Author: Richard

“Bankers provide necessary and useful services. But the runaway juggernaut we have inflicted upon ourselves today has gone far beyond oiling economic activity. It has metastised into something which behaves like a parasite, destroying substance and justifying it by creating an apparently larger, but a lot more fleeting, prosperity increasingly based on our collective belief that it is actually doing so and not on underlying value added. When that illusions shatters, the reckoning will be painful.”
Good stuf from Jerome Guillet (Thanks to Dave Pollard for the pointer)

Like many people, the current economic turmoil is having a direct impact on my life, amplified by ill health over the last six months that has severely limited my capacity for action. But despite all that I feel surprisingly optimistic. In my naive, bright little ray of sunshine in a cruel dark world way, I can see some exciting opportunities ahead. The positive side of what is happening now is that it sweeping some of the nonsense of the last thirty years or so out of the way. Just maybe now, we can stop rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic and get down to the real business of muddling our way through to a better, more enjoyable world for our grandchildren and their children and the generations that could follow.
Am I alone in my optimism?

I have been fascinated by 37signals since I first discovered them a couple of years ago, when I came across some remarks about planning by Jason Fried that seemed very close to some of my ideas about purposive drift. As well as following their blog and various articles about them I also devoured their book, “Getting Real”. More recently, I have been raving to my friends about David Heinemeier Hansson’s presentation at Paul Graham’s Startup School at Stanford in April. Today I wandered over to their blog and discovered this nugget of wisdom from David:
“Popular perception holds that companies must always be growing or they’re dying. There’s either up or down, win or lose, success or failure. I think that’s a harmful dichotomy that leads to the death of perfectly viable companies in their quest for constant growth.
Not all companies are meant to have thousands of employees or a billion-dollar market cap. Some companies are meant to be just 10 people or 5 people or just one guy. That’s what their product, niche, or technique is capable of sustaining and there’s absolutely no shame in that. Finding your natural size should be a triumph, not a capitulation.”

As John Brunner once wrote, “It is one thing to talk glibly about the determinism of history but quite another thing altogether to find oneself caught up in historical forces like dead leaf on the gale.”
At the moment I feel a wee bit like a dead leaf on the gale. As I wrote in a few posts ago, “Waiting for the dead cat bounce”, I had a nice neat plan for selling our house, which, had it all gone through, would have insulated us from much of the gloom and turmoil of the moment. Like so many nice, neat plans I got the timing wrong, so it didn’t happen. So here I am swirling around in the wind looking for that anchor point to allow me to shift to Brunner’s more optimistic image of the Shockwave Rider surfing on the waves of change.
There is a backhanded plus to all this. Had my nice, neat plan gone through I could have found myself basking in a smug disinterest. From one perspective looming stagflation, collapsing property prices, high oil prices, the credit crunch and loss of confidence in our government are all a plus – necessary correctives to a set of collective delusions.
While I still think that is the case, finding one self suffering some of the consequences of those corrections along with millions of others, pushed into the situation of having to focus on getting by, may be a better place to think through what is to be done, rather than one of Olympian detachment – a more human, empathetic place.
The downside is, of course, that one is so busy focusing on the day to day business of getting by that that one has little time, inclination or energy to look at the larger picture and to spot the opportunities for positive change that the current shifts in mood and circumstance generate.
This again may be a question of timing. At the moment we have swapped one form of hysteria for another. I suspect that, while not comfortable, things are not going to be as bad as a reading of the financial press would suggest. (I am talking in the relative short term here.) After a while we will reach gloom fatigue – gloom will lose the thrill of novelty and our media will start looking for “things are not so bad stories”.
This is the danger point. There are important lessons to be learnt from the current situation in terms of what not to do, what doesn’t work. Moving from that to seeing what we should be doing is more difficult and will require greater imagination, creativity and improvisation, to say nothing of some hard reality checks. The danger is that as the gloom lifts we will find ourselves returning to the same old same old rather than taking account of the place we all find ourselves in and dealing with it.
As for me, I may allow myself a brief period of indulging in dead leaf mode, but then it is on to the Shockwave Rider.

“Jean-Claude Trichet, the President of the European Central Bank (ECB), told a conference in Barcelona last week: “From a world of seemingly unlimited resources, mankind is gradually accustoming itself to the Earth as a limited, crowded and finite space, with limited resources for extraction and a narrowing capacity for waste disposal of pollution.”
Mr Trichet argued that the economics of this new world were “increasingly pushing at the boundaries of development” and required new thinking.”

Some sound advice from Jeffrey McGrew of Because we can, “Six tips for those about to leap into business for themselves.”
1. Get as debt-free as possible, and try your best to stay that way.
2. Plans are worthless, planning is essential.
3. Listen to everything everyone has to say, but then go ahead and do what you were going to do anyways.
4. Look (and learn) before you Leap.
5. Have a solid plan B in place.
6. You’ve probably already got a niche, you just don’t know it yet.
You can read his explanation here and watch him and Jillian Northrup talking about how they set up their business here. Nice to be pointing to a business that actually designs and makes tangible things.
(Thanks to Russell Davies for the tip)

As 2008 proceeds a general mood of gloom deepens. Despite finding my own plans thwarted (see “Waiting for the dead cat bounce”) I see in the growing dismal news signals that a long nightmare may be coming to an end and that, just maybe, very soon we can start focusing on dealing the predicaments that face us rather than being subjected to the implementation of a set of half baked theories designed, intentionally or not, to benefit the flashocracy.
In the meantime, here are some words from the Sixties from the wise and under valued Geoffrey Vickers:
“The appropriate attitude to our predicament, however fearful it may be, does not depend on our optimism or even on our hope. It was best expressed in the words of a member of the Connecticut Assembly in 1780, when proceeding were threatened by panic induced by a darkening of the sky so unprecedented as to suggest the arrival of a prophesied Judgement Day. He ruled – “Either this is the end of the world or it is not. If it is not, our business should proceed. If it is, I prefer to be found doing my duty. Let lights be brought.’
Let lights be brought. Not more power; but that much rarer, subtler, more demanding fruit of human spirit – more light.”
From “Freedom in a Rocking Boat”, page 125

My friend Rosie Dalziel died five years ago. Her illness was sudden. Her death was unexpected. I miss her.
Here is what I said at her funeral:

Continue reading Remembering Rosie

I recently wrote to a friend of mine enthusing about Meg Wheatley, describing her, among other things, as a “real realist”. To which my friend very sensibly replied, “what is an unreal realist”. My rather puny response was “For start all those hard headed people, who talk about “the bottom line”.”
On Saturday I encountered an article in the Guardian’s weekend magazine, “Last flight of the honeybee?”. I still haven’t recovered. Among other follies it described was that apparently three quarters of the honey bees in the US are shipped to the orchards of California’s Central Valley for three weeks each year to pollinate the almond flowers. We are talking here of a $1.9bn a year industry that supplies 80% of the world’s almonds.
Even if there wasn’t a threat of honeybees disappear altogether, which is apparently a real concern, this practice seems utterly bizarre – but no doubt there are hard headed, realistic reasons for doing things this way and for continuing the practice in the face of losing the bees that do the work. (Why am I reminded of the cod in Canada’s Grand Banks and the realists, who despite warnings, went on fishing them?)
So maybe my current nomination for the title unreal realists would be the Almond Industry of California, along with the rest of us, who happily go along with these disconnects between systems and consequences.

Thanks to Axel Albin of tinygigantic I have just discovered Meg Wheatley. I intend to write some more about her ideas when I have had more time to digest them, but after an afternoon of listening to interviews, watching videos and reading some of her articles I have a sense of of her as great truth teller and some one, who, without false optimism, offers a way forward through many of of the dilemmas that face us all. But for now here is a taster from an interview with Scott London:
“We really have to “de-engineer” our thinking, which means that we have to examine how mechanistically we are oriented — even in our treatment of one another. This is especially true in corporations. We believe that we can best manage people by making assumptions more fitting to machines than people. So we assume that, like good machines, we have no desire, no heart, no spirit, no compassion, no real intelligence — because machines don’t have any of that. The great dream of machines is that if you give them a set of instructions, they will follow it.
I see the history of management as an effort to perfect the instructions that you hope someone will follow this time — even though they have never followed directions in their whole life.
When I spoke of “de-engineering” our thinking, I wanted us to realize that at bottom we are alive, we are human beings. We possess all of the attributes that somehow disappeared in the mechanistic way of thinking. At the organizational level, the same is true. You cannot give an organization of people a set of directions, a re-engineered business process, a new org-chart, a new boss, a new set of behavioral expectations. You can’t just legislate that. It doesn’t happen. Yet corporations were, at the time of the reengineering frenzy, spending literally millions and millions of dollars to develop new engineering plans for the organization.
The 70 to 80 percent failure rate of those re-engineering efforts was, for me, totally predictable. Some say it was even higher than that over the long-term. Wherever you are taking an engineering approach to human , you are going to get an enormous level of backlash and resistance and bitterness because people have not been included.”