January 16th, 2010 §
Thoughts of Haiti or any natural disaster like Katrina or the flash floods in India make me consider how unjustified the loss of life is. Who deserves such an unexpected fate? Is it fair? Why them? Why now? What possible meaning can we derive from this?
Our petty worries of “Why me?” when we don’t make the team or get pulled over lose their value in the face of such disasters. Eventually though we all go back to our daily routines and such menial things start once again taking on more value. I remember feeling this strongly a year after 9/11. Business as usual.
How can we learn to stay with that keen focus that results from realizing how ephemeral life is – how random fate can be? We can’t control for the unexpected. We can try preparing for it with sandbags and supplies and extra food, but to preserve what? To go back to live the way we’ve been living and prepare for the next big catastrophe?
It doesn’t add up. The preservation of life as it is seems banal. The trauma of loss can be an opportunity to evolve at an accelerated rate. To maintain the foresight of seeing life almost gone and suddenly saved at the last moment. To take advantage of a second chance that we so rarely get as adults unless we put ourselves through the minor trauma of moving, changing jobs, or leaving a loved one.
I like the way Viktor Frankl puts it in Man’s Search for Meaning:
Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
January 12th, 2010 §
As attention becomes more of a scarce resource, does it become a commodity for sale?
Marketing agencies must view attention in this way at times. The signals we’re bombarded with day-to-day are endless; tv, music, books, ads, and magazines are just a start. Everyone has an opinion too and they aren’t afraid to express it, the blogosphere being a great example.
Attention spans are only going to get thinner. Multi-tasking has a limit, so do you a) choose to scale back and unitask, b) limit the scope of what you pay attention to, c) don’t do anything and let yourself swim in the sea of messages?
It’s a tough choice, but no matter which path you choose, you are paying out something of yourself. Something much more valuable than the dollar in your pocket. If attention is the next scarce resource, buy-in is gold.
January 11th, 2010 §
If we’re all oarsmen on a ship, who’s manning the sails?
The golden rule, both in economics and ethics, aims to find the balance with what we have today and we aim to have tomorrow. Knowing either can be very subjective; it’s defined relative to where you are in the world. It’s possible that boundaries exist for this very reason. To allow a society of individually capable members to construct a vision that balances the present and the future. To that effect, are boundaries actually working?
One of Drucker’s key qualitative metrics of success for an organization is each member having a general idea what the top three goals of the organization are. From the janitor to the middle manager to the CEO, being able to state 1, 2 and 3 without much effort. It could be the mission statement, but most often its much simpler; make money for stakeholders, increase speed of delivery, improve quality of care, educate X% of the population, and so on. That’s cohesiveness. The sails are set and the ship is moving.
The golden rule goes well beyond this in trying to optimize the decision making behind the three objectives. “Why?” do we set these goals in the first place and “How?” did we come to agree upon them. Put simply,
…if a society could choose a savings rate that maximized its own consumption, it would save nothing and consume everything. But that would leave future generations in a lurch as no capital would have been built to enhance future output and consumption. If, conversely, the current generation saved so much that future generations would in fact be better off than the current, then we are also violating “Golden Rule” as we are not doing unto ourselves what we have done for posterity. Thus, the “Golden Rule” condition is that the collectively-chosen or policy-imposed savings propensity is such that future generations can enjoy the same level of consumption per capita as the initial one.
When I studied economics, it was mathematically proven that in our current state, one generation (approx. a 25-year cohort) would have to maximize savings and reduce consumption to such an extreme point in order to create the foundation for an optimum savings rate for future generations. Implying our savings/consumption ratio in the past generations has been highly skewed to the lower end. Not much of a surprise.
I wonder now if we’re creating the psycho-social environment for that “sacrificial” generation to emerge. They certainly won’t view themselves this way and taking a step back and doing less will seem like the right thing to do. The trends towards reduced consumption didn’t just start with the recession. They’ve been building for a while, along with ethnic and gender equality, at least in some parts of the world. The global power struggle is still ongoing, but there’s definitely a trend towards the “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” philosophy. It’s certainly been repeated enough. Time to practice it. Daily.
October 14th, 2009 §
John Robb writes about Entrepreneurship as Resilience:
One of the best ways you can prepare for the future is to train yourself to become an entrepreneur — essentially a person that makes their own economic opportunities. It’s going to become a major differentiator between those that succeed and those that fail in a harsh global system (this expertise has been deprecated by a system that prides itself on manufacturing salaried consumption bots).
He gives 10 survival tips. Here’s a great one:
Deconstruct any business you see. Estimate revenues. Evaluate competition and competitive advantage and marketing. Etc. Find out how they make money and how much.
Much thanks to Cameron Schaefer for sharing.