Well surprise, surprise. McKinsey has surveyed a selection of executives (and yes, I know all surveys are rubbish) and found that these company people not only believe that they will face increasing regulation in the next few years but expect to make some money out of it! With change comes opportunity. With expense comes profit – for some. After all, someone will have to clean up – literally – this carbon-dumping habit of ours. The execs also say they are doing nothing right now. Typical – wait until pushed. Well I know some are doing something about it, and I expect we’ll all have to pitch in soon enough. It’s a decent read, anyway. You have to register.

Have you ever read a headline and drew conclusions that weren’t supported by the following text? Well I just had that sort of moment. I read the headline ‘Is CVS-Caremark out-innovating Apple?’ and thought I’d be reading a comparison between two firms based around the subject of innovation. Intead I got a story about how products may or may not “fit” the needs of individual consumers. Like if you slim down a notebook and call it something “airy” because it’s light, it may now lack features that some people need. In which case you buy the “fat” version, I guess. I surmise that these Harvard Business people think that any new product represents “innovation”, and maybe they are right. Perhaps even varying the size – or simply the colour – of an existing product is an innovation.

I tend to disagree. To me an innovation is something that makes you go ‘a-ha!’ or ‘why didn’t I think of that?’, not a shuffling of features or an earnest desire to be merely different. Innovation is (again, to me) a real change, small or large, where you invent a new thing, a new way of doing something, or a new use for an existing thing. It’s not about trifles, or even incremental improvement. It’s a leap.

So does Apple “leap” in that sense? I don’t think so. Way back when, in the olden days, Apples were just one of many backyard computers. Now the home-brewed PC itself was an innovation. Taking the big-iron computer and re-thinking it and re-packaging it as a personal device was a leap. But Apple wasn’t first to do that (was it the Altair, instead?). But they were good at it, and they incrementally improved their design over time; but Jobs and Wozniak were riding a wave of innovation that started elsewhere. (Bill Gates rode that same wave, of course, but ended up on another shore.) Sure, Apple showed great flair and resoucefulness in those early days and made something useful out of what was a hobbyist’s plaything. In bringing it together and fashioning a total, usable unit they innovated to a degree – although to what really must be an obvious and fairly simple degree. They just put together a nice, more widely usable package. Perhaps a better one than most, but just another option in the bustling pre-IBM PC marketplace. Does Apple’s ‘innovator’ tag come to us from these early years? I doubt it. Most people have forgotten or never even knew of the Apple I or II.
Indeed if Apple are innovators because they brought together some nice external ideas and made a marketable package out of it, what about IBM’s slightly later effort? They took parts from all over the company and made something different. Again they leveraged existing ideas, but they assembled a complete package and marketed it. Innovation? As much as Apple’s, surely. (Potential conflict of interest! OK, I work for IBM, these are my views, not necessarily the company’s.)
Just to extend this argument historically, Apple Corp didn’t invent the mouse, or the GUI, but they brought them together in one machine, and may have been first or close there-to. It’s line-ball but they certainly deserve credit for their vision, and by persisting with that ‘ease-of-use’ concept they were certainly exercising creativity in their PC designs. Maybe in that sense they were innovators? Certainly Xerox and the  separate inventors of the GUI and mouse, respectively, were truly innovators, but they didn’t get the product to market. Not successfully, anyway. So are the innovators the low-key inventors, or the successful marketers?
OK, let’s be generous and say that Apple innovated in moving from the old green screen Apple 2 era to the mouse and GUI Lisa and Mac era. They implemented a few good ideas (mostly from elsewhere) and have run with them ever since. Sure, they have made them stylish, and colourful, and smaller, and they have fiddled with the technology and the operating system to make a grander design; but exactly where is the innovation? By leaving out the disk drive or the Ethernet card? By forcing the market to move to their preferred technical solutions? By locking up the box and prosecuting the clone-makers? Is that innovation, or is that tactics and strategy?

Which leaves us with iPod – and again they neither invented the MP3 file format or the MP3 player, but they did get a product to market quickly and did give it the best marketing push imaginable. So they had both good timing and a sweet design. Perhaps that sweet, simple design was the innovation? Perhaps, although again it wasn’t new, was it? It was an adaptation of tried and tested ideas from the video industry, amongst other places. Still, that’s good enough, isn’t it?
In bringing these ‘invented-elsewhere’ ideas together into great, simple designs and getting the product to market swiftly Apple may indeed be said to be innovators, if only by degree. Am I too harsh? Well, what exactly makes you think of Apple as innovation machines? What Apple ideas have no peer in your mind? The mad colours and clear boxes? The simple interfaces? The effectiveness with which they hide the internals of there PCs and avoid using cooling fans? Is it enough that they dominate the MP3 player market, whilst barely scratching out 4% of the PC market? Can successful innovators really have so little impact on the market that they can effectively be ignored in their mainstay product line? Or is it enough that they are a great niche marketing company with a fantastic spin on innovation? And a charismatic leader, of course.
It all depends on how you define and weight things, doesn’t it?

Yes, I know, I do go on about it. Labels. Again. I also mention video gaming, right at the bottom…

But to start with labels, and where better than with Astrology?  Astrology “works” for many people both because it is so accurately imprecise and because it taps into what seems to be true. You believe you really are a Scorpio, for example, because the description is so vague yet targeted: variously a noble, lofty eagle of destiny coupled with a vicious sting. Truth is that everyone has a sting of some sort in their tail, so it rings a bell. And everyone feels noble aspirations at times, so again it “fits”. You can do the same with all 12 signs. And you want to believe that it’s you because it sounds right and it’s generally a pretty safe flag to wave. None of the signs – even the promiscuous Pisceans – are so utterly bad and nasty that no-one wants to “belong”. They are safe homes defined more by the position of solar and planetary bodies than ourselves, so they are apart from us and “objective”.  These are clubs we automatically join just because, and we find it agreeable to so so. Of course if we don’t find it so agreeable and believe ‘this just doesn’t sound like me’, we can always delve deeper into the obscurities of rising signs and oppositions and have an ‘ah-ha’ moment that welds us to our charts. Or simply adjust our time of birth a fraction because mum wasn’t sure about that, was she?

Of course it may be that there’s something “to” astrology, other than possible psychic forces at work (maybe) and a small correlation with the planet Mars (true), but it hasn’t been proven – yet.

Now with the “Generations” label it’s much the same. We are born into it, for starters. It “sounds” right and it has a wealth of scientific-sounding correlation to back it all up. If you are a classic boomer born after the 2nd World War you can feel the connection with other boomers. Maybe you lost relatives in the war. Maybe you remember the shortages, the rebuilding, the focus on doing things right and better this time. You remember the fear, the anger, the pain. You grew up in dour, struggling families with little hope. And it affected you; you determined within yourself to break free, to declare war on war itself, to expand the mind and give peace a chance. You gained optimism out of shared heartache and helped build a better world. And then you feasted on it, taking the wealth that you created and building more. And you remembered where it came from: hard work, loyalty and dedication. And kept it for yourselves.
Alas your kids didn’t share the immediate post-war privations and struggles and shrugged off the idealism and optimism off the 1960s. They were Generation X and they were angry. They didn’t want to just accept what their parents wanted for them, they saw things differently. Jobs were harder to find and they took what they could. They saw wealth all around but couldn’t share in it. They were disenfranchised. They latched onto technology and travel and meandered through their lives, rejecting the home-style values of their parents and making for themselves a more mobile, flexible and detached lifestyle. Oh, and they grew up with the fear of an imminent nuclear holocaust, too, so that affected them lots, eh? But out of all that we got a services-based economy with 24*7 fast food, so it must be all right. And they too grew up and had kids and trips in the country.
Except that the Next Generation has to work those poor hours for low pay and no overtime, whilst bathed in the light of a computer screen, one ear on the MP3 player the other on their mobile. Of course it’s what they want, but, isn’t it? They want flexibility in everything because that’s what they have grown up in. They don’t want a career now, do they? They want to flip and flop and dabble. And those aging boomers had better understand that, rather than whinge about the youth of today and their techno-babble, lack discipline, poor grammar, lousy spelling and loose morals. Oh, but they still eat at Maccas, travel widely and take drives in the country
I could go on. You can smell the truth in there, can’t you? It rings true, if only because the media bombard us with this message about generations and differences on a daily basis. We never hear about similarities, only the differences. We don’t get good news, just bad. Kids are never going to be good enough in this world and we’re going to tell them all about it. Older people just don’t get it – especially if it involves technology – and never will. Kids these days don’t display loyalty and they shift from job to job relentlessly – but that’s because it’s what they want, not because it’s how our modern economy works. I think you get the drift.

Of course it’s labelling. It’s black and white and filled with generalizations. But if you randomly sampled a thousand people across these ‘generations’ you’d get a thousand variations of life, genetics, experience, preferences, skills and education. You’d find common ground in emotions, feelings and human urges like reproduction, of course. And you could say that generally the youngest people have the least influence on society, the least independence, and the least accumulated wealth and experience. But you could do that sample at any point in history and it would ring true. It may shift temporally – we on average live longer and stay at school longer as well – but it’s part of our human reality.
Of course the labelling starts with some innocent marketing surveys. You’d find that at one end of the scale ‘older’ people tended to like big band music, but then they went to dance halls and listened to the steam radio, so what do you expect? They didn’t have MTV or MP3 players after all. And post-war ‘boomers’ tended more towards rock, but this was the great age of rock and roll, so again what do you expect? Some of them actually hated rock, and some didn’t care. Some like surf music. Some liked country or classical. Some still listened to swing, for goodness sake. But we didn’t ask them that.  And underneath they are still human, with feelings and emotions based on a million years of humanity. Why do we latch onto the merest, thinnest skin of our being and label people X, Y and Z? Because it’s easy. Because it makes targeting markets easier. We can spin a convincing story around a product and say it targets “generation Y” and throw our dollars into youth websites and viral campaigns. And because we are fond of joining clubs, especially clubs we have automatic membership of, we accept our labels.

The biggest thing to take away from my ranting and raving is that people remain people. Our environment is important, sure, but we remain human. And we continue to learn and grow and adapt throughout our lives. It may be easier for young kids to adapt to and use the latest techno-gadgets but they aren’t the only ones to use them or to see the usefulness. Not all young people are gadget-focused, either. Old or young, each and every one of us is individual – so let’s de-emphasise “generations” and just treat us all as equals.

Which brings me, perhaps surprisingly, to the future of video games. If you click on the link you’ll see that the Nintendo Wii has outsold its competitors from Microsoft and Sony. How has it done so? By de-emphasising the “generational” focus and simply becoming easier to use. With fewer controls, a more natural action and a broader (read less male-centric and techno-focused) approach it appeals to more people. You’d imagine that someone would have thought of this earlier… now if they applied this thought to more techno-gadgetry imagine how quickly we may all adapt to new technology, irrespective of our generation or our labelling?

From Forbes mag: http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/08/future-video-games-tech-future07-cx_mn_de_0211game.html?partner=alerts

Folks, if you were thinking that biofuel was the answer to our substitute-for petroleum, easily-transportable fuel source needs in a post-oil world, you may be surprised to read that the draw-backs outweigh the pluses for ethanol and the like. Now this is no surprise really – if you watched certain West Wing episodes from a couple of years ago it was explained explicitly that converting corn to fuel was a sop to farmers, nothing more, and used more fuel in manufacture than it actually produced. Now when a TV drama already has this sussed, why should we still be surprised? Ahhh, politics and lobbying strikes again! When you add up the costs of clearing land, fertilising and watering the crop, moving and storing the crop after harvest, processing it into fuel… you begin to see that the fuel needed to power the process itself is quite substantial, if not potentially greater than the energy harvest itself. And then you have to transport the final fuel to the petrol stations…

This is well known, but not often discussed or publicised. Yes, biofuels do have a role to play in our energy needs, especially if they are manufactured and distributed locally; but as a long-term replacement they do more harm than good. At least at current efficiency rates and models of distribution, anyway. And the last thing we want is to convert more land from forest to crops, for food or fuel.

Here’s a report on this via Carconnection.com:

n recent months, a number of sources, including the U.K. magazine The Ecologist, have suggested that all of the supplementary (and necessary) processes around biofuels production may actually emit more carbon dioxide than if we were to keep using fossil fuels. Now two studies, published in the journal Science, confirm that. While biofuel crops, such as corn or sugar cane, help absorb CO2, they absorb far less than forests, or even scrubland, according to the study, which uses a worldwide agricultural model to estimate the emissions associated with the change in land use. Bottom line, the study concludes that the use of corn-based ethanol nearly doubles greenhouse-gas emissions over 30 years, while switchgrass — long thought of as an ethanol-producing alternative crop, would increase overall emissions by 50 percent if grown instead of corn on U.S. lands. To cut to the chase, nearly all crop-based biofuels used today end up causing more greenhouse-gas emissions than ‘conventional’ fossil fuels do.

What can I say? Trust me, lots.

First, read this: Britain’s universities are turning out more graduates than ever before, and a report overnight from the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGA) said employers found the generation born since 1982 ambitious, demanding, confident – or overconfident – tech-savvy and ethically conscious. But they also said some were simply “self-centred”, “fickle” and “greedy”. “They are coming up to recruitment stands at events and saying “what can you offer me?”,” LGA chief executive Carl Gilleard said. “Better would be to say “Do you have time so I can tell you what I can offer … Generation Y is me, me, me.” But perhaps unlike the more cynical, disaffected “Generation X” of the 1960s and 70s, they are less focused on salary and more on work-life balance, environment and ethics, he said. With a job for life being something of the past, they are also seen as less loyal to individual employers.

So what do I say? First up, if this is based on a survey – and we can’t tell – then let’s remember that surveys are usually rubbish. Especially when we are given no details on how the report was prepared, or the biases of the organisation. Let’s face it, people say what they think you want to hear, or simply just lie. Sure, some tell it like it is but get lead up the garden path by poor or leading questions. You need to look at actual behaviours, not what people say they think and do.

More particularly, the report says “employers found the generation born since 1982 ambitious, demanding, confident – or overconfident – tech-savvy and ethically conscious”. How did they arrive at a measure for “over-confident”? Is that an empirical value of some sort, or an opinion? Let me guess…. And note that if you were born in 1981 then it doesn’t apply. Just like a light-switch, it’s off or on. Sure. And should we be surprised that young people who have grown up with personal computers and the like to be tech-savvy? On the other hand you could be born in 1957 and still be tech-savvy, enough to know and use the latest gadgets, anyway. Because people continue to learn throughout their lives. Yes, the proportion of uptake varies with the late baby-boomers – as it does even with those born after 1982 – because (a) we have our own needs (b) we are all different. Let’s not forget that the technologies that those born post-’82 are so savvy with were more often than not invented by the un-savvy “boomers”.

It gets more opinionated. The report goes on to say that “they also said some were simply “self-centred”, “fickle” and “greedy”.” Well “some” certainly pins it down. What proportion does “some” represent? 10%? 2%? It reads like a significant percentage, but as always it’s never quantified, is it?

And yet more opinion, and the anecdotal evidence chimes in: “They are coming up to recruitment stands at events and saying “what can you offer me?”,” LGA chief executive Carl Gilleard said. “Better would be to say “Do you have time so I can tell you what I can offer … Generation Y is me, me, me.”

Well fancy people expecting to get answers from employers? They should just accept what’s offered and shut up, eh? And how many of these so-called Gen-Yers actually are so assertive, and how does this compare with say other labels, like their presumably non-assertive baby-boomer or Gen X parents? Well, the whole house of cards falls over because the parents are apparently a problem as well, in that they are acting assertively too!

To quote again: “I think we as parents are certainly partly to blame,” Mr Gilleard said. “In America, there are now big global companies who have to have policies on how to deal with parents… Some parents are coming back and saying their children are worth more – they are effectively acting as agents for their children.” Heavens above, assertive parents, just like their kids. Funny that. The article – from news.com – goes on with examples like how one person apparently showed little initiative in finding transport. That’s convincing. Therefore they are all like that. It has a slap at Gen-X as well and then laments that these kids are living in a global economic boom that may well bust. Can these pampered Gen-Ys actually survive an economic downturn, this opinionated labeller asks. Perhaps they will all melt-down when faced with a problem?

Well maybe these young people have hidden reserves, like all of us, and will adapt. Irrespective of when they were born.

You know how I feel about the cult of personality, that pseudo-scientific urge to label us all by ‘type’ and put us into the appropriate pigeon-hole. By this we ‘understand’ ourselves and can ‘perfect’ our lives. Or so the story goes. It’s like all of those other mildly convincing labels – like Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Scorpio, Virgo, and so on. It never tells the whole story, does it. Instead it promotes labelling, something that humans do particulary well.

OK, this rant is about teams and terminology and personality. We like to think we need ‘teamplayers’ in our business, and in our lives in general. They sound like assets, don’t they? People who are cohesive, get along, absorb instructions and lead others in the designated direction. They follow the rules, don’t make trouble and work as one with the group to generate the desired result. All goodness, surely?

Mind you, to most of us our vision of a team is based around sporting analogies, tinged with military terminology like tactics and strategy. So we tend to see our manager as a coach, our team leader as a captain and the team working in different positions on the field but playing to the same rules and game plan. Which is all sweet and lovely within a context of strictly enforced rules, clearly delineated roles and an end result (ie winning games, winning the season finale etc) that’s a self-reinforcing common vision.

If we are to critique this just a little, what exactly do we have in common here with modern work practices? Perhaps it was a stronger analogy in the 20th Century’s time-and-motion-manufacturing and typing-pool-style of regimented labor, but does it hold true in a world of increasing role diversity and the blurring of who-does-what-when. Do you see yourself in such a team? I don’t. I work in a geographically dispersed, virtual team, do everything myself (from typing to reporting to creating graphics; scheduling my time, prioritising as I see fit) as and when needed. I set my own hours around a work and life balance and rarely find myself boxed into anything like regimentation. It’s more fluid, organic and diverse, and very flexible.

Sure, I’m just me, just one example. But the shift in work practices – from full time to more part-time work; from office or factory to home-based work; from clearly delineated single-task-based work to multi-tasking, is as real as the shift to a service-based economy. Not everyone works likes this but a heck of a lot more do today than yesterday.

So what does this mean for teams? To some, nothing at all. They cling to old ideas with new labels. They divide people up by ‘personality type’ and advise that you need one of these and two of those and lots of these worker bees to make it hum. Which is great if you are a bee, and ant or maybe a wasp. But what do insects know about teamwork outside of their genetic endowment? What about insects, sorry people who need to generate new ideas to improve the business and match – or beat – the competition? We don’t want to make the same stuff the same way over and over again, do we? Well not if we are making incandescent bulbs in a world that is switching to energy-saving LEDs and fluoros.

In this new 21st Century world we need flexible, adaptable people who think and act on the run. They are assets to the team as well, in fact they are the new team. And if they uncover problems and devise and implement solutions within the overall team context and direction then they are invaluable. So we don’t want mere followers, we want action-thinkers who network with their peers. We don’t want them to buck the system for no reason, and we need a way to accommodate valid dissent, too. We don’t want managers to have to micro-manage, either. So it’s not just the team player per se but the team organisation that needs to allow free thought, innovation and a way to generate and propagate new ideas, quickly. In fact in a lean organisation, and I mean Lean in a particularly business-oriented way, the team player will contribute incremental improvement to process, procedure and organisational design quite naturally. So they are truly a thinking, doing, trying-out-new-ideas kind of beast. Sure, not all of the team members will shine to the same degree, or generate the same caliber or type of idea; but they will support each other and provide an environment of contribution by which the team overall prospers.

So it’s a cohesive environment of contribution that is important, coupled with flexible, empowered individuals. Perhaps thinking about ‘personality types’ and trying to build teams around a shopping list of personalities is too blinkered in this new world. Maybe we need to expect everyone to do a bit of everything, but in their individual way.

OK, you didn’t ask, but here I go. Some thoughts and questions to consider for today.

1. Why is it that the bicycle industry can make frames that are compatible with the drivetrains of at least 3 major manufacturers and the componentry of just about everyone? Doesn’t that (otherwise very sensible) component commonality impinge upon product differentiation?
2. Why is it that automotive companies can barely get it together to share wheels and tyres and sundry hidden mechanicals and electricals? Sure they have tried to share platforms and engines, and there are plenty of exceptions, but generally they keep reinventing the wheel; or in this case the complete drivetrain and monocoque shell. Does this more complete individualism grant some competitive advantage or are they simply blind to the savings that they could make for themselves, their customers and the world?
3. Why is it that the PC industry is split so unevenly between the bespoke “locked-up” designs like Apple’s and the open, modular and shared componentry that the “IBM-compatible” (or perhaps ‘Intel/Microsoft architecture-compatible’) makers comply with? What can we take away from the far greater market penetration of the latter approach? Or the higher prices and possibly ‘cooler’ designs from the low-volume makers?
4. What is the best approach for the world (including our living environment as well as our economic one)? To evolve shared componentry in all cases and thereby reduce overlap and waste; or to instead foster maximum competitive differentiation with bespoke, individualised design? Or to balance the 2 approaches? Or to find a 3rd way?
5. If there is ‘a better way’, should governments mandate it? Car safety legislation would be one example when government has enforced a common standard of safer design, however I have the sneaking suspicion that there are better, lighter, cheaper safety systems than the amazingly contrived explosive ‘airbag’ system that car companies have foist upon us. Airbags are of course less intrusive than helmets, harnesses and the like – but are they ‘better’? Is this an example where the compromise reached favours maximising car sales over implementing good sense? Or do the practical problems of getting people to wear harnesses and helmets outweigh the benefits?

These are the questions on my mind right now. More later, I’m sure…

Gross Domestic Product. You have to ask why gross, not net? Why only domestic? This is a perennial game of ‘what figures can I come up with quickly and easily that people will believe’, played by politicians and economists on a roughly quarterly basis. When you look into it, it’s a house of cards. It has some relevance as a measure of relative production (so yes, we can say we generated more – or less – quantifiable economic activity within our national borders during the chosen period) but its biggest drawback is that it doesn’t subtract the costs of that production. Sure, we are making and ‘doing’ more stuff, but at what cost to our environment or our real standard of living? It’s looking only at a raw, fat, dirty number. (We can however discount the international product as that is a much smaller part of the whole deal.)

This is not a secret. It’s taught in economics. It’s obvious – it’s actually spelled out in “GDP”. It’s not net. It’s domestic. It’s product. So why don’t we think about it and do something? Because it’s hard to calculate the real costs of production, especially the fuzzy ones like standard of living and loss of environment. Anyway, at least it’s getting mentioned in the press: Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist tapped to head a new French study, said Tuesday he sees gross domestic product (GDP), the most often cited yardstick, as an imperfect indicator. Stiglitz, named by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to head a panel to find a new method of economic calculation that will include quality-of-life factors, said the current yardsticks “only reward governments if they increase materialistic production.”

They may not sell as many cars, or make as much profit (or any, for that matter) but they are selling a nice line of sub-brands these days. First it was Aston, now it’s Jag. Volvo may go eventually but for now it’s held closely to the corporate bosom. From the Car Connection: Ford opened up a new era in automotive history Thursday by announcing it hoped to sell the company’s Jaguar and Land Rover brands to India’s Tata Motors.

Well it had to happen, I guess. Ford and GM continue to try to dig themselves out of their respective holes whilst the Japanese, the Koreans and now the Indians make strategic investments in new technologies, factories and brands. Will this be a technological and marketplace coup that propels Indian manufacturing into Europe, or will Tata find itself supping from a poisoned chalice?

Whilst on Ford, don’t miss this: EcoBoost. A slick name that sounds enviro-friendly and new but which is simply 2 old ideas tarted-up. No wonder the US car makers are bleeding. They are (a) late to the party and (b) out of ideas. Still, when you have no cash you may as well do the obvious and hope for the best!

It seems that we can’t let go of labels. As I have noted before we continually stretch the labelling logic with increasingly weak definitions for Baby Boomers, Gens X and Y and of course the weakest link of all, Gen Next. And we can’t leave the Web alone either, with Webs 1, 2 and now 3. But can you tell the difference? Does it matter? Do we agree on the definitions? No, no and no! But Forbes mag has taken a stab at it.

In general we are all human and react in fairly predictable ways to basic stimuli. However we each grow up in different circumstances, often in different cultures, and experience different things. When we try to distill one or two key common denominators across these timeless boundaries we often come unstuck. This, as I’ve said before, is the big problem with “generations” theory. Firstly the theory discounts the core human values – that which is basic to all of us, and assumes instead that being born ‘at a certain time’ overrides genetics and any strong local cultural beliefs. It over-emphasizes both our high-impact events and the dull background noise of life and diminishes the family and our individual preferences. Then it conveniently forgets that people experience both more things and new things as they age; so people labelled as ‘baby boomers’ can never adapt to new circumstances by becoming something else. And by mistaking what is actually ‘aging behaviour’ for ‘generational behaviour’ they continue to mis-tell us what we “should” be like. It’s all about convenience.

Not sure about this? Well think what ‘baby boomer’ means to you; the pop definition, if you like. You get a picture of post-war boomers, cashed-up, people who had lived the peace and love era and moved on to embrace property and success after all. You imagine Beatle-loving hippies who have raised kids and settled into a selfish retirement full of rich expectation. Yet this is a hugely diverse group, even if you only consider ‘boomers’ in the Western nations. Diverse indeed by circumstance, nationality, religion, employment, education and absolute situation. Some indeed had parents who fought in the 2nd World War but many more didn’t. Some were old enough to see the Vietnam war in the news, some only saw the ending. Some remember Korea, most don’t. Some liked the Beatles, but many more were barely old enough to remember the Fab Four breaking up. Yet we lump ‘em all together, or at best divide them into early, late or mid boomer. It’s just a label.

It’s easier to call me a late baby boomer because of my birth year than to actually find out what I’m like. And of course by sheer numbers enough people will fall roughly within broad boundaries to make the label ‘stick’. Enough of us have indeed an affection for the Beatles that marketers can ‘use’ this knowledge to do some targeting. But plenty of us preferred the Stones or the Who, or classical music, or something else again. We reduce ourselves to averages and then try to tar us all with the one brush.

But do some labels stick better than others? What about the great cultural divide between nations? Yes, there are some correlations that suggest that certain styles of leadership resonate more strongly within some cultures. That doesn’t mean we can jump to conclusions, but we can be aware that people who experienced culture ‘a’ will have been shaped to some degree by that culture and will often react in certain ways. With that in mind, read here at Harvard about Mao’s possible influence on Chinese CEOs.

OK, OK, I’m part of the problem. Like G.W. Bush I have an MBA in my back pocket, so I can streamline manufacturing processes, organise effective marketing, think strategically and tie my own shoelaces. Which brings me to modern low-cost manufacturing, famously Toyota and “lean”-style. Yes folks, MBAs are taught how to organise production lines, strip things down to the basics and to cut out waste. Duplication – bad. Re-doing stuff – bad. Too many steps, especially redundant ones – bad. Why? Because waste, duplication and redundant steps in manufacturing all cost money. If you can cut them down, or even completely out, you end up with a cheaper product. And a cheaper product can either gain you more marketshare or more profit – or both. And for the consumer a cheaper product must be a better product, surely.

Well, no. If you are an old-timer like me you will remember ‘the good old days’ when you could pull something apart and fix it. You will remember being able to buy even the tiniest spare parts at reasonable prices and to take them home and to fix things, so they lasted longer. Now whilst the manufacturer makes some money out of spare parts it also costs them a lot in warehousing and distribution. To get parts to little shops near you and me takes up a lot of time, money and effort. It’s actually very costly. And you know what MBAs love to do, right? Yep, remove costs. Gradually we have moved from a world of repairable manufactured goods with ample supplies of spares to a world of ever-more-modular manufacturing. Yes, you can still “fix” things, it’s just that you can’t simply fix the broken bit – you have to replace the entire module.

Now these modules exist because it’s cheaper to make and stock one large bit than a larger number of much smaller components. Fitting such individual components costs money and time for each manufacturing step, so doing away with the “bits” removes lots of steps and makes it cheaper to assemble and to stock. It saves the manufacturer everywhere. You are happy because manufactured stuff is cheaper.

But there are hidden costs, aren’t there? Repairing a manufactured good is now either impossible – it’s just not designed to be taken apart again – or much more expensive as large modules are involved. So you either pay through the nose and replace the module, hack at it with a saw, or give up and buy a whole new “thing”. And as new “things” are so cheap we don’t mind so much. And as new consumers are born they are born into a world of consumerism, waste and excess and don’t realise that there once was ‘another reality’. And as we get into the swing of just buying another thing to replace the old thing we bring down the cost of “things” generally. It’s called mass consumption.

But it gets worse. By ramping up this overall consumption of “things” we are burning more oil, digging up more raw materials and generally just throwing more and more stuff out. OK, OK, it sounds bleak. Well maybe it is.

And the saddest part – we are taught to do this in our graduate business schools. It’s modern manufacturing folks.

Lots of recent words on the young these days ditching the technologies of the elderly.

Thus we have PCs displaced by super-powered mobile phones and email ditched in favour of instant messaging. Well I reckon it’s not quite like that at all. Sure, hand-held devices are becoming more powerful and can do more, but they can’t do everything. I don’t want to use Photoshop on a hand held, for example. Or Office, for that matter. Maybe I’ll do a draft, or a sketch on a handheld but I’ll do the real work on the PC. If youngsters are ditching PCs it’s because they don’t need to do the heavy lifting that a PC can do. They are satisfied with faster, lower quality and less functionality. And that’s sweet. Most of us only use a fraction of what a PC and its typical applications can do – maybe only 10-20%, if that – so it’s only natural that we’ll adjust our tools to suit our real work and home needs. In that way I think handheld devices will continue to erode some of the PC market, and convergence of features will continue to shift people to new devices with new multi-functional capabilities.

So PCs are indeed going to have to evolve, and even then will lose more market share. They’ll shrink in size but retain that heavy-lifting grunt-ability we need to do full-size jobs. Equally, however, the miniature-sized devices will continue to grow their abilities upwards and become much more like miniature, portable computers. Sounds like they’ll collide in the middle. So what’s really happening here?

Well PCs aren’t dying, they are evolving, just as the hand-helds are, too. These new converged devices – cell phones with CPU, memory and camera, for example – will grow into still more capable hand-held PC modules that will plug seamlessly into full-size keyboards, scanners and monitors when you need to use Office or Photoshop or whatever. When we need that still-more-big-iron-grunt, extra memory or some specific applications we can download it all off the web and “the grid” and simply leverage the scale of the Internet to boost the performance of our modular mini-PC. In this way the PC-in-a-big-box will have morphed into a more portable device; just be careful not to lose it somewhere on a train or a taxi, OK?

Does that mean it died? Or is it more like dinosaurs evolving into birds?

As for email, well IM is just like email but quicker, looser, more free and easy. It’s part of a continuum between casual and formal communication.  I expect to see the divisions and distinctions blur over time so IM simply becomes email when needed, or an email simply becomes an IM. It all depends on the application – if your email application only does email then that’s what you are stuck with… but if it can morph into IM on a whim, so will you. Again, does that mean email is dead? Nope, it just evolved again.

Here’s an InfoWorld piece on this subject.

You may have noticed the recent DARPA-organised robotic car competition. If you didn’t you can read about it here in a Forbes article. It’s certainly impressive and looked like a lot of fun. Aside from enhancing research into practical robotics, competitions between robotic cars completing ‘races’ in urban environments is an interesting look into a Sci-fi future of immense wonder. There must be a business model here for someone.

Just imagine: robotic sports, anyone? Google-search your way to an urban pleasure robot for hire, perhaps? Replace human-driven taxis with robots and cut down on those inane cab-driver conversations? (Unless the robots get speech chips as well of course.) Or robotic buses that eliminate the end-of-shift grumpy-driver syndrome? Or more seriously, competent robotic day-surgery in remote locations without the need for expensive, highly-trained human surgeons “on-site”. It’s potentially a mix of good and bad, isn’t it? More programmers and robotics experts, fewer jobs for real people.

Now I’m not a Luddite, but I do wonder about whether we think these things through. Like Einstein wondering whether his work opened to door to nuclear war.

And sure enough these harmless-looking robot games have a military goal as well, with lives saved if you can send more robots into battle instead of warm bodies. The downside to robotic wars, however, are grim. Without the appropriate programming robots will not show human mercy or simple judgment, and may indeed be programmed to be exactly that – inhumane killing machines. And war with ‘thinking’ machines instead of people at risk may lower the barriers to war itself. So we get more war with fewer consequences – well, if you are on the winning side, anyway.

Meanwhile Google’s ‘first privately-owned car on the moon’ competition is a bit wacky – and certainly way-out – but hints at where we may be going next in our personal transport. Despite the fun of it all it’s possible that our obsession with cars will end on Earth when we run out of accessible, cheap resources; equally it’s hard to see how lunar exploration and exploitation will solve our immediate problems. But that’s humanity – pressing on, pushing the boundaries and fixing up the broken stuff later.

You can poke holes in anything if you pick the right stats. I guess that’s the great thing about statistics, isn’t it, that it can be used so elegantly and persuasively in support or attack of an idea. For example many believe that lowering  trade barriers and increasing world connectivity (both of which are patently true – it really has happened, if not yet to the “nth” degree) has resulted in a more level playing  field for both individuals (that’s you and me) and businesses (big and small) to compete on a global scale. On the face of it that’s surely true.

Indeed there are many, many examples of small “local” businesses operating on the web and staking a global market share which would otherwise take major investment in distribution effort. Think of the marketing, sales reps, call centres, support staff, wholesalers and distributors required for a small business to expand beyond its local area.  Now think of all the small ebay businesses that have prospered globally, the small shops that garner 10, 20 or 30% of their trade now from a global reach, the companies that leverage Amazon’s computer services and back end distribution services. It doesn’t take much looking to see new forms of distribution and profit-taking that takes advantage both of lower trade barriers and the near-frictionlessness of global Internet commerce.

Well maybe that’s all wrong, or out of proportion, anyway. Apparently Harvard Business School professor Pankaj Ghemawat calls that  vision of the early 21st century “globaloney” and has written a book about it. Now you could say right up front that he is saying “it’s not so” when he’s (a) leveraging the Internet to promote and sell his book and (b) taking advantage of the breakdown of international book distribution cartels by promoting and selling his book globally. But I’m being glib, aren’t I?

He has been quoted as saying that international trade today represents less than 10% of most economies.  He’s criticising a popular “25%” figure but here in Australia I have seen figures for exports alone ranging from 12% in the 1950s to 22% in 1996, and back to 18% of Australian GDP in 2006. Which would indeed support around 25%, if you add in imports, surely? Maybe he’s working on some global average when he gets the 10% figure? Even so, surely trade varies by country and fluctuates with exchange rates and commodity prices, so a net exporter of commodities (things like oil, iron ore and coal, notoriously hard to shift over the Internet) will need to look very closely at the figures and do some breakdowns by type of transaction to really draw conclusions that stick. I’m not sure even the OECD has done the sort of work needed to truly even out the stats globally, but probably they have (I’ll look it up when I get a chance).

In any case his stance is that most  economic activity happens locally, and you can hardly argue with that. Most of us shop at local supermarkets, buy most of our day to day goods and services locally and if we buy a car or build a house – well, there’s a global connection with the car but for most of us it involves local trade. Indeed the highest price is paid by the end user and the global component is diminished substantially by margins added along the way.

So I guess I agree with Pankaj Ghemawat, in that local still rules overall. But that doesn’t mean that the world hasn’t changed, only that some things are more resistant to change than others. It’s still hard to beat shopping at a local store where you can examine and receive the goods (especially food and clothing) immediately. However as real-time Internet commerce improves on static images and provides a more immersive shopping experience I’m sure it will garner a bigger share of these ‘resistant’ products.

And trade barriers have lifted and I can buy imported cars far more easily and cheaply than ever before. I know that’s true. Ghemawat also writes of immigration rates falling as some proof that we aren’t globalising like we think we are, whereas I know that that my personal contact with the greater world community is at an all-time high. Email, online chat and Web 2.0 has brought us all closer, surely? As well, tourism is at an all-time high. People may not be moving to another country to live, but maybe moving to another country is not so necessary now? Perhaps the drivers of population movement are different in the 21st century? Which is also in agreement with Ghemawat’s view, but what actually is he saying by this? That because (for example) Europe hasn’t suffered another World War recently and has been at relative peace and prosperity for some time we aren’t globalising like we think we are? Is Ghemawat comparing the immigration stats for one period of history with another and drawing weird conclusions? Maybe.

To my mind Pankaj Ghemawat is stating the obvious and making some rather unprofound motherhood statements. Yes, it’s true, people are not driven to relocate from country to country like they were. However tourism is up. Yes, it’s true, local transactions beat global ones by volume and value. But the types and numbers of transactions made globally have certainly changed and bear some examination. And trade barriers are down and the patterns of world trade have changed.

If that’s not enough change to mean we’ve ‘globalised’ then that’s fine. It just means that what we don’t actually have is  clear and agreed definition of ‘globalisation’. The BNET story that sparked my rave is here by the way.

Journalists have it tough. They must report factually (never easy when truth can be so dull). They must separate fact from opinion (which requires both insight and time-consuming research). They must meet their deadlines (don’t we all?). And they must write appealing prose that targets their readership or audience. In other words they are horribly compromised by eternal conflicts of interest and can never be trusted. If you’ve ever been involved with putting stories together with journalists you’ll know that your words are often accepted holus-bolus (which is great if you want to get your spiel out there) as that’s the easiest (ie laziest) approach for them. However if your story is too insipid, or if they want to prove a point of some kind then don’t expect much of your story to get ‘out there’. Instead it will vary from ‘enhanced’ to ‘total fabrication’. You can’t blame ‘em really.

Anyway, today’s brave words are from news.com.au: MORE than 50 of the world’s airlines can’t be wrong in their choice of Boeing’s hi-tech Dreamliner ahead of the A380 “big bird” from Airbus.

Wow, that many airlines can’t be wrong, eh? Airlines are never wrong, never make mistakes when choosing one aircraft over another, no. Never. Funny how this gushing story also coincides with the arrival of the first commercial flight of the A380 into Australia.

The article continues to enthuse with:The moulded carbon-fibre “plastic fantastic” has yet to fly but is already the most successful new airliner in aviation history. Yes, the fastest selling commercial airliner yet to be seen… and indeed it hasn’t been seen in the air, either. But gee that A380 already has its wings… can’t let Airbus get any leverage out of that, can we?

Anyone got the original Boeing press release handy?

Really, by now they should know better. They call some cars “green” or the saviours of the world because they do a little better than the others in fuel consumption, but forget that cars need infrastructure and resources other than fuel to get around. And that ‘other stuff’ stuffs the environment, too. And they call old stuff, like hybrid engines (think diesel-electric locos on our railroads) or combos of super and turbo chargers (think piston-engined airliners like the Super Connie), new. And then they write stuff like this: But what happens if one of these automotive gods descends from the stratosphere and into the reach of the only moderately well-heeled? It’s a dangerous path to tread. Mercedes and BMW have been there, trading the exclusivity of the badge for the lure of sales growth. But no one from the top shelf of supercars had tried it until Porsche released the Cayenne 4WD in 2003. This vehicle has certainly lifted Porsche sales (the company says it will make up about 45 per cent of total sales with the new model) – but how has it affected the long-standing Porsche formula? Just how fast (or slow) is the cheapest Porsche money can buy? To find out we grabbed two other popular six-cylinder cars as a benchmark.

First up, who cares? Well I care because the resources squandered by hulks like these mean less resources around for the future. And the basic premise is wrong. This is just a brand issue, and it has been done to death. According to the hacks at drive.com.au Porsche has never trod this path before. Yeah, right. In these lame moto-journalistic eyes Porsche never made a truck-powered 924 or – what was that earlier effort with the flat-four? Well it was firstly the 356 but that was cool, and then the subsequent 912 was bigger and not-so-cool. And then there was the 914. With the parts-bin 924 and 914 they really made affordable, economical performance cars that competed with Alfa Romeo’s GTV and its ilk. Oh for the days when sports cars – all cars – were small and fiesty, not fat and fusty.
But watered down Porsches didn’t really work and they were worked over relentlessly until Porker gave up and kept the 911 going and going instead. Which has led us to today, when the hacks are going ‘gosh, a cheap-ish Porsche’. Again. And the thrust of it all is business, not passion or sustainability. Porsche are once more broadening their range, not with sports cars but with fat but powerful iterations of the 4WD from hell. You could say it’s diversification, and it’s been a success. It’s also risky in that it is polluting and diluting the brand. It may be that in these times when everyone has an overpowered 4WD that Porker can get away with it – seemingly so. But it’s neither new nor original. And definitely not something a ‘traditional’ 911 owner would want to know about.

And let’s not beat it up into something desirable, either.

We say we want safer vehicles. We say we are concerned about global warming. We say we are concerned about mixing ever-bigger vehicles with smaller cars on our roads, and about the extra space consumed in car parks by these family trucks. So why do we get stories like this one (from Fairfax online): According to the information leaked in the magazine report, the six-speed-automatic-only F6 X should be capable of accelerating from 0-100km/h in about six seconds. This kind of straightline performance puts it on par with more expensive, high-performance 4WD wagons from Porsche, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The report confirms that the FPV F6 X scores a number of firsts for the FPV brand. The two-tonne wagon is fitted with Brembo six-piston front brakes with a unique anti-lock-braking tune, and is the first FPV model with electronic stability control and curtain airbags. The F6 X gets firmer suspension and unique 18-inch alloy wheels to improve its road manners .

And why do car makers think this is good? They all do it. They love their hero cars, and bigger and brasher is better. But would you actually buy one, or be so arrogant or unaware as to drive it?

We tend to focus on the energy we put into the car – you know, that liquid energy we currently use as fuel – rather than look at the total energy budget of the car. Which of course would be fuel over lifetime of car+car manufacture+car repairs and maintenance+fuel to move raw materials+share of cost of infrastructure and so on. That would include roads, ships that transport cars, port facilities for cars, car parks and even the family garage. It would include opportunity costs as well (you know, what you could have done with all of that land and money if it wasn’t tied up as freeways and so on). People install fluoro lightbulbs and offset their petrol expense and then declare themselves ‘carbon neutral’, when of course they are not even close. Worse still they buy a hybrid car and think ‘job done’. Baloney, it’s just job started.
Now it has been said that roughly 40% of the total energy budget of a car is expended just in its manufacture. Other people have suggested 60%, some much less. It depends of course on the size of the car, the cost of raw materials and fuel and how far that car travels in its life time. But is it true? Could so much of the energy expense actually occur just in manufacture? Now if you extend the life of the car (and continue to drive it, of course!) you increase the likely absolute cost of the fuel whilst diminishing the proportion of energy used in manufacture. But of course nothing is ever that simple, is it? You should factor in a share of the infrastructure, too. Can’t drive a car without roads after all (even off-road vehicles end up on road at times).
Unless of course we make it simple, just to prove a point. So let’s calculate how much energy is expended in making a car by setting aside the (probably!) much larger infrastructure costs for the moment. We could calculate this by breaking the car into material types by weight and looking up melting points of metals and so on and calculating back from there, but let’s just do a rough calculation simply based on retail price. We will assume that there are no energy subsidies (when of course there are) and that the price is fair, i.e. not below cost (or “dumped”). Big assumptions, yes. But we can’t be too far off, surely? (He writes, hopefully.)
Anyway if we choose 3 cars – a Hyundai Getz, a GM Commodore and an Alfa Romeo Brera and make a few more rash assumptions we may get some answers. The recommended retail of these cars in Australia is $A15,490 for the Getz 1.6l; $A39,900 for a Commodore Berlina V6 and $A87,990 for the Brera AWD v6. We will assume that the dealer makes 3% on the Getz, 8% on the Commodore and 15% on the Brera. (I’m assuming a very competitive market where more money is made on servicing and value-adds than selling the car itself – I could be way out!) There are many such layers of margin and tax to peel away, so here’s a table to show my calculations…

I have to tell you I was somewhat surprised at the estimated factory cost of the Alfa Brera. It must be wrong, surely? Somewhere my assumptions have gone awry, because seemingly the prestige European sports luxury car has a lower base cost per vehicle than the locally built sedan. But then I wondered if the still-somewhat protected nature of the small Aussie car manufacturing industry may have distorted the real cost of manufacture. So I bumped up the factory margin for the GM Commodore; but perhaps I should also knock the Alfa factory margin down somewhat? I thought a prestige car must attract a good margin, but maybe not so much when it’s an Alfa?

So let’s peg the Alfa back…

OK, these figures are still fantasy and probably out of kilter all over the place, but it’s still remarkable that the $80K+ RRP Alfa Romeo comes so close to the factory costs of the local Aussie sedan and the imported Korean small car, but there you go. You can play with the numbers yourself and get a somewhat different result – but it does illustrate how taxes alone distort pricing. And I didn’t even factor in the now-small import duties. Oooops – well you can do it yourself, and it just shows again why we probably shouldn’t be making cars in Australia. It may well say something similar if we chose to decompose US car prices, but I’m too lazy to go to further trouble.

Anyway, our aim here is to estimate energy costs, and you can see immediately that the factory’s raw material + transport + energy costs are going to be quite small individually, but proportionately larger for the ironically more economical small car. If I was to hazard a guess I’d say transport of resources currently would be 20%, energy 20% and raw materials 60% – but that is a guess.

Which would in any case give us this result:

If that breakdown is even close it means that the fuel cost will quite quickly overtake the cost of the energy used in manufacture. Of course we aren’t dealing with a level playing field at all, in fact various governments at times make decisions to subsidise development and infrastructure for export industries, so the real numbers are probably a few – maybe many – percent higher. I’m still surprised at the moderately low manufacturing costs overall, but that’s modern manufacturing at work isn’t it? Note also that if we ramp up energy costs we’d certainly change the nature of the whole manufacturing game. Transport costs would go through the roof for starters and the percentages will go south. But so will fuel prices…

It’s not easy, is it? We want to include everyone in our society, to extend our care and concern generally across the community, so that all share equally in the greater good of our civilisation. Everyone wants that, or they say they do. They want us to have our freedom, to do as we like – as long as we don’t hurt others in the process. From that grow our laws, be they enshrined in public legislation or religious text. And as everyone also knows, the law is an ass.

I recently wrote this: And as a consequence we go lightly on both driver qualifications and reprimands for driver ‘infringements’. If we applied tougher rules, or even applied our existing rules in a diligent manner then we’d actually remove that accessibility for a large number of people and hurt them socially and economically, and as a corollary hurt the politicians who act on our behalf. And I believe it’s true. We want everyone to have access to the freedom of personal transport. However as a western society we have ploughed far more investment into car ownership than public transport, so we have ended up with a society where logistically it is difficult to get everywhere and anywhere, easily, without a car. And we have made it easy to get a drivers’ licence, and cheap and easy to buy a car. So we all go out and get cars, and our expectation is that car ownership is a right, not a privilege. However we want to make driving reasonably safe (and we have settled for a dangerous level of accident and injury in our compromise, too, may I add) and thus we impose laws to control errant behaviour. Some things are perfectly obvious, like stopping for red lights and keeping right or left. But other laws are contentious or simply difficult to enforce. People like to speed, car manufacturers like to make ever faster cars, and some people seemingly lack the skill or judgement to not monitor and control speed. We then catch them and fine them until they lose their licence, their job, and their social status. We create enemies within, with a grudge against law makers and enforcers.

It’s akin to setting people up to fail. We encourage and reinforce car ownership and freedom with easy access to licences, cars and roads on one hand, then crack down on people who lack the skill, talent, experience, maturity or judgement to obey the laws. We let them in, then punish them for coming onboard. Why not raise the licensing and ownership bar and keep them out in the first place, so that they don’t go through this agony and loss of privilege? Because we want to be seen to be inclusive? Because we are all sadists at heart? Or because we don’t want to pay for the public transport infrastructure that supports non-car-drivers?

Well it’s a thought, anyway. Another option is to make cars fail-safe, so they cannot exceed posted limits. The technology is certainly here, with GPS, RFID and car-based computer power and ‘fly-by-wire’ controls. It’s just a matter of political will. Who is prepared to take on the car makers who sell speed as well as function with their “hero” car marketing? Who will stand up and be prepared to save thousands, if not millions of lives, by simply rendering cars safe from law-abuse? Whoever takes this on will be called undemocratic for starters – the “freedom fighters” of this world will say that it’s not the car that breaks the law, it’s the driver. And haven’t we heard that line before?

Personality is such a unique thing, so individual. It’s both an inner force that shapes and filters our thoughts and actions and an outer shield that we project to identify ourselves to others and to protect our inner self from harm. It’s our essence, isn’t it? If we feel something we feel it via our perception filters, which are embedded in our personality. If we do something we do it in alignment with who we are and how we think. If we meet and greet someone we project our personality onto our outer skin, or hide it from harm if we don’t wish to expose ourselves. How we make those decisions, whether to be open or closed, jolly or sombre, deep or shallow, is very much up to us, our past experiences and our reaction to the environment around us at the time. If we step outside our skins to act out a fantasy, or shift our perceptions or behaviours to fit into social or work situations, that’s entirely within our control. We may have some ingrained beliefs and “default” options to fall back on but we are powerfully human and mutable to suit the need. You need to be tough-minded to do a job, so you do it. You don’t sit there thinking ‘I’m an introvert and I can’t do this’. Well maybe you do. Point is, only you know what you are thinking.
Unless of course you believe in personality tests. Or believe that they are meaningful, or that they tell you something useful. Personality tests are meant to map you to a fixed number of “qualities” and degrees of belonging within each quality. It is of course labelling – and again it’s very human to want to do this – and it’s tempting to believe that in answering a multitude of carefully selected questions we will be lured into revealing our inner natures, our core drivers. Now I love these tests, I really do. They are great fun. And sometimes I get those “oooh-ahhh” moments when I think yes, it really is me. It really is. But then I get the same feelings from a good astrology reading. Where lies the truth?

I think the jury is still out. It hasn’t been sufficiently demonstrated that personality can be measured, or deduced from cunning questions. We can’t even be utterly sure that you and I are reading the same meanings into the same questions, or that we have the same truthful intent when answering. And we certainly can’t reliably predict our behaviours, let alone our work performance, from our personality assessment. We actually have powerful, possibly unique human thinking processes that let us adapt ourselves to suit the need. That’s why we are at the top of the food chain, not down the bottom with only pre-written reactive programs to help us find food and survive.
Which is why I get the creeps when I read stuff like this: “They thought he was a surface guy. They didn’t think he was deep enough to be the ceo,” says Carlick. But he aced the Myers-Briggs personality test they made him take, and he became chief in February 2004″. Oh please. Is it possible to “ace” the MBTI? I think the journalist in question means that the personality type indicated by the test results is strongly correlated with being a CEO. That is to say that some brilliant researchers somewhere have done a large number of MBTI assessments on many CEOs and have found a statistically powerful connection between certain personality types and those that occupy the top job. Hopefully these same researchers have dug deeper and found that this correlation holds true for successful CEOs and that there’s some defining characteristic that sets them apart from unsuccessful CEOs. Otherwise you may just be repeating the same hiring patterns of the past, irrespective of performance outcomes. And proponents will say exactly that, that they have correlated MBTI results with job roles and successful behaviours. If so, where’s that compelling data? I’ve looked, it’s just not there.
And how do you know for sure what’s going on inside someone’s mind when they complete the MBTI? What if they are lying? And are good at it?
And why don’t we all just give up, accept our labelling and go do what “they” tell us we would be good at? Is my blood boiling? You bet!
Of course there’s a postscript. Having “aced” the MBTI the CEO in question went on to “rename the company Intermix, nixed half a dozen failing businesses and gave MySpace Chief Chris DeWolfe free rein and more resources. MySpace grew from 1,000,000 members to 24 million by October 2005, when Rosenblatt sold Intermix to Fox for $650 million–an eightfold increase from the company’s value on day he arrived. Rosenblatt walked off with $23 million.” Well that proves it, doesn’t it?

Cars. I like them, I really do. 200 years ago only the most intrepid or desperate of us ventured outside of our villages, and it involved great risk to do so. In some measure the automobile and its accompanying infrastructure has facilitated the breaking down of barriers between villages, towns and cities, even more so than the train or ship. It has made it far more practical to go and visit the unknown and opened the eyes of many more people to the fact that there really is nothing to fear but fear itself. It’s akin to what the aeroplane has done to help break down barriers between wider geographies, like nations themselves.  Of course cars and planes are not the only factors – trade is a big one, and breaking down barriers to trade has probably had a bigger impact again. The idea that a country or region has to be self-sufficient and can’t rely to any great extent on other regions persists today but has fewer supporters. In this new global world we have more trade because we have a more fair and open approach to markets; and the gains made include a more peaceful relationship between nations as well as vastly more trade and thus economic activity. On the back of that we see more air, road and sea traffic between cities and nations.

This increased traffic and freer trade (it’s not perfect yet and imbalances abound) has allowed our economic system to drive increased specialization and a greater reliance upon more efficient producers, wherever they may be. Unfortunately part of the success of that system has relied upon subsidized oil. Because it seems so important to trade, we have fostered an imperfect market based on unreal costs. Now’s a great time to look at those costs and start balancing the equation to set things right. We need to preserve the good effects of almost-frictionless trading whilst pricing the oil, coal and gas appropriately, in a way that reflects the real costs.

Which really is my thought for the day. Perhaps the IT industry will assist us in keeping the barriers down between nations, if the Internet is kept free and open with no massive vested interests (like governments and corporates) dominating and blocking communication. Of course it’s not always free and open now, and there are always limits set, openly or by stealth. I have no easy answer, but there are some tough decisions to be made all round, aren’t there?

This dropped into my mailbox from Harvard. It’s basically discussing the difference between the old school thought that corporations just did what they do best and kept away from the social consequences, which is handled better by governments, and the new-school thinking of Corporate Social Responsibility – which brings ethics and responsibility into the balance sheets. From Harvard Business Online: Although social issues are indeed the purview of government, in reality, global corporations are creating a de facto set of international standards that collectively rise above the social obligations imposed by any one government – and to compete in the global economy, companies are finding that they must abide by this emerging code of conduct. Government intervention is required for America to solve its major social problems — whether in education, health care, or the environment — but consumer tastes and political will are ultimately inseparable. If US consumers don’t care about global warming, they won’t buy a Prius — but they also won’t demand that politicians tax carbon emissions either. It is the attitudes of our consumer-citizens that drive both politics and profits.

About which I am thinking how CSR can help to more quickly address – or nip in the bud – some of the social consequences of global corporate activity. It’s not going to solve every problem but it’s a welcome change from the “not my problem” buck-passing that has gone on in the past. Possibly the best way to solve the downstream impacts of innovation and change is to properly and fairly price those impacts. Which of course assumes that we know the real costs before they actually happen – a big if, but one that we could set about addressing. A carbon-offset program is one such example – put a price on carbon and use economic theory to resolve the out-of-control emission of carbon into the atmosphere. Now if we had used our heads back in the 1970s when it became apparent that we had a global warming problem we could have set something up and saved ourselves a lot of future pain. But “we” labelled those people the “looney left” and “greenies” and just laughed. Some of us are still laughing as we sink into the mud, oblivious to it all.
Of course global warming just is the tip of the iceberg. I’m thinking of all of the social impacts of our innovations, and asking questions like: “Do we price the health impact of remote controlled TVs into our electrical goods industry and provide a cost recovery cash stream for health care?” and “Do we price the medical consequences of automobile accidents into our auto manufacturing industry and provide that funding back to our medical system?” And of course the answer is typically no – because it’s ‘too hard’, or would “hurt” employment somewhere. But if we don’t recover real costs from the real users then what we are actually doing is not capitalism, it’s socialism. What we do when we isolate these downstream effects from the cost of manufacture is to protect and subsidise that manufacture. Which promotes inefficiency and hides the real causes behind so many changes in our society. And leaves the rest of us picking up the tab.
Now I’m not against socialism, or capitalism. I just want to bring these imperfections to light and help strike a balance.

This may take a while to explain, so bear with me. About a year or so ago now I had a yarn (or rather I exchanged emails with) IBM’s then chief technologist Irving Wladawsky-Berger. The subject was our collective responsibility to manage the future as well as the present. (I work for IBM too, by the way, but not at Irving’s altitude, if you know what I mean. And these are of course my views, not necessarily IBM’s.) Now this exchange was along the lines of my previous post, but rather than just asking ‘how did we get here?’ I instead asked ‘what happens if we just innovate and release, ever quicker, and repeat ad infinitum?’. It was in part a technological conversation, where as a technologist Irving was keen to expand upon the benefits to humanity of – you guessed it – technology.

And of course I agree. Technological innovation is not just a special gift of humanity but a vital tool by which we meet the challenges and threats to our lives, such as to our food and water supplies and to our general comfort, security and wellbeing. To meet these challenges swiftly may very well be critical to resolving the issues we face and surviving as individuals (or even as a species). So we don’t want to hold things up unnecessarily. On that count both Irving and myself would probably agree (and I’ll stop speaking for him now – you can find Irving’s insightful blog here).
My real bone of contention is that whilst we are very creative animals, we don’t necessarily respect or adequately consider the consequences of what we do. We may well ask ‘is anyone going to buy this?’ and I bet we’ll ask the ever-popular ‘will we capture the lion’s share of the market and make a killing?’, too. We will probably also ask ‘is it legal?’ and ‘can we patent it?’, but we won’t necessarily ask ‘will this product lead to consequences we don’t understand, or can’t control?’. I don’t blame anyone for answering along the lines that we have to trust the social and legal system to monitor and adapt to these downstream effects, for that is the system we have. When releasing a new product we are asked simply to meet the legislated requirements of any particular market and we tend (as humans do) take advantage of any loopholes. Some companies may take a more ethical or wider social view than others but in principle we innovate within set guidelines and then release. The community itself has evolved social, legal and economic systems that are meant to self-adjust to our innovations. Typically this means that if something goes awry down the line it’s spotted by someone, somewhere, at some time. It’s a downstream effect, and it may be cumulative, and – crucially – may not necessarily be direct. It will almost certainly be reflected in changed human behaviour, and maybe acknowledged also as a ‘hurt’ to an individual. 

If the changed behaviour is small or painless enough we’ll just forget about it and go on with our lives. But if we are hurt in some way by the innovation we’ll notice it. If we can identify the source of the pain then we’ll mount a legal case or perhaps lobby for a new law. Subsequently it may enter the wider public debate and sometimes – eventually, in the fullness of time – it may become a new law, guideline or requirement. If the originator was identified then they may be compelled to modify the product or service. Now that’s a great, self-correcting system, surely. After all, that’s what we have been trusting, revising and relying upon for the last 2,000 years at least, so why not just continue as before?

I’m sure you can see already that this largely reactive system (there are exceptions of course, but it’s generally reacting to a ‘hurt’) isn’t going to respond well to lots of small, relatively painless and increasingly speedy innovations. In the time elapsed between innovation and resolution of any hurt (be it physical, emotional or financial pain) there’s an indeterminate number of people out there with a problem of some sort. Or maybe a set of changed behaviours that will not hurt right now but will cause discomfort to future generations. And let’s not forget that this is arguably the greatest period of human change and innovation, ever. I say that with some trepidation, but I’m thinking we have over 6 billion people on the planet now, and even if they aren’t all innovating like crazy, by sheer weight of numbers a heck of a lot of them surely are. And they are increasingly connected in ways that we hadn’t even thought of just 20 years ago. So my contention is that, sure, we have ethics and laws and regulations and governing bodies in place to provide the checks and balances – but what if we just overload those institutions by sheer volume of seemingly innocent yet cumulative change?

Perhaps we already have.

Who will pay for the seawalls, the pumping stations, the levees and the relocations if our global mean sea level really is rising? Some people will lose their homes, their lives, or even their entire country (think Tuvalu for one example).

Now not everyone believes, and some actively dispute what we are “told”. I quote “told” because some of us – myself included – tend to preach a little at times. And for many and various reasons it won’t affect everyone or every place in the same way, if indeed it is happening. Maybe it isn’t, after all.
Assuming it is true, who pays? I’m thinking that the community – local and global – will eventually have to cough up to help some people and others will just have to help themselves. Is it fair that those who have wantonly chosen to live in exposed areas have to be subsidised by more prudent – or lucky – folk? It’s probably true to say that many people choose to deny what’s happening, and others just don’t realise it affects them. So they go on over-capitalising dwellings that in 50 years time will be surrounded by water or will lie behind a very unattractive seawall. As a community we’ll just have to make a decision on how best to help these people. If you are one of those close-to-sea types living in what are drained swamps or beachfront communities built on sand-dunes you may like to prudently cash-out now; or hope like hell that the community is prepared – or able – to assist you in 10, 20 or 50 years time. Just a thought.

As to the evidence, well here are some more seemingly compelling yet possibly confusing sites to visit. You can decide for yourself if they are reliable or distorted sources of information. I should add that it’s not simple. As the Australian Baseline Sea Level Monitoring Project“>Australian Bureau of Meteorology points out in its analysis of Aussie data, whilst the mean sea level trending appears to range from a rising rate of 1-8mm per year at most of their stations, when you subtract mechanical variations in recorder height and the inverse barometric effect on sea level you get much, much reduced – if not negative – trends. Which is a bit of a contradiction, eh? However they also point out that the long-term data is influenced by the fact that we didn’t understand the importance of the data and the full range of effects acting upon it until relatively recently – so the older data may in fact be wrong. They point out as the data set grows the trends will flatten out and become more reliable… which is apparent in the graphs they display. Nevertheless the national corrected average trend is 0.9mm per year (with 2 noted negative ‘outliers’ – exclude them and it rises to 1.2mm/yr).
Another effect mentioned is an apparent “sloshing” of the Pacific Ocean. Sea level is rising on the western (Aussie) side but falling on the opposite, eastern (Peruvian) side… a bit like sloshing water in a basin. Throw in the El Nino effects and we have some diabolically complex analysis ahead of us to sort it all out. It makes it hard to be convincing about the real rate of sea level change globally, although if your particular part of the world is getting sloshed then you will definitely notice…

Confused? Try this huge list of links to datasets and informative websites. Indian Ocean datasets are here. Visit the global database at GLOSS. The CSIRO says: In Australia the rise of sea-level relative to the land (June, 2001) at Fremantle is 1.38 mm/year with more than 90 years of data, and at Sydney 0.86 mm/year from 82 years of data. (Corrected for land motion, the rate of sea- level rise at these two locations is estimated to be about 1.6 and 1.2 mm/yr respectively.). However they also say this:The longest tide-gauge records (starting from as early as 1700) show an acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise. However, no acceleration has been detected during the 20th Century. Hmmm. To be fair John Daly posts a lot of words of refutation here, but I can’t see that it’s more than pettifogging quibbles most of the time – a little like Nero fiddling whilst Rome burns (or Venice sinks). Still, thats just my view and it’s worth a read just to be balanced – or unhinged, perhaps!
Frankly I’m not a climatologist but the reports written by acknowledged scientists working for real government-financed institutions seem to be balanced in the extreme. They go into depth about anomalies and tread warily, explaining everything from what they think is happening to how they think it is happening and why. It’s mind-numbing stuff to go into, and most people don’t want to read about inverse barometric effects for one example, or simply don’t have the time. I don’t have the time either! But from what I’ve read it looks like some places on this globe have a real problem and some other places less so, or no problem at all. It also looks complex and to be frank “almost everyone” on these government-funded sites say that they think there’s a positive trend – and can show it – whilst acknowledging that they need more data to improve statistical reliability.

You can quite reasonably argue therefore, ‘let’s wait until the data is reliable’. But the counter argument is that it may be too late. Anyone into risk management?

It keeps happening. I get carried away. Then I remember perspective and try to recant but get carried away again instead. Before all of the non-believers jump on me I have to stress that whilst I personally believe that the evidence for man-influenced climate change is compelling, I also understand that it’s perfectly reasonable to disagree. It’s a free country. Well where I am is free, except when APEC and George W. Bush visit us. Then we get a day off work and told to stay away. But I digress.

What I wanted to really do was make a comment about the “climate change industry”. You know, the idea that if you are paid to do research on a topic that you then readily throw your credibility away and just twist the data to agree with the best argument that supports your continued employment. Now that does make sense to some degree – I’m a consultant after all and we must keep the objectives of our client “in mind” at all times – but consultants, like scientists, also live by their credibility and reputation. If you are just looking for handouts and continually deliver the result that the client wants then you’ll only get that sort of work, if you get any work at all. In fact scientists have to publish and be reviewed and lay themselves and their work open to critique. Indeed, if they get it wrong then other scientists appear more than keen to establish their reputations by skewering yours. It’s actually the scientific method, or pretty close thereto. So even if some climatologists were twisting things to get continued funding it’s sure as sunrise someone would untwist it soon enough and drop them in it. It’s a self-policing system in a sense.

And we are all in this together. The stakes are high. It’s not just continued funding for climate research, it’s our environmental and our economic health. Some scientists may twist the facts (it’s called applied statistical analysis, and we know what that really means) but if they do beat up panic unnecessarily over climate change they risk economic collapse – which surely undermines their superannuation plans. And if they go the other way and try to hide the impact of climate change then they risk delaying our response to the challenge – and again ruining their retirement plans. So they could go either way, really, as the effect is the same. But if they want continued funding then it’s actually in their interests to tell the truth, as hiding the tragedy of it all will surely sink their ship. Nevertheless they also want stability, not panic. Stability is better for steady funding and long and distinguished careers. Whereas panic begets chaos – and who knows where the money may go if we really went crazy and started unravelling our fossil-fueled gravy train.

Given that they actually want stability, not panic, I’d imagine that our climatologists are deliberately underplaying their worst case scenarios to avoid panic. As a scientific body they are innately critical, as in they view things analytically, but conservatively. The wilder, more unlikely scenarios get voted down as “outliers” in the stats. Well so I gather, anyway. Which is pretty scary, if true, as it means things are far worse than the IPCC is telling us.

And my last point is this – we are all paid by someone to do something. If this “you are paid to research this subject and thus have a vested interest in continuing employment” is true – and of course it has to be – then it applies equally to all of us. Politicians, scientists, people in any job in any walk of life will have hidden agendas to say and do things. It’s a given. We remember this every time a politician or sales person speaks. Where it gets out of control is when those vested interests or hidden agendas are not revealed. I think the fact that scientists have studied and worked in the field of climatology, to give one example, means that they have an interest in that field, both personally and in terms of continued employment. But they wear that on their sleeve. It’s the bleeding obvious. It’s upfront.

Instead let’s look at those who don’t declare their interests and critique them. (I think I just got carried away again.)