Concept: Excellence

The vaue of grades

2011-04-20T10:04:00.000-04:00

An interesting discussion of different ways to scale grades using algorithms over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative. The comments are at least as interesting as the post. In the comments, the value of grades emerges as a central concern.

Grades have two main uses:

Social
Pedagogical

Both are important, but it's very clear that the main social use of grades--as a socially visible and efficacious mark which sets apart the "smart" kids from the not-so-smart ones--is predicated upon the sound functioning of the main pedagogical use--as a form of critical feedback that lets a student know relatively how s/he's performing. Grade inflation is driven by the democratization of the university and the concomitant rise of the social importance of grades. Since a university-level education is now regarded as a sine qua non for a decent job, and since universities use high-school grades as an admissions test (i.e., to make invidious distinctions between students), it's no surprise that enormous pressure is placed on teachers to give higher marks. Similarly, since university students now presume (rather unimaginatively, in my opinion) that a graduate degree is the key to social success, and since graduate schools look at university grades as an admissions test, university students correctly adduce that good grades are key to their social success. And since grades are presented with little context, enormous pressure can be brought to bear on teachers, since it hardly matters how a student gets good grades. The succesful wheedler can expect a level of social success (status and salary) equivalent to that of the class genius.

Students believe that this equation represents the world perfectly. They are not entirely wrong.

With that in mind, the crucial context that makes it possible to put grades to any use is deep knowledge of the relative expectations that presumably animate the teacher's instruction. I always think of this context as having three layers:

The student's performance vis-à-vis his/her peers in this particular course (during this semester, with these students)
The student's performance vis-à-vis other cohorts taking more of less the same course (i.e., compared to all students who've taken this course with me)
The student's performance vis-à-vis the universe of students who have ever taken, are now taking, or will take a course more or less equivalent to this one, in any institution and with any instructor.

Comparing students only among their immediate peers can give a false impression of their performance, since cohorts and classes can and do differ in relative strength. Some groups should skew higher or lower, because the groups are stronger or weaker than other groups. I find this kind of contextualizing to be very difficult, and while algorithms can be helpful as a method, they are no substitute for the judgment that decides which of them to use or whether to use them at all.

There are several universities in the US at which students are given feedback but no grades. Hampshire College, for example, provides no grades: at the end of each course, the teacher and the student both draft a 300-400 word narrative discussing the student's performance. These narratives form the body of the student's "transcript." These transcripts are made available to the entire student body as well as to other institutions at the student's request. I took two courses at Hampshire, and I found the students to be engaged, engaging, and highly motivated. (Since I attended a different school, which did give grades, my teachers gave me a grade, but I can tell you that the narratives they wrote are far more precious to me. I still have them.)

Even though they still publish evaluations of each student's performance, such institutions obviously have a strong position on the social value of grades. An interesting thought experiment that really pushes the distinction between social and pedagogical uses to its limit is to imagine a university that gives grades, but does not publish them. Students are told what grades they have received, but the records are then destroyed, so that no one can "prove" anything. The students' transcripts are simply the lists of the courses they've taken. Anyone could say he'd gotten an A, but only he and his teacher know for sure, and no on can prove anything. Wouldn't teachers and students then simply regard the grades are a rather autistic and reductive form of feedback? Would giving grades be worth the trouble? Would teaching per se be easier or harder? Relative performance would still need to be graded, in the strict sense of the word, but since the social value of the grade has been eliminated, the only value left is its pedagogical value. So what IS the pedagogical value of a grade?

Kinds of businesses and kinds of business(wo)men

2010-09-13T14:56:00.011-04:00

Paul Kedrosky discusses some of the consequences coming down the pipe for the VC industry. Paul draws much of his inspiration from his friend, Bill Stensrud, who's a VC investor himself. Thinking about the current state of the VC industry, Bill observes that an overweening interest in getting to an exit (read: finding a buyer) has come to replace an interest in cash flow (read: making money).

What [all VC] firms have in common is that they exist to buy and sell equities. They both buy from entrepreneurs and they both sell to acquirers or (very infrequently these days) to public shareholders. They are, at their very core, traders. Their job is to buy low and sell high. This fundamental truth about the venture business informs every action they take whether mainstream of super-angel. It also informs the culture of the businesses they create. Everyone is looking for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - the life changing - all consuming - EXIT!! The nature of their business model demands it. These are close-end funds. They have to return money - cash - to their investors.

In this blog over the next several months I am going to explore another - even more ancient - model for company creation. This is art and practice of building and running a business for POSITIVE CASH FLOW. Before there was venture capital and before there were EXITS, people built businesses to make money so they could pay their bills. I will argue that re-discovering this model drives a corporate culture which is much healthier, more robust and more survivable than the EXIT-focused culture created by the venture capital model. I will also argue that the cash flow model can engage the employees, the critical human capital asset of every business, to significantly greater efficacy than equity models. Lastly, I will argue that we can modestly scale this model to the point that it can become a significant factor in new business creation.

One of the consequences of thinking about business environments as ecologies is that it makes it relatively easy to think the relationship between the people who run businesses and the generic conditions in which those businesses operate. It becomes easy to see how VCs, in actively selecting with an eye toward the exit, might over time change the population of entrepreneurs they partner with. It might be obvious that business ideas that make money, but have no clear exit strategies, do not fare well securing VC in today's market. But business ideas are developed by and instantiated by businesspeople.

Today's VC climate actively selects against entrepreneurs who want to "build and hold" profitable businesses. "Build and hold" doesn't just describe a business model--it describes a temperament:

Thoughtful - concerned with long-term secular trends rather than high-velocity volatile fads
Prudent - husbands scarce resources for the long haul--including and especially managerial stamina (contemporary VC expects managerial burnout, though it hopes to exit before it happens)
Patient - satisfied to build a strong foundation for big success by stringing together a long series of small, cumulative successes

If we want businesses that are conceived and constructed as long-term money-making ventures, we need entrepreneurs with the right temperament. If modern VC's intensive focus on the exit has changed the character of our pool of important and interesting business ideas, well, so what? New ideas are easy to come by. But I fear there may have been a more subtle and more fundamental change in the character of our entrepreneurs (as a group, not as individuals). We now have one, maybe two generations of top-tier entrepreneurs (with the right experience and connections) who think of starting a business as aiming for an exit.

In order to make best use of our limited resources, we have created a streamlined system whereby everyone must exit at Easy Street.

Our current business culture of get-what-you-can-while-you-can follows directly from the preferences of the VC investors who hire people with that kind of temperament to build and run their businesses. As go new businesses, so goes all business. It's hard to see how we get sensible businesspeople to run our businesses until investors stop thinking like traders.

No apologies for Aristotle

2010-05-21T14:16:00.000-04:00

I'm aware that it would be pretty easy to get the impression, reading this blog, that Aristotle is the only philosopher I read or care about. While this is grossly incorrect, I refuse to apologize for portraying the big A as the most important ethical philosopher in history. He is. While this is only my opinion, it is not my fault.

Social attitudes usually reflect social conditions (not moral preferences)

2010-01-18T10:30:00.000-05:00

It turns out that personal finance isn't so "personal." Much of it has to do with prevailing attitudes toward financial conditions. Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis recently worried in public [WSJ; behind firewall] about people who might walk away from their mortgages now their homes are worth less than their loan balance.

Calculated Risk puts up some scary numbers, which indicate the potentially seismic consequences of large-scale shifts in social attitudes. How scary? How does TWO TRILLION strike you?

If every upside down homeowner resorted to "jingle mail" (mailing the keys to the lender), the losses for the lenders could be staggering. Assuming a 15% total price decline, and a 50% average loss per mortgage, the losses for lenders and investors would be about $1 trillion. Assuming a 30% price decline, the losses would be over $2 trillion.

Not every upside down homeowner will use jingle mail, but if prices drop 30%, the losses for the lenders and investors might well be over $1 trillion (far in excess of the $70 to $80 billion in losses reported so far).

There's a huge social component to personal ethics--much larger than we usually suppose. Is walking away from your mortgage bad behavior? Well, what if not only makes financial sense, but many people are doing it? What if it were recommended? Shame depends on the visibility of certain personal behavior in the eyes of a public, and there seems to be much less shame associated with cutting one's mortgage losses. The big lesson (apart from the shame I hope the banks are feeling) is that personal character is developed in symbiosis with social conditions, not in spite of them.

Living through the digital revolution

2009-03-15T19:09:00.006-04:00

Clay Shirky says more or less everything that needs to be said about why newspapers are in trouble and what might replace them in the future. He concludes:

In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
[...]
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

[...]

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

As Shirky so astutely points out, the economic reality of newspaper publishing is shifting beneath the feet of the industry. Probably today's newspapers can't dance nimbly enough to save themselves. And that shouldn't worry us very much. It's just that one crucial function of newspapers--namely, reporting--remains a pillar of democratic society. We don't need to care who does it, but we need to care passionately that it gets done.

The economists have no clothes

2009-02-17T10:44:00.006-05:00

Over at The Atlantic, Gregory Clark admits, rather refreshingly, that academic economists have no clothes.

The current recession has revealed the weaknesses in the structures of modern capitalism. But it also revealed as useless the mathematical contortions of academic economics. There is no totemic power.

As a discipline, economics proposes models, which are by definition incomplete. That is, they exclude some details and highlight others. To think that economic theories actually describe reality--as opposed to offer an image of reality that is useful for some purposes--is to mistake the map for the world.

Ceci n'est pas le monde.

Further, the dismal science has all too often provided models whose validity is impossible to ascertain, since it has often built its theories on the basis of premises that are false prima facie. The point here is that, logically speaking, false premises do not yield false conclusions; rather, false premises render the truth values of an argument's conclusions indeterminate. It isn't that economic models are false, but rather that the falseness of their premises means that can know nothing with certainty about their conclusions. We can't say whether economic models are true, false, or some determinate mix of the two. Logically speaking, they're mere speculation, with the same logical status as wishful thinking.

You mean we came all this way and we don't even know if we're wrong?

For example, the theories of classical economics generally accept as axioms (i.e., they accept as true without argument) the following:

All economic actors are rational.
All economic actors have perfect information about the markets in which they act.
All resources are scarce.

These are bad axioms, since they're obviously not true. As in, there's no doubt at all that these are false. Of course, not all branches of modern economics still accept these premises without qualification, but historically speaking these assumptions lie at the foundation of all economic thought. This is precisely the main reason I never studied economics in college. Who can take seriously a discipline that, wherever it ends up, begins with nonsense? While there's no doubt that the phenomena we think of as economic are intrinsically interesting, I remain skeptical that the formal discipline of economics has a great deal to offer beyond the obvious. As Clark notes:

The debate about the bank bailout, and the stimulus package, has all revolved around issues that are entirely at the level of Econ 1. What is the multiplier from government spending? Does government spending crowd out private spending? How quickly can you increase government spending? If you got a A in college in Econ 1 you are an expert in this debate: fully an equal of Summers and Geithner.

Common sense cloaked in jargon and equations. Even the economists' invisible clothes look rather shabby these days.

The value of inconvenience

2008-09-23T11:18:00.007-04:00

By almost any meaningful performance measurement, the U.S. economy in the 20th century performed better under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones. Reflecting on this seeming paradox, Christopher Carroll suggests that

perhaps the best explanation has to do with attitudes, not doctrines: Maybe capitalism works better when its excesses are restrained by skeptics than when true-believers are writing, interpreting, judging, and executing the rules of the game. (The Democrats are surely the more skeptical of our two parties).

Most would agree that restraining the excesses of almost anything counts as good sense, but this is only a preliminary step toward a bigger and more interesting idea:

Capitalism works better when it is being held accountable to some external standard than when left to its own devices.

The whole system works better when "held accountable to some external standard," when it is, in a word, constrained. Optimal performance, in other words, is the fruit of struggle. Make things too easy and performance declines.

Relaxed external standards? Check. Highlight reel material? Not so much.

Consider how effective coaches pull outstanding athletic performance from their players. Good coaches don't let their players do whatever they want, without accountability or oversight; they create rules and systems of accountability. A good soccer coach makes you use your weak foot in order to develop it. A good swimming coach pushes you to hold your breath longer. Optimal athletic performance depends upon the measured application of psychological and physiological pressure. (Go watch Gavin O'Connor's Miracle to see a dramatization of great coaching.) Good coaches don't remove limitations--they use them.

Or consider architectural and industrial design. The famous designer Charles Eames (yet another famous St. Louisan) once remarked:

Design depends largely on constraints.

We tend to believe that creativity is best served by removing constraints. If we could just somehow make the process of invention easier for the inventor, we imagine that she would be more inventive. But the opposite is usually true. People get creative--truly creative--when challenged to negotiate constraints. Budgets (within reason) push architects to develop new strategies to solve old problems. (The story of how the design of Seattle's new public library building developed is a great example.) The particularities of manufacturing processes push industrial designers to find solutions which challenge convention. (The story of the how the first commercially viable computer mouse was designed is a textbook example.) Constraints drive creativity.

Artist Andy Goldsworthy creates astonishing ephemeral works using only the materials he finds on site during his wilderness hikes: creativity driven by constraint.

The same is true in business. Real innovation happens where someone discovers a new way to scratch an old itch, where someone thinks through a problem in a new way (even if it's simply a new application of an old technology). When we talk about innovation happening "at the edges" of a market or industry, what we mean is that innovation happens where business rubs up against constraints. (The "mainstream" of anything is where things flow smoothly, right?) We can't have innovation--and capitalism's greatest strength as an economic system is its powerful incentives for innovation--unless we have the right kind of rules and restrictions. (The question of "more" regulation versus "less" regulation is puerile. The kind of regulation matters more than the amount.) The free market, to put it pointedly, is only as free as its constraints force it to be.

Of course, constraints are damned inconvenient. And that's precisely the point. It's often--if not always--in response to inconveniences that people are most creative, most inventive, most innovative. And so we're led inevitably to the conclusion that inconveniences can be useful.

"Traffic lights are just the Man keeping us down! We will not be constrained!"

Some inconveniences, naturally, are more useful than others, but that hardly obviates the necessity of inconvenience for optimal performance. It's easy enough to see how inconveniencing others might be worthwhile, but it's one of the marks of emotional maturity to see the value of inconvenience for oneself. Politics--in the largest possible sense of the word--is only possible because we deliberately accept to be inconvenienced in certain ways (e.g., we don't simply use whichever car is closest, use guns to force our crushes to go out with us, or lynch elected officials from opposing parties). We recognize that our condition is collectively better when we all accept to be inconvenienced in certain ways. (Again, the kind of self-regulation matters more than the amount.)

Finding--and enforcing--the right kind of constraints is key to getting the most out of people, as innovators, as politicians, as artists, as designers, and even as citizens. We would all of us do well to remember that inconvenience--yes, even our own--often serves us much, much better than convenience.

The first rule of student engagement

2008-07-10T21:35:00.011-04:00

I'm in Québec City right now, attending a 5-week intensive program in French Language immersion. One of the options I've chosen is an introductory survey course on Quebecoise literature. There are only a dozen students in the course, so the teacher said she'd like to run the class more as a seminar and less as a lecture. Which sounded great--but it turns out our teacher doesn't seem to know how to run a discussion (not an uncommon failing among teachers). She doesn't seem to grasp the first rule of student engagement--actually, the first of intellectual engagement in general. And that rule is this:

People engage with ideas on the basis of what they already know.

The technicalities of revolution are, as everyone who attended the party found out, pretty damn tedious.
(Revolutionary Tedious Party, originally uploaded by abitnice)

This rule has two important practical corollaries:

Discussions turn on questions that everyone can answer. Domains where students are largely ignorant offer no footholds for students to establish a stance and launch into a discussion. If you start talking about what you know well, but what your students don't know at all, they won't respond for the simple reason that you're the obvious authority and what you say goes. If you base the discussion in a domain where the students have some knowledge (their own opinions are painfully dependable as a point of departure), you'll be able to introduce the topics you want to cover without killing the conversation.
Technicalities kill engagement. Technicalities are inevitably the province of specialists. If you're talking about technicalities, you'd better be talking to another specialist (or someone who aspires to be a specialist). If you're not, guaranteed you're boring people in a way that makes them just want to break something.

Engagement is the foundation of every learning experience. Engagement can only happen when people take what they already know and either reinterpret it or connect it with new knowledge.

A cinema whose house is always full

2008-03-28T14:22:00.005-04:00

As promised, I'm getting around to posting my better business ideas. Yes, yes. I'm sure your breath has been bated.

INTRO
Think of your favorite movie. Now imagine the ideal environment in which to watch it. Do you see yourself alone, in your underwear, in your own bedroom, late at night, watching your favorite movie on your computer monitor? Unless you're one of those rare individuals willing to argue the artistic and cultural merits of porn, it's not likely.

The future of porn? Maybe. The future of cinema? Don't count on it.

Probably you're thinking of a dark room with a huge screen and comfortable chairs. And, almost certainly, other people. Although the advent of forums like YouTube has fomented whole new genres of minimalist movies (e.g., machinima, video how-tos, porn vlogs, and even as yet un(sound)bitten political speeches), our thirst for full-length feature films appears unslaked. And we still prefer viewing them, when possible, in the company of other viewers. As an art form, film descends from theater, and the social dimension of theater is irreducible and ineradicable. Part of the meaning of watching theater--and therefore part of the meaning of watching films--is watching them as part of group.

Viscerally, we know this is true. Funny movies are funnier when viewed in a packed cinema. Scary movies are scarier. Exciting movies are more exciting. The whole experience of watching a film is intensified and improved when the house is full.

In a sense, "audience" is a role--a role it sucks to have to play by yourself.

OPPORTUNITY
Most current thinking about about how people are going to consume movies in the future, even the freshest, can be divided into models based on how people consume live theater on the one hand and how people consume internet pornography on the other. (There are some non-stupid "innovations" in the works which try to make the most of the cinema space, but they have little to do with the movie-going experience per se.) The theater model can't seem to get past the fact that plays are performances while films are recordings of performances--that is, they're what we call media. The porn model can't seem to get past the fact that watching anything except porn by yourself isn't nearly as much fun as watching it as part of an audience.

The most important development in the movie business during the past 20 years isn't--with all due respect to Peter Jackson and his fanboys--CGI, but the megaplex:

The improved viewing experience and the ability to let consumers watch whatever movie they wanted almost whenever they wanted brought more people through the door and bulked up Hollywood's grosses.

I love this conceit--that access to 20 or 30 screens has allowed consumer to "watch whatever movie they wanted almost whenever they wanted." Whatever movie I want? Give me a break. And what about TV series, animated shorts, foreign releases, etc. etc. etc.? And rental stores? There are good reasons why they're dying out.

"Um.. Bollywood? The Thunderbirds? Fullmetal Alchemist? Le Dîner de cons? Nah, we don't got any of that. But, dude, have you seen The Transformers?"

Megaplexes offer an order of magnitude more choice than the 3-screen movie house; your average rental store (which carries some 3,000 titles according to Chris Andersen) ups the choice by two more orders of magnitude. And then Netflix and company bump that up to 60,000+ titles--another order of magnitude plus a doubling thrown in for good measure. No doubt that 30 screens offers a lot of choice, but it's still the film industry and the theater managers who decide what's on the menu. Time to break out.

THE IDEA
The challenge, I would argue, is to get The Long Tail of screenable media (i.e., movies, TV, video games, and a bunch of stuff I'm sure I'm missing) to interface elegantly with the social theater experience.

The Setting. So, imagine an urban megaplex which offers 30 screens of varying sizes--from the 300-person stadium to the 15-person black box. (I'm picking 15 as the minimum capacity because, in my experience anyways, 12 is the magic number where dinner party tips and becomes a house party.) However we manage it, our megaplex is technically capable of showing anything that's currently out on DVD on any of its screens. (I see two basic possibilities here: either (1) allow the viewers to bring their own media--you're just a screen and seat provider; or (2) go digital--maybe make ISO images of every DVD you can get your hands on, or an equivalent. I like (2) better for a variety of reasons, but (1) might be the place to start while the IP agreements get hammered out.)

Architecturally, the lobby resembles a cafe more than a cattle yard. Picture a large space subtly divided by differences in floor height, floor coloring, lighting, etc. in order to create a cluster of distinct, yet interconnected spaces, each of which feels somewhat enclosed and therefore intimate. The idea is to provide environmental level support the social dimension of consuming screenable media. Film clubs, groups of friends, and/or couples can use this space to nosh and chat before and after movies.

The Website. The website of our megaplex looks more like a social networking website than a tarted-up broadsheet for the very simply reason that it is a social networking site. The website is the platform which our megaplex uses to decide--on a rolling, ongoing basis--what it's going to show on each of its screens. Website members "vote" for a particular title and a particular time-slot by prepurchasing tickets to those titles at those times. (Credit card authorization--not charged until movie is shown.) The most popular title for any given time-slot is shown in the biggest theater, the second most popular in the second biggest screen, and so on. Titles are "locked in" 48 hours in advance in order to allow everyone to plan their schedules and casual viewers to pick what they want.

One interesting consequence of this system is that it becomes possible to distribute various screens over several different physical locations within a city. Not too many different locations, or people would get confused. But a single web system could link together a handful of physical clusters of screens into a single movie selection and viewing system, effectively allowing our megaplex to consume urban real estate much more efficiently. We can therefore offer 100 screens' worth of choice without thereby incurring a need for a gargantuan, unbroken chunk of real estate. In fact, precisely the opposite. The more geographically concentrated our demand (the more "urban"), the more screens we can offer. And further, since every theater is filled to capacity (or as close as we can get) every time, we optimize our use of square footage even further.

Show Me the Money. Our megaplex will pass profits back to those who own the rights to the media on a per-seat-sold basis rather than a per-showing basis. This has several consequences.

First, pricing for the viewer is dynamic. The more "votes" a suggested title-and-time gets, the cheaper the tickets. This displaces some of the responsibility (and risk!) of promoting a particular title-and-time onto its supporters. A film club working its way through all of Humphrey Bogart's films, for example, will not only form the core of the audience which views those films--they'll also promote those title-and-times to everyone else. Take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, and you've got individual promoters buying out entire screens and promoting film events (say, a Star Wars-a-thon) on their own. The promoters shoulder the risk of promotion; the audience gets a full house experience; and our megaplex gets a locked-in profit on an optimized use of cinema square footage. Every title which gets shown in our megaplex has, before it shows, demonstrated that it can command such-and-such level of committed demand.

Second, pricing between our megaplex and media rights owners is negotiable on a title-by-title basis--even on a showing-by-showing basis--because our megaplex can show exactly how many seats are sold for each title. Structurally, such a system will favor older titles (whose production costs have already been either recouped or written off), niche titles (which capture focused, sustained affection), and less publicized titles (which have fewer advertising costs built into their financing model). Basically, although our megaplex is perfectly capable of competing with "normal" theaters when it comes to blockbusters, it's capable of making gold out the vast libraries of screenable media currently lying around in our culture.

And third, this system really opens up the possibilities for using a cinema-like space in creative ways. Business presentations? Naturally. Ungodly-huge-screen Super Smash Bros. Brawl parties? No problem. Anime marathons? Duh. In a way, this model is a bit like McDonald's:

The brilliance behind Harry Sonnenborne’s model [for McDonald's] was to sell real estate and not hamburgers. His suggestion was to purchase or lease the land on which all the McDonald’s restaurants were built on. Franchisees would then pay the company either a monthly rent amount or a percentage of their gross sales, whichever amount was greater.

The idea isn't to sell movies (which today's theaters can't do, so they sell outrageously priced corn syrup instead) , it's to rent square footage, facilities, and equipment to those in a position to use those resources to their utmost. Why be a lousy movie promoter or a gouging snack-food vendor when you can be a fantastic screenable media landlord? Let the watchers be the deciders, because those who decide what to show bear the risk for promoting it.

AFTERWORD
There are plenty of holes here, so please, comment away.

The meaning of business

2008-03-06T16:19:00.007-05:00

Lately, I've been mulling over a comment made by my uncle--who has the reputation in the family of being a super savvy investor--to the effect that it doesn't matter what a business does per se, so long as it turns a profit. I've argued before on this blog that my uncle's position unfairly impoverishes the concept of value. I've even gestured (crudely) in a few directions which might help us to enrich our concept of value.

Over at The Bastiat Society Blog, however, Ben Rast has a post entitled Business as Creative Act, which takes the first few steps down what I think is the brightest path toward a full and mature understanding of what business is (and why my uncle is mistaken). Simply put:

Business, as a creative act, draws on the very same strengths and suffers the same weaknesses as the creative act in art. They are more alike than dissimilar.

By "creative act," Rast means to emphasize entrepreneurship particularly:

We can illustrate just how much artistic creativity and business creativity have in common with the following paragraph of advice to writers, taken from an interview of William Faulkner published in the Paris Review in 1956:

"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."

Now, notice how well it works as advice to entrepreneurs -- those troublesome dreamers and innovators in business -- with a few strategic substitutions.

"Let the entrepreneur take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get business done, no shortcut. The young entrepreneur would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good entrepreneur believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old business, he wants to beat it."

Rast is astute to catch this similarity. People who launch new enterprises resemble artists in their drive to make something new, to add an original trope to the poem of humanity. But it's obvious, in a sense, that entrepreneurs are creators. What's not so obvious is that all productive activity (in the economic sense)--that is, all business activity--is creative as well.

To put it succinctly, human creativity is coextensive with human endeavor. Wherever people get stuff done, there people come up with new ways to think, do, and make. It doesn't matter what you call the end product--good, service, artwork--productive human activity demands creativity for the very simply reason that every object humans make with intention and every action humans do with intention bears the stamp, as it were, of the intention that brought it into being.

Aristotle identified four causes which obtain in the world: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the so-called final cause. It's the last one which concerns us here. The

final cause explains the cause of something in terms of its conceived end, or the purpose why it is made. According to Aristotle, [the] final cause is “the end (telos), that for the sake of which a thing is done.”

Every good is made and every service performed for the sake of something else--specifically, they're made and performed for the sake of the customer's good. That's why we call them "goods," right? Yes, yes, the producer produces goods in order to get paid, and the service provider serves in order to get paid, but they only get paid if someone recognizes the value of their goods and services. (And this objection is weak, since money is only and always a means to an end. "To get paid" can never be a final cause for making or doing something for the simple reason that money always points beyond itself to another end--one always exchanges the money on something else. It is not, simply put, final.)

Because goods and services are self-evidently intended to do someone some good (otherwise who would buy them?), we can say that economically productive activity is not only a functional activity, but is additionally an expressive activity--that is, it means something. In particular, it speaks to a vision of the good in general and the customer's good in particular. Even further, each good produced and each service provided changes the world; each good and each service brings into being a new state of affairs which must be presumed to be better than had the good been left unmade, the service undone (again, otherwise who would buy them?).

From this line of thinking two absurdly important conclusions follow:

Businesses really do change the world--so they'd better get it right. The presumption of "providing value," of making or doing something "good," is built into the very possibility of business. If a business doesn't add value--that is, if it doesn't make the world a better place--then it has no business being in business. It seems almost too obvious to need saying, but... businesses may be judged by the same standard as every other human endeavor, and that standard is whether or not the business's making and/or doing makes the world a better place.
Investors are to companies what patrons are to artists--so they'd better get it right. Warren Buffet famously advises investors to buy shares of a company only if they'd be willing to buy the whole company. I'll take Mr. Buffet one step further. You should buy shares of a company only if you'd be willing to be that company's sole customer--like an artist's patron, buying, owning, and enjoying responsibility for that company's entire output. Just as being a shareholder means being wholly and individually responsible for (and dependent upon) a company's entire financial performance, so being a shareholder means being wholly and individually responsible for (and dependent upon) a company's entire, world-changing making and doing. Just like a patron, you've put money down so that the companies you own can make what they make, do what they do. You enjoy the financial fruit of the shares you own for the single, simple reason that the companies you own get paid for changing the world, and the world they're making and enacting is the world we all live in--the world our children are growing up in.

18 inspirations for educators and social entrepreneurs

2008-02-07T16:14:00.001-05:00

Some people collect stamps. Others collect curiosities. I collect (among other things) pedagogical models, theories of learning, writings on education, and great educators. Someday I'll boil it all down and give you just the bullion, just the essence. But I need more time. My collection is far from a complete 7-course chowdown; heck, it won't do anything more than whet your appetite... but at least that means I've probably gotten to hors d'oeuvre status.

"My! You have such an interesting collection of... um... what are these, exactly?"

Model Institutions, Organizations, Etc.

Danish Folkeuniversitetet ("Folk High Schools"). The keystone of Danish national and democratic identity. One of the great triumphs of modern liberalism (in the strict sense of the term).
Hampshire College. The Un-Ivy League. Classes, but no core curriculum. Written evaluations, but no grades. Books, but no teacher's dirty looks.
The Nueva Escuela ("New School"). A program aimed at the developing world which supports schools as agents of positive social change. Focuses on education which is "active, participatory, cooperative, child-centered, and life-relevant." The story is that the founder asked every Nobel laureate she could get her hands on what kind of school they wished they had attended.
The KaosPilots (of course). A new kind of business school, aimed at at the fourth sector.
The Acton MBA (of course). Business school on steroids, which aims to produce entrepreneurs rather than managers.
Y Combinator. Although it claims to be a new kind of venture capital firm, it's really an intense education in how to be a world-class tech entrepreneur.
Gever Tully's Tinkering School. Let your kids do dangerous things, otherwise they'll never learn how to handle dangerous things. When I put it that way, it's obvious, right?

Writings Worth Reading

"On Education." Ralph Waldo Emerson's seminal essay on the subject, in which he argues that "the secret of education lies in respecting the pupil."
"Talks with Teachers." Brilliant lectures on teaching by eminent 19th century American psychologist and philosopher William James.
"Complicity." Online journal on complexity (read: chaos theory) and education. Be warned: this journal has a rather pointy head.
Infinite Thinking Machine. A blog providing coverage of innovation in education.

Models, Movements, and Technologies

Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, by which I mean more than simply the book by the same name. The exercises are a masterfully conceived and carefully refined ethical technique (read: a practice by which one acquires a particular character).
Unschooling. Let the child set the educational agenda; teaching consists principally in encouraging and enabling.
Moodle. A widely used open source course course management system.

Educators to Emulate

Socrates. The gadfly of great Athens.
Johan Amos Comenius, the Czech (Moravian, to be precise) "Copernicus of education."
Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, founder of the Danish Folk High School.
Amos Bronson Alcott, the original Transcendentalist, and the greatest teacher [.pdf] in U.S. history.

It's getting hot in here...

2008-01-11T10:08:00.001-05:00

...so take off all your clothes? No, no, no, silly. Your mind is clearly elsewhere. Let's try again.

It's getting got in here, so harvest all of that wasted body heat and pipe it over to the nearest office building. (My thanks to LS for bringing the story to my attention.) Come again? They're going to use body heat to keep buildings warm? Isn't that just a bit... brilliant? If the whole scheme sounds too savvy to be true, that's only because it's Swedish.

A Swedish company plans to harness the body heat generated by thousands of commuters scrambling to catch their trains at Stockholm's main railway station and use it for heating a nearby office building.

I can avow, on the basis of personal experience, that the Swedish think differently. Which is why I think the current rail-station plan is just the tip of the iceberg.

Trust the Swedes to see that awkward singles scenes are one of our great untapped reservoirs of renewable energy.

From this spark, fire

2008-01-10T13:13:00.000-05:00

At the behest of some smart people I recently had the good fortune to meet, I'm going to start using this blog to post concept sketches for some of my business ideas. (All such posts will be filed under--i.e., tagged as--"JPs Biz Ideas") I'm posting ideas in the spirit of cooperative thinking; I hope that my thoughts inspire reflection, conversation, and maybe even action. Just remember that this is thinking toward getting something started. Whatever you have which will help move the conversation forward--thoughts, criticisms, stories, whatever--I'm eager to hear from you.

For those worried that I'm only sharing the chaff, I can understand where you're coming from, but I'm not going to be driven by my fear. What you'll see here will only be the cream. And further, just because an idea happens to sashay in front of my mind's eye doesn't mean I'll post it; only those which my satisfy my rather demanding inner impresario will be offered up for your delectation. In other words, only the truly interesting ideas will find themselves in pixels.

Enjoy! And please add to the conversation. Comments and contacts welcome!

7 simple litmus tests for innovativeness

2008-01-03T11:32:00.000-05:00

Several weeks ago, when I was complaining about the first round Innovation Challenge results for 2007, I promised that I would get around to providing a few simple litmus tests for determining whether or not an idea is truly innovative. Eh, voilà!

These tests have been designed with three purposes in mind. First, these tests specifically aim to refine the line between the categories of conventional and innovative. Once an evaluator (whether in situ or post facto) has performed her first-order triage of proposals into probably conventional, probably innovative, and borderline, these tests should help her to shake a few proposals off of the fence before she proceeds to her in-depth review.

Second, these tests provide points of departure for a structured approach to evaluating the relative merits of one proposal vis-à-vis another. My catalog of traits certainly fails to exhaust the concept of innovativeness, but it at least offers a starting point for further thought and discussion. (Please let me know if you think of a trait I've missed.) If, for example, you're trying to decide which of two possible proposals should go forward, these tests should springboard the team into a focused dialog.

And third, these tests provide innovators with a set of spot checks which are so simple and so fast that they can be applied on the fly, as the innovation process unfolds. Because the tests are rational in their structure, they can help a team build a shared understanding of what a genuinely innovative proposal would look and feel like. But because the tests rely explicitly and entirely on subjective interpretation, they can tolerate extremely intuitive applications. These tests have designed to act as guides--not straitjackets.

Would the Innovation Challenge judges of C.E. 1301 have recognized Arnaldus de Villa Nova's litmus paper for the miracle innovation it is?

Each of the following tests is constructed as a proposition which purports to highlight a particular trait inherent to innovativeness. The evaluator considers the idea or proposal in question in light of the proposition and decides to what extent the proposition applies. A positive response to the (i.e., "yes," "good," "true," or the like) indicates that the idea or proposal in question is testing positive for innovativeness. Comments are enclosed in square brackets.

Fresh. "Although I grasp the proposal in its broad outline, parts of it seem strange and/or unfamiliar." [You know you're getting close to a fresh opportunity when things stop feeling normal and familiar.]
Simple. "The value proposition (for the customer) is so simple that not only do I understand it, I can easily explain it to others." [Implementation can be complex, but the value proposition must be simple, because people won't buy what they don't understand.]
Bold. "The first thing I think when looking at the proposal is, 'Too challenging!' 'Too risky!' or maybe even 'Impossible!'" [Challenge is what brings out the best in people and organizations; risk is the harbinger of reward; and the impossible is only another name for the as-yet untried.]
Trailblazing. "If someone were to implement the proposal, I know that competitors would immediately attempt to copy it." [Fear of being copied is, in practice, equivalent to fear of being the leader.]
Obvious. "Now that I've read the proposal, the idea seems completely obvious." [Great innovations are obvious, but not cliché--that is, they're ideas which many people could have implemented, but which no one has yet implemented.]
Clever. "I wish I had thought of that." [Whatever inversion, riposte, or twist of thinking makes the proposal hum should inspire admiration.]
Feasible. "In a close-to-perfect world, the proposal ought to be feasible." [For early-stage innovation, the appropriate test is putative feasibility. The real-world feasibility of an idea is not truly tested until a competent team commits to trying to implement it. An overweening demand for "practicality" will kill any proposal which requires an unconventional implementation strategy.]

Are you so certain this is foolish? As it turns out, he didn't reinvent the wheel--he reinvented the road.

Disorganize the schools!

2008-01-02T10:05:00.002-05:00

The NYT covers the--gasp!--new trend of tutoring students (mostly boys) who seem to be having trouble in school. OK, OK, it's not the tutoring itself which is interesting. We've known for some time that tutoring is among the most successful of teaching methods. It's the fact that the tutors aren't teaching subjects, they're teaching habits. In other words, ethical tutoring.

If you want to get 'em educated, you first gotta' get 'em organized.
(Photo by Jim Wilson for the New York Times)

As per their standard operating procedure, the NYT adds zero content to and only a confused, watery viewpoint on the conversation. (When will they stop "reporting" and start giving us the story?) We've known for some time that girls outperform boys in almost every subject until puberty hits, at which point boys edge ahead in math and science. But why? And what to do about it?

The NYT frames the problem as one of organizational habits--which is curious because it focuses not on the problem, but on the (stopgap) solution. Providing boys with better organizational skills will undoubtedly help them do better in school. But doesn't this beg the question of why schools demand that children be "well-organized" in order to receive an education? Why should high-school boys need to develop bureaucratic skills and habits in order to learn? After all, the world itself wasn't color-coded the last time I checked.

A classic case of mistaking your map of the world for the world itself.

Too, the culture's perception of schooling has changed. I believe that parents used to be more focused on the education itself--what the child was learning, how s/he was doing in class, etc. There was a sense that the learning itself was the primary propellant provided by schools to children aimed at moving up in the world. Nowadays there's a great deal more focus on getting the certification at the end. It's the paper that matters--not the process. Especially with No Child Left Behind [free registration required], our focus become fixed on making the grade, and the means seem to matter little.

On top of our intense focus on the finish line, we still teach using methods which we know (and have known for years) don't work all that well. Is it any surprise that energetic, independent students should rapidly come to the conclusion that school isn't worth their time? Why not simply cheat, or cram for the test? And why worry at all, since that silly certificate isn't worth much any more unless you've got the right parents in any case?

Ultimately, it isn't boys who are less organized, it's our pedagogy (and indeed every institutional activity in our culture) which has become more rigidly organized. Turning in your not-very-interesting and not-at-all-important homework on time isn't equivalent to responsibility. It's just punching in. People who focus intensely on thing they themselves find trivial and meaningless are usually pretty unhappy. And no surprise there either.

The myth of "passive income"

2007-12-27T14:01:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine, JD, who used to work as a developer in New England, tells me that there's a new board game which is "sweeping the country." The game: Cashflow 101. The object of the game: become wealthy by mastering the art of investing. The game's designer (or perhaps just endorser): Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame.

After reading his Yahoo! Finance column a few times, I've come to conclusion that Kiyosaki is a financial charlatan (which means that I refuse to drive traffic his way by linking to his stuff directly). In a nutshell, Kiyosaki's financial advice boils down to "Choose to be wealthy." I'm not kidding. His is the worst kind of quasi-libertarian snowjob, since if you pay for any of his motivational products or services, but don't get rich, why, it must be that you just haven't "really committed yourself" to being wealthy. If you're poor, it's your fault. You just haven't really, in your heart of hearts, chosen to be rich.

"As you can see, my heart of hearts loves poverty more than I do."

While it's true that the acquisition of wealth can be a very subtle art, it's an open secret that (in the US, at least) the most simple, most direct, and by far most common strategy for getting rich is to have wealthy parents. But this is all really an aside. What I really want to discuss is the folly underlying Kiyosaki's game and the worldview it reflects.

In Cashflow 101, each player begins with a randomly selected income-expense profile--a job and a bunch of expenses. After that,

There are two stages to the game. In the first, "the rat race", the player aims to raise his or her character's passive income level to where it exceeds the character's expenses. The winner is determined in the second stage, "the fast track". To win, a player must get his or her character to buy their "dream" or accumulate an additional $50,000 in monthly cash flow.

The whole thing revolves around this mysterious concept of passive income.

He just followed me home. Seriously. So... can I keep him?

Aaron Maxwell has written a pretty good beginner's guide to Cashflow 101, which explains that

[p]assive income is income that comes in with little or no additional effort on your part. If you have royalties from a book, income from a rental property you own, or stock that pays dividends each quarter, you have passive income.

Maxwell immediately goes on the qualify that definition:

Sometimes you'll have to do SOME work - if that rental house develops a leaky roof, you'd better have it fixed if you want to continue collecting rent! The difference is that for a "normal" job, you have to invest your time continually to keep receiving income, and if you work half as much, your income immediately goes down by half or more. With passive income, after you do some initial work up front, you have an income stream that continues with little or no time on your part to maintain it.

And there's the rub. Passive income isn't genuinely passive in the sense that it requires no effort. It's simply that compensation isn't immediately correlated to effort. Passive income doesn't require endless, futile labor to sustain it. Rather passive income represents one flow within a relationship of ownership--and in the opposite direction flows responsibility. We receive passive income from assets for whose condition and behavior we are liable.

Calling the income passive is misleading, because it implies that such income arrives not simply without--or with minimal--effort, but with minimal worry as well. But ask any landlord--you're essentially paid to worry about stuff. Whatever the gods of pop music claim to the contrary, tenants do not call Ghostbusters first. Especially when the heat goes out. First, they call the landlord. Then, they call their lawyers.

I ain't afraid o' no tenant.

Responsibility implies liability. Although rental property income provides the most stark example, other kinds of passive income also admit of analogous forms of responsibility. In exchange for book royalties, the author remains responsible for what he's written. In exchange for stock dividends, the owner becomes responsible for the behavior of the company whose shares she owns. (Warren Buffett famously advocates treating the purchase of stock as equivalent to the purchase of the entire company.)

The point here is that wealth, because it depends upon ownership, entails responsibility and liability in direct proportion. There's no such thing as truly passive income, and anyone who thinks she wants to be rich should be warned that Easy Street is the main thoroughfare in Neverland. Wealth is a sacred social trust, not a ticket to heedless self-indulgence. It is most certainly possible to enjoys the fruits of responsibility, but only for so long as and to the degree that one proves willing and able to bear its weight.

We have a word for those who take the lazy way to easy street, and it ain't flattering.

Knowing what you know

2007-12-24T14:22:00.001-05:00

When I found Langdon Morris's book on innovation which boasts an epigram from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, I was understandably excited. "Which passage from Aristotle did he choose?" you ask. Well, he chose:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Which is an awesome quote, except that it doesn't belong to Aristotle. As a one-time teacher of the Nicomachean Ethics, I can vouch that this quote accurately sums up Aristotle's position on excellence. But when I went looking for the precise provenance of the quote, I discovered that (according to Wikiquote, at least) while the meaning does indeed belong to Aristotle, the specific words flowed from another's pen. Apparently, the above quote is Will Durant's summation of Aristotle's position in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics. Since the quote remains a clear, concise, accurate summation--in fact, it's probably better than anything Aristotle wrote himself--we'll keep it.

I expect that Mr. Langdon's ethically sensitive parsing of the innovation process will yield a number of worthwhile insights, but for now I just want to cover one. His definition of knowledge and its implied definition of learning. Definitions appeal to my inner philosopher, and smart definitions are what make the world make sense. Too, the subject is, I think, central to the whole constellation of fields covered by this blog; loyal readers will recall that this blog was launched with a post on knowledge and learning.

Langdon's subtle and sophisticated definition of knowledge (found on p. 61 of the .pdf), boils down to the following:

Knowledge is concerned with "how," with the capacity to do useful things. Such capacity, in turn, comes about as a result of the integration of three other elements, information, theory, and experience. Information is the "what," the basic description [the "facts" or "data"]; theory is the conceptual framework that explains how the world functions [the "context"], and experience is the immersive and multidimensional process of doing and having done [the "practice"].

The subtle shift in emphasis from knowledge-as-what to knowledge-as-how turns our entire educational system on its head. Knowledge isn't something that you have--it's something that you exercise. It isn't an amalgam of friable and discrete facts--it's a layered, nested, and embodied concatenation of practices. It isn't a two-dimensional map of bounded domains--it's a multi-dimensional narrative.

Academic education as internal phrenology.

On Langdon's definition of knowledge learning becomes the subjective fusion of information, theory, and experience. The student generates knowledge for himself by bringing information, theory, and experience into relation with one another. It isn't enough simply to have data; nor is it enough to see contextual possibilities; nor is it enough simply to have one or several experiences. All three must fuse within a single self-awareness, and the resulting knowledge possesses the breadth and depth only of the most limited of the three factors.

And perhaps most importantly for me, as an educator, on Langdon's definition of knowledge teaching becomes a creative attempt to stimulate and/or guide the student to meld the three ingredients of knowledge into practicable know-how. Successful teaching doesn't mean providing students with more or better information; it has to do with process only tangentially. Successful teaching means that students are, after being taught, measurably more effective in doing things. They get more done of what they want to do. It's hard to imagine students wanting anything else from their teachers--which may in itself be the strongest single argument for Langdon's definition.

Sector four

2007-12-10T17:52:00.000-05:00

A riddle: If you're not for-profit, and you're not non-profit, what are you?

"Ah..." says the clever reader. "You're the government."

"But my lawyers tell me that I really am the government."

But let's just say that you're not the government either. (You listening, George?) You're still a private organization, you don't live off charitable donations, and you're not just in it for the money. Is there a fourth option?

There is. Although not fully formed, the emergent fourth sector comprises organizations not interested in playing by the old rules. Goodbye Marx, Spencer, Jacobs, and even Keynes. Hello KaosPilots. Increasingly referred to as "for-benefit," 4th Sector organizations have the following features:

Privately owned and controlled (not government)
Sustains its operations based on income generated by their activities (not a charity)
Returns some of their surplus to their equity owners in the form of profits (not a non-profit)
Leaves some of the value it generates in the community where it can continue to accrue (not merely a profit machine)

While for-benefit organizations often represent the fruit of social entrepreneurship, they're not one and the same. Social entrepreneurship (which has very official support here in Canada and elsewhere) means using the tools, techniques, and attitude of for-profit entrepreneurship to tackle social issues. For-benefits are one possible outcome of social entrepreneurship, but so are innovative charities, non-profits, political organizations, one-off events... even for-profits can be conscripted sometimes.

While no one knows exactly what the 4th Sector is going to look like, it's increasingly obvious that it's coming. (Even the last-to-every-party NYT has caught the shift in the wind.) And it won't be just companies--it's a whole new ecosystem. They're even growing their own venture capital firms. Watch out, old order.

"4th Sector rabble resists Ancien Régime forces?" No way.
"4th Sector overruns final barricade manned by scruffy Ancien Régime holdouts." Oh, yeah.

Development of the slums, for the slums, by the slums

2007-12-06T17:16:00.001-05:00

Shack / Slum Dwellers International (an organization which seems to take a Puckish pride in the lumpishness of its name) has undertaken a challenging mission: "Securing land tenure and housing" for the urban poor "in 24 countries on 3 different continents." Bold, but hardly original. Their approach, however, is another matter.

The group, known by the initials SDI and formed in India in 1996, is a loose network of grass-roots organizations of the urban poor. It’s grown to millions of members in 24 nations, cities spread from Manila to Cape Town, Mumbai to Sao Paulo. Typically, members are women ready to share their meager savings in collective efforts to upgrade their homes, secure titles to the land their houses sit on, build a latrine block, perhaps start a school.

Slum dwellers sit right across the table from local government authorities, designing projects and negotiating how they’ll be financed and carried out.

Of course, the slum dwellers get professional advice [.pdf], but we're talking about slum dwellers acting as their own real-estate developers. For themselves and on their own terms. And they just got an unrestricted grant of US $10M from the Gates Foundation.

Unbelievable? On the contrary: perfectly necessary. When governments, NGOs, and big businesses can't or won't get people what they want, people quite naturally just do it themselves. Although it's obvious, it bears repeating: the poor (like every other demographic) are their own best--and in many cases only--allies.

Caging the innovation bird

2007-12-06T14:28:00.001-05:00

So, 800-pound Microsoft has begun developing a network of Innovation Centers around the globe as part of strategy to "to foster innovation and growth in local software economies." Hmmm....

I think most people would be at least a little suspicious of Microsoft's intentions in spearheading such an effort. Innovation is inherently a collaborative and not a competitive process. Microsoft claims to be cooperating with governments, universities, and other software companies; while I see no reason to think that they're not doing so, I do believe there are grounds for thinking that Microsoft may understand "cooperation" differently than some of its Innovation Center partners. Microsoft Founder Mr. Gates may or may not have reconnected with his inner philanthropist; it remains the case that Microsoft's behavior and corporate culture during his tenure was profoundly combative and territorial.

Soon every innovation in this neighborhood... will be mine!
(Photo by oddthingies)

A key question private businesses are asking themselves these days is how to capture value generated by an innovation process--how keep the innovation bird happy in its cage, as it were. Innovation, however, doesn't just thrive in an open environment--it arguably cannot even survive unless it can roam freely, build doors in impenetrable walls, outgrow its origins. While people can own innovation processes and products in the looser sense of taking responsibility for them, it's hard to see how anyone can own them in the stricter legal sense. (And I seriously, seriously doubt that Microsoft will be the one to crack this nut; their outlook is too closed.)

And if you've been wondering whether or not the new fixation on innovation is just a passing fad, it isn't. My ex-boss David Smith of the Affordable Housing Institute recently blogged about an April 2007 PNAS paper by Luís M. A. Bettencourt, et al., entitled "Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities." According to Smith, Bettencourt et al. divide all the factors of urban life into three categories:

Factors that scale linearly with the city's size, such as number of jobs, water consumption, etc. (Smith calls these "personal matters");
Factors that scale sublinearly with the city's size--i.e., those factors that enjoy economies of scale--such as consumption of energy and transportation resources (Smith calls these "hardware");
those factors that scale superlinearly with the city's scale--i.e., those factors which enjoy network effects--such as disease rates, innovation rates, and wealth generation (Smith calls these "software," or "social interactions").

Wealth is, as Jane Jacobs has noted, an urban phenomenon. But wealth moves hand in hand with innovation--both are superlinear urban effects. Which means that big cities both demand and generate higher rates of innovation and wealth generation. Note that superlinear effects are not merely epiphenomena--that is, it's not just that bigger cities "happen to" generate exponentially more innovation, crime, wealth, and disease. The economies of bigger cities, when they grow (again, as Jacobs has noted), grow on the basis of wealth and innovation. An ever-growing economy producing ever more wealth--the holy grail of Protestant democratic capitalism--both requires and produces ever more innovation. As long as our cities keep getting bigger we will keep getting wealthier and smarter, and innovation will weave itself ever more inextricably into our economies and cultures.

As anyone who's tried to innovate knows, innovation relies upon creativity, and creativity thrives in open systems, open networks, and open minds. It's no wonder that the interests in innovation and social entrepreneurship have developed in parallel, since social entrepreneurs seem willing to perform all kinds of commercial functions without basing their organizations on the pathological greed and egomania which lie at the heart of corporate misbehavior. Greed and egomania are diametrically opposed to the values of generosity and humility which form the basis of every successful culture of innovation.

Corporations today--and Microsoft is no exception--want the wealth that follows on the heels of good innovation, but they can't bring themselves to believe that "proprietary innovation" makes about as much sense as "a happily caged falcon." At bottom, I think it's our whole notion of ownership which needs rethinking. In a sense, after all, wealth belongs to communities (or societies, if you prefer). We just entrust it to corporations and families and individuals in the belief that they will use it responsibly if their personal well-being depends upon its sound management. A pretty smart system, overall. But can we imagine (and design) a better one? Can we imagine (and design) a form of ownership which engenders and protects responsibility, but also resists the excesses of the miser and the tyrant?

Maybe building a better cage means not building a cage at all; maybe it means becoming falconers.
(Photo by wallyg)

Responsibility in education

2007-12-03T16:50:00.001-05:00

One of my personal favorite pedagogic precepts was best expressed by the laconic Mr. Miyagi, one of the all-time best teachers portrayed in cinema: "No such thing as bad student; only bad teacher."

"Man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything."

Which is not to say that even the most gifted teacher will enjoy success with every student. It's just that the most important lessons we learn from our teachers--how to face the overwhelming reality of human ignorance, when and how to (dis)respect authority, when to resort to knowledge and when to resort to compassion--derive not from what the teacher knows but from who the teacher is. That's because good teachers know that learning is not the process by which the student absorbs the teacher's knowledge, but rather the process by the student creates knowledge. The teacher can only either stimulate or suppress the student's personal learning process; or, put differently, what a student really gets from a teacher is an attitude, and if a student internalizes a (teacher's) bad attitude, then that student will find all future learning difficult.

Thus Bob Talbert's corollary to Mr. Miyagi's precept: "Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more." So when I see failure in an educational context, I always look to the teacher (and his bosses) first.

Mr. Whipswitch could never understand why the other teachers kept ending up with the best students.

But it's not always that simple. Take the example of 14-year old Australian Beau Abela, who can barely read, let alone spell. He's in high-school, and has trouble counting beyond 10, so let's just set aside any questions you might have about his performance in algebra class. Beau suffers from a mild learning disability, so in some ways it's not surprising that his performance is subpar for his age, but this seems egregious. Indeed, Beau's condition--unless you're one of those all-too-common philistines who actually embrace incompetence--seems utterly outrageous. As in, it outrages me.

And I'm not the only one who's upset. Beau's father is suing the Victorian educational department for AU $300k. On the surface, seems like they probably deserve it. As you might expect,

Mr Abela [has] said his court action was not motivated by money, but by frustration at the way the system appeared to be letting down children. ... Mr Abela said he would drop the lawsuit tomorrow if the department would guarantee him it would educate (Beau) to a proper level.

I think most people can understand that Mr Abela is frustrated given his son's lackluster academic performance, but what exactly does he mean when says that the system is "letting down children?" Certainly the system doesn't seem to be producing measurable results in Beau's case. But to whom to attribute this failure? Or rather, how should responsibility for this failure be untangled?

Mr Abela concedes that

the Education Department had made significant efforts to help his son, including paying for one-on-one tutoring and providing a laptop. Over the years dozens of assessments and reports have been done to get to the bottom of Beau's problems. ... Documents seen by the Sunday Herald Sun show Panton Hills Primary School and Eltham High have directed considerable time and effort towards the troubled student.

What kind of problems, exactly?

Beau has been on ADHD medication in the past and school reports consistently say he does not concentrate in class or make an effort with his work. ... Eltham High School principal Vincent Sicari said in a recent report Beau's behaviour was increasingly disruptive and violent.

Doesn't sound like Beau's is an easy case. In fact, it rather sounds like the school system has been sensitive, proactive, and generous.

As framed by the Sunday Herald Sun, it looks as though Mr Abela is suing simply because he's frustrated--not because the school is at fault. And even if the school had been less responsive, how much (and what kind of) responsibility for Beau's failure could we honestly lay at the feet of his teachers and their bosses? How much (and what kind) belongs to Beau? Without more particular information on Beau's case, it's impossible to judge the case wisely.

But the very intractability of the case forces one interesting issue to the surface: Why do we persist in regarding education as a responsibility? Issues in contemporary education--especially failures--are almost always framed as a polarized conflict between individual responsibility and systemic sensitivity. The important question, as this line of thinking has it, is how much responsibility belongs to the student and how much to the system (as though responsibility only came in one flavor).

The key assumption which underlies this thinking is that education is a necessity, with all that that entails. And of course, education is necessary for the kind of society we operate [.pdf], the kind of culture we participate, the kind of government we practice. Indeed, few institutions bear more of the weight of our current way of life than universal education. The incredible social importance of education, however, tends to overshadow the fact that education provides (if these guys are to be believed) the most sublime pleasure available to human experience. It's worth remembering that our word school derives from the Greek skhole, which means "leisure"--school is supposed to be what humans do for fun.

In a Protestant culture (and especially in a Puritan culture), even the pleasure of learning is suspect; only the pleasure of discipline passes without question--especially if the one disciplined is oneself.

Wait just a minute? Did I just say that learning is fun? Yes. That's it exactly. We often get so invested in the importance of "an education" (by which we too often mean "a decent résumé") that we forget that we can always recognize real learning when it happens because it is always pleasurable. (Incidentally, this is a non-trivial criticism of contemporary schooling, which is, as everyone knows, no fun at all. When learning happens in an academic environment, it's almost always either an accident or against the rules.)

So I have one question for Beau and his teachers: What does it mean that Beau is obviously having no fun at all "being educated" at Eltham High?

Do values have value?

2007-11-26T11:16:00.000-05:00

One of the most pernicious fallacies into which our business thinking is prone to fall--and this is especially true in disciplines like finance and engineering, where numbers are particularly preeminent--is the conflation of measured value and real value. It's an old truism that you cannot manage what you cannot (or do not) measure. But managers, driven by objective results, take it one step further: If we cannot (or do not) measure it, the thinking goes, then for all practical purposes we can act as if it were not real. Oh, the endless debaucheries which descend from this one, simple stupidity.

Who says you can't measure love?

If we reject this fallacy, however, we ipso facto assume the value of CSR ("Corporate Social Responsibility"), which is really just another way of saying that the bottom line isn't really the bottom line. (Although, then again, maybe it is.) There are plenty of us who believe that environmental concerns, labor issues, management practices, and other corporate habits of thought and action impact the bottom line. Many of us also see quite clearly that making lots of money in our stock portfolio isn't worth it if the costs show up elsewhere.

Where else? Well, we might, I don't know, run out of water or something. (Even soft drink company execs, who seem to view potable water as competition, must realize that water is the main ingredient in their product.) Or perhaps canned air will become the only kind of air worth breathing. (Los Angelians must love the smell of cancer in the morning.) Or we pave our "path to financial freedom" using the backs of children. Or maybe we'll get to that point where corporate boneheadocracy seems normal.

After all, who cares? We customers and shareholders don't have to pay to clean up everything up when corporate America poops in the nest. But then who does? We taxpayers do, that's who. But wait. Aren't "customers," shareholders," and "taxpayers" just different roles played by the same flesh and blood human beings? Not only that, but at the end of the fiscal year, there's really only one balance sheet. Costs that corporate America manages to externalize just end up on a different line item on our annual budget, that's all. If we don't pay them as customers or shareholders, we pay them as taxpayers or family members or landholders or what have you. Only the dense, the foolish, and the psychopathic truly believe that the corporate bottom line is their own bottom line.

Burning Beds, Inc. has posted outstanding earnings for the past three quarters, and... hey! That's my bed!

Once you assume that clean water, clean air, happy children, and sane work environments have value (anyone other than these guys want to argue that this stuff is without value?), there are two possible ways forward:

Get creative when it comes to measurement. Instead of whining about how some things are "unmeasurable," innovate new mensuration and valuation techniques. Two interesting actors in the field of valuation innovation are Innovest and Communications Consulting Worldwide (CCW). What's this all about? Consider the following example: Say Wal-Mart's got labor troubles (no, really, imagine it); how much does that dent in their reputation cost shareholders? According to CCW, "if Wal-Mart had a reputation like that of rival Target Corp., its stock would be worth 8.4% more, adding $16 billion in market capitalization." That's a game changing assertion, shifting the debate from "Can the effects of reputation be measured (i.e., is it possible)?" to "Can we improve the methodology used in this study (i.e., how well are we doing it)?"
Stop managing and start leading. Insanity, as AA has it, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. While the methods of bureaucratic management can optimize a banal system defined by quantified data, they are poorly suited to effecting metamorphic leaps in consciousness and/or character. As a rule, our businesses don't need to "do better," they need to "do differently." Better data and better management practices cannot provide a fresh, holistic vision for the future of business--only inspired leadership can do that. Bill McDonough and the Regenesis Group are two interesting players in the field of consciousness shifting.

We did not manage our way to the moon.

While I believe that creative mensuration and valuation techniques are effective tools for advancing a CSR agenda, they are useless without the proper outlook. Only competent, inspired leadership--a coherent vision supported by capable entrepreneurship--can truly change things. The incremental approach is appropriate as a rhetorical approach (that is, as part of a strategy of persuasion), but only a true leap in consciousness and character can ever save us from ourselves.

Cerebration

2007-11-13T10:39:00.001-05:00

Innovation competitions are becoming all the rage. We all understand that, in a crowded marketplace, it's important to stand out if you want to get ahead. But there may be limits. The National University of Singapore, for example, runs a competition which they've cleverly entitled Cerebration. As you can see from the fact that my link works, I kid you not.

But, you may ask, what's the problem with calling an innovation contest Cerebration? After all, cerebration is real word and everything. Well, since the contest is based in Singapore... THIS is the problem. Cerebrate good times, baby.

I've looked over the contest website, and it appears that the organizers are staring the irony right in the eye. No one appears to have blinked yet.

The only way to stress less is to let it go

2007-10-30T13:45:00.001-04:00

The NYT covers an emerging trend in affluent US high schools, where a culture of "super-achievement" has taken over.

Relaxation, like stress, is a habitual behavior based on learned techniques.
(Photo by Jodi Hilton for NYT)

I have a feeling that many people will view requiring stressed out high school seniors to take yoga (and the like) as a kind of fad aimed at making kids even more well rounded. But I would suggest that such efforts may really reflect the first wave of a shift in consciousness which sees clearly that the habits kids acquire in school become the backbones of their respective characters. And being stressed by work is one of those habits. (And remember, this is all high school level coursework--i.e., almost completely insignificant.)

Challenge results

2007-10-26T14:03:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: They won!

Well, first-round results are in, and they aren't pretty. The bad news: both of my teams (search for "McGill") landed pretty short of the top 10. In both cases, we were at least partially victims of the evaluation methodology, which allows various judges to give give absolute grades without guidance. (So, for example, one of our judges for the Sustainable Innovation Summit gave us a score of 30-something/100, which seems bad, except that the highest grade he gave was 41/100. How to integrate those results with those of the judge who gave us 81/100? We were the judge's no. 2 choice in both cases....)

We also suffered from a certain confusion among the judges about what innovation actually means. For the Innovation Challenge, we had one judge comment that our idea of making a large retailer's catalog available from within a small concept store was extremely innovative, while another judge castigated us for not putting the small concept in its own special space within the large retailer ("that would have been really innovative"). It's tempting to believe that taking a kind of "average" definition of innovation will take off the rough edges, but it's really just a way to cut corners. Understandable when resources are limited and rough-and-ready solutions are preferable, but increasingly suspect for a competition that wants to become truly global in scope.

An Innovation Challenge judge cogitates intensely.

I fully confess that there are plenty of sour grapes in my comments. I would note, in all fairness though, that I made the same complaints last year when we won.

An interesting observation which my wife made in our conversations about this year's results is that most commentary on innovation concerns process rather than product. There's plenty of information out there on innovation processes, but precious little on how to recognize a truly innovative idea if it hits you in the face. Lots on the how; not much on the what. I'm currently reflecting on this, and will post the fruits of my pondering later.

These disappointing results do have a silver lining, though. I've become pretty good friends with the captain of last year's 2nd place finishers from North Carolina. He's one of the most competent people I've met, he's good a great nose for great ideas, and he's hands-down the best presenter I've ever even heard of. He's in the finals this year, so at least I have someone to root for. Go UNC!

The ghetto of sustainability

2007-10-03T11:57:00.001-04:00

I'm also concurrently at work on an innovation challenge for the Sustainable Innovation Summit, which is much like the Innovation Challenge, only ghettoized. Although the SIS draws some big name brands (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, Xerox, et al.), I find it hard to see how it plans to effect real market transformation, since it tries to carve "sustainability" off as a niche family of problems rather than trying to integrate environmental consciousness into business thinking generally.

Since this is my first time through the SIS wringer, though, I'm reserving judgment. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Innovation Challenge

2007-10-03T11:44:00.001-04:00

I have no good excuses for not posting anything recently. Except for the past days, during which I've been hard at work recruiting and doing admin for my Innovation Challenge team. The Innovation Challenge is something like a case competition, but orientated toward real current and future business problems rather than previous or hypothetical situations.

Apart from the $20K grand prize, if you win you also get to call yourself a member of "The Most Innovative MBA Team in the World." Yes, yes, I know I'm not an MBA, but I hope that's at least partially an asset. And I have at least a little experience in this department...

Letters to a Young Teacher

2007-08-30T22:01:00.001-04:00

Salon's Mathew Fishbane interviews Jonathan Kozol, author of the recently published Letters to a Young Teacher, in which Mr. Kozol advises school teachers to adopt an "attitude of irreverence." Thank goodness at least one person who testifies before the U.S. Congress is saying it.

Learning in time

2007-08-25T20:31:00.002-04:00

Over at FutureLab, Jack Kenny has an article discussing the importance of time in learning environments and experiences. Kenny details the experiences a number of schools in the UK have had in changing the way that time and learning interact. Faithful readers of this blog will recall the post on thought/days, in which I suggested a supplementary time measurement for learning (in addition to the now-standard credit/hour).

I think the most important point raised by Kenny's article is that "a [rigid] timetable is restrictive when teachers are working creatively." Clock time and learning time are related, but they're not necessarily isometric. To illustrate this difference, you need only reflect on what happened to clock time during one of those magic moments when you became completely immersed in an enjoyable learning experience...

The MBA: new, improved, or simply on steroids?

2007-08-21T15:08:00.001-04:00

In Austin, Texas, a bunch of teachers at the Acton MBA program have uncovered the secret of American greatness (such as it is):

We believe that thoughtful, principled entrepreneurs are the secret to America's success, and her scarcest resource.

Anyone who doubts whether or not Acton's founders are correct in this surmise should stop and think about the meaning of the word entrepreneur. I hardly think it unfair to qualify Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, and King as entrepreneurs. It's just that their domain was politics rather than commerce. The US owes all of its greatness (again, such as it is) to its most entrepreneurial members. Better US entrepreneurs can only mean a brighter future for the US.

But setting aside for the moment the whole question of social entrepreneurship, Acton claims as its goal

to educate a new kind of MBA: one who is equipped to add value from day one, build successful businesses, raise a healthy family, and give back to his or her community.

Having considered business school in the past, and having cheered from the sidelines as a spouse paid her two years of dues, this sounds great. Your average garden-variety MBA program makes it a rule to thwart whatever entrepreneurial impulses its students may bring to its doors. So maybe Acton really does offer something different. At the very least, it has proven itself capable of convincing already successful entrepreneurs that it offers something worthwhile:

Acton is the only MBA program in the country that offers every student a $35,000 Acton Fellowship to cover the full cost of tuition, fees, and materials.

Seems like a hell of deal, if the curriculum is any good. And the curriculum looks pretty damn good to me. They use the the case method, but with a focus on entrepreneurial issues rather than managerial ones. They include hands-on experience in sales, complex simulations, and site visits as part of the package. And one of their core curricular segments is entitled "Life of Meaning," suggesting that they're not merely about enabling corporate greed. And to top it all off, it's all taught by seasoned entrepreneurs, not by researchers. It looks like a fantastic curriculum, and I'd endorse it wholeheartedly except for a few little details which set my nose to twitching.

(A) First off, the workload is 80-90+ hours per week. Now, it's only a one-year program, and traditional MBA programs seem to work their little serfs 50-70 hours per week for two years, so perhaps it's not so bad by comparison. It's just that that kind of workload sends several important messages:

it suggests, by sealing people hermetically into their program so that they barely even see their spouses, that success in business depends upon sacrificing everything else (from the FAQ: "We offer several sessions throughout the year in which students and their significant others get together with the Life of Meaning teacher to discuss the contributions and sacrifices each has to make throughout the year-long program");
it teaches the phony lesson that working harder is more important than working smarter;
and because it lasts an entire year, it creates habits of dissociation (an addiction to work really is a spiritual disease) which can reappear at any time.

(B) Second, it looks like the school is staffed by only (or almost only) white males. Lord knows that a lot of diversity can exist beneath identical skin colors and genders, but it's nevertheless hard to believe that this kind of homogeneity doesn't reflect a certain homogeneity of outlook. Driving forward relentlessly has been a very successful strategy for white males, but I can't help but wonder whether or not there may be other strategies.

(C) Third, and most importantly, it's still a curriculum taught by faculty at a school where students come and sit in classrooms to "learn at the feet of the master." Acton notes that "traditional MBA faculty see themselves, not their students, as the customers," thereby suggesting that at Acton, students are the customers. That is to say, the students are the boss. But while "clear contracts and a competitive grading system" probably do provide for quite a bit of the pressure experienced by students, I fail to see how they "encourage... perspective, discipline and accountability." Perspective comes from broad understanding--not from narrow focus; discipline arises as a result of self-knowledge--not from external standards; and accountability arises from a sense of connectedness to other persons and things--not from abstract contracts, however clear.

From its website, Acton appears to be a smarter, leaner, and perhaps meaner MBA, but it's still an MBA. In many ways it returns to original intent of the MBA, which was to provide to rising managers (who already had some real-world experience) a suite of tools to help them manage more effectively. And in several ways it has outgrown its roots: its focus on entrepreneurship is welcome; its penchant for hands-on teaching is laudable; and its ability to support its students financially is breathtaking.

Without visiting the campus and conversing, face-to-face, with its students and teachers, I don't think it would be possible to render a more complete judgment. (I despair of the possibility of any student giving me any time for conversation.) It's an extremely exciting project, but I think it's still mostly a large step in the direction of faster and more, and only a small step in the direction of better.

KaosPilots' Admission Workshop

2007-05-10T13:23:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned before, I was able to observe the KaosPilot Admission Workshop (AW) in Århus, Denmark. Living up to their reputation, the KaosPilots put on an AW that was fun, unexpected, and a bit chaotic--definitely a breath of fresh air. The structure of the process made excellent use of a great deal of extremely creative thinking about getting to know applications ("test-pilots," as they're called), and while I think their evaluation methodology is flawed in some ways, I also think it's both courageous and corrigible.

I can't give away too much here, but I can say that the AW consists in a series of team-based activities designed to create opportunities for test-pilots to showcase their creativity, aptitude for leadership, and personal courage. Also, while the final decisions are made by KaosPilot staff, it's the first-year students who act as the frontline evaluators. The students' recommendations are generally determinative for admission.

My role, which I was honored to perform, was to act as part of the "Evaluation Team" (also composed of students), which tries to evaluate the efficacy of individual evaluation activities as well as the entire process arc. I found the experience both stimulating and inspiring--I ended up writing a 5,000-word memo detailing my impressions. While I wouldn't exactly say that the KaosPilots opened my eyes to what's possible (their innovative activities resemble strikingly some of the educational activities and projects I've designed myself), they definitely showed me that the key ingredients for creating something new are passion, courage, and faith. I can only hope to emulate them in this regard.

What's wrong here

2007-04-24T05:57:00.001-04:00

Sustainable Architecture, Building, and Culture (which very cleverly yields the name Sustainable ABC) has got its hands on the domain GreenHomesForSale.com. And what are they doing with this bellwether domain?

We make green homes hip, stylish, and easy to find. Or not.

I'm very happy that someone, somewhere is trying to market green homes. I'm delighted that someone has expended serious thought and effort on giving sustainable homes a virtual presence. But I think some serious improvements are possible and in order.

Oh, and why should green homes be ghettoized? Why not simply provide it as one searchable criterion out of many?

Who's to say who can be pilot?

2007-04-22T10:23:00.001-04:00

As it turns out, I'm to ~~have a small say~~ watch the process! I'm delighted to announce that I've been invited to act as a ~~guest interviewer~~ admission workshop monitor for the KaosPilot school in Århus, Denmark. (I don't yet know the exact capacity in which I'll be operating, so I'm presuming that I'll have a kind of advisory role.) According to the official website copy, the admissions workshop functions thusly:

The admissions workshop lasts two days. Here the applicant enters a group of 8-10 applicants divided according to nationality. During the workshop applicants from non-Scandinavian countries work in English. In each group the applicants – either as a group or individually – complete a long series of creative and professional assignments set by the school in collaboration with the KaosPilots external partners.

Sounds like fun, if you ask me.

The workshop is scheduled to take place Thursday and Friday of next week. I'll have more details after I participate. I'm very much looking forward to meeting the some of the school's faculty, students, and prospective students.

Thought/days (a new measure for slow learning)

2007-03-26T17:59:00.000-04:00

Our culture is all too quick to prejudge in favor of high speed, and nowhere is our prejudice so evident as in education. The idea of "slow learning" would probably seem to most people to be something to be avoided. Children who learn slowly, after all, are called disadvantaged.

I've been doing some reading and thinking about learning, though, and I have a bone to pick with our speed prejudice, particularly as it relates to environmental issues. To begin, I'd like to cite David Orr's lecture on "Environmental Literacy," in which he distinguishes between cleverness and intelligence, giving the nod to intelligence in part because it is slower:

From an ecological perspective it is clear that we have often confused cleverness and intelligence. Cleverness, as I understand it, tends to fragment things and to focus on the short term. The epitome of cleverness is the specialist whose intellect and person have been shaped by the demands of a single function. Ecological intelligence, on the other hand, requires a broader view of the world and a long-term perspective. Cleverness can be adequately measured by SAT and GRE tests, but intelligence is not so easily computed. In time, I think we will come to see that true intelligence tends to be integrative and often works slowly while mulling things over. Further, intelligence can be inferred, according to Wendell Berry in Standing By Words, from the “good order or harmoniousness of [one’s] surroundings.” In other words, the consequences of our actions are a measure of our intelligence, and the plea of ignorance is no good defense. Because some consequences cannot be predicted, the exercise of intelligence requires forbearance and a sense of limits. Ecological intelligence, in contrast to mere cleverness, does not presume to act beyond a certain scale at which effects can be known and unpredictable consequences would not be catastrophic.

While I don't care for Orr's diction (cleverness and intelligence seem too close in terms of connotation and valence in my view), his more general point that there exists a kind of quick intelligence and a kind of slow intelligence is well taken. I would suggest further that his distinction be extrapolated a bit: there's also a kind of quick learning and a kind of slow learning, both of which are good. Children who suffer from learning disabilities are simply "slower" (than average) when it comes to the quick kind of learning. The slow kind of learning can't really be measured in the same way. In fact, I believe it requires an entirely different conception of time.

Clive Holtham, et al. n their article Slow Knowledge: The Importance of Tempo in Debriefing and in Individual Learning [.pdf], discuss some of the key qualitative differences between "fast time" and "slow time." Without getting too deep into their work (which is worth at least skimming), they specifically advance the notion of tempo (fast tempo vs. slow tempo) as a conceptual overlay for understanding time as it relates to learning. Tempo means rhythm, and it is precisely the notion of rhythm as it relates to learning which I want to refine.

We currently measure quantity of learning (quite apart from quality, which has its own issues) in terms of credit/hours, instruction/hours, or something similar. We measure, in other words, learning time from the instructor's point of view. Or, to put it slightly differently, we measure time from the subject matter's point of view. As if the sheer number of hours a subject matter and a mind were in contact were meaningful. And it is, under certain conditions and within limits.

Student learning + instructor timetable = VERY slow learning.

I'd like to propose a new measure for quantity of learning. (Not a substitute for credit/hours, but a complement.)

The thought/day: a day in which specific, conscious mental attention is brought to bear on a particular idea-cluster. Thought/days are typically measured within a larger context, just as credit/hours are. One generally doesn't simply assign 50 thought/days to a project; one assigns 5 thought/days per week for 10 weeks.

The thought/day attempts to guide and quantify reflection rather than the co-presence of "learner" and "subject matter." Naturally, thought/days have no significance unless the learner is committed to reflection. Since, however, the student is the independent actor and the instructor the dependent actor in a teaching system, thought/days don't offer the temptation of education-as-body-processing which is all too common under credit/hour regimes.

Again, though, thought/days cannot replace credit/hours, but they can supplement them. They are especially helpful in disciplines such as philosophy, theology, and creative writing, in which reflection (spiritual digestion) is more important than the absorption of information.

How green is your zipcode?

2007-03-23T11:47:00.001-04:00

MarketWatch's real-estate writer Amy Hoak publishes a few links--with extensive commentary--to websites which provide information your average real-estate agent may not be able to provide. Setting aside the sex offender nonsense, the article provides some great links.

First (of course), the environment:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Web site has a tool that allows visitors to search a community by ZIP code for environmental facts about the area, including pollution statistics, the location of hazardous waste sites and information about the area's watershed.

Another site dedicated to helping the public retrieve information about local environmental health is Scorecard.org, which generates a pollution report card at the county level, giving information on such topics as air and water quality.

Where in this picture would you like to live?

Second, another issue dear to me, schools:

A national database of school demographic information can be found on the National Center for Education Statistics Web site. Click on the "School, College and Library Search" tab at the top in order to view data including a particular school's student-to-teacher ratio or enrollment by race and ethnicity.
For a snapshot of academic performance and to compare schools, a prospective homeowner might browse the School Matters Web site, a service of Standard & Poor's.
Another site, Great Schools, offers similar tools.

Even as the internet threatens to inflict fully-fledged virtuality upon us, it also enhances the quality and quantity of information about place.

How green is green?

2007-03-17T17:29:00.001-04:00

Ah! St. Patrick's Day! When everyone is green. Or at least, everyone wears green. But some people really are drinking green beer--and the recipe involves no food coloring.

Newsvine feed

2007-03-12T07:06:00.001-04:00

For those who love news, love the internet, and think they go great together, there are variety of interesting new services out there which are trying to change the way we discover and digest news. My current favorite is Newsvine, which offers a collection of tools aimed at helping internauts share their online discoveries with each other. Taken together, Newsvine's tools allow users to initiate, track, and advance conversations about the news. It relies upon extant news production and distribution networks, but it enormously expands the possibilities for commentary and discussion.

I've added a feed to my "column" (as they call it) over on the right. Questions, criticisms, and comments welcome!

What do you get when cross ethics and Wal*Mart?

2007-02-28T06:01:00.001-05:00

Besides a bunch of lawsuits, I mean. Evidently, you get Global Ethics University (GEU), who really, really, really wants to be your

one-stop online ethics and compliance-training provider for both individuals and corporations. From easy, affordable online ethics courses to complete, ready-to-use ethics training curricula, look no further than Global Ethics University. Ethics is a serious problem and requires serious solutions. Of course you can do it yourself or reinvent the wheel, but Global Ethics University has everything you need in one convenient place with packages and prices that suit any size organization.

"Ethics is a serious problem?" Um, no it's not. Ethics means principally the study of habits, which means that it is at bottom a framework for understanding what the problem is and how to solve it. One kind of "serious problem" typically results when unscrupulous people and ineffective management systems get together and do the corruption mamba. Another kind of "serious problem," as I've noted before, occurs when people conflate ethics with compliance (again from the homepage):

You can do something significant and different TODAY to achieve high standards of ethical compliance. The best part is that you don't have to settle for either reflective professional/personal development course or hard-hitting compliance training. You can have BOTH in EVERY Global Ethics University course or training program.

Textbook conflation. This kind of thing just reeks of intellectual confusion.

But wait! There's more! From the glossy-pamphlet literature on their "flagship Ethics for a Modern Workforce program":

[The program] is the perfect balance between a no-nonsense compliance program and a personal/professional growth course. The easy, straight-forward program builds participants’ ethical skills and knowledge using practical teaching and real-life scenarios. What makes Ethics for a Modern Workforce unique is that it builds skills in incremental levels, or ethics Competencies.

"Perfect balance?" They mean that it's both and neither, right? Donkey before the cart and all that, right?

No one told us that the donkey was on a diet.

And the program "builds participants’ ethical skills and knowledge?" Maybe they mean working on participants' ethical reasoning, or something along those lines?

And the uniqueness of the program "is that it builds skills in incremental levels, or ethics Competencies?" The whole incremental education thing has been around since Johan Amos Comenius took the idea mainstream back in 1657 or so. And "ethics Competencies?" First off, the whole capitalization of random nouns thing died off in the early 19th century. And secondly, there are no such things as generalized competencies in ethics. Each person must develop techniques for his/her personal challenges.

If you want to learn pablums bordering on nonsense, it would seem that GEU is you one-stop shop. Otherwise, it's back to the books.

Web 2.0 meets real estate

2007-02-24T15:21:00.000-05:00

I recently--in the context of this blog, I mean--opened the can of worms that is web 2.0 vis-a-vis education. Another important intersection between the internet and the real world is real estate. Although there's a tendency, as I recently noted, for people to think that the internet univocally minimizes the importance of geography, in fact there are a number of interesting ways in which the internet actually reifies geographical distinctions. One important way is through the organization and distribution of real estate information.

I've been poking around in the web 2.0 universe a little bit lately, and I'd like briefly to introduce four web 2.0 real estate tools to anyone who may not have yet heard of them. Organized roughly in order, in this author's humble opinion, from most interesting to least interesting (all emphasis added to call out the key innovation of each project):

(1) Zillow. From the site:

Today we are answering what we believe is the first question most home buyers, sellers, and the curious ask: "How much is this home really worth?" Zillow.com calculates a valuation (the Zestimate™) that anyone can see — for free — for most homes in the U.S., including yours. Or the one you want to be yours. Or the one you are curious about. Or ours, for that matter. You can refine the value of any home with My Estimator, an interactive tool that allows you to enter things you know about a home but we don't.

(2) Homethinking. From the site:

Homethinking helps you find real estate agents by showing you what each real estate agent has done in the past and what customers have said about the job they did.

(3) Propsmart. From the site:

Propsmart is a next-generation, independent real estate search engine and online community. We crawl and index over 1 million homes for sale and other properties, then organize and display them on a slick Google Map interface.

(4) Trulia. From the site:

Whether you are moving down the street or clear across the country, we're here to help you understand real estate trends at the local level. When you are about to make the biggest financial decision of your life, we help you understand how your future home stacks up compared to similar homes on the market, and similar homes that have recently sold. We show you how sales prices have been trending where it matters—in your county, city, ZIP code and neighborhood.

All players to watch.

Preservation + green = good questions

2007-02-18T11:08:00.001-05:00

The Real Estate section of today's Sunday NYT has an article on "The Greening of Graying Buildings." The article covers two successful preservation projects--a NJ farmhouse and a Hoboken factory--which also go green. The most interesting of the two is the farmhouse, developed by Conservation Development of Hillsborough, NJ. (Full disclosure: The principal of Conservation Development, Lise Thompson, is a personal friend and colleague.)

It may not look green... and that's the point.

In its customarily clunky way, the NYT states the obvious as though it were utterly arcane:

THE conversion of a huge Hoboken warehouse building into condominiums and the nearly completed restoration of a small 1860 farmhouse near the Delaware River are two very different sorts of projects. But they share an intriguing goal: creation of 21st-century “green” homes in history-laden structures without stripping the buildings’ original character.

It's not "intriguing"--it's only sensible. In any case, the real story here is captured beautifully and succinctly in a quote from Ms. Thompson:

“Sometimes, we had to ask ourselves: What is ‘green?’”

Green isn't a "movement," a "lifestyle," or even a technological category. Green is a state of consciousness--a paradigm--a mental model. The challenge isn't a scientific or technical one--the whole question of "efficiency" is merely a sidebar--but rather a spiritual one. In order to build greener buildings, we must become greener people.

Ms. Thompson goes on to explain a bit of her generative thinking vis-à-vis this project:

“The fact is that preserving the house is itself ‘green,’ because it avoids further development and sprawl — but there are tensions between being green and authentic restoration, and we had to resolve them as best we could.”

While there's plenty of room for growth beyond this statement, the point is that Ms. Thompson didn't assume that there is only one answer, and that all she had to do was find it. Instead, she creatively opened up an entire new vista for thinking green: the idea that preservation itself is a kind of environmentally sensitive practice.

There's much left to explore here. But the takeaway, which of course the NYT doesn't really take away, is that green isn't the answer, it's the question.

How the web thwarts virtuality

2007-02-16T11:56:00.001-05:00

Here's a new site which I think indicates a general trend which has creeping potential to be really important for proponents of place: placeblogger.

Notice the tagline: "towards an annotated world..."

One emerging trend in our networked world is the return of geography in (post-) modern consciousness. I remember seeing an ad for a cell-phone company (can't remember which) a few years back which said, "New York, Buenos Aires. What's the difference?" To which one can only reply that if you don't find the difference obvious, then I pity you your blindness. That ad was based on a 20th century, world-is-flat (a la Thomas Friedman) mentality. Increasingly, I'm seeing geography--by which I mean embodied place--emerge as a concern for designers, and in particular for designers of web-based services and products.

I (almost) hate to break it to Thomas Friedman and his fans, but, um... no, it's not.

Although placeblogger specifically is a project inspired by the journalism/ free press movement online, there are tremendous implications--and opportunities!--for anyone who cares about place. Even as our world becomes increasingly virtual (where we use the word "community" to describe people who merely share interests), it also becomes becomes ever more embodied (where your neighbors--who drink the same water and breathe the same air--matter more than your far-away fellow-feelers). It's just so surprising--and delighting--to find that the Internet organically enhances embodied experience as well as what you might call virtual experience.

Inquiry always trumps "information"

2007-02-09T07:13:00.001-05:00

Educator, blogger, and technophile TomMarch summarizes web 2.0 in a single sentence:

Inquiry always trumps "information."

His coinage, "School 2.0" is suggestive, but this isn't just school he's talking about (whether he means it or not, it's how the mind of humanity--aided by the internet--functions as a thinking collective. World wide web as prosthetic.

What is "Ethics Training?"

2007-02-07T12:30:00.001-05:00

Mr. Norm Alster takes a look at some of corporate America's recent efforts at protecting themselves against Enron's fate. Central to most efforts, according to Alster, is ethics training; the piece essentially revolves around the question of whether or not ethics training works, and if so, to what extent. In a brief two sentences, Alster defines in what ethics training consists:

Typically, the programs involve training in ethical reasoning, along with mechanisms to encourage the reporting of misconduct. In some cases, employees act out scenarios that could land them in trouble in the workplace.

So, ethics training more or less boils down to "training in ethical reasoning" coupled with information on and incentives for snitching. Oh yes, and a bit of playacting. Ultimately, Alster concludes that

...ethical training may not be enough to discourage cheating in a competitive business world. Training must be coupled with new techniques — things like preemployment screening and revamped performance reviews — if future Enrons and WorldComs are to be averted.

Given his watered-down and indistinct definition of ethics training, it's hardly surprising that reinforcements should be necessary.

After reading the article, I have one burning question: What is "ethical reasoning" (and how does it differ from normal reasoning)? Reasoning in general means the inference of valid conclusions based on given premises. There is only one, universally valid, way to reason, though there are infinite chains of reasoning one might follow. Ethical reasoning must therefore simply mean reasoning about ethical issues. OK, so no special skills necessary. Any training given in ethical reasoning must be quite simply training in how to reason.

Different? Yes. Better? Well, um... at least we've got the technology in hand.

Besides, ethics means one's relationship to one's habits. Habits as in "automatic thought, feeling, or action undertaken without reflection." Reasoning about ethics consists almost entirely in first (1) becoming aware of one's habits of thought, feeling, and action; second, (2) in discerning the broader implications of the patterns one finds; and third, (3) in identifying appropriate steps to improve one's habits. Ethical problems, in other words, are not of the same order as the question, "Is this action, which I am considering doing, right or wrong?" Ethical problems are long-term considerations of personal character and its relationship to personal contentment.

The goodness or badness of a particular action, in ethical terms, depends upon its position within a larger pattern of behavior. Whether an action does or does not comply with some code of belief is not an ethical, but rather a moral consideration. (The curious should consult Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory for more on this crucial distinction.) The moralistic and legalistic slant of the ethics training considered by Alster reveals itself through its reliance on the language of compliance, which has nothing really to do with ethics per se. Before corporate America can address its issues, it first needs to get clear on whether or not those problems are indeed ethical. If they are, then ethically effective--rather than morally hopeful--measures will be needed.

Graffiti that cleans

2007-02-07T12:18:00.001-05:00

My friend AM emails me to let me know about reverse graffiti, which consists in making images by scrubbing away soot and dirt rather than applying paint or dye. Socially conscious art at its very, very best.

He's actually cleaning the wall--scrubbing away soot and grime to create images!

Why Bush and Rove seem confident

2006-10-17T13:45:00.001-04:00

I think it's important to remember how very little information about states of mind that we are able to get via news stories and television. If we watched Bush and Rove deliver their bluffs in person, I bet we could tell within 30 seconds how much substance their claims had. Given what we do know about their personalities, my hunch is that they would both come off as liars, bluffers, and bullies, because that's what they are, after all.

Both men have built their careers on acting the way they're now acting, and both are habitual liars; each has a personal ethos to lie at the slightest provocation. Everything they both say is 100% unbelievable. The only reason we give their little tantrums any credence at all is because we don't see them regularly in person, and because we're not habitual liars, we find it difficult to bear in mind that other people may very well be. We all tend to project our own spiritual strengths and weaknesses onto others. The fact is that Bush and Rove are, as a matter of habit (which is to say, ethically), liars, bluffers, bullies, and we should interpret everything they say and do through that lens.

I would never join any club whose members ritualistically burn their underwear—while wearing it.

Bush is a self-deceiver. He can't admit, even to himself, who he really is and what he really thinks. Reality for him is only ever a dim reflection of his own desires and anguishes. Emotionally, he's 13 years old. He acts as though he can get what he wants simply by wanting it badly enough. Whatever good qualities he may have been born with have been spoiled. He's spiritually crippled. He bluffs and bullies because he actually thinks that's how leaders act.

Rove, on the other hand, is so habitually cynical that he wouldn't tell the truth even if it was wonderful. He'd still embellish it. He has a twisted, stunted heart, and so it's nearly impossible for him to imagine a world in which he doesn't have to lie and cheat in order to get what he wants. He bluffs and bullies because he literally cannot think of anything else to do.

As to stealing the election, I don't doubt that they'll try; nor do I doubt that they'll both fail and succeed to certain extent. The real question is whether the American people--who have thus far given these losers a pass on cheating--will continue to put up with their shenanigans. I somehow think that the carte blanche of 9/11 has expired. Candidates get away with stealing elections only when people let them. I frankly hope they really try to steal it, because I have a feeling convenient GOP victories will provoke a good deal more outrage now than they did in the past 6 years. Times have changed, but Bush and Rove have only become more like themselves.

(Cross-posted at TPMCafe.)

Investment guru does not understand what investment is

2006-06-03T16:33:00.001-04:00

Mark Skousen, writing on socially responsible investing, writes that:

If you wish to maximize your profits, don’t limit your investment choices. If you choose to make value judgments on which stocks you are going to invest in (in today's example, "socially responsible investing" funds), you are probably going to hurt your return.

Mr. Skousen bases his conclusion by comparing the performance of a socially responsible mutual fund (the Sierra Club Stock Fund - SCFSX) against a mutual fund which focuses exclusively on investing in tobacco, alcohol, gambling and military stocks (the Vice Fund - VICEX). He claims that he didn't cherry-pick his funds, but his reasoning is baldly casuistic. It isn't valid to infer a general rule from a single example.Still, what I really want to focus on here is the elephant in the room when it comes to investing, which is the question of "value judgments."

Mr. Skousen quite reasonably assumes that investors generally desire to maximize their profits. How is it that profit doesn't qualify as a value? Profit is only one aspect of an investment. Warren Buffet advises that you treat the purchase of a portion of a company (essentially what a share of stock represents) exactly as you would treat the purchase of the entire company. We all need to make a living, so I find it difficult to resent profit--which is supposed to be the reward for competent work--per se. (I of course recognize that profit can be unfairly earned.) But am I the kind of business owner who's willing to accept the fruit of labor which results in the production of weapons or drugs? I presumably want to own the kinds of companies that I would found and operate.

Well of course I value profits over life on earth. I’m an investor.

Profit is only one reason among many that people work. Subsistence, personal satisfaction, a desire to contribute to one's community, and the desire to improve the world are others. Financial investment has never been a purely pecuniary consideration. Like all investors, socially responsible investors seek to maximize their return within such constraints as represent their values. Some people can tolerate high levels of risk; some people can tolerate larger demands on their time for research into investment opportunities; and some people can tolerate profiting from the production of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Skousen may be correct about socially responsible investments yielding lower returns (though I doubt it). His underlying assumptions, however, are both pernicious and foolish. Investment is nothing more than financing your values, and values are best understood as a system of mutually constrained desires. I want profit, but not at any price. I can only hope that Mr. Skousen and his readers agree.

Senate "leader" on ethics less than ethical on further review

2006-03-29T12:59:00.001-05:00

U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) editorializes in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

I will continue to do everything in my power to ensure that the Senate does the right thing from an ethics point of view.

If we were to take Santorum's statement at face value, we would assume that he means to encourage Senate members to adopt habits of professional practice which result in good Senators. Generally speaking, good Senators (qua Senators, which may differ to some extent from their goodness qua husbands or businessmen) are accountable to their constituents, politically effective (by which I mean that they prove able to advance their policy agenda), and fundamentally committed to the overarching principles of American government. One perennial bad habit of Senators has been the reliance on a small group of especially wealthy contributors for their financial support (we qualify the interests of such groups as "special" precisely because they are not general).

Santorum goes on, however, to explain exactly what he means by doing everything in his power to keep Senators away from the ethically slippery slope of improper lobbying:

When Sen. Bill Frist asked me to lead the Republican lobbying reform effort, the goal was to bring Democrats and Republicans together on a bill that we could all agree on.

Curious. I would have thought that the goal was formulating a baseline standard for what constitutes poor practice when it comes to mixing lobbying and fundraising. The challenge would have been persuading everyone to accept the highest standard possible, which is what political leadership is. For Santorum, the goal is simply to find something "we could all agree on."

Finding people willing to agree with him proved Mr. Santorum’s greatest challenge.

This is not political leadership, and it is does not really concern ethics. This is demagoguery--a sitting member of Congress spinning about "bipartisan working groups" while he indulges the most egregious of his bad habits. Further, even if Santorum could be taken more or less at his word, his actions don't really address the ethics of the situation, since establishing baseline standards of naughtiness won't encourage good habits, and good ethics means, more or less, good habits (as I've discussed elsewhere).

I ask you: Does this look like the best way to make ethical decisions?

An authentically ethical solution to the problem of improper lobbying and fundraising requires an approach which first and foremost assumes that continual improvement is possible. It’s not enough simply to set standards and leave it at that. Ethically, the point would have to be to inculcate in Senators good habits when dealing with lobbyists and handling their fundraising. Not that rules don't have an important role to play, but the question is less about specific rules than about an underlying commitment to being a good Senator. We need first to agree what a good Senator is in general, and then we need to come up with ways to get those elected to adopt habits which fit them to that mold.

(Hat tip to Santorum Exposed.)

Food ethics in Africa

2006-03-28T23:33:00.001-05:00

Chris MacDonald writes a blog on business ethics, which is refreshingly thoughtful. Chris generally has a pretty good nose for finding news items related to hot-button issues in ethics related to corporate business. (I recommend taking a look.)

In yesterday's post (Monday 27 March 2006), Chris blogs about DuPont subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred Int'l. Pioneer aims to develop a nutritionally enhanced strain of sorghum (an important food crop in Africa), and then more or less to give it away. They need to give it away because many African nations have proved reluctant (at best) to use genetically modified (GM) crops. Pioneer hopes that Africans can be persuaded to accept this "gift," because Pioneer believes that the performance of the new and improved sorghum will lift African confidence is GM crops generally. Pioneer freely admits that they intend the GM sorghum to serve as a loss leader for the company, assuring nervous Africans that GM crops can be trusted.

Chris interprets the ethical situation thusly:

The claim is often made that biotechnology will bring huge benefits to the world's developing nations. In particular, it's often--too often, I would venture--claimed that genetically modified (GM) foods will do wonderful things for the starving millions in Africa. It seems to me that the question is not whether biotechnology could help the developing world, but rather whether it will.

The distinction between could and will is ultimately a consequential distinction, which means that you paradoxically can't decide until the outcome of the decision is known. Current information is always both incomplete and imperfect, which means that some level of risk will always persist. Granting that there's no sure way to predict the future, I assume that Chris must intend a slightly weaker position: Africans just need to undertake a cost-benefit analysis with some kind of risk constant factored in. But what if our analysis is flawed? It seems that we're back in the realm of could. The could/will distinction isn't much use ethically speaking since almost all present decisions of any importance involve non-trivial levels of uncertainty.

For if it could you will must understand the meaning of ethics.

Despite this, Chris wields his distinction with vigor, valorizing the will over the could. He confidently posits two possible techniques for squeezing uncertainty out of the equation:

For biotech actually to help developing nations, it seems that one of two things has to happen. Either governments and NGO's need to spend a lot of money to donate biotech products or know-how, or companies need to find business models that let them a) do good, while b) making a profit.

I don't see how either of these options (spending money or alternative business models) will mitigate the fallout, from the Africans' point of view, should GM crops turn out to be a hindrance rather than a help.

From the African side, the fundamental ethical question is whether embracing this particular GM crop can serve as good foundation for subsequent good decisions about similar and/or related issues. As I've pointed out in an earlier post, ethics concerns the cumulative power of habits. The questions that Africans should be (and apparently are) asking concern the long view. What happens if these GM crops don't behave as advertised? (The controlled conditions in experiments, after all, are quite unlike the relatively uncontrolled conditions of widespread agriculture.) What happens if GM crops cause problems with other key species in our ecosystems? Why are they just giving us this stuff for free?

No, no, no. We couldn’t possibly accept any payment. Let it be our gift to you.

As to this last question, Chris notes that "the company involved in this story (Pioneer Hi-Bred) is frank about its business model." He goes on to suggest that "the company's candour about its business model is pretty disarming." The company explains it's strategy thusly:

Pioneer will have no rights to revenues from the biotech sorghum once it is developed and commercialized, said Anderson. But the company, already locked into tight competition in the commercial seeds market, hopes that success with biotech sorghum might help open doors for other biotech crops in countries currently skeptical of genetically altered crops.

Pioneer admits (1) that the GM sorghum is a loss-leader, (2) that the stimulus for this behavior is "tight competition," and (3) that the overall goal is to "open other doors for other biotech crops." Candid? Yes. Mercenary? Also, yes. I would certainly question whether or not one ought to get into the habit of thinking that mercenaries make good company, no matter how candid they are. Far from finding this disarming, I find it disappointing that Pioneer does not (because it believes that it cannot?) speak sincerely about reasons other than competitive advantage for their actions.

Trust me! I sell GMOs for a living. I wouldn’t lie to you about food, would I?

On Pioneer's side, the principal ethical issue is whether or not this whole project is conducive to a fruitful, long-term business relationship. I would question whether or not Pioneer is really looking at this whole issue from its customers' point of view. Wanting to make a profit is only sensible. Wanting nothing else from an action or a relationship except to make a profit is so shallow, stupid, and autistic as to be criminal. Deliberately inculcating and reinforcing such a desire is the very definition of poor ethics.

Enforcement (or: How to get uncooperative people to comply)

2006-03-23T21:42:00.001-05:00

Following up on my previous post about the pretensions of “compliance professionals,” I’m going to recommend that you take a look at this great post (the first in a series of three) on the dos and don’ts of enforcement from the perspective of government regulators. (Full disclosure: I used to work for David Smith, who authors AHI’s USA weblog.)

For those unwilling to read the entire series, I give you the payload (offered in the third installment):

Rule enforcement: dos and don'ts
Do's
Don'ts
Within the rules as written
Based on a loose interpretation or memory
In writing
Solely verbally
Quickly
Slowly and irregularly
After each occurrence
Inconsistently
Proportionately
Unconnected to offense severity
In a measured escalation
Abruptly
To the letter of the documents
Whimsically
With forewarning
Out of the blue
Allowing chances to reform
Once and for all

Although “compliance professionals” ought to feel rather sheepish at picking such an embarrassing name for themselves, real law enforcement officers play a critical role, ethically speaking. Having good character means having good habits, and any set of habits must include both habits of commission (activities undertaken regularly) and habits of omission (activities avoided). Good rules (or laws) can provide an excellent starting point for the development of good character. But as David notes,

Written rules can never be better than their enforcement.

Ultimately, how you take your first steps on the path to virtue is less important ethically than the fact that they’re in the right direction. Getting “enforced” into the start of a good habit is largely equivalent, in the long run, to willing yourself into compliance. No matter who makes you do it, it’s never too late to start making those child support payments—you might end being a responsible parent. And it’s never to early to stop fudging your taxes. You might just catch yourself being honest when no one’s looking. And that’s good character.

Ethics goes sci-fi

2006-03-20T19:11:00.001-05:00

Australia's St. James Ethics Centre (SJEC) proposes a bold vision:

we seek to bring about a world in which people feel free to include the ethical dimension in their daily lives

How many ways is this statement silly? Let me count the ways:

1) When they say that they're "seeking," don't they mean "acting?" Or maybe "struggling?" Doesn't sound like they know what they're doing, does it?

2) Someday someone's going to take me to visit the "ethical dimension," and I'm sure it'll be better than Doctor Who on party pills. Until then, I’m going to insist that SJEC's use of dimensionality as a metaphor for ethics is both misleading and revealing. Misleading because it implies that ethics, as its own dimension, is skew to the rest of life, intersecting it only at one point. But ethics saturates life; every action is ethically freighted. Further, the metaphor suggests that ethics reduces to a geometricized calculus—a vector equation. The metaphor is revealing because it shows that SJEC is insensitive to the absurd connotations insinuated by their language.

Extrapolating from the latest ethical probe data, top government artists offer tantalizing glimpses of what the ethical dimension might actually be like.

3) "To bring about a world" has such a lovely, dystopian ring to it. Seriously, I thought God already took care of the whole world-bringing-about business--first two chapters of Genesis and all that. Promethean pretensions like these are vapid to the point of being dangerous—and that’s on top of being irritating.

4) When they say they want "people [to] feel free to include the ethical dimension," it sounds like they're insisting that we make the most of the all-you-can-eat salad bar. "No, really. Go ahead and take all the ethical dimension you can stomach. There's plenty more in the kitchen." The sentiment is very sweet, but can we please find a less Donna Reed way to say this?

Our new ethics bar features virtues, moral principles, and fresh tomatoes. Satiate the saint in you for only $9.95!

5) I'm sure that the SJEC boasts a membership as erudite as it is pompous, but where do they get off suggesting to the rest of us that we “feel free” to get down with our ethical selves? First off, what’s with the nudge-nudge, wink-wink? If the rest of us are bad people, just come right out and say it. We’ll have a good clean argument and see who’s right, who’s bad, and who’s eye-rollingly self-righteous. Second, ethics is one of the foundations of human life whether we like it or not. (Tom DeLay, good postmodern that he is, probably convinced himself that that irksome ethical dimension was just a figment of the ol' imagination; but surprise, surprise--it turned out to be plenty real.) "Feeling free" has nothing to do with it. And third, ethics isn't patty-cake and crumpets. It’s not about comfort, but about excellence. We're already and always eyebrow deep in the sludge of questions concerning the best way to navigate life. Ethics concerns hard-won wisdom about the human good, hard-bitten advice given in the teeth of a dilemma, and hard-core you-break-it-you-bought-it consequentialism. (Anyone who thinks forgiveness is soft needs to think harder about what his parents did to him as a child.)

6) Somebody please tap me on the shoulder and let me know when our "daily lives" start happening. You know, as opposed to our other lives--the non-daily ones. This definitely isn't the first time I've heard of this "daily" life I'm supposed to be leading; I’m always the last one to the party. To the SJEC vision committee: adjectives—such as “daily”—are supposed to descriptive, not rhetorical. And as I said before, every action already and always carries ethical significance and imposes ethical consequences. Ethic significance is omnichronic; no deed to dilute it to "daily."

7) Last, but not least: the statement cited above isn't a vision statement; it's a mission statement. A vision statement describes what you'd like to see happen in future. (Hence the use of the word, "vision.") A mission statement describes what you plan to accomplish. (Hence the use of the word, "mission.")

Professionalizing ethics

2006-03-16T12:28:00.000-05:00

As if we weren't confused enough about ethics these days. Today the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) will recognize 6 "Compliance Champions" for... well, for complying. And for making sure other people comply, too. "Comply with what?" you ask. Well, they explain:

Compliance professionals develop and oversee corporate compliance programs to ensure that their organizations comply with state and federal regulations.

Wait a minute. "Compliance professionals?" Professionals who ensures that organizations “comply with state and federal regulations?” Don’t you mean law enforcement officers? One might think that we already have enough people on top of the whole compliance issue (as in, nearly 800,000 as of 2000–-not counting federal regulators and officers). But cops, as we know, don’t—indeed can’t—force people to act ethically. No one can.

Hate to be the buzz-killer, SCCE, but at bottom, your “compliance professionals” are just security guards: privately employed rule-enforcers. So what’s with this language about ethics?

Highly competent compliance professionals are already active in your neighborhood.

On the surface, the SCCE looks like a bunch of quasi-academics trying to capitalize on corporate America’s rash of scandals. Dig a little bit deeper, though, and something stranger and more insidious pops up. The SCCE isn’t a group of concerned citizens banding together to fight corporate excesses; it’s a new professional advocacy group, with its sights set on introducing the process of certification into the arena of ethics.

Certified Smart Guys earn more than their uncertified (but equally Smart) counterparts.

Probably they’re just too foolish or greedy to stop and really think about this. The thing is, certification concerns technical know-how. Professions such as law, medicine, and engineering use certification precisely to enforce their monopolies, which we countenance only because we presume that no one else is competent to oversee them.

Only lawyers, for example, possess the technical knowledge necessary to spot the incompetence and/or clever malfeasance of other lawyers. But what sane, sound, adult (apart from these guys) isn’t competent to render ethical judgement? Ethical authority doesn’t derive from technical knowledge; it derives from wisdom. So either the SCCE thinks that there’s no difference between knowledge and wisdom (which is foolish), or they think that other people won’t care and will pay for their “certified” wisdom anyhow (which is greedy).

In any case, as any half-conscious American knows, compliance with the law and ethical action are two completely different things. It’s both confusing and dangerous to conflate the two. Being ethical does NOT mean complying with state and federal regulations. (“Civil Disobedience” anyone?) Like any sensible person, I think it’s obvious that corporations need competent oversight. I also think that corporations ought to act ethically no matter what the law is. Just because something is legal don’t make it right or good, and just because it’s illegal don’t make it wrong or bad. (“Letter from the Birmingham Jail” anyone?)

How to confuse ethical issues

2006-03-14T17:55:00.000-05:00

Thomas Shanks, S.J., Executive Director of The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University runs through a sample case concerning due diligence on MCAE’s website. The webmaster introduces the case as follows:

Ethical principles and values are, of course, key to ethical decision making, but how should they be applied to actual business situations?

The clear implication is that ethics and business are two separate silos of human experience, one of which is highly abstract, and the other a collection of “actual situations.” Further, the webmaster’s statement suggests that achieving a clear understansing of ethics represents a intellectual challenge of the highest order. Oh my God! How should ethics be applied in bussines situations? Please, great and mighty consultant--enlighten us benighted souls! This clearly serves only to bolster the Center’s assumed position that you need a consultant to understand ethics. While leading an ethical life is surely a great challenge, understanding what ethics means and how ethics works could hardly be simpler.

The English word “ethics” derives from the Classical Greek word ethos, which means “habit.” (Ethos derives the Ancient Greek ethea, which means “where wild animals live,” closing the link between “habit” and “habitat.”) Ethics therefore means the habits of character we have acquired, and which shape our typical behavior. Good ethics means good habits of character; bad ethics means bad habits of character. Ethics do not specifically concern how we relate with other people, but rather how our characters--that is, our general disposition toward our experience--improve or worsen over time.

Habits are patterns of behavior—predispositions to act in a certain way—which we acquire through repetition. We become brave precisely by practising bravery; we become greedy by practising greed. These days, when we say that an action is “unethical,” we seem to mean that it’s a “cruel” or “insensitive” action. In point of fact, an unethical action is one which leads down the slippery slope to bad character. Several intemperate actions tend to incline one to still greater shows of intemperance. The guys at Enron didn’t start robbing old ladies in California as their first malfeasance; they had to build up to it.

Mr. Fastow: "I wasn't born a cheat and a crook; I had to practice diligently for many years.”

All of which makes speaking of ethics as if they were something to be applied seem pretty weird. You don’t apply your habits or your character; you just live them. (With determination and grace, you improve them.) Business situations, like all human situations, are saturated with ethical significance. The question isn’t whether or not to apply ethical values and principles. The question is whether your next move is going to make you worse or better off in terms of your habits of character. Does the choice you're making now make the next good move easier or harder? As to the question of why one ought to prefer a better character, another post to follow.

Who creates knowledge?

2006-03-13T11:28:00.000-05:00

From a cover letter I found on the internet:

A teacher’s role is not to impart knowledge, but rather to help students create knowledge.

The so-called revolution in education has been going on, in the U.S. at least, for a long time now—at least since Emerson wrote his seminal essay, “Education,” and I suspect some time before that as well. It has never made much progress because it has tended to focus on methods of instruction, student-teacher ratios, curricular composition, etc. But it is neither the tools nor the circumstances of schools which restrain us from making real improvements in education. It is our concept of knowledge.

Can you spot the knowledge in this picture?

Contained in the rather unassuming remark quoted above, tossed off in a cover letter, is a radical critique of our concept of knowledge as a kind of “bundle of facts,” or a “collection of information.” Knowledge does not exist in the abstract; it exists only within the horizon of some person’s real engagement with herself and her world. No one else can give me her knowledge in the way she might give me a book. Mediocre teachers simply fail to understand this, and so they fail to understand the difference between the student parroting the teacher and real knowledge. Good teachers understand where knowledge originates, so they encourage their students to engage the world on their own (i.e., the students’) terms. Great teachers provoke students to create knowledge by engaging students strategically. With a great teacher, neither the teacher nor the student sets the terms; instead, the teacher tailors every aspect of his practice to his most honest perception of his students’ best selves. In a sense, the teacher acts like a shaman, assisting the students to become whole through their active engagement with the practice of learning.

Revisioning knowledge as something created anew in each generation entails profound consequences for nearly every aspect of our culture: science, technology, politics, industry, etc. etc. Indeed, the entire idea of culture in general takes an interesting turn. One this new view, culture is not a shared body of knowledge; it is a collection of insights about how to help the next generation find the knowledge necessary to keep things running smoothly. The distinction between facts and values here collapses into their common origin in education.

The issues of pedagogical methods, student-teacher ratios, curricular composition must take second fiddle to the essential issue of knowledge generation. We keep making silly decisions because we don’t understand what’s really happening when teaching occurs. Once we understand where knowledge comes from (we don’t even have to understand what it is!), we can begin to make more intelligent choices about other educational issues.

Introduction

2006-03-12T17:14:00.000-05:00

While the topics which most interest me (listed below) have reasonably clear dictionary definitions--and it's not as if I'll try to gainsay the OED--the way that I think about most of them is pretty unconventional. Let me lay out some of the principal points of digression:

Philosophy - I went to graduate school for philosophy (focused on ethics if I focused on anything), which is where I learned that philosophy is not an academic discipline. The "love of wisdom" is a feeling, an intuition that wisdom--which itself needs to be distinguished from both intelligence and knowledge--is something to be cherished. Wisdom, which is an insight to the way the world really works, represents one of the most rarefied and astonishing achievements of human civilization.

Architecture - I'm in graduate school right now for architecture (history and theory), and I learned quickly that architecture is not a profession, and it is definitely not just "buildings." Architecture is the way that humans, using rituals, language, and techniques for the manipulation of materials (this includes both the arts and construction), appropriate space and transform it into place. Architecture is the residue of human inhabitation on the earth.

Education - George Savile said that "education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught." Precisely. Information and knowledge are merely the means by which we shape our characters. At bottom, education is about habits of character--what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.

Finance - People love to conflate economics and finance. Economics concerns the allocation and relative value of resources. Finance concerns the definition and management of risk.

Politics - I've heard more than one professional politician echo Otto von Biskmark's definition, that "politics is the art of the possible." But that definition derives from the experience of the statesman as a forger of compromises. Politics more largely means those projects which we humans can envision and accomplish only if we act collectively in concert with one another.

Writing - Because we live though language, we give little thought to its power. Even the incidental language we use in daily life--ordering coffee in the morning or gossipping at the office--shapes our actions and, ultimately, who we are. Writing therefore represents one of the great powers ever developed or deployed by human civilization. Few things are harder than writing well, and few activities more redolent of the potential to change lives.

Do's	Don'ts
Within the rules as written	Based on a loose interpretation or memory
In writing	Solely verbally
Quickly	Slowly and irregularly
After each occurrence	Inconsistently
Proportionately	Unconnected to offense severity
In a measured escalation	Abruptly
To the letter of the documents	Whimsically
With forewarning	Out of the blue
Allowing chances to reform	Once and for all