That was the second year of the Third World War,
The one between Us and Them.
Well, we've gotten used.
We don't talk much about it, queerly enough.
There was all sorts of talk the first years after the Peace,
A million theories, a million wild suppositions,
A million hopeful explanations and plans,
But we don't talk about it, now. We don't even ask.
We might do the wrong thing. I don't guess you'd understand that.
But you're eighteen, now. You can take it. You'd better know.
No organization cares about you. Organizations aren't capable of this.
Your bank, certainly, doesn't care. Neither does your HMO or even your car dealer. It's amazing to me that people are surprised to discover this fact.
People, on the other hand, are perfectly capable of caring. It's part of being a human. It's only when organizational demands and regulations get in the way that the caring fades.
If you want to build a caring organization, you need to fill it with caring people and then get out of their way. When your organization punishes people for caring, don't be surprised when people stop caring.
When you free your employees to act like people (as opposed to cogs in a profit-maximizing efficient machine) then the caring can't help but happen.
I just came across an excellent piece in the Harvard Business Review thanks to my colleague Larry Pixa. Published in 1999 by Stanford professors Pfeffer and Sutton, “The Smart-Talk Trap” (PDF) is even more pertinent in today’s new media world where user-generated content is ubiquitous. The key to success is action but the authors warn that we are increasingly “rewarded for talking—and the longer, louder, and more confusingly, the better.” This dynamic, which substitutes talk for action, is responsible for what Pfeffer and Sutton call the knowing-doing gap. The purpose of this blog post is to assess this gap in the context of social media and to offer potential solutions.
Phi Beta Iota: We would merely observe that this problem is characteristic of virtually every US Government element, and every major corporation including the so-called innovators like Facebook which could actually fold sometime soon as alternatives come out of the BRICS. What Brother Patrick does not address is the reality that in both government and in corporations, the rotation and retirement of people often destroys all accountability for their failure while in any specific office. The stovepiping of everything makes it even more difficult to address “true cost” information, or to measure effectiveness in context. We do not lack for money in this world, we lack for applied intelligence and the integrity to connect truth to product.
What does your organization do with legacy products and services? Things you started that never really caught on, or died out slowly over time?
That's a very easy way to judge the posture and speed of a brand. If there's a one-way track–stuff gets added, but it never gets taken away–then the ship is going to get slower and heavier and become much harder to handle until it eventually sinks.
How long did it take Detroit to take the ashtrays out of cars? The single-sex admission policy at the club? How many people who use your website need to speak up on behalf of a button or a policy for you to persist in keeping it there? How long before you cancel the Sisterhood meetings that are now attended by just three people?
Either you're focused on maintaining the legacy features or you're focused on figuring out how to replace them. Driving with your eyes on the rearview mirror is difficult indeed.
In a world of little competition, legacy features are something worth keeping. No sense alienating loyal customers.
But we don't live in a world of little competition. The faster your industry moves, the more likely others are willing to live without the legacy stuff and create a solution that's going to eclipse what you've got, legacies and all.
Corporations haven't changed much organizationally since the middle ages. They're dinosaurs. It's time to turn them into history, where they belong.
As part of the new venture I'm working on, we're developing a set of new rules that allow a new form of corporation to work much more like the Internet. We think these changes will make these new organizations superior to our current corporate competition — both from the perspective of the person working with (not, not for) us and from the ability of these ventures to compete with the status quo.
At this point, the organization we're building is the equivalent of the first mammal. Very, very small relative to competition (the dinos that ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years) but incredibly adaptive. The rules of adaptation we're developing will help us stay alive, and eventually (we hope) defeat the competition. We hope you'll decide to evolve along with us.
Here's the first rule we think is important: if at all possible, use entrepreneurial superempowerment.
Essentially, this rule is torn from my book on global guerrilla warfare. The same amplification that makes it possible for small groups of terrorists/guerrillas to do incredible damage/challenge nation-states can be used to build a successful organization. In short, this rule means that you should provide the people working with your organization all of the tools they need to be economically successful. In particular, these tools need to be networked tools. Tools that amplify every action taken by 1,000 fold.
Further, on a motivational level, these people should be allowed to innovate. To become entrepreneurs that are constantly striving to maximize their potential. Allow them the flexibility to try new ideas, change up the processes used, and pioneer new areas for expansion. The objective is to fill your entire organization with superempowered entrepreneurs.
There is a lot of fear associated with ‘overextended'.
Take too much financial risk, expose yourself to the vagaries of the market and you'll end up stressed, bankrupt and overextended.
Stretch your knee too much in the wrong direction after a long swim and the doctor will tell you that the ligaments are overextended.
Brands that get greedy and put their names in too many places in too many ways (as Tiffany's did a generation ago) get overextended and take a long time to heal.
But what about the more prevalent, more insidious and ultimately more damaging notion of being underextended?
The factory-mindset encourages every worker to protect his time and his effort. Don't volunteer because they'll never give you any slack. Don't push harder because you'll only exhaust yourself. Don't let them speed up the line because it will never slow down again…
Networked tribes, systems disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures.
The most likely scenario for the next decade starts with the resumption of global economic depression (D2). Economies shrink. Wealth evaporates as former “assets” become worthless. Commodities fall (even energy) due to declines in economic activity. Currencies gyrate, explode, and/or evaporate.
In this environment, sovereigns will begin to default as the industrial nation-state model runs out of gas. Developed nation-states will find themselves crushed between bailouts of their cronies and excess spending (i.e. social spending (EU), national security spending (US), or mercantilist over-investment (China). Developing nations will just implode.
Things will continue on this track until one of two things happen:
things really begin to fail (complete system breakdown) or
new, better economic and social systems become viable as replacements to our broken one.
I'm betting on new economic and social systems. Part of that bet, and something many people now get, is accomplished through the establishment of self-reliant resilient communities. However, resilient communities aren't a sufficient replacement, in and of themselves (unless you want to turn back the clock to the 1800s). By themselves, they don't represent a superior alternative to a failing and flailing global system. Something else is needed, but what?
It's simple. What's needed are (note the plural here), virtual global economic systems built on a sound footing (i.e. better and more sensible rules than we currently have), prosperous participants, and a hard currency. Systems that people can flee to when currencies become scarce (deflation) or worthless (inflation) or nation-state political systems fail (corruption/crime) or flail (repression).
My advice to you: when you see a system that looks like the one outlined above, start to diversify your economic activity into it as soon as is practicable.
