notesinthekitchen

[notesinthekitchen]

Altar Reality

In disbelief I watch them wave the maple leaf

Full denial while truth and the world has put us on trial

Attempting to hide our colonial inspired genocide

We called it a residential school, like they won a scholarship, an all-expense paid trip

To an ivy covered college seeking higher knowledge

But they were ripped from their home, shown hate they’d never known

Robbed of their land, forced to recite the lord’s command

We replaced the sky woman falling to earth with a misogynist story of the sin of birth

But the original sin, is when we came in

The story history should tell is how we destroyed the turtle’s shell

Stand not on guard, but aside and listen now to what they decide

[notesinthekitchen]

A Dumber Version

I am the CEO, never bold, only did what I was told.

Wrapped in naivety, avoiding complexity, my dumbed down reality.

Of limited skills, ignored society’s ills, left unpaid social bills

My myopic view, shareholder value – left the mess for you.

 I fantasize that this would be the opening words of a for-profit CEO asked to provide the keynote address to a gathering of non-profit leaders.  The CEO would go on to say that it is based on Marilynne Robinson’s comment “the weak skills of for profit managers cause them to blindly adhere to the naïve and myopic dogma of Friedman – that business must only increase shareholder value.  It allows them to avoid dealing with the inherent complexity of balancing competing interests – people/planet/profits – a challenge that well exceeds their ability, so they play a dumber version of the game.”

The fantasy is not that a CEO would have actually read and acknowledged the thoughts and ideas of others, but that they would openly acknowledge the obvious contradiction.  The absurdity that the initiative taking innovator, will not proactively address a problem, until specifically instructed to do so.  How would that same CEO respond to an employee who did not act, who watched the problem occur, grow lager, and in fact, continued to make the situation worse.  Would they not speak of going from Good to Great, of the never ending Search of Excellence, of the need to Lean In?  Yet our business leaders are waiting, waiting to be told to address climate issues, waiting to be told to pay living wage, waiting to be told to address racism, waiting to be told to address sexism.  

How can those who play a “dumber version” of the game, who lack initiative, be seen as the leaders, while those who proactively work with the complexity and reality of the world’s problems, be seen as naive?

[notesinthekitchen]

Sloth and Vanity

Sloth and Vanity – succumbing to these traits can lead to poor decisions. Taking short cuts in order to obtain fleeting accolades can erode employee satisfaction.  Essayist Martin Amis attributes the mass shootings in the US to sloth and vanity. The perpetrator is too lazy or too inept to do something of value, yet still longs for recognition.  While it may seem an extreme example, it does allow us to ask a similar question about our organization.  Are we doing the heavy lifting required to provide something remarkable, resulting in lasting respect or are we opting for sloth.

[notesinthekitchen]

A Boomer’s Lament

Are we the generation that starts with Woodstock and ends with Monsanto?  When we talk about the good old days, do we long for our old selves or the old ways?   If the past was so good, what were we protesting about?  

The distance from idealist to defender of the status quo is long, but we boomers seem to have made the journey rather quickly.  Perhaps the pace at which we traveled has left us too tired to act otherwise.  I can only imagine how tiring it must be for the younger generations to hear our empty rhetoric extolling past ideals, while witnessing our participation in current problems.  

It is hard to picture the Woodstock crowd cheering and clapping their support for fracking, bank bailouts, climate change, environmental degradation, and food monopolies, but then again, our old selves did not have a financial stake in those endeavors.  

As David Runciman states in The Confidence Trap “Given a choice between a vague threat of future disaster and a clear threat to present prosperity, democracies always plump to avoid the latter”.  We have become the people we protested against.  

Rather than writing about innovation, let’s actually innovate. Let’s put the future first and our immediate prosperity second – much like the advice we give our children about paying dues and deferring gratification.  Our old selves would have aspired to more than voting to put more money in our pockets.

[notesinthekitchen]

SPECIALIZATION

According to Tim Harford, the Undercover Economist, approximately 3,000 scientific articles are published every day.  Given this overwhelming flood of information, it is not surprising that our response is to specialize.  But is narrow specialization an appropriate response to the rapid expansion of science and technology?   Sir Halford John Mackinder, a former director of the London School of Economics, is quoted as saying “Knowledge is one.  Its division into subjects is a concession of human weakness.”  

Narrow specialization can lead us to take solutions and break them into problems.  Consider the example of factory farming. Environmental activist Wendell Berry points out that taking animals off farms and putting them on feed lots takes an elegant solution - animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete, and neatly divides it into two problems - fertility on the farm, and pollution on the feed lot.  In isolation, the increased efficiency of animals on a feed lot may improve the economics of meat production but it results in the depletion of a priceless commodity - fertile soil - and leads to the degradation of downstream water systems.

Specialization is also shaping our cities and our society.  As Jeff Speck points out in Walkable Cities, unintended consequences of specialization impact the physical spaces in our cities.  School boards and parks departments push for fewer, but larger, facilities as they are easier to maintain, but the result is that fewer people can benefit from walking to them.  Public works departments push for designs based on snow and garbage removal needs, but infrastructure that is organized around large trucks is not inviting to people.

The effects of narrow specialization are not limited to our physical spaces.  Specialization also impacts the structure of our society. “Communities of fate” is a term used to define the group of people with whom we feel entangled, those whose interests and welfare we perceive as tied to our own. These communities of fate are the catalysts that can spur individuals to act against their own self-interest for the sake of another’s welfare. Margaret Levi, Director of the Centre for Advanced Behavioural Sciences and Professor at Stanford University, states “the fact that so many people choose to live in ways that narrow the community of fate to a very limited set of others and to define the rest as threatening to their way of life and values, is deeply worrying because this contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enable them to deny complex and more cross cutting mutual dependencies.”

We see examples of this in our own city.  Dividing lines are drawn between those who live on the mountain and those who live downtown, between motorists and cyclists, between long-term residents and new residents. When we choose to narrow our community of fate, we lose sight of the fact that our fates are intertwined. It becomes easier to ignore the fact that issues of poverty, transit, and air quality are city-wide and influence us all.

Responses of bigger and fewer schools and parks, and smaller and more isolated communities of fate, may seem correct in a vacuum. Taken collectively, however, they do not result in the inclusive, healthy cities we wish to build. The solution may be to go in the opposite direction, for each of us to become more of a generalist - one who considers all factors and makes the difficult choices and trade-offs necessary to build a great city.  Perhaps the next time an issue comes up for debate, we can ask ourselves “what would a generalist say?”

 Sources:---

 Speck, Jeff. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time. New York: North Point Press, 2010.

Harford, Tim. The Undercover Economist, http://timharford.com/articles/undercovereconomist/

https://edge.org/response-detail/23739 - link to web page where Margaret Levi’s quote on communities of fate is found. She is the Jere L Bacharach Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington and senior fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University. http://faculty.washington.edu/mlevi/

 Halford John Mackinder quote:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1008858.Halford_Mackinder

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[notesinthekitchen]

Firm Evolution: The Descent Into FIGJAM

I was at a firm again this week and continue to be amazed by the slide into mediocrity.  There were signs on the glass door saying "use the handle so you don't get finger prints on the glass" signs on the outside of the washroom "showing how to wash your hands" BUT on the back of their business card are the words VISION DEPTH INNOVATION - I found the disconnect a challenge.  As an aside, I did tell them in the meeting that in our office we play the "business buzzword drinking game" and so in that context, their business cards are GOLD.

In addition, the only proactive calls I have received from them were to push for payment "retainer" for work they have not even done yet - just paying them for the privilege of working with them, because although they will "bring value" and want to "build relationships" they just don't trust enough to think that we will pay.   

Gee, I can't understand why engineering is a commodity and clients shop around for the lowest price...

[notesinthekitchen]

Seth Godin, author of Linchpin, on marketing, technocracy, & living in the real world.