in the arts -- people who reconnect adults to their emotions -- for 2030.

Goodguide Political Contributions Widget

I found this widget via FastCompany. It's fascinating.

I encourage you to click through and play with the filter - on Goodguide, you can scroll and mouseover for more information.  Also, you can select by industry or sort the output in different ways. The top one is the financial industry, sorted by how much the total contributions were. (The half-check box is Deutschebank.)

Democratic

Republican

GoodGuide.com political contribution data for the finance sector

And if you're wondering where to shop, here's this:

Democratic

Republican

GoodGuide.com political contribution data for the retail sales sector

GoodGuide.com political contribution data for over 100 companies
View data for other companies at GoodGuide.com

Metrics and Outcomes and Intuition, Oh My!

Well, it's Thanksgiving, and time to think about what we're thankful about. At the Social Capital Markets blog, we've started a blog roundup (#socap #thankful) and of course this first abbreviated month is about stories of thanks.

During the discussions about topics, Kevin Jones at one point said, "Quantify the good for which you are thankful. Does measuring it make it grow in your mind or memory? So what's the good of social metrics? If they take away from thanksgiving, what earthly good are they?"

As it turns out, this is a topic near and dear. (HINT: What that means is this is going to be a long, rambly post, and now you've been warned!)

Are You a Social Entrepreneur?

"Social Capital" and "Social Entrepreneurialism" are evolving terms that have fuzzy meanings. So, instead of adding another definition, I'm going to give you a check list to help you decide whether you might be a Social Entrepreneur.

You're a Social Entrepreneur when:

(1) Whether for-profit or non-profit, your entity was founded and continues to exist in large part because of an identified social need, rather than a market need. There might be both; however without the social need, the entity just wouldn't be the same. The employees feel that their work is purposefully contributing to a greater good.

(2) That social need might be related to providing for the growth or development of any kind of intangible asset(s): intellectual assets, relationship building and conflict management, the environment (water, land, air), health -- mental, physical, and spiritual.

(3) Your entity is market-driven when it comes to finding resources: people feel it's within the entity's mission to find donors or capital because they have a transaction of value to offer. (This is in contrast to having people donate because they should support the entity due to moral or ethical reasons. That type of entity has a role also, but it's a charitable role.)

(4) There is a growth strategy, and it can encompass merging with another entity. With traditional non-profits, one persistent issue is that some non-profits have a concept of "territory," as though non-profits were monopolies in their particular specialty. In that case, merging with another entity -- even if services can be delivered more efficiently that way -- can be perceived as a loss of status (which is then related to difficulty in fundraising).  In a socially entrepreneurial venture, there are other mechanisms to increase revenues, so more flexibility is available for merging separate operating entities.

Differentiating Spiritual from Social

Begin reading at the bottom.

When you finished (or read it the first time), did you feel pain?

Many do. That pain is evidence that we're connected. We imagine these two young men; we imagine or remember our own losses. That's Spiritual. Even those of us who do not know these people nevertheless feel their pain.

I need to pause here. I do also want to say how heartbreaking it was to hear, and express my condolences to those who knew Vijay personally, his family and Mike in particular.

I'm drawing connections into the financial world after the jump.

The Value of the Team

I'm lifting this mini-book review straight from a particularly interesting post on GigaOm, and I was alerted to it by Sebastian Hassinger.  The point is that if you are looking at how to measure morale and intangible assets, one way may be to look at how sports teams do it.

I am going to grab a copy of "Mathletics" just as soon as it materializes.

Socialedge Forum on Wealth

I put up a LinkedIn Question recently:

What do you think "wealth" is? Do you think we make decisions based on what makes us and our community wealthy? How do you see this changing in the future?

I did this specifically to see what the community-at-large is beginning to think about the concept.  SocialEdge invited me to continue the conversation in their forum.

As the community at SocialEdge is quite sophisticated in the topic, I wanted to post excerpts here. I urge anyone who is interested to read the expanded versions -- these are tiny excerpts -- of these very thoughtful posts, and contribute to the topic.  Also, on LinkedIn I've just recently initiated a group Future of Wealth.

Transcript of Shiller on Charlie Rose

I am moderating a week-long forum on Skoll's SocialEdge on "What is Wealth." In that, I refer to the video of the interview Charlie Rose did of Robert Shiller. It was brought to my attention that as broadband is limited in areas where many Skoll participants are, that this would be useless to them.

So I sought to provide a link to the transcript, but unfortunately, Charlie Rose's site has a layout problem, and it's unreadable, at least to me.  So I copied-and-pasted it here and cleaned up the tags until it laid out like it should.

Finding Framework: SoCap09

Last year was the inaugural Social Capital Markets conference. In September 2008, we were amidst the financial meltdown and the 2008 election. The "vibe" conveyed the visceral fear inherent in having to make key decisions while only knowing Worst Practices. "Confusion" was an understatement.

I was honored to participate on a panel about financing trends in the non-profit world -- and it was packed; we didn't know what interest would emerge, yet there it was. The room was packed not only with non-profit folk and funders, but others trying to develop new ways of thinking about solving the social capital growth problems using non-profit infrastructure.  Like the Skoll World Forum, the brilliance in the room can be blinding.

Yet the biggest take-away from me happened when listening to the final panel, moderated by Matthew Bishop of the Economist,

Can't Take it With You? How to Downsize

I have recently downsized from a house that was far too large for my needs. My new apartment fits much better—but is just small enough to need some storage. As you can imagine, I've had a lot of decisions to make, and of course this isn't the first time I've had to make them.

I realized I was using the framework of evaluating items based on not only their tangible value, but their intangible value as well. I also realized that this was helping me go much more quickly.

This is a big job, that we all face at some point, whether we do this in our own home or after a family death, so I thought I'd share some insights.

How do you establish value?

Finance: What is broken?

A quick shoutout today for a brilliantly turned couple of paragraphs to illustrate a new framework for explaining what many intuitively understand.  From  The Responsiveness Scorecard - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org:

The real problem isn't stimulus, it's responsiveness. We're trapped in a zombieconomy: one full of brain-dead organizations who are about as intelligently responsive as Homer Simpson.

Want better clothes? Don't ask the Gap. Want better software? Don't ask Microsoft. Want better cars? Don't ask Detroit. Want better music? Don't ask record labels. Want better healthcare? Don't ask big pharma. Want to hold on to your money? Don't ask a banker. Welcome to economic Bizarro World.

The economy has gone catatonic. Unresponsive corporations are just the tip of the iceberg. Markets can't allocate. Investors won't invest. Banks can't value, or hold onto anything of value. People don't trust, much less consume. What's going on? The real problem isn't how or what we stimulate - but that almost none of our organizations could respond in the first place.

He goes along to illustrate four different ways to break through these problems. I'd like to add my drum: in order to be responsive, we have to know what's going on, and that requires two things: (1) measurement in line with our values, and (2) a new type of leader who instinctively, unrelentingly creates and upholds an healthy cultural environment even in the midst of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.

WANTED: Financial Pros with Firm Will

The WSJ blog post, "Don't Be a Hero" discusses just how random things are right now.  The financial markets have essentially turned into prediction markets, reflecting peoples' intuitions about what might happen next and rendering absurd the concept of a valuation model.  It's almost as if we're in a volatility bubble. What does "we're providing liquidity to the markets" even mean now?

What can be done?

Instead of "don't be a hero," we need fund managers and traders to go long, to stop staring at the short-term catastrophe, and INVEST for two years from now (or longer).  After all, what does risk management mean when the real risk is everything goes to he!! in a handbag? So, instead, imagine coming out the other side, after everything melts into a puddle and needs to be reformed: what should the economy look like in 5-10 years?

(HINT: Many of you will already know what I'm going to say, but for those who don't, this is not conceptually difficult.  Productivity depends on having the pieces of the puzzle ready to go. Those pieces center around (1) trust -- which is built within relationships, which are themselves created through common purpose and shared activities, (2) knowledge, and (3) personal and environmental health. Find entities that build those components, and we'll be out of the deep dark hole much faster than if we continue to flail around.  And it's not farfetched or out in wacky-land: here's the World Bank blogging from Social Capital 08.)

Financial pros: The social expectations are that financial losses will be huge, and that there's no rhyme or reason or good plays in this market.  It's not a matter of being astoundingly clever or fast on your feet; in a way, you have carte blanche to do what you think best without any second-guessing.  Stop looking for short-term opportunity -- it's all roadkill, and you're behaving like crows. Move this in the right direction.

Technorati's Ironic Lack of Community Focus

I occasionally point out that there's a lack of representation in technology-based communities of a non-upper-middle-class-male life experience. I mention that this leads to many problems, including structures that instantiate a specific type of young-male worldview and style of interpersonal interaction.

Another example for the heap: the blog categories for Technorati.  I'm not exactly sure where a blog about volunteerism would go, since there actually is no category -- ironically -- for community activities.

SoCap08 - Financial Return Maximization is Absurd

Last week, I was SoCapO8, a conference that was oversubscribed nearly 3-fold, where most people have signed up in the past few weeks, post-financial catastrophe.

There is a lot going on in the social investment space, but I want to address, specifically, one item, since my for-pay job at the groupery is a bit hectic due to a major upgrade (...and if you run volunteer organizations, you should check it out! It's a powerful product and a great team!).

Back on-topic: on Tuesday evening was The Economist Debate Series:

Motion: This house believes you can maximize social returns by maximizing financial returns. Two voices for, two voices against.

    * Moderator: Matthew Bishop, The Economist
    * Shari Berenbach, Calvert Foundation
    * Elizabeth Funk, Unitus
    * Steve Zuckerman, Self Help
    * Alvaro Rodriguez-Arregui, Ignia Partners LLC

Your Future Financial Health - A Roadmap

The markets are crashing.  You might be feeling anxious, worried about how you going to weather this financial crisis, what you should *do* (or not??) to protect you and your family.

I will tell you.

If you build an airplane out of legos, and the airplane comes apart -- well it is very disappointing, you might feel crushed if you've worked very hard on it -- but you can still build a new airplane because you still have the legos. Sure, it's not an airplane until it's assembled, but the legos themselves are intact. When the airplane falls apart, it's time to make sure we don't lose any of the legos.  We can even gather more legos, get them organized, and start snapping those guys together for the rebuild.

That's what intangible assets are: the legos. 

Those are not only the aspects of life that we truly can't do without, those are the blocks from which productivity is built and risk is managed.  Examples of intangible assets are social relationships, trust, teamwork, knowledge, health, environmental resilience... the list goes on.  Take stock of those things. Treasure them and build upon them.

And the economy will recover, because those building blocks, like legos, are still here in a very real way.

So, do this:

• Build social assets: Build positive relationships. Reconnect with people you genuinely enjoy spending time with. Reach out to new people.  Help others who don't have much to rebuild with.  Help the elderly who won't have time to wait out. Protect your friendships. Have the courage to maintain a positive outlook during a time of misfortune. Don't argue, turn on each other, or let fear or panic guide your behavior.
• Build knowledge assets: While listening to other people, learn a little. Read what other people have to say; imagine things from their perspective. Of course, it's always a good idea to learn new things, just like it's always a good idea to behave honorably.
• Build physical assets: Maintain health, both physical and emotional. Get whatever it is taken care of. Keep your sick kids home until they're no longer contagious. Make choices that benefit environmental health.
• Build spiritual assets: Enjoy the arts: music, reading, whatever you prefer. Enjoy nature. Become grounded and connected with the teachings of the religion of your choice.

You may think, "Lovely. But what the heck am I supposed to do with what remains of my money?"

The answer is to do the same thing. Invest in building blocks. Will the financial ROI be good? Will it even be positive? That, I don't know, and even for successful investments it will depend on the time frame.  But I do know this:  If you are going to invest, carefully investing in areas that will benefit the ability of the world to solve problems and be productive will build the ability for the economy to recover.

Specifically:

• Invest in technologies centered not only on energy production and efficiency, but on sensor and separations technologies (like filtration). 
• Invest in approaches that facilitate community cohesion, problem-solving, and the formation of partnerships and groups. 
• Invest in knowledge growth within schools and beyond.

There is a lot to do.

When Variance is High

I was talking to a friend this weekend. He mentioned how broadly distributed intellectual potential is among the population, and it got me thinking....

When I was a kid, I played games at recess and ran around. I swam butterfly for a year in high school.  I played some tennis. A few coaches commented that I have decent hand/eye coordination and was reasonably quick. I was nothing special, either way... unless what I needed to do required both my feet to leave and then to return to the ground! In that case, failure was (and is) a reasonable expectation, and an injury, quite possible. Unless I'm going to be landing in water at the end, this whole "leaving the earth's surface" thing is clearly something my brain doesn't process well at all.

I was lucky, since I was a girl - the fact I was eager to play sports successfully offset my comparative lack of height as well as my leaping challenges. But for many boys, Physical Education class was a nightmare of humiliation, where coaches had achievement expectations that the boys just didn't have the inclination to train for and in many cases lacked the physical talent to meet.

Those same boys grew up in many cases to be academically successful men; fathers, who could determine funding priorities and administer school districts. I'm not sure this is related, but my son's academically excellent public school has a Physical Education department whose grading requirements for an A- in 9th and 10th grades are apparently "successfully changes into PE clothes."  There is no required physical education at all for 11th and 12th grades. The coaches do care a lot about the teams, but not at all about educating anyone of even average physical talent.

In other words, I suspect that since PE was difficult for people who weren't talented athletically, it was curtailed and then turned into an utterly useless program.  Imagine what would happen if we taught math that way? If you're not "math team" caliber, you show up for class, play math-based games if you want to -- hang out and talk to your friends if not -- and then you get an "A-" so long as you don't cause any problems.

I believe we need to create "learning environments" for physical learning in the schools. Teachers ridiculing kids who can't make the quota of pushups isn't okay; but neither is saying "voila! no need for push-ups!" I think understanding how to deal with the wide distribution of physical talent will help academics find innovative new approaches for managing the wide distribution of intellectual talent.

So back to the conversation with my friend, because there's another part to this, centered around the wide disparity in IQ that schools have to deal with, and how that affects the way people approach their lives, particularly how they approach conflict.

I don't actually have any answers to the questions he raised. But I have been thinking a lot about, specifically, the role of public education beyond the education of specific intellectual skills.

I have seen bright children become so competitive that they lose all sense of empathy. I have seen average children become so insecure and anxious they get sick. I have seen children (and adults) become violently angry and destructively frustrated when they just can't "get it," particularly when the pressure's on and the stakes are high.

I believe the future of education has to be team-based, because we can't afford, as a society, to exacerbate impulsive anger in children who aren't succeeding at the moment, whether they're just not smart enough or they're just generally prone to anger or impulsivity, or they are having short term personal crises.  Having social support helps people feel calmer, and gives them confidence they'll weather whatever they need to face.

We need to know a lot more about how to integrate people who are experiencing failure, anger, and obsession. We have an idea of how to create an intellectual learning environment: it's okay to try, mistakes are tolerated, unpacked, and knowledge is gained. Now we need to learn how to create learning environments that accommodate emotional learning.

And we have to expand those domains to encompass a way to differentiate the curriculum for a very wide disparity in natural talent.

SocialEdge Discussion Update

This is an update for the first week, inclusive (after the jump).
I've also asked two new questions.

                   

 

                                   

7/29-8/4: Skoll Foundation SocialEdge.org forum

Next week, I'll be hosting a forum on the Skoll Foundation's community website,  SocialEdge, which describes itself as "the global online community where social entrepreneurs and other practitioners of the social benefit sector connect to network, learn, inspire and share resources."

I'll be addressing the following issue:  When entrepreneurs start a social venture, they are immediately in conflict: they have a short-term focus on achieving financial return for their investors, with a long-term focus of building a community's intangible assets as their mission.

A social venture itself is usually specifically about developing intangible assets within a community: social connectedness, intellectual resources and skills, creative expression, personal health, a safer and cleaner environment. But the entrepreneur/investor relationship (typically through an equity deal) is at odds with this because the equity partner is mostly interested in return on financial capital: in an equity deal, this is the only measure of success.

Microfinance has emerged as a solution by providing debt, which changes the expectation for the scale of financial returns.  However, microfinance typically manages risk of course by lending small amounts and also by focusing on how building a community's intangible assets manages the risks associated with default. 

Social Enterprises often require a scale that microfinance can't address, and while the service area may be in desperate need of intangible asset development, the social enterprise is rarely a "distressed property" in terms of its social, physical, and intellectual assets.

But a hybrid is possible:

• apply concepts from microfinance to Entrepreneurship in developed countries (heretofore the VC playground)
• use debt to provide seed capital for ambitious ideas -- de facto very high risk
• mitigate the risk through the same focus on intangible asset development: providing resources to develop the social and intellectual assets associated with the building the enterprise.

An example of such hybridizing is what Marc Dangeard is building with the Entrepreneur Commons, which I've mentioned here previously.  He explains:

Sustainable Economy

A few people have asked how in the world the variety of things I work on are related to each other. Well, some aren't (tennis, piano, quilting...). But professionally, they're all tied together. 

I've decided to make a map of what that looks like to me. For my astute and precise friends, you'll notice that there are many more examples that could be added. Please feel free to comment if your map is faceted differently, and of course mention anything you feels needs mentioning.

Community

I belong to a few online groups; one was having a discussion thread called "To Give or To Get - That is the question!" I responded, as did many others, and a few people have said it was helpful for them to think about how I had phrased things, so here's what is essentially a repost:

Health Care, Doctors, and Managed Care

The New York Times published a piece,  "Fed Up With the Frustrations, More Doctors Change Course - NYTimes.com," about how the difficulties of getting insurance and administration to pay for prescribed care affects their ability to do their work. To get a gist of the article:

In a survey last year of nearly 2,400 physicians conducted by a physician recruiting firm, locumtenens.com, 3 percent said they were not frustrated by nonclinical aspects of medicine. The level of frustration has increased with nearly every survey.

and

“I’d write a prescription,” [the doctor] told me, “and then insurance companies would put restrictions on almost every medication. I’d get a call: ‘Drug not covered. Write a different prescription or get preauthorization.’ If I ordered an M.R.I., I’d have to explain to a clerk why I wanted to do the test. I felt handcuffed. It was a big, big headache.”

...

He continues to be frustrated by payment denials. “Thirty percent of my hospital admissions are being denied. There’s a 45-day limit on the appeal. You don’t bill in time, you lose everything. You’re discussing this with a managed-care rep on the phone and you think: ‘You’re sitting there, I’m sitting here. How do you know anything about this patient?’ ”

Recently, he confessed, he has been thinking about quitting medicine altogether and opening a convenience store. “Ninety percent of doctors I know are fed up with medicine,” he said.

The article also points out that plenty of people are self-educating on the internet and demanding irrelevant procedures, and that doctors have to deal with that. (I'm certainly guilty of "educating" my doctor. But then again I tend to send him medical journal articles about my diagnosis, not whatever I see in O Magazine that month. He says he appreciates it, but he may just be being polite.)

A friend of mine, who works at a high level in health care operations, mentioned recently how pricing has to cover those unable to pay their copays as well as those who are outright uninsured, and so of course the degree to which ones practitioner covers the un(der)insured affects their overall pricing structure.

Nearly simultaneously, I heard about someone who simply refused to pay for health insurance for his family (astronomical for the self-employed), and negotiated terms on everything. He noted that for now, he's getting such good discounts from medical care providers that he's content to carry on this way. It's a sensible conclusion, assuming he didn't know and so hasn't thought through the consequences for other peoples' medical costs.

That conversation was tangentially related to a recent experience where I was involved in a conversation about alternative mechanisms to fund private health care. Once again, human beings can do without money, but we can't do without health, social support, and whatever knowledge we need.

It's only because the wealthy have access and the poor don't that we continue to measure money so carefully and other assets only minimally: if the only way to have access to private practitioners who aren't overworked and to have medical procedures done in a hospital in a timely way is to pay for them; if the only way to be considered part of some groups is to have shared (costly) experiences; if the only way to get a good education where teachers can teach and students can focus on class (and not outside obligations) is to "buy in"... well, then yes: we will continue to live as greedy people.

Let's let Chuck Jones do the narrative via Daffy (circa 1957, for those who keep track).

Complaints Board

Several discussions I have recently had have been about how poorly creditors behave. Consumers have credit scores; why don't creditors have credit reporting based on their consumer-lending behavior?  Especially after the Countrywide fiasco, I believe that people who are financially sophisticated and able to cherrypick their creditors are no longer oblivious to the bad apple effect in their community-at-large.

This is the best I've found, and I've searched already for my current nemesis so that you can loathe them yourselves.  They have many services, and often underwrite consumer retail cards.  Complaints Board for GE Money.

Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus

In a brilliant talk by Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus from Web2.0 via laughingsquid.com, Clay mentions the following:

• All of wikipedia in every language 100 million hours of human thought
• TV watching 200 billion hours in the US alone, every year. (2000 wikipedias per year.)
• In the US, we spend 100 million hours per weekend watching just the ads.

He notes that a surplus is only a surplus because we don't know what to do with it. Because it's so complex - what to do with it - many experiments must run. I'll stop there; but there's more to what he says.

Evidently the revelation came to him when talking to a woman who asked, "how do people find the time?" Now, being a single working mom, I gotta wonder...what she may be asking is "and who is it that, after work, ends up having to do the laundry, the grocery shopping, finding appropriate gifts for an upcoming event, taking care of the sick kids, and organizing the summer camp schedule?" 

It may be that she was perceiving that the cognitive surplus existed because of a social deficit.

So while the story of the four year old is endearing for entrepreneurs, the real narrative about interaction Clay might investigate would be the transformation of cognitive surplus to social capital.  Televisions created a platform for conversation to glue together the social contribution, but it only worked so long as there were only a handful of options. The cognitive surplus was masked; but there was a platform for common dialog and discussion that kept the social fabric together. Until about 1980.

But then the social fabric became scattered and fragmented. "Everyone" didn't watch prime time television any more, or even traditional sports or the evening news. Quickly, the cognitive surplus became unmasked, and thankfully found and made its own outlet.

Fast forward 20 years, and, as with financial exchange, the social conversation is embedded in the movement of cognitive surplus, and the concept of "social entrepreneurialism" has taken off. How will this cognitive surplus be employed? As Clay says, we've woken up. It's time to create relevant institutions.  What those will be, we won't really know, but we can watch the flow of capital and it will emerge.

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.

Web 2.0 video - round 2

A few posts ago, I talked about competition after viewing the Richter Scales' Web 2.0 video.  Well, chaos evidently ensued.  They've put up a new version. Thanks to Sky blogging for the Dalai Lama Foundation for alerting me.

Advanced Materials and Consumerism

There is an interesting article out of MIT, about a new tiny, quick sensor.

Note to VC Funds interested in alternative energy because it's such an obvious thing: the field is competitive, there are many paths that are going to dead-end, and it's highly interactive with regulatory forces.

Wanna diversify?  You should be investing in filtering and sensing technology.  Control of microstructure as well as the creation of new types of advanced materials will make these the must-have consumer products of the (20)10's.

Decisionmaking Under Uncertainty - Global Warming

Here's a brilliant video describing how to deal with the "is it real or is it memorex?" questions about Global Warming.

In true Generation X leadership style, the argument -- devoid of idealism, only paying attention to pragmatic concerns -- is as follows: Who cares about what scenario is true or false? Who cares about who is right or wrong?

What should we do?

Bubble 2.0

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.

The real harm of helicopter parenting: correcting the problems we encounter in OUR generation and forgetting that our children will encounter entirely different ones. Maybe, given what massive foreclosures can do to an economy, not to mention environmental mishaps and other disasters we seem to be one step away from, we should be teaching our children hyper-cooperation rather than fostering hyper-competitive "win or die trying!" attitudes.

(Update - previous video was pulled down. The link goes to a newly released version. Thanks to Sky's Blog at the Dalai Lama Foundation for alerting me.)

The video

The credits

Changing The Present

If you and everyone you know are trying to declutter, this might be the holiday to give gifts via Changing The Present.

Run across one of those gifts that cause triple-takes or more? Post them to Stupid Gifts Hall of Shame.

Hubris

Yesterday, I joined an IFTF session on Leadership.  During that time, many interesting opinions were discussed, and I realized (again) that I have an axe to grind.

It's all well and good to empower people based on merit, and technology is incredibly disruptive (for those who can afford to use it and who are inherently mobile and change-oriented enough to integrate it into their lives).

However, to assume that newly minted adults are capable of leadership simply because they have strong opinions, strongly held is foolish. Sure, it's something Baby Boomers can identify and relate to, but it's not leadership, it's hubris.

There's a whole decade or two of people who have lived not only with disruptive technology, but with rapid change in volatile and uncertain environments... for 20 years.

More will follow; I'm going to have to break down and take the time to post what I have to say about Generation X and leadership.

(This post was motivated by Jon Swift's experience, as relayed in his post Facebook Declares War on the Blogosphere.)

Twitter

Twitter is, effectively, an asynchronous chat room. 

Evidently, you can now track special interests and meet people via Twitter. A very interesting entertainment use.

Social Entrepreneurialism vs. Charity

Sunday morning, and I woke up with an analogy.

Social Entrepreneurialism is (currently) like building a gym.  It's great - people can combat everything from osteoporesis to stress, can keep physically fit, and can even meet people and meet up with people to reinforce social community.

Charity is when someone in the gym yells out "spot."  The charity-giver provides the little bit extra necessary for the person to finish their set and move on.

Some charity is analogous to the physical rehabilitation work that goes on in the gym: it's not just about a spot. It's about having prolonged interaction that (re)builds range of motion and function.

It's not enough to build a gym and say "go use it!"  It's not going to work to say "I'm here to provide a spot if you need it" when there is no gym, or it's the stairwell in the office building.

This analogy rose because of a thread on Cooperation Commons "Is Free Cell Phone Service & Internet a Panacea to the Digital Divide?"  While I've said several times that I don't think it's a bad idea, I've also been struck by the disconnect.  In this case, the cell phones would be the socially entrepreneurial level. The early adopters will be those who maintain the status quo, just like the early gym members are likely to be people already fit or close to it, and not elderly who need to conserve bone mass, nor children who won't leave the couch.

The Experience of Prediction Markets

(Cross-post to IFTF's FutureNow blog.)

I had been co-administering the prediction market for the Open Ex program at IFTF and pulled together a summary for people interested in Prediction Markets.  The IFTF market used InklingMarkets.com as a platform.

These ideas are pulled predominantly from the experience of running the market, rather than participating in the market.

Jon Stewart on Leadership

During a conversation regarding the troop surge, the Iraq war, the multiple failures of strategy and the lying and deception amidst Bush's belligerent communications strategy of "You're with me or against me," Jon said

Isn't leadership... bringing along a country, NOT chastising those who disagree and making them feel like pussies?

The reason I find that particularly profound is that it is exactly the attitude necessary for leadership or governance in an open and transparent world.  If the world is viewed systemically, it seems to me that ultimately there is no "other."  If we're fragmented (in the postmodernist sense), then it's our fragmented selves and the disparate areas they inhabit that eventually reform a multiply-threaded community.

Generation X and Koolaid-ism

I was a participant at on a Yi-Tan podcast, and used this term.  Some people asked for more:

Kool-Aid-ism

As we come of age, we learn to differentiate ourselves from our parents and other authority figures, but we also learn how to reconnect with them.  Given major public events, generational cultures often have a pivotal point of shared experience.

Although it’s been said that Generation X has had no such experience, I believe otherwise.  The Baby Boomers had Nationalism vs. Jingoism, and Generation X has had Citizenship vs. Kool-Aid-ism. 

For the Boomers, Viet Nam was the question:  Would you go?  Would you NOT go?  If you didn’t go, would you protest? Leave the country?  What is a hero? Where are your national duties?  You may have relatives who served or even died during World War II; how can you oppose your government’s call to duty - is that disrespectful of their sacrifice? 

Generation X has had a similar pivotal issue:  Will you work in corporation?  Will you refuse?  How far into your career will you continue to work in a corporation? How long will you stay with one firm in one job?  Will you start your own business?  How should you support yourself; what role should your livelihood play in your life? What about your family? Where are your obligations?  How should you effect change?

The degree to which (US-raised) Generation Xers bought into to the framework of unfettered capitalism is as much a litmus test as the degree to which Boomers bought into the framework of unfettered nationalism.  It even has the same polarizing issues: If you’re going to do it, do it right! (Be much more aggressive in Viet Nam; make a lot of money in the corporate world.)  If you object to the powerful treating you badly, then you’d better not do the same thing yourself when you have power (“Make love, not war”; “First, do no evil”).

(For those who are unfamiliar, “Drinking the Corporate Kool-Aid” is an expression often used to mean the degree to which an employee buys into the goals and objectives as stated by the executives in the firm they work.)

New Leaders' Litmus Test

In Ted Rall's column this week (CHOOSE ONE: LOYALTY OR GLORY) he points out how people in key positions needing to speak up when it makes a difference.

I've said it elsewhere, but after a recent Ten Year Forecast with Institute for the Future, where work was done on citizens' Superhero attributes I was struck by how much it felt to  me that the 25-45 crowd was explaining how the world has changed to the 45-65 (plus?) crowd.  In other words, it's another one of those Generation X Leadership moments.

If Viet Nam was a litmus test where Boomers thought deeply about the nature of violence within society and what an individuals' role and responsibiity was to themself, their nation, and their world, then adjusting the political world -- in all organizations: philanthropic, corporate, and NGO -- is the purview of Gen X.

Whom are you willing to be loyal to? For how long? Why would you stop? Under what circumstances would you choose to put those you protect at short-term risk because of your convictions about long-term risks?

Sensible Investing Quiz: How HIP Is Your Company?

FastCompany's April issue has a section on Sustainable Investing, created by SVT Group and HIP Investor, founded by Paul Herman.

The section is very accessible to people who are unfamiliar or newly acquainted with the topic and does a good job of creating a comprehensive framework for those who like comprehensive frameworks.

One of the things I like about this approach is that it creates an accessible way for any company to begin thinking about how they deal with key areas of investment.  For example, the How HIP Is Your Company? quiz helps people conceive of the areas in which they might focus.

I also enjoyed the graph Driving Profit Through Impact that plotted Revenue against HIP practices, complete with a summary and clickthrough to a scorecard.

Assassination Markets

I've been doing some work in Prediction Markets for IFTF, and have been particularly interested in the concept of assassination markets:  I predict this person will die can be transformed into a price on their head.

The thing that's fascinating is that markets have positivity and negativity built into them all the time.  However, with prediction markets, it becomes explicit.  A new betting site, BetUs.com, allows people to bet on specific outcomes for global warming.

Will new types of regulation spring up to eliminate the possibility of creating markets in destruction? 

The Struggle to Return

As I previously mentioned, I'm of the opinion that we're seeing the struggles to return of an entire Generation that, like the Lost Generation of the 1920's, became disenfranchised en masse. The Diva Marketing Blog discusses the Caveman ad, where he talks to his therapist.

How should non-profits raise money?

Pursuant to a LinkedIn: Answers question:

What are the available models for sustainability for non-profits?

My response:

Think about asset types:
- Financial
- Social / Political
- Natural
- Intellectual

All organizations are mission-driven; the mission of some is to increase their financial asset base. For-profits traditionally have invoked the intellectual construct "externality" to avoid even thinking about how achieving higher financial weath can be exploitative long term; hence the concept "sustainability."

So first of all, when you say, "For the huge majority of non-profits, fund-raising is an extra-ordinarily expensive way to generate operating capital," you're probably not including the degree to which social capital is also generated alongside financial capital AND how little social capital it costs the organization to generate financial capital in this traditional way. Further,

Generation X : Secretly Charitable and Generous

Are Generation X really surly slackers, trusting no one and grumbling cynically?  Or are they (secretly) benevolent?

In the Wall Street Journal Online/Harris Interactive Personal Finance Poll of 12/28/06, 94% of 35-44 year olds donated some amount of money to charity (up 5%) whereas 87% of 45-54-year olds did (down 2%). 

The average amount given for 2006 for 35-44 year olds was 11% more than the 45-54 group.
 

Where have all the flowers gone?

Well, I tried several times to post a comment to Stanford Social Innovation Review but they're having some sort of server problem.  So here are my thoughts on what to do about the concern that Perla Ni raised:

My question to you, dear reader, is this: Who will pay for social services in our country if neither government nor foundations will?

I completely agree that these are key issues, and I have had the same sorts of observations and am happy to see them raised here.  I believe that the short answer isn't as horrible as you fear.

Wear a hijab day - Nov 13

As stovepiped as Fremont can be, I'm very proud of the community response to our most recent murder. The hijab-wearing mother of six kids, ages 2-13, was killed walking them to school in a neighborhood generally regarded as safe, and died from gunshot wounds holding the hand of her 3 year old so she wouldn't run into the street. 

While people caution against jumping to the conclusion that this is a hate crime, in a sense that's irrelevant: I believe there's a sense that the muslim community is in need of a showing of solidarity (cf. what's going on in the UK) which has led to at least anxiety -- and often outright fear -- that this is a hate crime.  The article calls for a day of solidarity with devout muslim women, who are easily targeted because of their dress.

To donate to a fund for the Ansari children, checks can be made to the ``Ansari Family'' at Washington Mutual, account No. 3091558830, and Fremont Bank, account No. 55041477. For more information on ``Wear a Hijab Day,'' contact Melanie Gadener at melanie@efsr.org.

It's the real thing. Throw a scarf over your head before you leave the house on Nov. 13.

School Selection

The paper examines how it is that conscientious parents make school choices.  She uses a sample set that is deliberately constructed in a high-choice city, and the subjects all are "choosers," i.e. people relatively actively involved with their kids' education. 

Forget Bill Gates for President

Those of you who knew me in 1998 will recall my pronouncement that there would be a clamour for Bill Gates to run for President in 2008.  This was before a lot of things happened, but I based it on expectations that environmental issues would be key and people would want someone who had "proven" they could "get things done," ruthlessness be damned.

Well, no need to run; he's become King.  The Gates+Buffet philanthropy juggernaut involves giving away $3 Billion annually.  While I both agree with and at times outright admire their effectiveness, I am a bit concerned by the precedent this sets:  since the Foundation sets policy and accepts RFPs, it's really a top-down structure, and one that isn't representational. 

Generation X outnumbers Baby Boomers

You know... it seems that Boomers are in the news a lot these days, maybe it's because their first cohort is hitting 60 this year or maybe one of the last few, and it's true that there are a lot of Boomers when compared to the generation that preceded them.  And most discussion talks about what that initial wave does as it hits the shore.

But the truth is that there's a generation that follows the Boomers, Generation X, that's at least as big.  What happens when GenX takes over the secular leadership vacated by Boomers as they enter retirement?  Isn't that, also, a story worth telling?

In Support of Joel Beinin and Free Speech on College Campuses

In the San Jose Mercury News today: Professor fights portrayal as supporter of terrorism.

Beinin, a 58-year-old Jewish professor [at Stanford] who supports Palestinian rights, knows he has enemies. Secure in his tenured position at an elite university, he routinely criticizes U.S. leaders for failing to understand why Americans are hated in the Arab world. He decries the humanitarian costs of the Palestinian occupation.

The Ivy League-educated Beinin, former president of the prestigious Middle East Studies Association, favors peaceful coexistence of Palestinians and Israelis, and seeks a solution to the conflict based on the principles of human rights and international law. His work has triggered death threats; one caller said, ``You know what happened to Daniel Pearl. . . . The people who are sympathetic are the first ones to go.''

Crazy American - favoring Human Rights!  What precedent is their in our legal system for the idea that people have inalienable rights and that governmental systems should support that?

But without irony: If thought leaders in research institutions can't explore all aspects of human endeavor in an environment that's safe, and if people studying at the top academic institutions in our country aren't intellectually skeptical enough to be able to judge their faculty's teaching with a critical eye, then the United States has truly lost any hope at intellectual leadership.

Here's an old blog entry in Informed Comment that discusses the people in question.  Note the persistence of the persecutory activities of this group led by Pipes and Horowitz, and the enormous funding from a single donor for the purposes of harassing individuals.

As a liberal Jew from Los Angeles, I appreciate Juan Cole's exhortation that moderate or liberal Jews need to be as careful that their religious charity supports the secular vision they have as any moderate or liberal of any religion.

(By the way, I'd like to explicitly mention Sourcewatch.)

Size Matters

Someone I met at a DonorsChoose fundraiser when they were up for the Amazon award recently began blogging.  She's a 3rd grade teacher in an East Oakland (read: extremely challenging environment) elementary school.  She was raised a white suburbanite.

I posted the existence to a blog where someone with whom I've butted heads about "market forces" and their use in the educational context before.  He responded positively about the use of technology to facilitate transparency - definitely a point of agreement for us.  How else do you help people who have managed to create a relatively safe and positive life for themselves and their families to gainfully -- because it affects us all -- immerse themselves in the often unsafe and traumatic lives of East Oakland 8 year olds?

But it got me thinking: clearly there's a human need when the problems are bigger than I, as a single person, can manage, to look to a higher power, whether that's God, market forces, individualism, communism, equity, or something else.  Looking for a -- hopefully single -- overriding force that, once restrictions are removed, will realign the world and make things somehow solve whatever the problem is.

I think that's now the project at hand, Finance 2.0 or whatever it's called: what are the forces that act on the world.  How do they interact; what are their components? And how to we parameterize, measure, track, and experiment with them?

It took years for physicists to realize that electricity was related to magnetism, and that vision was related to both;  or to understand that classical mechanics was only relevant at a particular scale (much bigger than an atom) and rate (much slower than the speed of light). Now long past that, physics has become math, and the intention is to unify the conceptualization of fundmental forces.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, other than to note that a force is something that was originally observed, and then in the physical world what became relevant was how the force was mediated.  Is financial economics mediated by money?  Is value creation mediated by man-hours of labor?  Is knowledge mediated by hours in the classroom?

To the extent that physical forces are "potential wells"  (think of a ball rolling downhill to the bottom of a depression) are people potential wells in need-space?  Needspace would of course be comprised of physical, emotional, social, intellectual and possibly other needs.  What mediates those needs (well, money certainly; but obviously less concrete things as well)?  Then the next question is what acts on needspace (i.e. cultural expectations, historical need-fulfillment, etc.)

Is this analogy useful?  Does it break down too quickly?