Beyond 5 Stars–Inspirational, Valuable, Practical, September 27, 2008
Mike Oehler
This book is phenomenally wise, useful, easy to read, and plain inspiring. I picked it up this morning intending to get back to it tonight and ended up not putting it down at all.
I have bought and read a number of underground building books as well as log cabin books, and would sort them into three categories:
A Expensive log homes for the really rich
B Moderate earth-covered (not quite underground) homes for the middle
C This book, for those who truly want to integrate innovation and low cost with deep Earth comfort and resilience and all the good stuff that goes with it.
This book, in short, is in a class of its own. Most will notice that it was first offered in 1978. As the USA goes through a major financial crisis that proves nothing has changed–Wall Street and the two “parties” it has bought down to their lost souls are still here, still looting the commonwealth–this book proves that it is timeless.
There is indeed a great deal of land across this great country where one can still afford to “dig in,” and this could not be a better time to be thinking about renting what you have now in the close in fragile areas, and setting up alternative housing with adjacent land for a basic Life Garden.
As I went through each chapter I found the list of materials, the prices, the diagrams, and the text all coherent, concise, and totally “on target.” Black and white photographs throughout, and a handful of color photographs in the middle, round the book out.
The book ends by discreetly recommending a tape series on design as the key element for success, and one that professional architects generally overlook (as we are all learning, the “experts” in finance and other areas are really “credentialed” but NOT experts).
I LIKE THIS BOOK. As an afterthought, it is recommended by just about every major alternative living, green energy, and sanity outpost (Vermont, Oregon, Washington State) reviewer. This book is a “good deal” and inspiring to boot.
Outstanding Overview for CEOs and MBAs going into HR, August 1, 2008
Robert L. Cross
Ben Gilad, one of the top five business intelligence gurus that I know, teaches us that CEO information is invariably filtered, late, incomplete, and/or subjective, lacking in analytic rigor (and in my own experience, based on the easy 2% of the information the subordinates can access easily). CEOs have to not only create their own internal “organizational intelligence” unit, they have to read for themselves–reading and thinking cannot be delegated.
This is a great book, an essential reference for CEOs who are willing to open their minds and consider the possibility that the Weberian model of bureaucracy as knowledge-hoarding and information pigeon-holing is pathologically out of touch with the the diversity and pace of the modern world.
I do not agree with those that dismiss this book as being for consultants. It is an easy to read, well-organized, and ably-ducumented offering (including appendices with specific questions for exploration, and before and after charts).
I am loading a chart above of the four quadrants of knowledge, information, and intelligence that I have been exploring since the 1990's.
1. Most organizations are barely familiar with Quadrant I (Knowledge Management or data mining or making the most of what we already know.
2. A few are in Phase I of Quadrant II, on levering social networks both internally and externally–the Business Week cover story of 20 June 2005 on “The Power of Us” is a superb starting point for that one.
3. A handful of us have been focusing on Quadrant III since the 1990's, and Peter Drucker, writing in Forbes ASAP on 28 August 1998 said it best: “We have spent 50 years focusing on the T in IT, we should spend the next 50 years focusing on the I in IT.”
I like this book. It is not a cookie-cutter book, it is a serious stepping stone for anyone wanting to think about the move away from pyramidal organizations and toward ever-expanding circular organizations.
I also recommend the six books I have published, espeically the ones on public intelligence and collective intelligence and on information operations, and books on the general topic of group gtenius, wisdom of the crowds, smart mobs, and so on.
I like this book very much, in part because after 20 years of thinking of myself as a reformist beating his head against the idiot secret world, I now realize I am a social entrepreneur who has turned his back on secrets and is focused on creating public intelligence in the public interest.
The authors made me smile with their early explanation that most social entrepreneurs can be so unreasonable as to be called lunatic. This is precisely what happened to me when I published “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, and Intelligence” in the Fall 1992 edition of the Whole Earth Review–for having the temerity to suggest that we should emphasize open sources of information instead of spying, and sharing instead of hoarding, I was told that Sandra Cruzman, the top woman at CIA at the time, said “this confirms Steele's place on the lunatic fringe.” So forgive me for this sidebar, but this book speaks to me in very personal as well as socially meaningful terms, it resonates with me, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to think about ways of doing good while doing well enough.
I always look for whether authors are respecting those that came before or have made adjacent contributions, and on that score this book is completely satisfactory. It is also blessed by the authors' broad range of examples, carefully selected from what is clearly a universe they know better than anyone else.
Citing George Bernard Shaw, they explain early on that “unreasonable people” are seen so for their seeking to abandon outmoded thoughts, mindsets, or practices. Amen, brother!
This is not a feel-good book in intent, although it achieves that effect. It is a serious book that methodically reviews new business models, leadership styles, and thinking about value creation. It held my total attention over two evenings of reading.
The authors offer esteem to social entrepreneurs with the observation that corporations are noticing and hiring such individuals for three reasons:
1. They see the future sooner than the average cubicle resident
2. They help retain talent by making the business challenging
3. They bring love and fun into the office environment
The authors caution that social entrepreneurs fail more often than not, but they persist and ultimately find means of making a difference while making a living.
They suggest that immature markets are best explored by non-profits while noting that hybrids with blended values are the most interesting forms.
Page 5 is suitable for scaling up and framing for the office. The ten characteristics of social entrepreneurs (severely abbreviated here):
1. Shrug off ideology and discipline
2. Focus on practical solutions
3. Innvoate
4. Do social value creation and SHARE
5. Jump in without waiting for back-up
6. Have unwavering beliefs in innate capacity of others
7. Dogged determination
8. Passion for change
9. Have a great deal to teach change makers in other sectors
0. Healthy impatience (don't do well in bureaucracies)
They tell the reader that confusion is a normal circumstance for social entrepreneurs, whom they define as those that take “direct action that generates a paradigm shift” while attacking an “unsatisfactory equilibrium.”
They see a deep and lasting need for social entrepreneurs because coming decades will require unprecedented levels of system change (I add, and will have unprecedented and often unanticipated disasters, many turning into catastrophes for lack of planning, preparation, or responsiveness)
The authors tell us that the best of the charitable foundations are shifting from plain grant-making to sequential investments and deeper continuing relations with those being funded. At the same time they tell us that corporation and private equity firms are beginning to notice the value options in this space. [I think to myself, this is great, just at a time when corporations are also understanding green to gold, sustainable design, ecology of commerce, and true cost accounting.]
I am totally impressed with one page that describes how China has developed new green accounting methods and now realizes that environmentally-related work loss is no less than 10% of their newly-understood green Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
They provide a fine overview of new measures of merit including the double bottom line, the triple bottom line, the Social Return on Investment (SROI), and the “blended value proposition.”
On page 20 I see a quote worth posting: social entrepreneurs “bring together natural, social, human, intellectual, and cultural forms of capital.”
LEVERAGE is a key concept for these authors, and one I take very serioiusly as they describe how small investments can leverage indigenous capabilities (such as hard work from people who are poor but not stupid), philanthropic and other support, business partnerships, and income from previously untapped markets (at the Base of the Pyramid, like my Seattle friends they are clearly not comfortable with C. K. Prahalad's choice of title in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks).
The middle section of the book discusses three models and examples of each:
1. The leveraged non-profit, which is hard to scale, dependent on hand-outs, focuses on public goods and being a change catalyst
2. The hybrid non-profit that combines non-profit and revenue generating activities, with a focus on outcome generation, empowering the people at the base, community-centric, focused on low cost long term, and on driving the market or pulling more traditional providers into the market.
3. The social business, which focuses on both social and financial returns, scales much more easily because it can assume both debt and equity. We learn that Whole Foods is an example, that it drove the organic market and leverages voluntary cooperation among many networks. Another example combines sustainable organic agriculture, rural employment of the uneducated but willing, price security for farmers, and transparent information.
I want to emphasize the latter: transparent information. I have been persuaded by numerous books on the wealth of knowledge as well as my own 30+ years as an intelligence professional that shared information and transparent decision support is a wealth creation process that scales fast and inexpensively.
The authors go on to discuss ten markets that lend themselves to social entrepreneurship, and I will list them with tiny examples–the book is absolutely a gem that merits buying a reading from end to end.
1. Demographic: condoms, aging, disadvantages
2. Financial: child knowledge of finances, simple technologies, helping poor self-organize for leverage
3. Nutritiional: duck rice, food bank, food waste elevated to tasty and nutritious near zero cost consumables
4. Resources: energy, energy, energy (I would add water, and throw a respectful salute the the George Mason University professor born in Bangladesh who created a virtually free means of removing arsenic from water using a combination of charcoal and steel filings (from the ships torn apart there, see The Outlaw Sea : A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
5. Environment: educatae, plant trees
6. Health: high volume low cost (or free), cateract cures, telephone centers to help poor remotely
7. Gender (best ROI ever is on educating women, see A Half Penny on the Federal Dollar: The Future of Development Aid)
8. Educational: end rote learning, cross-pollinate, barefoot college that trains doctors and engineers narrowly and without years of credentialing (my own idea is call centers to education “one cell call at a time,” I would love to see India do this sooner than later)
9. Digital: embrace and empower poor as citizens
0. Security: redefine as jobs for everyone rather than high-end military
The last third of the book covers
1. helping those at the base of the pyramid with access (e.g. curing neglected diseases); price (slash to 10%); and quality (e.g. $100 laptops).
2. Democratizing technology (four clusters: basic building blocks, motorcycles and free neutral air in and out of disaster zones; media and media technology; and genetics and biology.
3. Changing the rules of the game (search for my “New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence” free on the Internet). They emphasize transparency; accountability; certification; land reform; emission trading; and value & valuation.
4. Scaling solutions, with examples covering true costs, clean toilets for tens of millions, and General Electric's commitment to 17 clean technoloogies, sustainability attracting the best and the brightest of the social entrepreneurs.
5. Lessons for leaders (below does not do the section justice–buy the book and read the whole thing):
– Focus on scalable entrepreneurial solutions
– Tackle apparently insolvable problems
– Be prepared to fail–but learn from failures
– Experiment with new business models
– Close the pay gap
– Join forces
– Seed tomorrow's markets
– Fuel growing expectations
– Help democratize technology
– Work to change the system
– Figure out how to scale and replicate
– Within reason, cultivate the art of being unreasonable
I put the book down extremely pleased with the content and the presentation. This is a very serious book for serious people, not just social entrepreneurs, but Second and Third World policy makers, bankers, investors, international and non-governmental leaders, and so on.
As I see it, social networks and collaboration among what I call the “ten tribes” (government, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-governmental, labor, religion, and civil society) are in their very infancy. The Internet has not been matched by easily available information sharing and decision support tools (DARPA STRONG ANGEL and TOOZL is a start), and governments persist is wasting tens of billions waging war and stealing secrets, instead of waging peace and nurturing open sources of information in 183 languages.
This book continued the inspiration that I have been getting from others, and here I list a few others including the first book from Earth Intelligence Network (free at the website):
Available Free Online, Hard-Copy 12 April 2008, March 20, 2008
FREE ONLINE: http://www.oss.net/CIB
Mark Tovey (ed)
This book is the first of a series of books from the Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 Public Charity incorporated in Virginia. As with all our books, it is available free online for inspection, digital search, and Creative Commons re-use at no cost.
We are of course very proud of the hard-copy and of being able to offer it on Amazon, and the 55 contributors, all volunteers, hope you will buy a hard-copy both for its ease of hand-eye coordination and exploitation, and to support our work in creating public intelligence in the public interest.
Here are ten other books I as the publisher personally admire, that lend credence to our proposition, hardly original in concept but uniquely documented in this book, that We the People are now ready to self-govern at the zip code and line item level.
I read a lot. Non-fiction. This is one of the most important and inspiring books I have read in some time. It is especially meaningful to me because my oldest of three sons is a pirate who refuses to waste my money on college “credentialing” and has told me point blank there is nothing he cannot learn on his own.
While I have been totally “open” since I published E3i in the Whole Earth Review (Fall 1992) and was called a lunatic by the spy world, and I have given a Gnomedex keytone on “Open Everything,” this book–I am shaking my head trying to find the right words–has been an inspiration to me.
Bottom line: the pyramidal structure, the Weberian bureaucracy model that characterizes all governments and corporations, is DEAD. The circule model, the open network model, is kicking serious butt.
This author has in my view demonstrated world-class scholarship, given us gifted writing, and developed a story line that I can only call DAZZELING. This is an important story we all need to understand.
Here are my flyleaf notes:
+ Pirates are rocking the boat.
+ Information Age has hit puberty.”
+ Citing Mark Ecko, a graffiti artist whose brand is now worth $1 billion: “The pirate has become the producer.”
+ Punk capitalism.”
+ Punk Plus equals creative destruction at hurricane force.
+ Purpose is everything.
+ Citing Shane Smith: In America there is no anti-status quo media–it's all the same four big companies…there is no voice.
+ Punk and green are converging on substance and style.
+ Citing Richard Florida, “Rise of the creative class”
+ 3d printing is here now, 3d product download is on the horizon (I envision FedEx Kinko's as a “one of” production facility, but the dumb ass at FedEx CEO blew me off when I proposed that he print books to lower their carbon footprint).
+ USA was founded on the basis of piracy of European technologies.
+ Three core punk ideas are 1) do it yourself; 2) resist authority; 3) combine altruism with self-interest.
+ Canal Street moves faster than Wall Street.”
+ Pirate radio as musical petri dishes creating new spaces.
+ “Today a new generation is demanding more choice.”
+ Net neutrality matters (FYI, Google has a programmable search engine that will let you see only what others pay to let you see. Google is now totally EVIL.
+ Lawsuits are a sign of corporate wekaness.
+ Monsanto is totally evil, and these morons have filed patents claiming they own all the pigs on the planet. Hard to believe. Time to close them down.
+ INSIGHT HALFWAY THROUGH THE BOOK: Punk and integral consciousness, pirates and creative commons, are converging.
+ 3 pirate hyabits: 1) look outside the market; 2) create a vehicle; 3) harness your audience.
+ Remix is HUGE.
+ Graffiti is explained brilliantly by this author.
+ Open Source is going physical, e.g. open source beer.
+ File sharing boosts sales and extends range of for-sale music.
+ Free education online (and my own idea, one cell call at a time) is the ultimate positive sharing experience.
+ 1.5 billion youth around the world waiting to explode in creativity or destruction–I ask myself, what are we doing to help them go creative?
+ Four pillar s of community: 1) Altruism, 2) Reputation; 3) Experience; 4) Pay them (revenue sharing with customers).
+ Authenticity is huge.
+ Weaker boundaries = stronger foundations.”
+ Hip hop as “sustainable sell-out,” a “powerful form of collective action.”
+UN Secretary Gen3eral Kofi Annan recognized hip hop as an international language.
+ Flash mobs
+ Create a virus and feed it: 1) Audeince makes the rules, 2) Avoid limelight, speak only to the audience; 3) Feed the virus; 4) Let it die.
Conclusion: our youth have a new world view, empowered by global information technology, and they are the pinnacle of incredibly efficient networks.
I am just totally blown away by this book. The author has written a manifesto of enormous import.
I was modestly disappointed to see so few references to pioneers I recognize, including Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Joe Trippi, and so on. Howard Rheingold and Yochai Benkler get single references. Seeing Stewart Brand's recommendation persuaded me I don't know the author well enough, and should err on the side of his being a genuine original.
Certainly the book reads well, and for someone like me who reads a great deal, I found myself recognizing thoughts explored by others, but also impressed by the synthesis and the clarity.
A few of my fly-leaf notes:
+ New technologies enable new kinds of groups to form.
+ “Message” is key, what Eric Raymond calls “plausible promise.”
+ Can now harness “free and ready participation in a large distributed group with a variety of skills.”
+ Cost-benefit of large “unsupervised” endeavors is off the charts.
+ From sharing to cooperation to collective action
+ Collective action requires shared vision
+ Literacy led to mass amatuerism, and I have note to myself, the cell phone can lead to mass on demand education “one cell call at a time”
+ Transactions costs dramatically lowered.
+ Revolution happens when it cannot be contained by status quo institutions
+ Good account of Wikipedia
+ Light discussion of social capital, Yochai Bnekler does it much better
+ Value of mass diversity
+ Implications of Linux for capitalism
+ Excellent account of how Perl beat out C++
Bottom line in this book: “Open Source teaches us that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial.
This book is a collection of essays by a woman of color who studied with Freire and found in his works her own liberation and her inspiration to take his ideas and practices further.
I am shocked early on to realize that her description of black schools prior to desegregation as better, because their teachers were passionate about helping them excel, whereas in integrated schools they were treated as second class citizens and taught obedience, rings true.
I see feminist pedagogy in a new more positive light.
The author represents a unique interplay among anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies.
She resonates with me when she speaks of the crisis in education; of our need for a totally renewed educational environment in which biases must be confronted and students liberated.
Her strong statement that education should be the practice of freedom is repeated in many different ways throughout the book.
She states, and I have three sons in public school who would agree, that transgressing wrong-headed boundaries is liberating and entirely called for. She discusses teachers as healers, and throughout this book I gain a deeper broader sense of the pain that minorities and women take pains to repress or conceal because the educational environment is not safe for revelation, only obedience.
I am quite taken by her discussion of the importance of wholeness in teaching, and her engaging discussion of how many professors, especially white mailes, are social misfits who think they can separate their teaching (one-way, authoritarian) without having to engage with students of be whole themselves. She is especially hard on the manner in which they treat the classroom as personal fiefdoms where they can exercise unchallenged authority.
She quotes Martin Luther King in emphasizing, as he did, that shared values and a focus on people are essential is we are to contain, in his words, “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.”
She states that teaching that does not include explicit awareness of race, sex, or class, lacks liberating context.
She cites Terry Eagleton who says “Children make the best theorists,” for not being indoctrinated, and I am reminded of how many arguments I have lost to my 18-year-old when “because I say so” just does not suffice.
I am fascinated by her discussion of how standards can suppresses, norms can neutralize.
She spends time on the importance of theory as a space, a place, for sense-making and reconciliation.
The author offers a very effective critique of the ignorance, stereotyping, and lack of understanding with which white professors wrote about black reality.
I am not doing justice to the essays on existentialism and on black-white women in relation and in critique of one another, but she notes that resolution between them demands joint collective dialog.
As the book of essays winds down I have a few notes:
+ Habit versus voice
+ Must teach students how to LISTEN
+ Being a teacher is about BEING with people
+ Pedagogy can be, should be, political activism
+ Queens in New York City has 17,000 people speaking 66 languages
+ Class matters, and is too often left unaddressed. I am reminded of Global Class War
Her final note: Learning is a place where paradise can be created. We must learn to transgress freely, and thereby demonstrate that education IS freedom. I am reminded of Improper behavior.
I would not have appreciated this book and the author's insights as easily had I not first read t he two works by Friere that I cite above. The author honors and exceeds her model, this is a very fine book, and I would add in passing that I also found Cornell West's Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism to be a Nobel-level reflection.
Beyond 5 Stars–Inspirational, Valuable, Practical, September 27, 2008
